Wholly Human

“In [Gampopa’s] discussion of the first paramita central to the discipline and training of a Bodhisattva, the practice of generosity, he explores three categories of giving, the three most basic things that people need and that one concerned for general well-being would want to provide. They are material goods, fearlessness (also translated as psychological comfort), and the dharma teachings themselves. This list seems promising, for it recognizes that there must be a context or container in which the dharma teachings can be heard and received, that physical and psychological needs must also be recognized, that one cannot practice the dharma in a vacuum or while overwhelmed by unmet but legitimate physical and emotional needs. When one reads that among the [material] gifts that are permissible and sometimes appropriate are wife and children, who are listed along with food, drink, clothing, and vehicles, suspicions begin to arise.

[Robbers, diseases, wild animals, and floods] make the gift of fearlessness sound like an extension of filling material needs, rather than helping someone deal with depression, anxiety, loneliness, or victimization, truly psychological traumas. Yet these emotional conditions present as many obstacles to the realized life as do robbers, diseases, wild animals, and floods, and are far more common and widespread. Interestingly, voluminous contemporary oral commentaries on the three gifts to be given in the practice of generosity are almost as unconvincing and sketchy as their discussions of the gift of psychological comfort. Most discussions of helping, or of giving the gift of fearlessness, remain at the level of outer, physical and material needs, ignoring, with embarrassed silence, the inner level of psychological comfort. It is much more difficult, because it is so close to home, to discuss the need for and the nature of a proper psychological environment for spirituality. Furthermore, it is part of the masculinist bias, which still dominates most public arenas of discussion, to be uncomfortable with open discussions of vulnerability, emotions, and the need for psychological comfort. So the topic is often glossed over, as in Gampopa’s text. [...]

It is important to acknowledge that such communication is not to be confused with some magic potion that would make suffering, anxiety, or depression disappear, to be replaced by bliss. The bittersweet edge of ultimate aloneness cannot be cut. Rather, communication makes the inevitable stresses and traumas bearable. It provides the necessary measure of relief that allows one to continue to deal with stress and suffering. The need for companionship, despite ultimate aloneness, could be compared to a more familiar topic in Buddhism. The first noble truth states that life is permeated with suffering. But this truth has never led Buddhists to seek out suffering deliberately, or to feel that they needed to provide it for others. Rather, one always tries to alleviate suffering. Similar practices regarding alienation and aloneness need to become much more explicit and important to Buddhists. Just as there is sufficient suffering, so there is sufficient aloneness; just as Buddhists seek to alleviate, rather than increase, the suffering of others, so they should see to alleviate the loneliness of others. For inappropriate loneliness and lack of an in-depth communication is among the most devastating and destructive of all forms of suffering.

“Years later, with the wisdom of hindsight, I feel that another message, which most of us missed, was also being beamed to us by our Buddhist teachers, but we were missing it, still are missing it, because it doesn’t accord with the values of a highly alienated, masculinist, and individualistic culture. We were also being told:

‘We take refuge in the Sangha as companionship. That means we have a lot of friends, fellow refugees, who are confused, as we are, and are working along the same guidelines as we are. ... They provide feedback, they bounce things back on you. Your friends in the sangha provide a continual reference point which created a continual learning process. The companionship within the sangha is a kind of clean friendship--without expectation, without demand, but at the same time fulfilling. ... The sangha acts as the source of the learning situation as much as the spiritual friend or the teacher does ... Without that sangha, we have no reference point. We are thrown back into the big samsaric sop and we have no idea who we are or what we are. We are lost.’ - Trungpa, ‘Taking Refuge’

For some time, I didn’t notice that clear message--nor in fairness, did anyone around me emphasize or manifest that message. Instead, I began to experience intensely that there can be too much aloneness--that while aloneness is integral to human experience and spiritual development, it can be overdone. I also began to notice more clearly the extreme contrast between the personal ineffectiveness accompanying too much aloneness and the sane joy of proper communal and relational existence, of genuine friendship and closeness, of true sangha experience. With these in place, it was so much more possible to be a decent person and to study or meditate effectively! I was discovering existentially what I had not been taught explicitely. The Three Jewels are completely interdependent; without the sangha, there is no Buddha and no dharma. The sangha as community, as source of psychological comfort, is the indispensable matrix of spiritual existence. Is is not something to be taken for granted, a poor third, to be ignored while one focuses on self-reliance and non-theism.”

Nature vs. nurture is part of this—and then there is what I think of as anti-nurturing—the ways we in a western/US context are socialized to work against respecting the emergent processes of the world and each other:

We learn to disrespect Indigenous and direct ties to land.

We learn to be quiet, polite, indirect, and submissive, not to disturb the status quo.

We learn facts out of context of application in school. How will this history, science, math show up in our lives, in the work of growing community and home?

We learn that tests and deadlines are the reasons to take action. This puts those with good short-term memories and a positive response to pressure in leadership positions, leading to urgency-based thinking, regardless of the circumstance.

We learn to compete with each other in a scarcity-based economy that denies and destroys the abundant world we actually live in.

We learn to deny our longings and our skills, and to do work that occupies our hours without inspiring our greatness.

We learn to manipulate each other and sell things to each other, rather than learning to collaborate and evolve together.

We learn that the natural world is to be manicured, controlled, or pillaged to support our consumerist lives. Even the natural lives of our bodies get medicated, pathologized, shaved or improved upon with cosmetic adjustments.

We learn that factors beyond our control determine the quality of our lives—something as random as which skin, gender, sexuality, ability, nation, or belief system we are born into sets a path for survival and quality of life.

In the United States specifically, though I see this most places I travel, we learn that we only have value if we can produce—only then do we earn food, home, health care, education.

Similarly, we learn our organizations are only as successful as our fundraising results, whether the community impact is powerful or not.

We learn as children to swallow our tears and any other inconvenient emotions, and as adults that translates into working through red flags, value differences, pain, and exhaustion.

We learn to bond through gossip, venting, and destroying, rather than cultivating solutions together.

Perhaps the most egregious thing we are taught is that we should just be really good at what’s already possible, to leave the impossible alone.

Lots of people and organizations have been and are critical of these ways we socialize each other, and have offered solutions—I think here of Harriet Tubman, Ella Baker, Frantz Fanon, Karl Marx, Augusto Boal, Malcolm X, the Zapatistas, and others throughout history who I believe have felt the thrum of emergence in their systems and moved what was possible in their lifetimes such that their impacts reverberate in my life and the work of my generation.

We are still mostly misdirected, turned away from the wisdom that is our inheritance. Joanna Macy speaks of the “great turning,” a collective awakening and shifting direction, away from the wanton destruction of this planet and each other, away from those practices of separation and competition listed above, towards life and abundance. I like this visual of turning and evolving, as opposed to destroying the systems in place now.

When Wheatley visited Detroit on a learning journey, she said systems built on greed eventually collapse on themselves, topple under their own top-heavy weight.

Matter doesn’t disappear, it transforms. Energy is the same way. The Earth is layer upon layer of all that has existed, remembered by the dirt. It is time to turn capitalism into a fossil, time to turn the soil, turn to the horizon together.”

Why was Buddhism so accommodating to its social environment, especially regarding gender arrangements? For on this issue alone, it accepted prevailing conventions, not only for the wider lay society but also for countercultural alternative society. And it did so despite developing its own dharma that is remarkably free of gender bias ['the dharma is neither male nor female']. This is an extremely tough puzzle to solve, more difficult than the emergency of patriarchy itself. But I believe two interlocking factors may explain Buddhist conventionality and conservatism on this issue. First is the fact that male dominance was already there as the norm for gender relations and second is the fact that Buddhism did not attempt to reconstruct or reform society because it saw withdrawal, rather than reconstruction, as the only feasible relationship with the larger society.

Had Buddhism been fortunate enough to enter history in an egalitarian rather than patriarchal society, it would just as happily have accommodated itself into that situation."

Despite violent attacks by elite forces, poor whites and Blacks continued to organize together. They formed the Southern Tenant Farmers Union, an interracial alliance demanding their fair share of subsidies and profits, and improved working conditions. Harrison George of the Communist Party remarked in 1932, 'The impoverished farmers are on the march. We cannot order them to retreat, even if we desired.'

Decolonization and rematriation go hand in hand. Settler colonialism is powered by the domination of the Earth and anyone deemed “too close” to Her. Patriarchal conquest convinces us that the feminine wears specific faces; that it has neither the wisdom nor the strength to extract itself from the “limitations” of the dark earth; that it is a subordinate background at best and a destabilizing threat at worst; and that it is the “other” to be infinitely exploited and discarded.

Patriarchal worldviews encourage alienation, greed, and the worship of the (masculine) individual, begun with the enforcement of “self” and “other” in a violent severing of an inextricably relational cosmos. For just as every magnet consists not only of both poles but also the fields or spectrum of charges in-between, so too is every being composed of these united, primordial currents. There are no distinct binaries.