It’s been a delight to be talking through Yoga history and the postmodern chaos of contemporary spirituality at the Tuesday Satsang, and about attention training in the NY Insight class. Then I go over to FB—my feed is almost entirely alarmed commentary on the US coup—or read the news and have another wave of doubt. This thing I’ve been doing of trying to balance obsessing about the global disaster that is this political moment and continuing with our Dhamma investigation and inner practice: is it skillful? Should I drop the themes I’ve been teaching on for the moment and encourage focusing all our collective energy on the crisis? I basically flip-flop on this weekly.
This doubt is everywhere in my communities at the moment, and absolutely natural, I think. I hear it in your questions and our discussions of practice all the time. What is the right balance of inner and outer attention for each of us, in this disorienting moment, and in the next, and the next?
We know that political, military, and economic crisis is an ongoing part of our world, so there is strong contemplative justification for mostly letting it sort itself out and staying close to the task of inner cultivation. We know the resilience and wisdom our practice grows is absolutely necessary for our own well-being in the long run and our ability to help others around us. But there are at least two other strong justifications pulling on our psyches.
When danger becomes local, there is a natural urge to help those around us stay safe. This is the active compassion that brings us to engaging in our immediate communities—joining with those who are tracking ICE raids or showing up at city council meetings to hold off what we can of the many-tentacled monster and not lose the culture war by giving up. This is an activism that stays close to the nervous system—to our instinctual need to protect those we care about in the immediate ecosystem.
The other force that pulls on us, though, is more distant, and is based on the profound but complex abstraction called “democracy.” Whether or not you live in a healthy or unhealthy democracy, the idea has been planted deep in our collective imagination that we have the power, collectively, to change the political situation we live under. In so many ways that weren’t possible in the ancient world, we do—this is what we mean by democracy. I think it is partly because of this that we have this doubt about social engagement as the opposite of contemplative spirituality. If we have the power to change an unjust situation, after all, shouldn’t doing so be our primary concern?
The Buddha didn’t try to overthrow the local murderous, imperial king Ajātasattu partly because his spiritual wisdom had other methods (he tried, with imperfect success, to convert him to the Dhamma), but also because people didn’t overthrow kings in those days. It wasn’t part of the collective consciousness that you could do that. But now that we have a great set of idealistic revolutions, but also just positive democratic processes, in our rearview mirror, we’ve been trained to feel the naturalness and rightness of the democratic process. We feel like we can have a voice in the affairs of the state, and that becomes the idea that we should exercise that voice, which can lead to the conclusion that doing so—because it seems to address most directly the suffering of the world—is the best use of our time and energy. Basically, the sense of empowerment that democracy gives us also leads to the doubt about whether it’s ethical to focus on anything other than politics, since politics is where the biggest harms and potentials for good both reside.
We’ll see where this doubt takes me this week, meaning that I’m not sure if tomorrow’s discussion at Satsang will be about this, and about political engagement, or if it will go back to our exploration of the roots of healthy individual practice we’ve been on since January. Either way, blessings as you navigate the choice points that mark your own path through the chaos of the moment, and in both the inner work and outer service that you find most nourishing for you.