|
For more information, contact: Gary Schouborg, PhD (925) 932-1982 |
Schouborg, The Inner Rhythm of Enlightened Activism Gary Schouborg Everything is gestation and then birthing. – The Puzzle In solitude, many of us
experience an inner peace and a compassion for others that quickly dissipate
once we return to daily life. We find it hard to maintain an inner peace
while striving to meet the demands of practical living; and we find it
equally hard to maintain compassion for others when their needs conflict with
our own. Such difficulties make us wonder if spirituality and everyday, practical living are really compatible. The complexity of
contemporary technological society sharpens the question. For it is hard
enough to live in an enlightened way with those we know, feeling peace within
ourselves and compassion toward those with whom we are dealing. But our
complicated culture presents us with an even greater challenge – living on
the same planet with people whom we will never know but who may nevertheless
be affected by what we do. It is relatively easy to feel compassion toward
those with whom we come into direct contact: if those before us are thirsty,
we can feel their need. It is more difficult to care about those who are
remote abstractions: we must make extra effort to summon up the image of people
suffering on the other side of the earth. It is also relatively easy to know
how to be compassionate toward those we meet face to face: if those before us
are thirsty, giving them a drink is a simple task. It is more difficult to
know what is compassionate public policy, where we can never know the full
consequences of what we do: it is difficult to know what economic and
political policies will really help the poor and powerless. In short, it is hard to
live enlightened personal lives, but harder still to create enlightened
public policy. As practical living becomes increasingly complex, the gulf
between it and spirituality seems to grow. Can we live in an enlightened way
not only in solitude, but also with those we know, and even create an
enlightened public policy that affects millions whom we will never meet? Or
must we experience and maintain inner peace and compassion for others only
through monastic withdrawal from our complex culture? Our puzzle is not just
contemporary. It has a history. Buddhist teachings seem to make enlightenment
and everyday living incompatible in principle. If we must eradicate desire
because it is the root of suffering, how can we care about the world we live
in and desire its improvement? And what's the point of trying to improve
things in the first place, if everything is impermanent? In what sense is one
ephemeral state better than another? Yet, Mahayana Buddhism
encourages us to live enlightened practical lives. Nagarjuna
(3rd century ce) explains that this is possible by
so realizing that everything is interrelated that our experiences of
enlightenment and of the everyday world cease to be separate. However,
Mahayana Buddhism also tells us that anyone who has Great Compassion delays
full enlightenment until all sentient beings are liberated from suffering.
This implies that the practical living of which Nagarjuna
speaks allows only partial enlightenment. Otherwise, why must we delay full
enlightenment until later? One possibility is that we are so tied together
that no one can become fully enlightened unless everyone is. We work out our
individual enlightenment mutually. No one is an island. The monastic Theravada
Buddhism seems more individualistic. Since it teaches that the Buddha
attained absolute enlightenment, and since all sentient beings have not yet
been liberated, it seems to deny that the Buddha had Great Compassion, at
least as Mahayana Buddhism conceives of it. Are the Theravada and Mahayana
traditions therefore in conflict? Or do they each have a piece of the puzzle?
What precisely is the relationship between enlightenment and everyday, practical living? A Crisis of Rhythm The solution to the
puzzle lies in awakening to our inner rhythm. Many say that our contemporary
culture is in a spiritual crisis that is due to an individual powerlessness
that arises from advancing technology and resulting social complexity. They
say that the way out is to promote environmental integrity and social
justice. However, the root cause of the crisis is neither the destruction of
the environment nor social injustice, nor even technology as such, but the
rhythm of our culture. When we allow this outer rhythm to disturb our inner
one, we fail to digest and savor our experience. Our initial impulse might be
to withdraw from society to preserve our inner rhythm. Instead, we might
consider bringing our inner rhythm as a healing balm to our culture. This is
enlightened activism, which can be applied to any activity: personal or
public, physical or intellectual, natural or technological. The Solution To awaken to our inner
rhythm, we must understand the difference between the content of our
experience and our relationship to that content. Inner rhythm is the temporal
flow of our experience at its natural, unmanipulated
pace. The content of our experience is what our experience is about. For
example, in reading this sentence, the content is what we may be focusing on:
the meaning, or the screen on which it is displayed, or the paper on which
the sentence is printed, or the color and shape of the letters, etc. The
total experience is its temporal flow, its content, and our relationship to
that content. The inner rhythm is the natural temporal flow that is the
product of content and our non-clinging relationship to it. When we are in
our inner rhythm, we give ourselves time to experience the personal
significance or meaning of what we do. When we manipulate our inner, temporal
flow and thereby take ourselves out of our inner rhythm, we fail to
experience that personal meaning; increasingly, we feel empty and our actions
seem meaningless. Together, the three
concepts of inner rhythm, content of experience, and our relationship to
content allow us to solve our puzzle in three steps: (1) understand
enlightenment in terms of savoring our experience; (2) understand the
confusion and suffering that arise when we so focus on content that we
overlook our inner rhythm; (3) understand intellect and theory in a way that
reconciles the immediate with the remote, thereby allowing us to maintain in
our daily lives the enlightenment that we find in solitude. (Did space allow,
we could also distinguish between good and bad desires as between those that
are congruent with our inner rhythm and those that interfere with it.) Savoring Experience Savoring our experience
is neither an epicurean high nor a bloodless, dispassionate observation of
life. It is being lovingly intimate with our experience. Informed by lovingkindness, we gratefully accept the pleasant both by
attending to its very nature and by being gratefully aware of it as a
temporary gift. And we compassionately dwell with the unpleasant by attending
to its very nature, being gratefully aware that it will not last, and, when
we cannot avoid it, warming ourselves in compassionate regard. When we savor
our experience, even parting is such sweet sorrow. Savoring is therefore the
core of spirituality, a compassionate appreciation of any experience in its
impermanence. Content versus
Relationship Ordinary savoring,
which focuses on the content of experience, is distinct from the deeper,
spiritual kind just described. At the ordinary, non-spiritual level we can
savor only what content we find pleasant. For example, we can savor a moment
of rapport with a friend, but not the painful aspects of conflict; we can
savor the sweet but not the bitter. Spiritual savoring
focuses on our relationship to our experience, allowing us to savor anything.
For example, we can gratefully enjoy rapport with a friend for the temporarily
pleasant experience that it is or compassionately dwell with conflict as a
temporarily unpleasant experience; we can enjoy the sweet and compassionately
accept the bitter. Were we completely liberated we could thus savor life no
matter what our circumstances, pleasant or unpleasant. Clinging Clinging is the
opposite of spiritual savoring. Whereas the latter respects the impermanence
of our experience, following the rhythm of its ebb and flow, clinging disrupts
the rhythm. If the experience is pleasant, clinging attempts to maintain it
beyond its natural life; if the experience is unpleasant,
"negative" clinging or rigid aversion attempts to shorten its
natural life. By overly focusing on content, clinging insufficiently attends
to the fact that the content changes, however slightly, from moment to moment
and that our own relationship to that content changes accordingly.
Paradoxically, in trying too hard either to enjoy or to avoid the content of
our experience, we set ourselves up for suffering by falsifying the
experience itself: exaggerating the briefness of the pleasant and the
duration of the unpleasant, and misperceiving the precise quality of both.
Thus, in manipulating our inner rhythm we lose control, just like the storied
monkey who, inserting his hand into a box to grab its contents, is trapped
until he lets go of them. If we apply the
preceding framework to activism, we can see how focusing on content
undermines activism and how focusing on relationship renders anything we do
activist. Focusing on Content
Encourages Withdrawal If we mistakenly
associate savoring only with content, we face two unpalatable choices. The
first is to swear off enjoyment of anything within our ordinary experience and
seek spirituality in some dispassionate, perhaps meta-physical experience.
This ascetic option has an honorable tradition sustained by the advantage
that it keeps its practitioners from becoming ensnared by ordinary human
concerns. However, it has, at least for many, two undesirable attributes: it
makes activism impossible; and it has not yet convincingly demonstrated that
it leads to anything more than a dissociated psychological state. Whether
those of us not inclined toward asceticism just don't have what it takes, or
have too much common sense and humanity not to go there, is a crucial and
as-yet-unanswered question. In the meantime, we can explore the second
option: parcel our experiences into those that are spiritual and those that
are not. For example, we might
decide that going to church is spiritual, going to the ball game is not.
Contemplating a beautiful sunset is spiritual, contemplating a beautiful nude
is not. Fasting is spiritual, feasting is not. Hugging a tree is spiritual,
cutting it down is not. Feelings of rapport are spiritual, setting and
implementing public policy is not. Giving to the poor is spiritual, running a
business is not. Natural living is spiritual, technological living is not.
Such dichotomizing has the advantage of targeting specific areas of activity
to engage in or to avoid. However, there is increasing difference of opinion
about how to divide things. For example, many traditionalists will be quite
comfortable with associating the church, but not the ball game, with spirituality.
Others, however, may find attending church a deadening experience and a ball
game an enlivening one. Similarly, environmentalists may characterize their
rapport with trees as spiritual, but loggers may similarly characterize their
virile control over trees and their ability to use them to shelter and
economically sustain their families. How are we to decide which content is
spiritual and which is not? More fundamentally, no
matter how we divide things, we eventually discover that we can make even the
spiritual a source of suffering by clinging to it. At one time or another, we
have probably all been seduced by a crass spirituality that associates the
spiritual with an emotional high. However, we soon discover that the high is
always temporary and almost inevitably followed by a proportionate low. We
also find that the higher the high, the more attached we almost inevitably
become to it – that we can as greedily grasp for spiritual goods (content) as
we can for material ones. Reflecting on these blind
alleys created by associating spirituality with particular content over
another, we may begin to see that what really counts is how we relate to that
content. Focusing on Relationship
Encourages Activism Why do we believe some
activities and not others are spiritual? Suppose we can get beyond the
confusion of identifying emotional highs as spiritual, and the self-serving
strategy of identifying as spiritual whatever content serves our interest,
preference, temperament, or convictions. We may then discover that what we
justifiably call spiritual sustains or restores our inner rhythm. Thus, we
find church-going spiritual if it sustains or restores our inner rhythm,
slowing us down if we have become too frenetic or enlivening and focusing us
if we have become dulled and confused. In either case we are awakened to our
inner process, with its continuous, enlivening ebb and flow. On the other
hand, attending church may distract us from our inner rhythm by an overly
theatrical liturgy or frenetic social programs, or dull us to our inner
rhythm by focusing us on self-denying dogma or magical nostrums. The critical
spiritual issue is therefore not primarily what we do (content). It is how we
relate to what we do – mindfully rather than heedlessly. Spirituality is
therefore essentially activist because it involves our relationship to what
we do. There is no question of withdrawing from the ordinary world, only the
issue of whether we act freely or compulsively, openly or defensively. For
that very reason, spirituality is universal. It applies to all activity, not
some to the exclusion of others. For it involves how we relate to anything we
do. Of course, depending on our individual needs and circumstances, some
activities better than others may help us to live life from our inner rhythm.
Such activities are indirectly, or secondarily, spiritual in virtue of that
helpfulness. The particular activities may vary from individual to
individual, and even for the same individual at different times and
circumstances. What is constant, no matter what the activity involved, is the
inner rhythm by which we relate to what we do. If spirituality is
found in our inner rhythm, it might seem that whatever we do is a matter of
complete indifference, as long as we do it mindfully. However, such a
conclusion overlooks the fact that content operates according to its own
laws. We still have the hard work of understanding from our own inner rhythm
the world to which we relate. We must still sort out as best we can all the
pieces of our complex world and decide how they should fit together. We must
still identify what is desirable and what is less so. All that is a job for
human imagination, intellect, and will. Spirituality as such formulates no
questions, provides no answers. Instead, by calling us to ourselves, to our
inner rhythm, it helps us savor our work and carry it out honestly, according
to the requirements of the situation. For example, consider three major areas
of contemporary concern: nature and technology, emotion and intellect, and
cultural diversity. Nature and Technology We are part of nature,
sharing its cycles of birth, growth, and death. We naturally look to it as a
healing presence that restores us to our inner rhythm when we have allowed
ourselves to become harried and distracted, or as a nurturing companion that
sustains our inner rhythm, or as a lover with whom our inner rhythm is in
sync. No wonder the spiritually minded are tempted to dwell with nature even
to the point of seeing technology as a natural enemy. Unfortunately, our
culture's primary message is that happiness lies in content: in a socially
constructed self and whatever fame, fortune, and achievement it can create
for itself. Consequently, we tend to pursue a happiness that consists in what
we can attribute to ourselves. We embark on a career of consumption –
material, psychological, even spiritual. We manipulate our conscious
processes as merely the means of maximizing our consumption. Technology is
both cause and effect of this content-oriented bias. Intently focused on the
content of our experience, we create technologies to help increase and
improve content. They in turn have a rhythm of their own, which we try to
match in order to increase technological productivity and efficiency. Living in a culture
permeated by technological processes and their apparent blessings, we almost
totally order our lives according to technological timetables rather than our
own. We become heedless, rather than mindful, of our inner experience.
Reversing our natural priorities, we focus our attention on the content of
our experience rather than on our relationship to it. We impel ourselves
toward consumption at the expense of value, stimulation at the expense of
spiritually savoring our experience. Rather than being the master of
technology, we become its servant. Rather than fashioning technology to
support and express our inner rhythm, we betray ourselves by accommodating
the rhythms of technology that we ourselves have created. Of course, we ourselves
do not have a single, fixed rhythm; in emergencies, for example, it
accelerates. However, contemporary culture presents us daily with more
"emergencies" than we can mindfully address. We rush through
breakfast because we have to get the children ready for school. We rush in
traffic because we have to get to work on time. We rush one task after
another, because yet another task seems to demand our attention.
Unfortunately, we can mindfully rush to address occasional emergencies, but
we are not built to run mindfully on chronic emergency. The nature (content) of
our activity does not rescue us from this treadmill. By itself, pursuing
"morally superior" goals such as environmental or social welfare
cannot liberate us. Indeed, we merely turn them into yet more consumer goods
if we pursue them mindlessly. True, even mindless activism can do good. It
can bring food to the starving, protect the vulnerable from the predatory,
and even educate others in helpful skills. But none of this necessarily
restores us to our inner rhythm and mastery over technology. The most that
mindless activism can do is make us more productive and less dissatisfied
servants of technology. Only mindfulness can liberate us. Fortunately,
progressive divorce from our innermost sense of ourselves is not inevitable.
We can free ourselves from overly focusing on content and reawaken to our
inner processes. We can then fashion technology to serve our inner rhythm,
rather than ignore the latter in a chronic, desperate attempt to conform to
the pace of technology. Emotion and Intellect Overly focusing on
content not only leads to an unnecessary opposition between nature and
technology, but to a closely related one between emotion and intellect as
well. Thus, we sometimes prefer emotion over intellect as the immediate and
intense over the remote and abstract. At other times, we prefer intellect
over emotion as the objective and rational over the subjective and
irrational. We seem forced to decide between emotional but subjective
richness and objective but bloodless rationality. Fortunately, this dichotomy
stems only from overly focusing on content. If we focus instead on our
relationship to content, our inner rhythm provides a kind of richness that
applies to intellect as well as to ordinary emotion. For thinking as well as
emoting is a conscious process that has its own inner rhythm to which we can
relate mindfully. Rapport with nature is
rightly prized insofar as its rhythms are sufficiently congruent with us that
they awaken us to our own. However, we must not overemphasize rapport.
Intellectual processes have their own inner rhythm as well. Enlightenment can
be found in theorizing as well as in contemplating nature. We thus err if we
romanticize nature over technology, rapport over theory, devaluing our
complex technological and economic culture as more abstract and less
emotionally immediate than a simpler, more "natural" existence.
Each has its appropriate sphere. Rapport and theory are
complementary because we are individuals in large systems. We usually have
rapport only with individuals or small groups. Yet, public policy addresses
systems, which are not just individuals writ large. We cannot simply project
our experience of rapport with trees or with people onto environmental or
social systems. The problem, of course, is that rapport has emotional
immediacy for us, whereas knowledge of the systems within we exist is
theoretical and emotionally remote. If we mistakenly locate enlightenment in
rapport (content), we will project onto the whole system our individual
preferences arising from our personal rapport with nature. Yet, if we
mistakenly locate enlightenment in theory (content), we will dilute our
personal experience in abstraction. We must somehow integrate emotionally
remote theories with emotionally immediate personal rapport. This we can do
if we locate enlightenment in the inner rhythm of how we relate to our
conscious processes. For we can then have a dynamic, experiential perspective
from which we can understand and relate not only to personal rapport but also
to the complex and abstract thinking processes required to understand the
cultural, political, and economic systems in which we exist. The preceding framework
enables us to promote cultural diversity in a way that is synergistic rather
than balkanizing. Cultural Diversity Overly focusing on
content leads to a dichotomy between emotion and intellect that balkanizes
diverse groups. Overcoming that dichotomy by focusing on our relationship to
content promotes synergy. Consider how illusion and enlightenment thus play
out in a classical conflict between environmentalists, loggers, and
investors. What is immediate
varies with individuals. Based on their rapport with nature,
environmentalists would build environmental policy on the requirements of
nature. However, loggers and their families find emotional immediacy
elsewhere, in their own dreams and hard work. Even investors and their
families find immediacy, but not in their abstract economic theory and
financial strategies. They find it in their own concrete dreams and hard
work. If they focus on content, members of each group will inevitably
undervalue the requirements that they see as remote but that other groups
experience as immediate. Environmentalists and investors, from their different
perspectives, will find it easy to believe that the loggers can get another
job, ignoring the difficulties that might entail or the personal satisfaction
that loggers and their families derive from their work. Environmentalists and
loggers will scoff at the idea that investors have human dreams and do hard
work, scorning investor culture as one of greed alone. Loggers and investors
will deride the requirements of "mere
nature" and write off the rapport of the environmentalists as mere
sentimentality or egghead theorizing about nature. (I am aware that there
are "objective" analyses that can be made on behalf of each group.
Even allowing that such analyses disagree on specifics, they can all agree
that destruction of the environment at some point threatens the survival of
everyone involved, and on the other hand that each group must make a living.
However, personal considerations are usually weighted by characteristic
experiences that one finds emotionally immediate and of special value.
Therefore, I am here focusing on the distinction between the immediate and
the remote as central to resolving differences among activists.) To the extent that each
group focuses on the content of its characteristic experience – rapport with
nature, well-paying and "manly" work, creating economic development
– it emphasizes its differences from the interests (immediacies) of the other
groups and has proportionately little empathy for them. Remaining focused on
content, the conflicting groups can negotiate their differences when forced
to, but will remain ever vigilant to gain advantage for what they see as the
superior good. Diversity here tends toward balkanization. In contrast,
enlightened disputants know that, whatever their differences of content, they
share the same human condition: the content under consideration is ever
shifting and their deepest happiness stems from their non-clinging
relationship to it as they ride the continuous flux of human experience. This
dynamic, enlightened core of their awareness maximizes their ability to
empathize with the experience of other groups, to compromise when necessary,
and to create win-win solutions where possible. It also allows an enlightened
intellect to understand how what is close to us is related to what is remote,
as we see in the following examples. Diversity here tends toward synergy. For loggers, nature
plays a dual role of object of rapport and object to be harvested. These are
not incompatible roles, but they do have to be harmonized. Enlightened loggers,
aware of nature's role in restoring them to themselves, will not harvest
trees heedlessly. They will do so reverently, as one receives a gift from a
benefactor. Attuned to the rhythms shared within themselves and the nature
that they harvest, they will see nature as an intimate part of their culture
rather than an alien object outside of it. Nature plays the same
dual role for investors as it does for loggers. However, the challenge to
harmonize is greater here, proportionate to the greater distance between
nature itself and the more abstract character of investment analysis and
decision making. Still, this relatively abstract work is a conscious process,
with its own felt rhythms, if one awakens to them. In the final analysis,
even investors have the same rhythms within themselves as they find in
nature. Attuned to their own inner rhythms, they also must deal with nature
as a benefactor within their culture rather than merely a commodity outside
their personal world. We cannot develop
rapport with everything. We cannot feel equally the beauty and rhythm of
nature, the dreams and heartaches of loggers, investors, and other interested
groups. Our capacity for rapport is limited. The more time we spend
contemplating one reality, the more abstract and remote other realities
appear. It is the hard work of intellectual analysis and theorizing that
extends our consciousness beyond the emotionally immediate to the extensive
reality that is emotionally remote to us but immediate to others. It is
theorizing that creates win-win solutions or at least hammers out livable
compromise. We need not fear theorizing as the enemy of rapport. We need only
give it its due while finding enlightenment in mindfully carrying out its
requirements. Bringing Our Inner Rhythm
to Our Culture We have seen that we
can be as enlightened in our everyday, practical daily living as we can in
solitude. We can even be enlightened in the way we carry out the more
abstract and complicated processes of theorizing and creating technology. The
key is to focus not on the content of our experience, but on our relationship
to that content. Meditation, feelings of rapport, everyday activity,
theorizing, and creating technology – each is a human process that has its
own inner rhythm, which is the core of enlightenment. Once we see how
theoretical and technical human activity can be as enlightened as any other,
we can be open to understanding how such activity complements rapport.
Activists tend to emphasize rapport with our social and natural environment,
because rapport is less complicated and more obviously related to
enlightenment than is theoretical and technical human activity. Nevertheless,
activists cannot base their efforts only on rapport. For we can have rapport
only with what is relatively close to us, whereas the systems in which we
exist have elements that are mostly remote. Therefore to understand those
systems we must supplement rapport with theorizing, which ties together the
immediate with the remote. And to work effectively in those systems we must
supplement rapport by creating technology, which extends our reach to their
furthest corners. That having been said,
our technological society remains problematic. Though it is not necessarily
incompatible with enlightened activism, its increasing social and
technological complexity tends to create a pace that very much conflicts with
our own inner rhythm. We must understand, however, that the conflict is not
one of principle. We can address contemporary social and technological
demands in as enlightened a way as we do anything else. The problem is how to
do so while respecting both their requirements and those of our inner rhythm.
The problem is how to bring our own inner rhythm to our culture – not avoid
it from an anti-intellectual, anti-technology ideology. That romantic
illusion poses as spirituality but is really the product of intellectual
confusion and half-hearted aspiration. If enlightened activism means
anything, it means being clear about one thing. Our complex technological society
lies before us, a vast human reality to be awakened. It presents us with a
challenge that is unknown territory as vast, threatening, enthralling, and
promising as anything Lewis and Clark explored in the nineteenth century. Gary Schouborg is
a partner of GaryNini.com, which provides Life Coaching. He is currently
constructing a naturalistic, developmental theory of enlightenment. Email: gary@garynini.com Web: www.garynini.com
|
