Book Review: Sanity and Sainthood, by Dr. Tucker Peck

good book!

Note: this is a heavily biased review. I participated in the creation of this book, giving Tucker some editorial feedback. However, I worked on this book simply because Tucker is one of the sanest meditation teachers out there, I only got paid in karma dollars.

Psychotherapy and traditional Buddhist meditation both offer compelling ideas of how to live a healthy life, ideas which happen to be completely incompatible.

The Buddhist idea is that your suffering is caused by an illusory sense of identity that separates you from experience. To dissolve this illusory self, inquire into the substance of your thoughts and emotions rather than getting caught in them, notice that they are transient, and, eventually, your illusory identity will dissolve. Your stories are not important.

The psychotherapeutic idea is that your identity is a densely woven fabric informed by all of your experiences, which contains valuable truths, but also outdated coping strategies. To become healthier, unweave and reweave this patterning, by carefully examining your stories and emotions, considering them important clues about how you function.

You can see the incompatibility here. One perspective regards mental content as important, and the primary material to work with. The other regards mental content as waves, which, instead of getting caught in, we should learn to simply surf.

Most people who have tried to work with both of these theories have noticed that they both work sometimes, despite being philosophically incompatible. So what is the synthesis of these perspectives?

It is something like: meditation can make you a really good therapy patient. It can dissolve some thoughts and emotions that are merely the mental engine sputtering. And it can also fast-forward you to difficult content that requires therapeutic work. Addressing this content will improve your stillness of mind, which will make you a better meditator, forming a virtuous feedback loop. Over time, your ego gets thinner and more flexible. You have a more durable happiness, and more awareness of the effects of your behavior. If you follow this loop far enough, you can maybe become a saint in this lifetime (like, over the course of decades). Not in the sense of working miracles (although if that happens to you, cool) but more in the sense of being unusually dedicated and skillful in living a life that benefits others.

The sweet smell of coherence floods the pagoda. But how to actually practice the combination of meditation and therapy? The above is not a sufficient operating manual. Making the above paragraph into a practice would be like trying to derive a gym routine from the principle “work your muscles hard enough to hurt them temporarily, not permanently.”

Sanity and Sainthood is the closest thing to a sufficient operating manual on the market. It’s written by Dr. Tucker Peck, a clinical psychologist and dharma teacher, who has years of experience watching people run afoul of the intersection. He thus is equipped to make credible recommendations about when you should work on the content of your mind, as opposed to merely observing it with meditative equanimity. He’s also pithy, funny, and wise, and the book represents him well, so it’s fun to read even if you’re not totally gaga about meditation yet.

The biggest endorsement I can give this book is that I once considered writing a book like this, but now I consider the job done. I can write something else. Also, I would’ve been a lot less stupid in areas of my meditation practice if I’d been given this book when I was 20. (For this reason, I have extra copies of this book to opportunistically give to young meditators I meet.)

Readers of this blog will know that I’ve experienced transformative effects from long-term meditation, more than I believed possible. I’m still amazed by what my life has become, on a near-daily basis. But something I don’t emphasize enough, perhaps, is that I spent hundreds of hours bashing my head against meditation in my early 20s, practice hours that were net negative for my mental health. Largely, my early practice wasn’t helpful because I was trying not to have a psychology, something this book would’ve talked me out of.

There’s lots of solid practical advice in this book. But most readers of self-help will notice that the best books don’t really work by imparting advice. You might take some of the advice, but the real action of self-help is vibe transmission. By reading the best self-help, you absorb the mental presence of a wise person, who can serve as a virtual interlocutor. In this capacity, Tucker shines.

An indicative story about him: I went for a walk with Tucker during the really psychoactive part of my meditation practice. I told him that I was extremely happy. He said something mildly congratulatory, and then said something like, “consider that you’re a privileged, healthy, smart married person living one of the best lives in history. Maybe it’s just appropriate that you’re happy, and that’s nice or whatever, but you can shoot for something more than that.” He managed to say it so gently and matter-of-factly that I immediately realized that it was true, with no resistance. Tucker is one of those people who can collapse your bullshit quickly, but it feels like a big hug. It helps that he is also highly conscious of his own frailties—this book doubles as an atlas of Tucker’s neuroses, which are presented joyfully.

If I have a criticism of the book, it’s that it, perhaps, underrates the effects of long-term serious meditation. Reading this book, you might get the sense that long-term meditation will make you quite pleased, whereas my experience is that it can completely explode what you thought life was, and replace it with something immeasurably better.

But then again, maybe this kind of dissuasion is helpful. My experience with meditation started getting really good after about 12 on-and-off years of it, with many, many hours of psychological self-exploration that were not immediately pleasurable. I write a sentence like this in almost every one of my posts raving about the era of practice I’m in now, and yet somehow people don’t manage to read the part where I say it was hard, based on some of the emails I get. Like people mentally skip the part where I struggled with myself for an extended period. That’s a message that seems unabsorbable by seekers in an aspirational mood.

Some meditation books will tell you that you can count on enlightenment within a year or two of serious practice, which actually does happen to some lucky students, but not to like 95%. The more typical case is not as rosy. One of Tucker’s big points in this book is that meditation gives you the opportunity to look at, and mend, destructive parts of your psychology—and this means confronting your destructive psychology, which is not pleasant in the short-term. So taking up meditation, even when it goes quite well, can involve a significant dip in perceived happiness before the benefits start kicking in.

And even if meditation gives you dramatic results in the short term—say, if you have a spectacular time on a Jhourney retreat—it typically tends to take many hours to integrate this into your life, and actually live differently. As in other domains, dramatic results from self-work tend to result from unusual levels of dedication.

Meanwhile, Sanity and Sainthood is one of the few meditation books that doesn’t lie to you, at all. I wish it had a more clickbaity title, it would sell more copies. But it is the anti-clickbait meditation book, and for that, it should be praised.