We can’t change our thinking, our beliefs, our mental models without first working with the affective discomfort that such shifts require.

Allow me to digress to see if I can flesh this out a bit. And to touch on why it matters individually, but also collectively.

Every year in my neighborhood the week before the 4th of July, a local, seemingly nice, real estate agent intent on both patriotism and increasing market share, the two virtues required of all Americans who wish for access to power, donates enough cheap American flags to be placed at the end of each of my neighborhood’s driveways. The real estate agent or their hirelings (I have never actually seen them- and therefore cannot verify that they actually exist) then walks throughout the neighborhood planting these flags. Every year a few days before July 4, I awaken to find a flag planted at the end of all the lawns across the neighborhood.

I must say that for a number of reasons this causes me a significant amount of affective discomfort.

Maybe most importantly, I am bothered by the aggressive assumption that I am ok with this cheap plastic replica of American Empire placed in a way that represents me without first garnering my consent.

I do not consent.

I do respect the symbolization of what the flag has historically and aspirationally represented. I respect the creation of the democratic ideal.

I do!

But I also see the flag’s use, increasingly, as a form of idolatry. It is a human made, socially constructed replica that, as a nation, we tend to bend to uncritically, and to sacrifice for unthoughtfully. I am bothered by the militaristic cooption of the flag. Of the NFL fly overs and the mythologizing of the military as a nationalistic, perverse form of power. Of a ritualistic embracement of American exceptionalism, and the myth making that this allows. (Note our current administration’s approach to Venezuela, Greenland, Iran as only recent, particularly glaring examples.) I am so bothered by the aggressive assumption that is ok to plant this cheap toy flag, with all of its symbolic baggage, in my yard with no regard to my actual permission.

So, every year, I pull out this plastic replica and throw it into the garbage can, knowing that it will now be around for the thousands of years that it takes plastic to disintegrate but never entirely break down into the earth, and probably end up blocking the intestines of a small mouth bass or lodged perpetually in someone’s brain if our species ends up surviving that long.

But this year, I did something additional.

After throwing out my flag, I took some time to imagine would it would be like to love this country uncritically. To be able to ignore a history of genocide and slavery and the continuing taint of this history, forever unprocessed and therefore forever recurring. I imagined what it would be like to stand without hesitation for the national anthem, place my hand proudly over an expanded rather than wounded heart, and to sing this song loudly. I imagined a world of only US white MAGA righteousness, an ideology and state of idolatry that I, in this imagined state, was able to swallow wholly, with a prideful lump in my throat.

And I was shocked.

At how good this way of imagining my country felt in my body, affectively.

It was a relief.

The task of working through the affective discomfort caused by the cognitive and emotional dissonance that comes via the awareness of our country’s complicated history and complicated present presents an entire doorway into unease/suffering/discomfort/dukkha. To be able to affectively integrate information like this is a challenge. To work with the knowledge that our nation was not and is not perfect, and thus, as a person formed into the myths of this nation, I am not perfect, is no tip toe through the tulips. It requires the discomfort of grieving the loss of who I thought I was, and of what I thought this nation was, of losing access to the imagined power that kept me safe. As former chaplain, current iconoclastic country music artist Nathan Evans Fox writes in these brilliant sentences, “In the context of chaplaincy where identity and culture impact our ability to respond to trauma and loss, I have come to realize that privilege usually manifests as social, psychic, and spiritual fragility. Our points of privilege are places where we have not had to learn real resilience and have instead relied on the fruits of domination to sustain us.” What he said.

So yes, it’s true, affective integration asks something of us.

But denial also asks something of us. It asks us to forgo the critical thinking that requires forgoing comfort. Denial is the grasping on to the relief of affective comfort. A state of denial requires that anything that disturbs must be resisted, pushed away, demonized. And in doing so this denial asks us to forgo our own humanity. To reduce our humanity to the zone of our own personal comfort. It asks us to forgo compassion, that which connects us to all, because compassion requires us to bear witness to pain. It hurts a bit. As Evans continues, he writes of his place in the South, but in a way that is true for all of us. Replace “Southerners” in this next sentence with “Americans” and it makes my point. “Southerners either choose to believe the brutal reality of America or they spiral into delusion.”

Denial and delusion keep us stuck in repetitive personal, cultural and political patterns. They shut down all alternative futures, keep us stuck in a loop of history repeating the same patterns, sacrificing all alternative futures to the comfort of the present; the short-term affective comfort that denial offers. They create a karmic continuation of personal, cultural and political habit patterns.

Which means, the door of transformation is unlocked when we are willing to sit with our own discomfort rather than being driven by the grasping for its relief. Our task is to practice sitting without our discomfort again and again and again so that we can continue to learn and grow. To allow experience and reality to teach us, rather to grasp at the delusional possibility of an unchanging future vision of specialness.

And this also applies to our cultural work that creates the basis for our politics. As Resmaa Menakem brilliantly points out in referring to trauma, the unprocessed affective harm that patterns our personal and cultural nervous systems and responses, “Trauma decontextualized in a person looks like personality. Trauma decontextualized in a family looks like family traits. Trauma decontextualized a people looks like culture.” This is why I think the work of people like Menakem and Bryan Stevenson are so important. They point the way to the importance of effective processing our karma, individually and collectively.

Without this, we all get stuck.

We will experience discomfort and suffer open way or another, which do we choose?

May you face discomfort.

The Rolling Stones, written long before the internet, social media and AI.

A few years ago, we were in the market for a new mattress. Note that my wife grew up in a family that owned and ran a hotel in a small tourist town. She spent much of her youth changing sheets, making beds, and vacuuming. As a result, quality mattresses and vacuums are a bit of an obsession for us now. Anway, we talked about mattresses even more than usual during this time. I was shocked when advertisements for mattresses showed up shortly afterwards in our Facebook feeds. Mark Zuckerberg was listening.

At this point I am more aware of how these algorithms are used to sneak into our lives. Zuckerberg, whether you know it or not, is, if you use social media, living rent free in the portion of your brain that craves. You also have podcasts and their advertisements in your car. You have Spotify curating algorithmically your playlists. As you go down most of our roads you can’t help but see the Target and McDonald’s iconic symbols for consumers (that is, all of us) is subtly, constantly working on you. AI isn’t around because it makes our lives better, as much as the tech bros try to convince you otherwise. It is around because it efficiently grows capital for some at the expense of the rest of us and the earth. Each of these specific manifestations of the ecosystem we are trained into isn’t interested in the answer to what it means to be human. Instead, they are all attempts to train us into an environment that has already determined that your core human function is to support the needs of capitalism, and your human value is measured by your ability to do so. As Douglas Atkins points out, “Cult brand marketers know that they must colonize every single moment of everyday life.” (Quoted in William Cavanaugh, The Uses of Idolatry.)

We are constantly trained in what we are to desire, and this training all too often occurs subtly and unconsciously. It’s not profound or unique to point out that our capitalistic system, premised on growth, is determined to shape us towards two dependently functioning states: 1. Dissatisfaction with our lives as they are and, 2. Consumption as the means of addressing this manufactured dissatisfaction. Everywhere we look, everywhere we listen, we are being trained to experience lack, and a means to address this lack.

And Facebook does it really well, really insidiously. But so does all of the media we engage in.

In the face of this core sense of experiential lack, Buddhism traditionally determined that our task is to extinguish desire. Upon the extinguishment of desire, we would enter nirvana. The traditional image of that is desire as a candle flame, and our practice the means of extinguishing the flame. The candle of life and desire will go out, and we will then enter nirvana, or desire will continue and drive us into our next life. The unmotivating correlative of this is that once our desire is extinguished, we die to this current expression of life. I’m not sure about you, but, although I do accept the inevitability of my own death, I’m not quite ready to extinguish my desire to live this life.

Fortunately, the Buddhist Mahayana tradition which includes Zen, offers a more life-giving version of desire. The problem is not desire itself, it’s what many theologians call “disordered desire.” A desire that has been trained toward the wrong things. Our capitalistic system necessarily depends on growth, the growth of capital- this is what defines it. Without capital growth, capitalism dies. The growth of capital requires consumption. Consumption requires desire for something not yet attained. Therefore, capitalism is a system that requires the creation of disordered desire. Desire for more of everything serves capitalism well. However, it doesn’t necessarily serve us well. Disordered desire leads to warped lives, warped communities and warped systems. In ordering our desires properly, we can recognize that nirvana can be found right here, right now.

So, one function of Zen practice involves the training of our desire. Zen practice is grounded in vow. The iconic figure in the Mahayana tradition is the Bodhisattva. This is a person who has reached the mythical place of nirvana as described in early Buddhism but refuses to leave the wheel of samsara until all beings are liberated. In other words, it is a person who organizes their life around a particular desire- the desire to free all beings. The first line of the four Bodhisattva vows chanted at Zen temples around the world, begins with some variation of, “All beings, one body I vow to liberate.” To quote Shahaku Okumura, “A bodhisattva is a person who lives by vow instead of by karma. As we grow up, we learn a system of preferences and values from the culture around us, which we use to evaluate the world and choose action. This is living by karma. In contrast, a bodhisattva lives by vow. Vow is like a magnet or compass that shows us the direction toward the Buddha.” To live by vow rather than merely by our karma requires the realization and constant reminder of our intention. Intention is the making of our desire conscious. Karma, on the other hand, is unconsciously living by trained habit. Our task is to train our habits towards healthy desire. In order to do this, we engage in ascetic practices- practices that can support us in retraining our desire. We chant, we do prostrations, we say gathas. We organize our lives around the liberation of all beings. And this liberation starts with our own- freeing ourselves from disordered desires. Asceticism gets a bad rap- a reputation for avoiding life and pleasure. This is decidedly not what healthy ascetism does. It is a renunciation of the things that harm life in favor of the things that support life. It is a turning away from the things that reduce our lives and humanity, and a turning towards the things that grow these. It is an intentional process of continual discernment into what gives life, and what are the obstacles to living fully. For me, the measure of our spirituality is the quality of our aliveness.

The core question is, do we intentionally shape our routines and habits in such a way that they bring us life, or do we unconsciously allow ourselves to be shaped by a system intent on meeting its own needs?

May you live by vow.

I listened to Tommy as he broke down the dark side of liberalism. You know, the kind that says, “I can’t be racist, I voted for Obama.” The kind that says, “Black Lives Matter,” right up until Trump is elected, but now it seems that maybe Black lives don’t matter so much anymore. The kind that has a hard time seeing reality as it is and naming as genocide what is happening in Gaza. The kind that says capitalism should be moderated, but don’t raise my taxes and, by the way, Democratic Socialists are scary.

Anyway, Tommy said something that that made me straighten up. (I have a friend who calls this a “BEAMER,” which I love. It is a “Behavioral Manifestation of Internal Response States.”) He said that the liberal framework is rooted in the idea that, “We all need to be good.” Why do we need to be good? Because the alternative is to be bad, and that would be shameful.

I am playing with the idea that all systems of domination and separation are rooted in shame.

That is, they are manifestations of shame, and they depend on the creation of shame to uphold them.

They are shame machines.

Why rooted in shame?

People rise to power all too often (maybe not always?) because, one, their desperate grasping at power is an attempt to keep them safe, and two, acquiring power proves their goodness. As Tommy said, this grasping at goodness is experienced as a need. Being seen as good is a protection from being bad. It is an inoculation against shame.

If I have a need for competitive success, such success proves my goodness. It is driven by the revulsion of seeing myself as a bad person, unsuccessful. To be “bad,” unsuccessful, in these hierarchical totem poles is terrifying because my sense of my own goodness depends on externals. I can’t find goodness inside myself, so I depend on others to bestow it upon me. I need the adulation, the admiration, the respect of others to protect me from my shame.

And thus, I cannot be good, I cannot be deserving, unless others are bad. Unless there is a rationale that explains why I deserve to be at the top- they are bad. I need a dualistic framing of Good vs. Evil. I need systems to hierarchically filter people into good and bad, especially when such systems predetermine that I am good, when they privilege my social location. I need to support the conditions that shame those people so that they come to believe that they are bad and undeserving, and I am good and so deserving. Without all of us having this same dualist understanding, those bad people would be righteously pissed. Avoiding the impact of this potential for righteous rage requires that, as one more insurance item that maintains this whole system, I need to support the cultivation of fear and scarcity. A threat. A subtle form of violence. Compliance as the access to resources. Because such a system creates the separation between people, the (superficial) flourishing of some over others, it requires violence, punishment, blame and shame in order to maintain it. All systems that are delusionally rooted in separation rather than interbeing require various forms of violence to uphold them.

Our culture runs on multiple systems of hierarchy. Racialized capitalism (and all capitalism is racialized) necessarily creates rich (deserving/good) and poor (undeserving/bad). Or, as Mitt Romney famously described it, the Makers and the Takers. And it has to rationalize such systems by describing those at the top as having worked hard, it is “merit” based. Not coincidentally, those hard workers are mostly white men. Hard workers. They “earned” their way.

Those at the bottom of our racialized system of capitalism seem to be overwhelming Black and Brown. Poor. So, they are given rationalizing names, like “lazy” and “welfare queens” via the justification of those on top.

For me, this is an obvious fact. However, in this Trump and Stephen Miller fueled age of delusional anti DEI, here are some statistics to support:

The median white family has 8 times the wealth of the median Black family.

People of color are more likely to be identified as working class

Black and AIAN people are 5 times more likely to be imprisoned than whites (with obvious economic impacts to the families and communities they are taken from).

Black and AIAN unemployment is consistently higher than other racial groups.

Etc., etc. etc. (Please do your work.)

The example of racialized capitalism is only one example of how a system of domination and separation works. Take any particular system and view it through this lens of seeing through institutionalized hierarchy. Prisons. Schools. Look at your own place of work through this lens. Look at your neighborhood.

Your whole fucking life.

And so, what does this have to do with Zen?

A bit back I wrote about emptiness/fullness in Buddhism. (See this.) In a nutshell, emptiness/fullness points to the fact that nothing, including you, has an essential, separate, unchanging identity. “You” do not exist outside of the context of the particular set of relationships you are in right now at this moment. And because, probably within a few minutes, your context will change, you will also change. Right now, I am on a deck. In a few minutes I will walk to say hi to a friend. Who I am in these two separate moments will be different. I am also not separate from my particular history, or that of my parents. Or their parents, or the way that our culture has conditioned me, has conditioned us, all of the way back forever and ever. And this moment, here and now creates the conditions for the future, forever and ever forwards. The recognition of my emptiness also requires the recognition of life’s fullness. Every moment is full of EVERYTHING always. EVERYTHING is connected to here and now. EVERYTHING comes and goes. Life matters. And life moves.

Shame, on the other hand, gets stuck. It puts a brake on the movement of life. Shame is the sense that, as Brene Brown teaches, I AM bad. This is rooted in the delusion that I am a separate, non-changing, essential self. In some fundamental way, I am not enough. And I am stuck, unchanging in my not-enoughness. I am poor. I am an alcoholic. I am a poor student. I am a criminal. I am damaged.

What Zen practice offers us the experiential recognition that shame is a delusion. It points to the fact that who I am at any given moment is always shifting. Everything is impermanent, including me. The sense of stuckness that shame carries is a delusion that creates suffering. In a conventional, delusional measure, I can tell you that there have been moments when I have acted “good,” and moments when I have acted “bad.” However, these moments do not encapsulate the entirety of my being. Brown suggested that the healing move is to shift from a focus on identity, to behavior. To shift our focus from who I am to what I did. Shame is harmful because in its imagination we are stuck. However, my behavior is something that I can take responsibility for, something that I can change. (Not to get too into the weeds, but it is important to note that shame begins with some degree of discomfort in the body. This discomfort is important- don’t run from it. It is a signal that something is messed up- possibly our own behavior. This is an awareness that is truly important. Do run from people that don’t experience the discomfort of shame! The problem is not the discomfort, but the ideas of who we are that this discomfort can habitually generate. The problem becomes the usually unconscious story that we tell ourselves in terms of the discomfort.)

Zen practice trains us to hold our identities, as necessary as they are, lightly. Our identities are necessary delusions that we can learn to let go of as needed. From the recognition that everything is connected, that the relative and absolute are the same, compassion arises all by itself. My welfare actually does depend on the welfare of all. I can learn to be responsible to this awareness- to behave in accordance with it. This is what Zen teaches us. Shame has no place. If we are continually allowing and releasing whatever it is that arises, shame has no place to live. We can be free of it. And we can be free then of the systems that create shame and fear in order to maintain our compliance to them. We can develop the courage of noncompliance as a result of our liberation from shame.

I hope this sounds beautiful. It is. But it takes a lifetime (or more). My sitting practice has done much to increase my awareness of how shame arises for me in my people pleasing tendencies, my tilting towards niceness, my discomfort in rocking the boat. It has also done much to help me see the violence and shame inherent in so many of our organizations, including many so-called peace movements. The root cause of shame is in some form of domination, one that shames. And it is incredibly insidious. When you see a sign at a protest calling Trump a fascist, you see the unconscious reification of a shaming system at work. When you hear someone called an anti-vaxxer, or a MAGA member, or a communist, you hear a person being reduced to a shameful identity. Don’t misunderstand! That doesn’t mean that we let people do whatever they want. We need to call out harmful behavior, but we can do so in such a way that we don’t “other’ others? Can we focus on behavior without reducing people to an identity? Can we call out harm while we call in the doer? And can we start this with our own internal dialogue so that we are also included? (Please read this for an excellent analysis of Othering.)

Zen practice is exactly this. When we sit on the mat, we learn to not get stuck. To let thoughts come and go. To let our various identities come and go. Our daydreams. Our ideas. Our sense of good and bad, right and wrong, our sense of our own goodness, and sadness. What that person said to me yesterday and how I wish I had responded. All of it.

Come and go.

Not stuckness. (Though admittedly, this is an idealized version of this practice. So let this go too. In actuality, there will probably be lots of stickiness along the way. For the rest of your life. But let this go too.)

You don’t need to be good. This is one more idea that we can let go of.

We can learn to let life flow all by itself. To let our shame come and then go. While learning to be without fear.

May you let go of your shame and compliance.

Empty.

Just like any particular thing.

Just like us.

And yet, this word, “emptiness,” connotes lack. When may gas tank is empty, it lacks gasonline. When my stomach is empty, it lacks food. When I am tired, I am empty of energy- food, glucose, sleep.

When my life is empty, it lacks life.

So conceptualizing this lack of “self” can make it seem like the task is to rid ourselves of this “self.” To recede into Oneness. To even out our uniquness into a bland, wonderbread sameness. To nihilisitically rid our life of the energy of its life. Language doesn’t just prescriptively describe; it proscriptively creates a frame of interpretation. And the language of emptiness can consciously, or, especially, unconsciously, connote a bland dullness. A recession from life rather than an entering into it.

The point of understanding emptiness is to know that if everything is “empty” everything is also One.

True.

But it can therefore seem that because all is One, everything- all moments, all things, all people- are all the same.

It can imply that our task is to become boring.

This is so not true.

I am currently reading the Flower Ornament Sutra. (Also known as the Avatamsaka Sutra.) It is a beautiful, impossible sutra, and, at over 1400 small print pages, also the longest sutra. So I am not necessarily recommending it. (Though please dip your proverbial toes into it. Or, better yet, read Ben Connelly’s very accessable and inspiring commentary on it.)

It is also a wonderful antidote to a bland conception of emptiness.

The sutra is full.

Full of buddhas, jewels, sunlight. It is full of life. It is absolutely anti-empty. Its fullness is way over the top. It is superabundant. And again and again and again it points out that fact that each moment, each dharma, each “thing,” is not merely empty, but actually full of everything. Each particluar “thing” that arises within a moment of time is actually an expression of everything. Each thing expresses the whole. Each moment of “now” also necessarily contains everything that occurrend before now, and everything that will occur after.

Which means it is impossible for life to be nihilistically empty. Because if everything that arises contains all else, then every moment matters. And you, as an interdependently conditioned expression of the whole, are necessarily incredibly unique. The bottomless set of conditions that you arose from are unique to you. All other people have a different set of bottomless conditions that they arose from. And thus your very particular uniqueness is incredibly important to the whole.

Our practice is not to empty our lives, but to embrace the fullness of every moment as it presents itself, uniquely.

It took the whole history of the world to create the conditons that allowed you to appear. And your appearance will create a whole future. Connelly writes, “We are creating the world we live in, and the world to come. We are the fruit of seeds, and we are planting seeds.”

The choices you make, the life you bring, matters.

Immensely.

So our Zen practice is to sit while continually letting go of our resistence to life. This resistance comes in the form of our conceptions, our ideas of who we should or shouldn’t be, what life should or shouldn’t be, of what we should or shouldn’t do. All of this we let come, and we let go. Instead of habitually grasping on to these ideas as a way of protecting them, of protecting our idea of our “self,” we allow life to present it self as it is, unfiltered. Which is always somewhat different from we think it should be, or shouldn’t be. This is what allows us to live from the force of life that is always expressing itself, uniquely, through us.

Which means that we must have the courage to be weird.

Because what arises as we experience each moment is also an overwhelming compassion and sense of love that binds the world together. We don’t have to create compassion. It is not something that we have to generate. It is something that arises all on its own. It is inherent to what I am calling the force of life. It doesn’t belong to us. We don’t own it. It’s not a property with its own essentialized self. Compassion is an interative pattern of response that arises from experiencing, moment to moment, each unique expression of the force of life. In each connected experience of the uniqueness of each moment, we recognize our wholeness as an expression of what Thomas Merton called the “hidden wholeness” underlying everything.

And to be straightforward, such compassion makes us weird, “strikenly odd, especially in an unsettling way.” Compassion calls for a response. A response that will be unique to us. Unique to the moment.

The people we admire the most have the courage to be weird, to defy convention, to be unsettling in their compassion. To break with the karmic conditioning of our society. Because, as Bruce Cockburn put it, “The trouble with normal is it always gets worse.”

Martin Luther King, that master of unsettling defiance of social conventionality, called this “maladjustment.” He said, “This hour in history needs a dedicated circle of transformed nonconformists. Our planet teeters on the brink of annihilation; danger, passions of pride, hatred, and selfishness are enthroned in our lives and men [and women] do reverence before false gods of nationalism and materialism. The saving of our world from pending doom will come, not through the complacent adjustment of the conforming majority, but through the creative maladjustment of a nonconforming minority.”

The strength to be weirdly maladjusted to unjust conditioning/conventions arises from our connection to the force of life that generates compassion. (Note, [again]- life itself generates compassion so that we don’t have to. Its a gift.)

Our work is to stay connected and to have the courage to be oddly unsettling as we courageously live from this connection.

Our work is to live the fullness of life through our weirdness. Our refusal to adjust.

Bodhisattva work is the work of creative maladjustment.

May you be weird.

So much to unpack here.

But given time restraints, let just say a word or two (or more) about this popular image of “zen”* as a calm, transcendent ability to rise above the samsara of everyday life.

It’s bullshit.

This image of Zen as calm and unperturbable stems from a superficial interpretation of one of the four the brahmaviharas (divine abodes) of Buddhism, uppekkha, which is most often translated as equanimity.

In traditional Buddhism, equanimity is usually presented as “detachment” from everyday lives. It is meant, in this presentation, as an unwavering calm in the midst of difficulty and suffering. Underneath this idea is the assumption that there is a way we should be that is different from the way we are. That one of the goals of Buddhism is to be tranquil in the face of a world gone mad. Underneath is an invisible assumption that we are to separate from our feelings, to be separate from our context- to avoid the perturbance that embodiment requests.

As Zen Teacher Robert Waldinger writes, “One of the things Zen corrected for me quite early was my misunderstanding that spiritual practice was about becoming unaffected. I thought meditation might help me become calmer by keeping difficult feelings at a distance.”

See it there? “…help me become calmer by keeping difficult feelings at a distance.”

But that’s not Zen.

Waldinger continues, “Instead, I discovered something closer to the opposite.”

Zen is radically nondual. Meaning, at its root, there is nothing to detach from. To present a situation as a “thing” that we are to detach from separates us from that thing- duality.

Instead, within Zen, as the Ch’an masters taught, enlightenment is “most intimate.” It is not only to be intimate with what arises, but to know that we are created with what arises. This is not detachment, but rather the opposite, most intimate.

The problem actually becomes when we create a “self” that is separate from what is arising. We impose a judgement from this imagined, transcendent place of separation. We objectify, we become a self who is separate from, beyond and above influence.

Waldinger again, “The practice was to turn toward experience, not away from it, even when it was painful, messy, or inconvenient. That does not mean indulging every feeling, and it does not mean pretending that painful emotions are pleasant. It means allowing them to be here long enough to actually know what they are.

Often that changes them.”

It is in the intimacy with our life as it arises that we are changed. To be “detached” (as if that were possible) from what arises is to remain unaffected, unchanged.

Stuck.

Now, let me clear. We are not identical to what arises. We don’t disappear into whatever emotions come up, or blend into whatever situation we are in. We retain our personhood, and thus our ability to respond. We retain our response-ability. It is the recognition that who we are in the moment is created with and by what arises, and that compassionate response comes from our ability to stay present. (I always think of the Zen Peacemakers’ 3 Tenets, which nicely summarize our practice: 1. Not knowing- drop our knowing 2. Bear witness 3. Compassionate response.) In this sense, it is important to remember that equanimity (upekka) is only one of four brahmaviharas. The others are loving kindness (maitri), compassion (karuna) and sympathetic joy (mudita). Upekka is part of a dynamic ecosystem. So what upekka actually means is remaining grounded in our body so that life doesn’t detach us from love, compassion and joy. Upekka is, to steal a phrase from Stephen Batchelor, embodied attention.

So, the task is to be intimate with whatever arises.

And right now, the world as it is arising is a shit show.

Living in a country that is drifting inevitably towards authoritarianism and the cruelty and violence required to sustain is highly perturbing.

I am highly perturbed.

I am not zen, like Donald Trump, in the face of such cruelty.

I am angry, sad, grieving.

My nervous system is not necessarily regulated.

My fear is that those of us who practice Zen do so with the unconscious (or conscious) goal of transcending the mess of this world. Of rising above the mess. Of detaching from it. Of remaining zen in the face of it.

Wrong.

Our task is to remain present to the mess, to be affected and thus transformed by it. To allow our nervous systems to go up and down like they are designed to do, rather than remain stuck in the Window of Tolerance, an unnecessary, impossible and performative gesture anyways.

Our task is to remain embodied in the face of such suffering, to not turn away. To show up as whole and messy as we are able to.

To be entirely alive.

To be transformed.

To be affected.

To be moved.

And to respond appropriately from a place of deep love.

May you be perturbed.

* Note the lack of capitalization when zen is spoken of as referenced in popular culture)

Yeah- that old trope. And it is true. “Chop wood, carry water.”

But what are the obstacles to our ability to being present?

Here, I believe, is one:

I LOVE being right.

But even more, I revel in righteousness.

I grew up into a particular idea of who I should be. In my world, the model was Jesus. I was confirmed in the Catholic church, and Jesus was the man, literally. There are lots of models of Jesus. (Currently the most cartoonish is the Christian Nationalist version propagated by Pete Hegseth. His Jesus does pushups, has a White Supremacist tattoo and carries guns. Weird.)

My version of Jesus was the one that was promoted by Dorothy Day, the Berrigan brothers and Thomas Merton. This was the courageous Jesus who promoted peace and compassion. The one who powerfully resisted systemic evil. This Jesus was truly righteous. This Jesus was the one I wanted to model my life after.

However, it also carried some built-in problems. Only one of the people mentioned in the paragraph above was married. I am married. All of the people mentioned above have spent lots of time in jail. I raised two children and felt the need to present to them. I also wanted to feed them, so my job was something I wasn’t willing to risk. These models all lived in some variation of intentional community, something that I greatly admire, but my wife, who I vowed to be with until death do us part, would not be a fan. They all gave their lives over to this image of Jesus. My life included so much more.

So, I was left wanting. There was a huge gap between me and Jesus. There was a huge gap in my mind between who I should have been, and who I actually was.

I would never be enough in this imaginary.

What I could be, though, was righteous. At least in some ways.

There are lots of righteous causes that I could righteously support. And I did!

I did all of things…I attended protests. I wrote and called my representatives. I volunteered at food kitchens and gave money. I dedicated my life to working with kids. (Note- the list of righteous causes to support is endless.)

When I did these things, I felt good. To be righteous feels really good.

However, I’ve begun to notice some things about my righteousness.

When I consider a righteous cause, then I can, without hesitation, consider myself to be righteous in the moment in which I am engaged in that cause. For instance, at the very moment that I find myself leaving a long-winded voice message on one of my senators’ phones, or when my feet are on the streets at a No Kings protest, there is absolutely no question that occurs in my mind regarding my own sense of pure goodness.

I know in those moments, without a doubt, that I am good.

What I am noticing more and more is that in the moments when I am not engaged in these so purely righteous causes, the purity of my own righteousness is a bit muddy and more complicated. I am far less at ease. I experience what we Buddhists call Dukkha- a lack of ease. Because my sense of purity is left to question, I am then highly motivated to engage in some productive (at least), righteous (best) action so that I know I am, once again, without question, good.

When I was vacuuming, I was not so sure.

So, I vacuumed quickly.

When I would do something that seems so pleasurable, like reading fiction (rather than productively increasing my ability to be productive by reading non-fictional systemic analysis…) I am not so sure.

So, I read less fiction.

My righteous action was less motivated by the righteousness of the action, and more motivated by my own need to grasp the comfort that righteousness provides. I was anxiously driven to retain my own unquestioned sense of earned goodness.

I spent most of my time and energy anxiously attempting to uphold a particular identity, that of a good person. This is how I have spent much of my life without even being aware of it.

So, I scoffed at friends’ uneducated views.

That felt good.

I bitched at the newspaper.

That felt good.

I raised my eyebrows very knowingly at my kids expecting them, via the raised eyebrow above my right eye (it’s always my right), to deeply understand all of the wisdom contained in such an act.

Felt good.

I educated everyone.

A lot.

Yes.

I was hypervigilantly seeking opportunities for all of the above and more- because my sense of myself as a person grounded in goodness was at stake.

Not only that.

I notice now that this means that some moments of the life I have been given had more value than others. Some aspects of my identity had more values that others. My value was determined by my striving for righteousness. I had unconsciously been conditioned into a society where a person’s value was based on productivity. And though I had intentionally, thanks to my early reading of Thoreau, avoided productivity as means of making money, I was wholly engulfed in the necessity of producing goodness. My own internal value was based on my ability to produce goodness. And any moment of lack that I spent that was not focused on productively producing goodness was a faulty glitch to be hurried through.

Much of my life became a fault that must be hurried through.

In Zen, the teaching is that each moment matters. That each moment is all that we have of our life. In hurrying through each moment, we fritter away our lives.

Yes, moments of compassion matter greatly. Justice matters.

So does peeling the carrots. In fact, peeling the carrots mindfully and well is an act of righteousness.

Yes, Jesus matters. And is a great model.

But our task is not to be Jesus. Or Daniel Berrigan, Or anyone else.

Our task is to live out fully who we are. In the context that we live. From the Dharma Position that we are finitely placed within.

Each moment is exactly as it “should” be. As much as we might anxiously strive to make it not so, there is no other alternative.

In her study of Zen Master Dogen’s Genjokoan, Shinshu Roberts writes, “Reality’s functioning- or continuous practice-realization- is never just one thing or another.”

We are not ever just one thing or another.

We are never righteous, or not.

Good or bad.

One moment isn’t more valuable than another. Reality, in spite of our ideas about it, doesn’t function in that way. “The self is both particular and universal. The is the intersection of ‘not one, not two.’ Continuous practice-realization is always found at the fulcrum of a dharma position’s point of contact with the totality of being-time and the specificity of our current experience. Despite our perception to the contrary, our life is always a flowing state of the indistinct boundaries of reality’s coming and going.”

Each moment that we live is wrapped up within all moments. The contact that our body makes with the present moment wraps us up in all other bodies. All moments matter.

Well, this is a relief.

I don’t have to be righteous. I can be me. Right here, right now. That is, actually, all that is possible.

That is enough.

One of Zen’s potential blind spots is its weakness in addressing systems and structures. Traditionally, Buddhism has been about individual liberation. Mahayana approaches have wonderfully extended this to all beings. However, it takes some work to explicate what this means systemically. There have been lots of great efforts to shore up this weakness- David Loy talks about the three poisons (greed, aggression and aversion) as organizational and institutional. Thich Nhat Hanh expounded beautifully on Socially Engaged Buddhism, which remains a powerful antidote to Buddhism’s blind spot. More recently, people like Adrianna Difazio, Mary Thanissara, Alexandra Cain and Ethan Nichtern have done wonderful work connecting Buddhist practice to liberation and healing in terms of harmful social structures. (This is a partial list. For a more complete, but still partial list, see Eric Manigian’s article linked below.)

And yet, this blind spot remains. Where, in my opinion, Zen and Buddhism might fall short is in terms of its scarcity of what Charles Strain calls prophetic wisdom. Eric Manigian has done wonderful work in illuminating the impact of this shortcoming, as exemplified in recent article, Zen at War 2.0. He addresses this blind spot in the context of the silence of Zen leaders in the face of U.S. supported genocide in Gaza. Manigian points out that a Buddhist emphasis on “emptiness,” on “selflessness,” can easily shift into an unwillingness to point out harm, on a tendency to silence marginalized voices as a means of creating “harmony with all.” (These quotes are are versions of phrases I bump into- not Manigian’s. See his article for more.) He writes, “The complicity comes in form of the demand for silence and inaction from the Buddhist communities and its leading teachers. It comes in the form of the weaponization of the Dharma to suppress the moral outcry of sangha members who are suffering the wounds of bearing witness to some of the most horrific images of carnage and cruelty and sadistic barbarism that we have seen in many of our lifetimes.”

So yes, this is a problem.

And one way of working with it is to use resources from outside of the Buddhist tradition- resources from traditions where structures and institutional critique is more foundational.

Jewish Prophecy as Zen Resource

One of my resources has become the work of theologian Walter Brueggemann. Brueggeman is an Old Testament scholar who looks at that resource through the lens of empire. And this is a powerful lens! He argues that the scripture of the Hebrew Prophets offers a means to “faithfully resist hegemonic ideologies…to give us courage to depart from Pharoah.” In other words, to imagine liberation for all. Sound familiar?

What I hope to do here is to explore a bit how Buddhists might use the resources of theologians like Brueggemann to explicate and translate what might be present in our own tradition so that we might better “faithfully resist hegemonic ideologies.”

Let’s go a bit deeper into an all too cursory exploration of Brueggemann’s framework and then translate that to resources available in our tradition using this lens.

In his excavation of the Book of Exodus from Journey to the Common Good, Brueggemann applies the lessons learned in regard to empire to our current time, where empire not only remains relevant, but is an intentional, not just systemic/functional, expansion under the Trump administration.

The lessons:

1. Empire creates the conditions of scarcity and its “…propelling ideology of scarcity are alive and well and aggressive among us.” This scarcity, and the anxiety it depends on, leads to a culture of always wanting more- a culture of consumerism (craving) and amplified discomfort (dukkha) always searching for alleviation by anxiously grasping for more.

2. The alternative to this “paucity” is the neighborhood (sangha). Our needs are addressed in the abundance of our commonality, of meeting each other’s needs through our “neighborhood” relations. It is a theology of bottom-up relationality rather than top-down control. (Relationality- sound familiar? Hanh calls this interbeing.) We need each other, not more goods. Or, to get radically Buddhist, we are each other.

3. Importantly, this requires an imaginal and behavioral departure from this system of scarcity creation. The biblical term for this is exodus. In Buddhism we call this liberation. To quote Brueggemann, “I imagine that this narrative journey from scarcity through abundance to neighborhood is the key journey….that all humans must make.” (Empasis mine.)

This journey from what he calls “captivation to the kingdom of scarcity” to departure/liberation is a crucial act for all of us in our attempts to live full lives. And it must be made explicit in our practice if we are to “free all beings from suffering.”

What captivation to this system allows, according to Brueggeman, is making it possible:

• to tolerate acute poverty in an economy of affluence, most especially without an adequate health-care policy;

• to commit aggressive brutalizing war in the name of democratic freedom,

• to defend a militarized police system that protects property over people in the name of ‘law and order.';

• to sustain policies of abuse of the environment, all in the name of nurturing the economy;

• to transform the U.S. flag into a totem for white nationalism.

I think that how these are playing out now are so obvious that I don’t need to make these connections. If you are in doubt, look at today’s headlines. (I.e., any day’s headlines.)

Note that Brueggemann couches his explanation in terms of actions, rather than beliefs. We don’t have to be Christian or Jewish to make use of Brueggeman’s work. With that said, what a religious or spiritual practice offers is an imagination and “neighborhood” that gifts resources for departure from empire. It offers both a vision and practices for liberation. In Zen, our vision is of the Bodhisattva, and our practices of sitting, chanting and the precepts are all examples of movement toward an alternative way of being that is grounded in resistance to empire.

The Paramitas and Departure from Scarcity

One of the great Zen resources is the practice and vision of the paramitas. The six paramitas are the “great perfections.” These are both ethical principles that insert growth inducing tension into our lives (rather than rules we must adhere to) and practices that help us embody the values they represent.

What are they and what might they look like from a framework of departure?

1. Generosity- This is a practice that directly resists the anxiety produced by scarcity. Generosity is rooted in a letting of self so that the abundance inherent in life and neighborhood/sangha can flow through us.

2. Virtue- The recognition that our behavior impacts other sentient beings. Behavior based on fear/anxiety induces the delusion of self-preservation. Virtue is the practice of creating the conditions that maintain the safety and trust needed for a letting go of self-preservation.

3. Patience- The practice of not reacting from fear, of sitting with discomfort so that we are not responding from our discomfort. It is the practice of not reifying empire but creating the time and space for another vision to emerge out of our relational contexts.

4. Energy- The practice of connecting to the force of life. Disrupting empire generates energy as expressed in the living of full, rather than stulted, lives. Think joy as resistance.

5. Meditation- The practice of departure from the habitual ways we have been conditioned into empire/scarcity/fear. It is the practice of creating the space needed for a reconditioning/reorganization of desire. From desire for delusional self-protection to desire for the liberation of all.

6. Wisdom. The practice of envisioning and working out the factual, experienced, embodied awareness of our interbeing.

The task is to come to know fully the experience of suffering that our inevitable conditioning into empire has produced so that we may free ourselves and all beings.

May all beings be free.

We have the dismantling of all our institutions designed to keep us safe and connected- education, DEI, etc. etc…

We have an internal war against those seeking support- ICE incursions, kidnappings, killing.

And now we have a war of choice determined by an obviously over empowered president whose mental health is in question.

And what for me, a powerful force of what is good and right, my dad, died last week.

I can’t lie. I feel great despair.

But I would like to move from despair to grief.

Parker Palmer wrote that contemplation is engagement in the practice of removing our illusions.

I’m not sure he wrote anywhere about how much that hurts.

And this pain is pointing to our need to develop private and public practices of grief.

Zen is a practice of sitting with our discomfort. It is a practice of removing our illusions. It is dropping our conceptions to allow what is. Thus, inherent in this practice is learning to grieve well. My teacher told me that his teacher said, “Enlightenment is learning our to live with a broken heart.”

My heart is broken. And my despair is pointing out the need to grieve this. To sit with it. To allow the loss of my delusions to painfully do its work.

If your heart is broken, your pain is also calling you to this task. Without grief, your pain will solidify into denial. Into rigidity. Into righteous indignation. Into immobility. Into violence. Parker Palmer points out that, “Violence is what happens when we don’t know what to do with our suffering.”

We live in a culture that doesn’t know what to do with its suffering, a culture of violence.

Grieving allows this pain to do its work rather than getting stuck. Grieving allows this pain to shift from stuck despair to grounded hope. Not a hope that slides on top of denial, but a hope that is grown from suffering.

I don’t know about you, but when I feel this depth of existential hurt, I want to “do” something about it. I want action that gives me control.

I now know this is the wrong first move. To reach for control is a step into denial.

In meditation, we often speak of the importance of “letting go”. What are we letting go of? Our resistance to what is. This means we must allow what is to be. Allow our suffering, our pain to be so that we may be transformed by it.

What does this look like?

Crying a lot. Hugging our loved ones a lot. Cooking good meals. Paying attention to our news consumption. (Though the details may shift, I can absolutely guarantee the patterns of the news are always the same- samsara.) Lots of sitting, walking, chanting. Conversations that are real. Crying a lot. The more you can do the above with others the better. (Hugging yourself, for instance, is good. Hugging another is twice as good.)

Please, don’t get stuck. Don’t harden.

We need each other.

will fill the largest pot.

Likewise a person who performs good deeds

becomes goodness itself.”

Buddha, The Dhammapada

Zen practice as a whole is generally very unsexy. The gist of it is: “Let me invite you into a deep experience of our suffering so that you may be transformed.”

It’s a hard sell.

But maybe the hardest sell, and the most paradoxical skill, is the practice of Right Effort. Number 6 on the Noble Eightfold Path. And yet, it is a crucially important practice in our work of liberating all from suffering, starting with, but never only, ourselves.

You all know or have heard about the Noble Eightfold Path. When people first come to Buddhism and Zen, usually what is on their mind is the practice of meditation. And people usually come to this practice because they have heard that, in some way, meditation can so beneficial to their (generalizing here) suffering and oh so lonely selves. (And it can be, and…, but…that “welcome to your suffering” part...) So usually in the modern West people come to Buddhism after some exposure a secular mindfulness practice. The godfather of this secular mindfulness, Jon Kabat Zinn, defines mindfulness as, “Awareness that arises through paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment, non-judgmentally.” Whatever effort there is in this definition has to do with paying attention but doing so without judgment. All good. Add to this the Zen ideal of making the “effort of no effort” and you might come to believe that this practice is learning how to make less effort- of merely accepting life as it is rather than making the effort to twisting into our idea of how it should be.

Fair enough. Because, yes, this is an important starting point. And it is also why the Buddha put Right View first on the Noble Eightfold Path. Right View is the experiential understanding, not just an idea that is isolated in the prefrontal cortex but an embodied experience, that all of life is interconnected. Or, even more deeply and more accurate is the twist that Thich Nhat Han put on this- all of life Inter-Is. We are not separate from anything, in a very real, lived, visceral way that exists below the level of cognition and language. We do not exist separately from the air we breathe, the water we drink, our ancestors are literally imprinted into our bodies, the future is what we are creating right now, and of course we are not separate from each other. Very concretely, my welfare is not separate from Palestinians’ experience of starvation and genocide, or Jews in Israel desperately believing their existence and safety are at stake. It is not separate from those being violently, mercilessly and lawlessly deported in the U.S., or from the I.C.E. agents acting violently from their delusions of separation. Etcetera and etc.. My welfare is intricately tied to yours, and to the welfare of every being on this earth that ever lived and will ever live.

How do we know this? Our practice teaches us this daily, and with every breathe. It is something that we need to experientially be reminded of, and learn to relax into, with every breathe. Right View means developing our capacity to let go of our own small personal “effort” to “be someone.” (Read: to protect our selves from uncertainty and vulnerability.) To move into and learn to trust the flow of life which is actually our true identity.

Shohaku Okumura puts this beautifully. “We don’t practice individually to improve ourselves; rather, we settle down peacefully within the network of interdependent origination and allow the universal life force to practice through us for all beings.”

Yes!

But then…

Why does the Buddha emphasize effort? And are we learning to let go of effort?

Sure.

And then…

Two foundational ideas that might be helpful in understanding what comes next are Karma and Alaya Vijnana (alaya), or storehouse consciousness. These two are deeply intertwined. Karma is simply the understanding that what I engage in now shapes my brain. This includes cultural karma- what my history and the history of culture (structural, political, historical…), what I am conditioned into. Roshi Greg Snyder says there is no such thing as a personal self- all of my thoughts, understandings and frameworks have been formed/conditioned by the boarder relationships of my context over the course of my life. Karma is where history, personal and cultural, collides with neuroplasticity.

In a nutshell, storehouse consciousness is the unconscious (usually) source of our thoughts and behaviors. In Buddhist terms, the source of actions of body, speech and mind. In this understanding it is the consciousness - the store house of the seeds that our Karma plants, that guides our actions. What we engage in terms of media, relationships, culture and our thinking shape our storehouse consciousness and thus determines our future “choices.”

Thich Nhat Hanh writes, “If you produce a thought of anger, hate and despair that is not good for your health or the health of the world. Attention plays a very important role. Depending on the kind of environment you land in and what you pay attention to, you have a greater or lesser chance of producing good thoughts and going in the direction of right thinking…You are responsible for you thought and that thought is your continuation.” (Emphasis mine.)

Note the word responsible.

Yes…we are connected to a life for force that is greater than our usual understanding of our self, and or task is to let that life force work through us for the benefit of all beings.

AND.

We have ways of thinking and acting that are embedded in our karmic habits, our storehouse consciousness, that we need to transform. Knots of consciousness that dam this force of life and so need to be undone.

Right Effort means doing the work of undoing these knots as they arise, of taking responsibility for creating a future oriented around compassion. The Buddha’s word for mindfulness was “heedfulness”. To be heedful means to not simply work with non discerning awareness. No! It means to work with awareness within the context of a set of values defined by our experience of Interbeing so that we can create a future that is aligned with these values. It is a practice not just of nonjudgmental awareness, but of ethics.

The brilliant psychologist, Lisa Feldman Barrett put it this way in her book How Emotions are Made in writing about what she calls the three types of responsibility. (Parenthetical additions are mine in what follows.) “The third type of responsibility relates to the context in your conceptual system. (My note- Read this as storehouse consciousness). A brain does not compute a mind in a vacuum. Every human being is the sum of his or her concepts, which become the predictions that drive behavior. The concepts in your head are not completely a matter of personal choice. Your predictions come from the influences you were pickled in…

If you commit a crime, you are indeed to blame, but your actions are rooted in your conceptual system (storehouse consciousness) and those concepts don’t just appear in a puff of magic. They are forged by the social reality you live in. Nevertheless, all animals shape their own environment. So as a human being, you have the ability to shape your environment, to modify your conceptual system, which means that you are ultimately responsible for the concepts you accept and reject.” (Emphasis mine.)

The effort of taking responsibility for your life, your environment, your storehouse consciousness and your impact on the cultural storehouse consciousness is Right Effort. And it never stops.

Buddhist Practice= Adulting.

And by doing so we also take responsibility for our part in shaping our collective storehouse consciousness- the cultural and structural context that we live and that is influenced by the way we show up to our lives here and now.

Uchiyama Roshi wrote that the task of life is to “concretize the eternal”. In your sitting practice over time, you will come to know and learn from the eternal flow of life that flows through everything.

And then get to work in concretizing this into specific actions that arise from love and wisdom.

Minnesota is a crisis. And the root of crisis points always to opportunity. What is happening in Minnesota is an awakening opportunity.

Just like Black Lives Matter was and continues to be.

Just like genocide in Gaza continues to be.

They are all reflections of the exact same pattern: White Supremacy. Patriarchy. Hierarchies of value. All reinforced by named power, and unnamed obedience.

I’m rediscovering Thoreau right now- mainly through the writing of philosopher Frederic Gros. (See here and here. H/T Mike Chitty.) Thoreau is incredibly instructive.

What Thoreau encouraged was an awareness of our inner voice, the one that nags, the one that says, “I am no longer ok with this.” The voice that encourages us to be aware of our context, and how we are conditioned into this context. Aware of how and when this context steals our soul by disconnecting us from ourselves. In Buddhism, we call this inner voice, this soul, our Buddha Nature- the innate wisdom that connects us to everyone and everything. And this is what awakens us to the when and how of the ways that we become disconnected.

In spite of his reputation as an irascible hermit, Thoreau was an artist of connection. And what he helps us recognize is that with connection comes the responsibility to these connections. For Thoreau, disobedience is not primarily an act against something. Rather it is an act for something- the connections and relational context that we exist in. Disobedience is to disconnection an act of responsibility, of accountability and of obedience to our connections.

So, in this time of apocalyptic unveiling, we are offered questions of awareness.

What are we choosing to be obedient to?

What are the relational connections that we are we called to be responsible for?

What are the ways that we support systems, relationships power structures that are organized around disconnection? (Think of systems that value some people over others. Of systems that incentivize “success.” Of systems that reward disconnection. Recognize and take responsibility for how these systems impact us.)

And what does our obedience to our interbeing call us to be disobedient to?

This is how we take care of ourselves, and our connections to all.

Thoreau wrote, “Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine.”

We all live in the machine. We all can provide friction. We all have the responsibility for determining what that means for us.

Let’s all sit with this.

I noticed I began to tense. What is coming next? Where is this going? What does this mean in my relationship with this person?

This conversation occurred the day after Renee Good was senselessly shot three times and killed by and ICE agent. I was already vigilant.

My body was speaking.

Discomfort entered. We both sensed it and moved away from it, not knowing what it might bring. Not sure that we had the relational capacity to work through it. We shifted back to discussing possible trade options for the Detroit Pistons.

What was going on here?

The same thing that is going on with every breath we take.

In Zen, and Buddhism in general, we speak a lot about “conditioning.” The Buddha recognized that because we exist contextually rather than independently, we are inevitably conditioned by the contexts that we live within.

I think we need to be specific in talking about what exactly this means.

Our karma is one way that Buddha spoke about this. I think science is finally catching up with him in many ways, including providing a deeper understanding of what he meant by this. One way of framing karma (our conditioning) is through the theory of constructed emotions. Essentially, this theory says that our brain is unable to access reality directly, it can only do so through the senses. And the brain’s core function is to keep us safe. The way that it does so is being taking its present sensual data and processing these through its past experiences. These past experiences are what it uses to interpret the current sensorial data in order to make predictions about what is occurring so it can remain safe.

I think of these past experiences as our karma- what we are conditioned into believing (often unconsciously), becomes our patterned/habitual way of being, and then we project these beliefs, these patterns, onto the present moment. Our brain is conditioned into a limited way of being based on lots of things but including, primarily, our past experiences.

To flesh this out a bit more: Our brain also exists contextually (like everything in the world). It exists within and as part of a broader nervous system. This nervous system is patterned into a particular way of being by its karma, all of its past experiences. This nervous system exists within the broader context of a body. This body is thus patterned into a particular way of being. And this body exists within a set of cultures, which are essentially communally created ways of being that are also historical and thus karmic.

Karma is where history, personal and cultural, collides with neuroplasticity.

What is our contextual history? What are we conditioned into? What are the systems and structures that work on conditioning us? What is the history our bodies are using to keep us safe? What is our culture?

In speaking of our particular culture, a culture of white body supremacy, Resmaa Menakem writes, “…white body supremacy doesn’t live in our thinking brains. It lives and breathes in our bodies…The body is where we fear, hope and react; where we constrict and release; and where we reflexively fight, flee or freeze. If we are to upend white body supremacy, we must begin with our bodies.”

Our culture, our systems, our structures are not things that exist only “out there.” They are imprinted in our bodies. Stacey Patton accurately points out that racism, like any other historical, cultural structure of conditioning, is “… is somatic and inherited, not just ideological.”

What our culture tells us is that our bodies- and thus all bodies- must be managed, controlled, disciplined into a performative way of being that allows for the status and success of those privileged by this culture- because status and success can keep those who benefit safe. This superficial safety generated through superficial power creates a superficial comfort, least for those at the top of our dominant system’s hierarchy.

What our culture tells us is that bodies can’t be trusted. And, as life moves through our bodies, life can’t be trusted.

Life must be controlled. Bodies must be controlled.

The ever incisive (and often hilarious) Patton recognizes this. In writing about the MAGA movement, notes its “obsession with the body as a war of worth.”

She continues, “This is a movement that mocks other people’s bodies because it secretly fears its own. That’s why Trump ridicules women’s looks, disabled bodies, aging opponents. That’s why they legislate against trans people, police women’s pregnancies, and starve the poor through policy. Every act of control is a way to project stability onto a body politic they can no longer command.

They punish other people’s bodies because they can’t master their own.”

This attempt to punish, to master, to discipline, is an attempt to maintain their comfort and thus their place in a structural hierarchy that creates winners and losers. A system that bell hooks describes as “white-supremacist/heteronormative/capitalist/patriarchy.” Those who don’t submit to this discipline are a threat. (Note our current president’s statement justifying the shooting of Renee Good by saying she was “highly disrespectful.” Disrespect is a threat, a threat worthy of death.)

(The hard question is, how are we complicit? In what ways have our own bodies been conditioned into this form of discipline? Please sit with this awhile.)

They are so wrong.

It turns out, our bodies are not a thing to be mastered.

They are a doorway to living fully.

Our inability to trust our bodies, to trust life, leads to harm.

We must unlearn the ways that we disconnect from our bodies. We must unlearn the ways that have been conditioned into treating our body as an object to be managed.

This disconnection from bodies, the conditioning that disconnects us, is what we call trauma. As Gabor Mate says, “Trauma fundamentally is a disconnection from self. Why do we disconnect? Because it is too painful to be ourselves.”

And remember, as Menakem points out, “…trauma decontextualized becomes culture.” Cultures unable to absorb pain reify harm. Thus, for example, MAGA

How do we come to understand our conditioning? Our cultural context? Our politics?

We come to understand these things by paying close attention to the ground of awareness that always provides us with the foundational information of what is happening right here and right now.

We attend to our bodies.

This is exactly what we do in our sitting practice, and why it can be so supportive. We learn to not itch. To not get up to do the dishes. To recognize when we get caught up in our thinking, our dissociation. We relearn to come home to the safety of our bodies right here and now. We relearn this feeling. Again and again. Titrated through a mediation practice. Again and again. We heal.

And we carry it off the cushion by sensing the conditioned karmic history arising within whatever context we are in that is not separate from us in that moment.

We practice paying attention to our bodies.

Our bodies exist contextually. They exist always within a context that has meaning. And this meaning is always historically, culturally conditioned into a way of understanding what it means to be together. And what it means to be together is the core political question.

Our bodies are a political site.

Forget mindfulness.

Our practice is actually body-fullness.

Bodhidharma said, “Your body is the real Buddha.”

Buddha means “awakened one.”

We don’t have to go anywhere to find out what’s happening right here and now. Our body can teach us.

We can pay attention to the constriction, contraction and openness that our bodies use to signal. We can note the relaxation that comes with genuine laughter, or the dry mouth. The pit in the stomach. These are all messages that, when paid attention to, keep us grounded in our humanity. They are personal, cultural and structural messages speaking here and now. When we react from constriction, we reify disconnection from ourselves and others. We allow harm. Instead, we can pay attention to our discomfort rather than moving away from it. What is our body telling us about our context? What does our silence serve to uphold? What is unnamed in the space between us? How might naming these unspoken turns allow for a tension that can allow us to grow?

It doesn’t mean we don’t talk about the Pistons trade options. It just means that we work with awareness of the affective the layers beneath that are always lurking and speaking through our bodies.

Your body is awake.

Your body is the real Buddha.

Listen to it. Learn from it.

I wrote about entanglement (Part 1), and its implications (Part 2).

That can all get a bit heavy.

How do we carry this weight?

How do we carry the suffering that our practice sensitizes us to?

Appreciative (or “sympathetic”) joy is one of the Buddhist “Four Immeasurables”. The Immeasurables are beyond limit. They cannot be contained. They are huge and they are an intrinsic aspect of our human nature that we can learn to feed and grow. These are the basis of love. They are:

Loving Kindness

Compassion

Appreciative Joy

Equanimity

The 4 biggies that we need to pay attention, and to do, to grow.

So yes, as one of the Big 4, joy is a big deal. And I always struggled with it. How can I be joyful, especially as a super privileged, upper middle class, cis hetero white male, when so many are so deeply suffering?. When the world is oriented around my comfort, and thus the discomfort of so many others? What have I done to earn such a thing?

And yet there it is. I am supposed to practice appreciative joy.

And by now you may see the obstacle that the I was imagining my experience had created. The problem, as framed above, is structured in such a way that the one who should be experiencing joy is isolated from context. In this framing, joy becomes one more burden, one more thing I have to do that seems so selfish in the face of all of those who are struggling so mightily. I have to generate joy on top of everything else, a joy that I feel undeserving of.

But what if joy isn’t something that I create or have? What if joy isn’t “mine”? What if, as one Inter-Is with the rest of the world, joy is an experience that appears all on its own?

My wife, Julie, is recently retired and now spends her days as a dog walker. She loves walking and loves dogs. The other day she was out walking a dog in the neighborhood and I, out for my own walk, randomly crossed paths with her and the dog of the moment, Fergus. It was a beautiful day. Fresh snow layered the ground, after storm sun was shining brightly. All was quiet. When Julie saw me, she said, “Come on Fergus look who is here!” Her whole body was animated. Fergus saw me and started wagging his tail madly. They then ran towards me. She laughing and smiling, he leaping and wagging. And this joy and love surged through me.

Was this mine?

No. I didn’t create it. It was something that I have learned to allow. It is a joy that I experienced simply as a part of my being in the world. One example of the kind of joy that sustains everything.

I once listened to a podcast with Fr. Greg Boyle. He is a powerful human being. (Please read at least his book, Cherished Belonging.) A Catholic priest who chooses to live his life in service of those who are coming out addiction, jail and gangs. He swims daily in a tremendous amount of trauma.

I can’t tell you exactly what the podcast was. (Sorry, I looked.) And this is a reconstruction of the conversation as I remember it, so any wrong memorization leading to inaccuracy is my own fault, not Fr. Greg’s. But it went something like this (with my thinking interspersed):

Podcast host: “Tell me about burn out. How do you avoid burn out doing what you do every day.”

Boyle: “I don’t believe in burn out.”

Me: WTF? This priest swimming in trauma and addiction every day doesn’t believe in burn out?

Podcast host: “What? Can you tell me more?”

Boyle: “Burnout occurs when you try to fix people. When you spend a lot of energy trying to change people- to make them into an image of who think they should be. I don’t do this.”

Me: Holy shit.

Podcast host: “Then what do you do?”

Boyle: “I just delight in them.”

Me: Holy shit

So that is next level appreciative joy. And it is this delight in each other, this relational attunement, that creates shifts. Not our attempt to fix, or save, which are attempts to control.

Friend and Buddhist teacher Derek Rasmussen wrote his thesis on this topic. Please take time to read the whole thing.

“When a fellow comrade reproached anarchist Emma Goldman for dancing with ‘reckless abandon’, saying ‘it did not behoove an agitator to dance’, she replied that the ‘beautiful ideal’ of freedom and anarchism ‘should not demand the denial of life and joy’ and ‘everybody’s right to beautiful and radiant things’ (Goldman 1970, 56). ‘Joy doesn’t betray but sustains activism,’ says Solnit (2016, 24).

Appreciative joy is the meditative compliment to these joys and delights. There are numerous benefits from this meditation to be gleaned by compassionate social and eco-justice organizers…”

Life comes. Our task is to allow it.

Emma Goldman, “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.”

So yeah, don’t forget joy.

It’s not an extra.

It is the thing.

Let me try to make these implications as concrete as possible. One thing I want to make clear is that resistance and structural analysis remain crucial. However, it is becoming more and more clear that they are also not everything. I found this paper, Navigating Collapse Together, by Nicole Negwetti, to be super clarifying. (H/t to Will Richardson). She writes, “Years of food systems advocacy and teaching law students to confront unjust systems taught me the necessity of resistance and strategic action. Every meaningful movement has relied on them. Yet I also saw how activism, when fueled only by urgency and certainty, can replicate the very patterns it seeks to transform.” (Emphasis mine. And do you see how the word “urgency comes up again?”) So yes, resistance and activism matter as means of stopping harm. We also need to be analytically clear about how we are conditioned into structures of harm. This analysis matters- structures and systems matter- a fact that Buddhism needs to be informed by. However, there is more that we must consider, and the more ties into the fact that we are entangled with the world, not separate from it.

So again, our entanglement with the whole universe has implications. I want to frame an approach to these within the context of public theologian Nadia Bolz-Weber’s three questions that she asks herself every day. Those three questions are:

What is mine to do and what is not mine to do?

What’s mine to say, and what’s not mine to say?

What’s mine to care about and what’s not mine to care about?

She considers the reality that, in this day and age with a crazy amount of information coming at us, we need to consider these questions as a means of recognizing that we are finite human beings placed within a particular context. What Dogen calls a Dharma position.

We can’t do everything. We can’t save the world. We are finite, limited human beings who must, and can only, attend to what is front of us right here right now.

And yet, the question of “mine” shifts subtly when we recognize that we are connected to, we InterAre with, everything. When we slow down, slow down, slow down we can begin to feel our way into our own suffering that is replicated in the world, and how the world’s suffering is replicated in us. In a powerful essay that focuses on the Zen practice of sitting, “doing nothing”, which Derek Gladwin and Nakao Ellis short handedly call “MU”, write, “Again, just think of mu as living with more care, attunement, and responsibility to the living systems we are all a part of.” So what might it look like to live in such a way that we are not urgently forcing change, but instead, living with more attunement and relational response?

As one concrete example, I write this, actual living, fully human beings are being kidnapped by ICE agents dressed for a Cosplay convention and sent without due process to dehumanizing camps. I would love to stop this- to “save” this aspect of the world. As a finite, limited human being constrained by the context of my particular dharma position, I can’t. I think that Bolz-Weber would point out that this is not actually mine to do. (However, every time I go shopping I continue to look for that elusive magic wand.) What I can do is increase my awareness (thus decreasing my ignorance, one of the three traditional Buddhist poisons) of the ways in which I am implicated in this ICE agent action. In the ways that this actually is “mine”, though I may be limited in what is possible for me to do directly. In what ways is this an experience of me “worlding the entirely worlding the entire world with the whole world”? In what ways is my relational existence entangled with ICE agent kidnappings?

Some paths of exploration:

I buy food that is picked by undocumented workers. I participate in a racialized system of capitalism that foundationally rests on the labor of black and brown people and poor white people. I can be aware of what I buy, who I buy from. In my tradition we have a meal gatha that begins, “This food comes from the labor of beings past and present…” How aware am I of where my food comes, and the lives of the beings who brought it to my table? How might this awareness inform my food choices?

The U.S. political system of representation is limited to electoral candidates that necessarily support the interests of capital over human rights. I can pester my elected officials to be support an alternative, and support candidates who do so. (One of my current moral test for votes is where a candidate stands on the Gaza genocide. Sure, the Mideast is complicated, but genocide seems like such a simple thing to be against.)

I can recognize the ways that I value some human beings over others, the way I have been conditioned to think that some humans are worthy and others are not, and to insert my intention to treat all with dignity, and to support structures that do so.

I can become aware of the difference between punishment and healing, and the ways that punishment reifies harm, thus continuing the cycle of violence and a delusional story of who we are that allows dehumanization. How does this attitude show up in my life? In what ways of I been conditioned to punish rather than in heal in all of my relationships? To imagine people in abstract terms of “good” vs. “bad”? When do I reach for control rather than relationship?

This is just a super cursory set of questions that arise from a fairly current situation. However, the pattern of this situation recurs again and again. And when we notice that a pattern something is occurring outside of ourselves, we can trust that these will show up in our lives, because we are all conditioned into a culture based on hierarchy and dominance. The dominant story of who we are creates the pattern. It is a story that we have all been conditioned into. With awareness, we can recognize these patterns in our own lives, and this becomes a means of disruption. Seeing that we are the world, not separate from it, allows us to see how we are implicated. This gives us agency. And the recognition of our agency carries with it the responsibility that is coupled to compassion. This responsibility isn’t a burden placed on top of our lives, one more weight that we are dutifully bound to carry, but a gift to our world that grows from within our lives. It isn’t an external added, but an awareness of what actually is, which arises from the unveiling of our delusion. The recognition of our entanglement as an experiential, not just cognitive, fact carries with it the recognition of the gifts we can uniquely offer to liberate all from their suffering. And our core task, as my friend Tommy Airey helpfully reminds me, is to connect the dots and speak the truth.

The proposal I am making is not that activism, resisting systems of harm and protesting don’t matter. When grounded in love and compassion for all, they do. The argument is that everything matters. That we support or dismantle care in all of our acts of body, speech and mind. The Bodhisattva Vow guides us in deepening our awareness always, and right here and now.

Wegewetti ends her piece with this. “The world is shifting in ways none of us can fully map, yet we are not without agency. Every act of care, every restored relationship, and every small step toward shared responsibility contributes to the future that is already taking shape. This is work we can keep doing, steadily and together.”

We each matter.

A lot.

(Stay tuned for Part 3.)

“Urge” is defined as a “strong desire or impulse”.

I find this definition helpful. Desire and impulse are exactly what we study in Buddhism. Getting to know our desires and working intentionally to shape them (not, as many believe, to erase them) is the root of our work. And understanding and experiencing impulse is one of our root affective responsibilities. So, my urge to save the world seems ripe for exploration.

I’ve been doing so. Mostly out of necessity.

Here are some of the tentative results of my exploration:

“I” am going to save “the world” is on its face dualistic.

• Imagining the world as something outside of me that I thus need to act on reinforces the need for “I’ to be an agent searching for leverage.

• And this need of an “I” in search of leverage that an “I” can exact is precisely, the Buddha argued, the root of dukkha- our sense of dis-ease. What David Loy calls, “a lack”.

My urge stems from a lack, a sense of dis-ease that I am seeking to fix. But the problem is the lack (ugh!). The world is not actually a problem to solve, fix or save.

Here’s how 13th century Zen Master Dogen puts it, “Conveying oneself toward the myriad things is delusion…”

So that’s a problem.

But now, WTF?

Because there sure is a lot of suffering.

If I may say so myself, good question.

This is where practice comes in. What any contemplative practice (mine is zazen) teaches is that my “self” is a conditioned idea that is ephemeral and shifts according to context and according to particular relationships, which are also ephemeral. My self is real, but not in the way I think it is. My body is real, but it is not separate. Any “self” is not separate, is a manifestation at a very particular time and a very particular place, both of which are always fluid- which create my world. This body that I call “my self” is made up of an incomprehensible set of conditions from the beginning of time, and is setting in motion a future, right now. As Dogen again, writes, in each moment we are “entirely worlding the entire world with the whole world…”

It turns out that in fact, we are the world.

So, my desire to save the world is actually a misplaced desire to save a misguided idea of “my self” that is based on affective discomfort created by the conditions of the world which I actually am.

(You may need to read that again. Sorry.)

This is incredibly liberating for two reasons.

1. There is no world outside of my “self” to save.

2. It offers a tremendous amount of agency.

Dogen is brilliant (and difficult) at explicating this. Shishu Roberts, in her wonderful book, Meeting the Myriad Things, a commentary on Dogen’s Genjokoan, helps us to understand Dogen.

“‘This very place,’ ‘ or a thinking’, ‘this path’ is the locus of “the actualization of reality (genjokoan)”. This point is essential in our understanding because it is only within the context of a particular encounter in our life that we may respond skillfully, unskillfully or perhaps somewhere in between. This is not something that can happen in the abstract.” (Emphasis mine.)

Hah!

We think in the abstract, but we can only act in the particularity of each moment. We can strategize in the abstract, but we can only execute “skillfully or unskillfully or somewhere in between” in the particularity of any moment.

“My” urge is a concrete, particular moment, but “the world” as a thing to save is an abstraction. My writing this right now is a concrete act that literally is a world- one that is not a “thing” outside of myself, and it is all that there is here and now for me.

In You Matter More Than You Think, an exploration of the field of quantum social change, Karen O’Brien writes that quantum social change, “…recognizes that we are entangled through language, meaning, and shared contexts, and that our deepest values and intentions are potential sources of individual change, collective change, and systems change….This moves us beyond a classical and mechanistic search for leverage points to transform systems. Instead, it suggests that we are the leverage points, and that how show up in every moment matters.…it is about each of us acting right now, within our own dynamic context and spheres of influence, to generate new patterns and relationships.”

As selves entangled with the whole world, “we are leverage points”. This shifts things a bit.

As Grace Lee Boggs said, “Transform Yourself to Transform the World.”

Now I am imagining that you are thinking, “Right, sounds beautiful, but what might this look like in our concrete lives?”

(Stay tuned for Part 2.)

Master Yunmen, “An appropriate response.”

I don’t know about anyone else, but I came to Zen practice as a way to individualistically transcend my own humanity. Like all other humans, I was suffering. Not in any big way, but the kind of, you know, life is hard kind of way. I found life to be exhausting. I thought there was something about me that needed correction, that needed to be better. I had previously done all of things. I read incessantly, was quite familiar with the self help genre. I had dipped my toe into various Buddhist approaches and meditation on and, of course, back off for a number of years. I read the stoics and Wim Hof. And still I suffered. I remember walking into bookstores and sweating because I believed the answer was somewhere in this store, and my life required that I make the right purchase.

That was stressful.

Life was stressful. Dukkha.

And therefore, in my mind, my commitment to Zen practice was made so that I could free myself from this stress and low level, constant dis-ease. And the way to do that was to transcend my suffering, my all too human needs. I imagined meditation as means to lift my suffering self by my proverbial bootstraps towards enlightenment because enlightenment doesn’t suck as much as being a plain old human being.

In other words, this practice, in my mind, was about me. How do I make myself so good that I don’t experience the unease that comes with being human?

That project failed.

Instead, this practice has taught me to unravel all of the beliefs implied in my previous wishes. I remain fully human, nothing special. And my needs aren’t something to transcend, they are what make me human. And being human is just fine.

At its core, the most fundamental thing I have learned through this practice, is that the “me” I was trying to protect doesn’t actually exist in the way I thought. The separation of myself from the circumstances of my life was exactly the misunderstanding that was at the core of my discomfort.

I was using this practice to escape my life. A trauma perspective might say that I was approaching this practice as a means of dissociation.

Instead, this practice helped to ground me into my life. Rather than escape suffering, the practice is to face and process your suffering. Instead of transcending my body and all of its too human needs, the practice is one of embodiment.

And in this embodiment, we learn that all we are is constituted from and into relationships. Always. Our lungs are in relationship with our heart, and the air outside of them. Who we are arises from the our relationship to the context of where and when we are, and of who we might be with.

What I’ve learned is that this practice is not something I do as means of taking care of myself while attaining enlightenment on a mountain top, preferably fed by organic, vegetarian meals and caffeinated by green tea. It is actually a practice of attunement.

Attunement to the world as it presents itself to me moment by moment in whatever context I find myself. Practice doesn’t further separate us, but helps us realize and attune to our embeddness. Practice isn’t about “retreat” (though retreats are super helpful in supporting us in realizing attunement) but the quality of our engagement.

Philosopher Mike Chitty has a beautiful post on “relational practice”. (Not sure if he knows about Zen, but Zen is life. So he knows Zen.) He writes,

“Relational practice is the craft of working with the living field.

• It is the cultivation of coherence.

• It is attunement to active information.

• It is the capacity to participate in emergence.

• It is listening to what the situation is asking.

• It is the art of becoming together.

This is not soft. It is not secondary. It is not optional.

It is our best understanding of how the world actually works.”

This is a beautiful description of Zen practice. It is a means of aligning ourselves with the way that “the world actually works”.

It is attunement to this world here and now as it presents itself in the relationships that constitute who we are in this moment.

Zen practice is relational attunement. Attunement to the embedded mess that creates our lives.

And knowing that this is just fine, exactly as it is.

Throwing myself into the world as it is,

I have erased all dates.

Yesterday I lived on green mountain;

Today I play in town.

More than one hundred pieces patch my robe.

A single bowl knows no years.

Leaning on my walking stick, I sing into the

Clear night;

Laying out the straw, I sleep under the moon.

Who says I don’t count?

This body of mine is just this.”

Ryokan

My mother had a stroke over 50 years ago. Long story short, she is paralyzed on her right side, she lost much of her speech, and now she is aging. Her good knee and hip have arthritis. Her good hand doesn’t work as much. For these more than 50 years, she has lived “crip time.”

“…To crip time is to experience a non-normative relationship to linear, chronological time, development, and progress. It means creating alternative ways of navigating an ableist world.” (See link above.)

So I guess I have always been interested in the question, what is time? I grew up face to face with two competing visions. One, the dominant social construction of time which is reduced to the well known saying, “Time is money.” The other, my being drawn into crip time as I grew up escorting my mother through our world. Time is different when things take longer- when time can’t be lived by the speed and efficiency required by a culture that demands these as the foundation of being productive. And being productive means being valued. Or, to put it more bluntly, my mother was incapable of living in a way that allowed her to be of value as determined by our culture.

And this is a powerful lesson. Because when you see the ways that your mother is devalued, is seen as less than, as an obstacle to efficiency, it calls into question that system of values. Because, I always knew, my mother was amazing.

In our “time is money” culture, time is a social construction that is designed to serve a purpose. And in our market economy, individualistic, competition based society, that purpose is primarily economic. Time as social construction based on a clock functions to standardize, to flatten. It is literally a fungible product that we use to buy and sell our lives. And our value as humans, in this economically framed dominant system, is literally based on our individualized ability to productively “make use” of our time. Jenny Odell states that, “The capitalist version of time…is defined by the ends to which intensity and standardization were ultimately directed: more capital for the company.” Those who are most valued are those who are able to most efficiently use their time in the creation of capital.

And though she has no control over this, do you see how this works for people like my mother?

Do you see how this works for people like me and you? For all of us?

We are necessarily objectified, reduced to the one dimension of our productivity in relation to time. We have all of the immensity of our humanity reduced to this one value. We are all dehumanized. The dominant framing of time is one that makes us less than human, and asks us to dole out the time our lives are given to a framework that only extracts and consumes, and values to the degree that we are able and willing to do so ourselves.

So what is the answer? It’s not easy, of course. In fact, it’s very complicated. To start with, it’s important to recognize that this time system is not just something that is “out there,” but it is a system, like all systems, that we are conditioned into. Therefore, it is also within us. And recognizing how this system exists within us, in our mental models and our affective functioning (note when you physically contract), is to begin to recognize the ways that we are both complicit and harmed by it. It is to recognize the ways that we both uphold this system, often unconsciously, and the ways that we are reduced because of this conditioning. It is to do so for a selfish reason- to ‘save’ our own lives. For a thorough meditation on this complication, I highly recommend Odell’s beautiful book, Saving Time: Discovering Life Beyond the Productivity Culture. But, for those without the time to read it (see how I did that?), I will quote part of Odell’s answer here:

What would this mean for an immediate, individual level? Oliver Burkeman made the observation, that our ‘frenetic doing,’ has suggested that as we work or policy changes, someone like the achievement subject should accept their mortality and give up the impossible quest for total control and optimization. I would add that the ‘giving up’ part is most true for those who can afford to do so, which means honest and possibly painful reckoning with one’s privilege. It all comes back to that discretion in discretionary time. Not All tasks are essential to survival,’ Burkeman writes, ‘and it isn’t universally ‘compulsory to earn more money, achieve more goals, realize our potential on every dimension, or fit more in.’ The hustle means different things for different people. But if you are truly an achievement-subject who is only wearing yourself down, then I suggest an adjustment of discretion: experimenting with what looks like mediocrity in some parts of your life. Then you might have a moment to wonder why and to whom it seems mediocre.”

So, what about Zen?

Zen, at its core, is the practice of letting go of our ideas about the world and about ourselves so that the concrete reality of life can be our teacher. And the core practice of Zen is sitting with our lives while we let go (and let go, and let go again…) of all of our ideas about our lives.

Time = money is an idea. Let it go. My ability to produce is an idea. Let it go. My status as one “who efficiently produces” value and therefore “I am someone who is valuable” is an idea. Let it go. This person I think I am is an idea. Let it go. Let it all go and let life show up exactly as it is right here and right now.

Kado Sawaki was a Japanese Zen teacher who famously said that zazen (this sitting practice) is, “Good for nothing.” It adds nothing to our lives that will align with an economic basis of time. It has no “purpose” in, or valued added to, a world bent on efficiency and optimization. What he meant was that this practice will not turn us into something other than who we actually are. If we use it to help us to become calmer, we are using it based on an idea of what it means to be calmer. Let it go. If we use it to help us be more present, then we are using it based on a conception of what “present” means. Let it go. Any idea of what it is that brings us to our practice is to be let go of. Any idea of who is the one who practices must be let go of. From the standpoint of our dominant culture’s values of efficiency, production, status, power, this practice does nothing of benefit that can serve us in such a way. Let all of these go.

It is good for nothing to a system of extraction. To a system of dehumanization.

Kodo’s student, Uchiyama Roshi understood this well. “Interestingly, Uchiyama went on to say that this understanding of gaining and losing means that we are actively participating in loss. Not only are we simply not indulging our desires, we’re taking responsibility for letting go of the fabrications on which we rely for finding meaning in our practice.”

This practice then teaches us, again and again, breath by breath, that life on its own time, a time that is not actually something we control, that we can call “ours”. In fact, a moment is not something that we possess, and can therefore monetize and extract from, it is something that we are. And we are already always in the flow of life and time just as they are. We can learn to relax and trust.

But also, importantly, religious.

My spirituality is grounded in my religious perspective.

If you have followed Buddhism in the U.S. anytime in the past 30 years you have undoubtedly stumbled across the brilliant work of Stephen Batchelor. Batchelor has studied under a number of Buddhist traditions and is a deep, provocative thinker. He is probably currently most well known for his conception of Secular Buddhism.

I must admit, as much as I love Batchelor, I am fairly confused by this particular project, both because I am not quite clear on what exactly makes his conception of Buddhism secular, nor why he feels the need to describe it as so. With that said, I have my ideas. What follows is a sketch of my conception of Secular Buddhism. (Which, given my admitted confusion, may not be fair.) But more importantly, why I think it is important to see our practice of Buddhism as religious.

Lets start with what we mean by the word “religious”. The root word, “religio” means “to bind”. To be religious is to be “bound” to something- a world view, a context, a set of practices. In the modern West, our conception of religion assumes those that follow it are bound to a belief- in God, Jesus, Allah. However, Buddhism has no God that requires belief in in order to participate. (And Buddha famously refused to offer conjecture regarding, for instance, the afterlife.) Rather, Buddhism offers a set of practices and rituals that form a particular way experiencing of our world. To get all Zen about it, we are bound to the groundlessness of “suchness”. So when people ask me, is Buddhism a religion? My response is, it depends on your perspective. If your definition of religion assumes adherence to a specific set of beliefs, then no. Buddhism is not a religion by this definition. (Which, I contend, is a fairly superficial definition.) However, if we consider religion to be a set of rituals and practices that work to form your experience of the world, then yes.

And I think this is the wrong question. If religion is a question of what we are bound to, then to not be religious is to be unbound. It is to be floating freely without context. And such a thing is impossible. At the same time, it is how many of us experience our lives. Our culture uproots us from our binding in the name of the delusion known as individualism. (Drastic examples of this are people such as Elon Musk and Peter Thiel who completely and ignorantly strive for the unbound. Not coincidentally, super rich white men protected from their embeddness and from accountability to this embeddness by their privilege.) The tricky thing is, because we always exist within a context, we are always embedded, it is impossible to actually operate outside of a binding. It is impossible to not be religious. What fills the void when an individual experiences themselves as unbound (in spite of their always, contextualized, necessarily relational experience)?

Capitalism.

Capitalism lies waiting to form you through the practices and rituals of materialism, and provide you with an identity based on consumption and “success”. You are what you consume. Your status is determined by the freedom that you have to consume. The clothes you wear. The car/truck you drive. Your Spotify play list. The food you eat. And, oh yes, your politics. These provide the boundaries of belonging and the rituals of formation. Religious scholar Eugene McCarraher eloquently points out, we have never actually become disenchanted from religion. We never are really only secular. As David Bentley Hart writes in a review of McCarraher’s master work, The Enchantments of Mammon, “In McCarraher’s telling, capitalism as it has taken shape over the past few centuries is not the product of any kind of epochal ‘disenchantment’ of the world (the Reformation, the scientific revolution, what have you). Far less does it represent the triumph of a more ‘realist’ and ‘pragmatic’ understanding of private wealth and civil society. Instead, it is another kind of religion, one whose chief tenets may be more irrational than almost any of the creeds it replaced at the various centers of global culture. It is the coldest and most stupefying of idolatries: …Rather than a sane calculation of material possibilities and human motives, it is in fact an enthusiast cult of insatiable consumption allied to a degrading metaphysics of human nature. And it is sustained, like any creed, by doctrines and miracles, mysteries and revelations, devotions and credulities, promises of beatitude and threats of dereliction.” (Emphasis mine.)

Yes. Capitalism is the world’s largest religion.

So the correct question is not, are you religious? The correct question is, how are you religious?

Back to Batchelor and his use of the word “secular”.

Batchelor spends a lot of time in his work shifting the perception of the historical Buddha away from being a describer of reality and towards his project as a development of ethics. Batchelor emphasizes a shift away from ontology, the origin and description of reality, towards a practice of ethics. And he has something here. Batchelor famously reorients Buddhas Four Noble Truths (truths to believe in) into The Four Noble Tasks. And I love his shift! It offers a super practical set of things we can actually do and that prove beneficial in all kinds of ways. (See his outline of these here.) And I think this shows what he means by secular. In an interview he said that, “Above all, Buddhism offers something to do, not something to believe in.” I think this is the crux of the matter for him- that the Buddha was not offering a set of ontological truths to believe, but rather a set of ethical practices. And therefore Batchelor infers that because such practices do not require belief, Buddhism is secular.

Bear with me for just a little as I pick at this. I love that Batchelor grounds his work in the ethical. I worry a bit that his version of the secular uproots Buddhism from the ontological. I do not think it is possible to create this separation, and I don’t think the Buddha did so. Ethics are necessarily grounded in an ontology- a view of the world. For the Buddha, this view was the nonconceptual experience of non-duality. Of the fact that, as Thich Nhat Hanh notes, we InterAre. That “because of this, that. Because of that, this.” And the Buddha conceptualized this, (Buddha was brilliant in his conceptualizing of the nonconceptual) as one example, in the first of the Eightfold Noble Path, Right View. Seeing things accurately as interbeing, Right View- has ethical implications. Buddha did not share these as truths that he expected you to noncritically accept. He did not expect people to accept his “truths” just because the Buddha said so. Instead, his message was basically, “Practice. Apply these things in your life- look attentively and really closely- and see if they are true for you.”

All of this is fairly semantical at this point, and because I trust that Batchelor’s project is rooted in ethics, I wish him well. (Although, in this interview on his view of Secualr Buddhism, he says, “Be that as it may, as a Buddhist practitioner, I look to the Buddha’s discourses not just for scholarly knowledge, but in order to help me come to terms with what the Chinese call the ‘great matter of birth and death.’ It is in this sense that my secular Buddhism still has a religious quality to it, because it is the conscious expression of my ‘ultimate concern’ – as the theologian Paul Tillich once defined ‘faith.’” See why I am confused?) My concern is the turn away from the religious and what is lost when we do so. What is it that we potentially become unbound from? What do we let go of in order to be accepted by those viewing through the lens of the religion of capitalism? And what dangers are presented by such unbinding?

My current guide in this is the work of Liz Bucar. I recently subscribed to her newsletter and find her amazing. Two of her articles are relevant to this point. In Why “Spiritual But Not Religious” Might be a Scam, she writes, “When we insist that we can be ‘spiritual but not religious’ we are essentially saying we can extract the parts we like while avoiding any responsibility to understand or respect the traditions we are borrowing from…When we extract spiritual practices from their religious contexts, we gain a sense of control. We get to create our own enlightenment menu. But something important is also lost: ethical frameworks, a long term commitment to community, systemic understanding of suffering and sickness, insights into human nature.”

My fear is that Secular Buddhism, in its attempt to be seen as a rational, nonreligious approach to spiritually does this exactly. Again, I am not accusing Batchelor of this. However, I am arguing for a religious Buddhism, (which is not necessarily connected to an institutionalized Buddhism!) not a secular version with the inherent dangers Bucar addresses above.

Religion as a set of rituals and practices in the context of community with a history, and ancestors, and support, and community (sangha!), and challenges really, really matters These provide an ontology for our ethical practices, a ground of richness to water our roots as we go into a world on fire.

In her article on religion and the world of Yoga, Your Yoga Class is More Religious That Church (And That’s Actually Good News) offers a brilliant way of framing religion. Replace “Yoga” below with “Zen” or “Buddhism” and you get the same result:

“When I engage yoga’s religious dimensions, I get:

• Ethical frameworks that connect my mat work to justice work

• Resources to challenge bypassing and ‘good vibes only’ culture

• Cosmologies that push back against American individualism

• Practices that don’t let me retreat from political reality

I don’t really think the problem is that yoga is religious. The problem is we’re practicing a deliberately impoverished version of it.”

So we have some choices available.

We can let go of the religious so that we provide an easier psychological fit within a capitalistic structure. That is a way that is very attractive due to its ease, and because we don’t have to change or challenge these systems.

Or we can deepen the religious so that we can allow our practice to be as rich as possible and extend deeper than the boundaries of extraction for the benefit of us and all beings.

But they kind of do mix, right?

In fact, to not talk about politics is a political choice with political implications. I am continually surprised to hear people of privilege offer up words like, “I’m not political,” without referencing the political implications of that choice- and thus making that statement a political one. And to live our religious values has political implications.

I’m not arguing that we should all talk about politics all of the time. However, Zen practice is about working with awareness- of including everything. Of being intentional in regards to how we engage the world. Therefore, of being and including the political.

Let’s unpack this.

Buddhist practice is centered on the liberation of suffering for all beings. As Buddha famously said, “I teach one thing and one thing only. Liberation from suffering.”

Such an intention needs to start with a recognition of the ways we suffer. The core suffering comes from pretending in all of the ways that we are isolated, separate beings- from each other. From the earth. Everything. The delusion that we are separate sets us up for all of the “suffering” (ie., discomfort, dis-ease, avoidance of joy, of turning away from…, etc. “Suffering” is a code word for affective contraction and all of the reactivity that follows.) This practice is that of continually deepening our experiential recognition that we InterAre with everything.

Our suffering comes from internal psychological dynamics and from social conditioning. Both of these can create and support the delusion of separation. Our practice therefore must address both. The relevant question here is, from what grounds does our social action rise from?

Buddhist psychological researcher, John Makransky, suggests that Buddhist liberation has two primary goals that must be taken in order:

“ 1. To help people attain liberation from the roots of suffering, by imparting practices that lead to nirvana and enlightenment.

2. To meet many individual and social needs by drawing on beneficial powers associated with Buddhist being and practice.”

And note this order is not determined by timing- which happens first vs. second- but by intention. The development of a Buddhist conscience is the primary intention. Responding to the world’s suffering is a natural outcome, and a means of deepening our intention.

The first goal involves a release from conditioned suffering by realizing the non-dual nature of reality, and, I would add, by realizing this in our here and now moment of time. This realization, right here and right now, and maybe just momentarily, is a moment of enlightenment.

The second goal involves attaining the skillful means to work in the everyday world of samsara in order to reduce suffering. This is what Uchiyama Roshi pointed to when we wrote, “The task is to concretize the eternal.” To live our lives as much as we can from a nondual grounding as we make our lives in the dualist, samsaric world of the conventional.

In a nutshell, our social engagement work addresses goal two above, our everyday lives in the conventional world of hot messy humans. Of our work lives. Of the communities and systems and structures we live within that are based on a delusional, conventional shared pretending that we are separate.

The problem comes when we forget goal one. Or to put it another way, the problem comes when goal two is engaged in directly without a grounding in goal one. (You following?)

Here is how Makransky puts it;

“To access such a beneficial power of enlightenment requires becoming newly conscious of, and undercutting, mental causes of suffering in oneself and others that hide the empty, unconditioned nature of phenomena, by realizing that emptiness in non-dual awareness. Working to change material and social conditions of suffering can be engaged as a compassionate expression of that liberated awareness, or as support for the practice of the six perfections that integrate that awareness. But working to change material and social conditions alone, divorced from such awareness (as in assumption 2 above), would not address the mental causes of suffering that contribute to all human-made forms of suffering.”

In other words, addressing social conditions is important, and partial. Buddhist social engagement is a particular type of engagement with the world that should not be reduced to the political. Buddhist social engagement is a way of engaging with the world that is grounded in our experiential awareness of the nondual- of our awareness of the fact that we are not separated from anything, that our well-being necessarily must include the well-being of all, including those that are delusionally against us. Our engagement is not an add on to our practice, but an extension of our practice. It is not merely a specific choice we make, but a recognition that all of our decisions, choices, values, actions, words all have a real life impact that we can use as a means to awaken all, including ourselves, from the delusion of separation. To engage without this grounded experiential understanding means that we most likely are reifying separation rather than healing it.

In her book Don’t Talk About Politics (highly recommend), Sarah Stein Lubardo writes, “...it is an alluring idea that we can exit the political, but it’s a fantasy. Politics is not inescapable, not through denial.” Politics is not escapable because it is always organized around the question of, how will we live together? And all of our actions of body, speech and mind are answers to this question. Even the attempt to escape others. Even being a hermit is a choice that necessarily has political implications. (See Thomas Merton.) We can’t avoid this question, so let’s be explicit with how we are political, rather than whether or not we are. Our realization becomes that our practice of sitting, the practice of realizing and becoming familiar with the transcendent, with Buddha Nature, our nonduality, has political implications. Living the precepts has political implications. Practicing the paramitas has political implications. Not doing these things also has political implications.

The question, always the core question, is what are we grounded in as we do our work in the world of samsara?

Bikkhu Bodhi puts it well, grounding our social action in the embodiment of a “Buddhist conscience”:

“I would say that the the crucial mission imposed on us by the conditions of our times is to embody a Buddhist conscience in response to the world’s suffering.”

Note Makransky’s two goals kept in order here- the (1) development of a Buddhist conscience and then (2) responding to the world’s suffering.

Bodhi continues, '“If we can apply the wisdom of the dharma to save humanity from a plunge into reckless self-destruction, this is certainly enough justification for the effort to create a socially engaged Buddhism. Ultimately, we may have no other choice.”

What he said.

That one.

I think of MLK a lot these days. Not because I’m hoping for the next prophet. (Though I wouldn’t be opposed.) Such a hope is just wish that leaves us powerless, that takes us off the hook. I think about him because he modelled a Bodhisattva practice that I want to learn from. His life stood for a transformation that I want all of us to undergo.

What can we all learn from his life? What did MLK experience that allowed for such an all encompassing Belonging? Who and what did he Belong to?

Belonging is so crucial. It is a basic human need (and the reason it will be capitalized here). We know that from an evolutionary perspective, to not belong means that we die- to lose access to the resources of community means that we will not survive. And this is one of the powers of social media. It uses dopamine to create an on-line sense of Belonging- to be “unfriended” or question on Instagram (for instance) literally feels in our body like we are dying. Our acknowledgement of this need has become fairly well known. To know that we Belong allows us to relax our hypervigilance so that we can feel safe in our bodies. And feeling safe in our bodies allows us to be at our best. In Buddhist terms this explains why sangha (community) is one of the Three Jewels. Belonging to a community organized around a common purpose as means of binding us together is not an option in transformation, it is a necessity. We so, so, so need each other.

And it still goes even deeper. Jim Coan is a researcher who has developed what he calls Social Baseline Theory. He is a researcher and psychologist who began his work by doing therapy with men traumatized by war. One of his clients was a man who returned home for Vietnam and, for all of the reasons, was struggling. However, Coan was making no progress in his sessions with this man. Every time the client tried to talk about his experience in Vietnam he would freeze. He just couldn’t. Finally, after another fruitless session and as an act of desperation, the client asked Coan if he could bring his wife to the next meeting. Just as desperate, Coan agreed.

The next session started as the man sat next to his wife and the same pattern emerged. The war came up, he tried to talk about it, and then he shut down. But this time his wife reached over and grabbed his hand. Immediately the man began to sob. Then the story came out.

What was going on? What did the touch of a hand have to do with the story coming out?

In Coan’s mind it was pretty obvious- there must have been a mechanism in the prefrontal cortex that was turning on to allow this to happen. A Coan, because of his access to MRI scanners, was going to use MRI scans to pin point what this mechanism was. So he went to work replicating and documenting with MRI what he has come to name the “hand holding” studies.

However, he was unable to find any action within the neo-cortex that could offer an explanation. In fact, energy used in the prefrontal cortex decreased when hand holding occurred. It was the opposite of his hypothesis.

Coan went around for a long time joking about what he thought of as his colossal failure. Meanwhile, a colleague of his, Dennis Proffitt was doing research on energetic burden. What Proffitt found was based on that recognition that our bodies’ energetic capacity is finite. We only have so much glucose available, so much “body battery” (as Garmin monetizes it) available to use for the tasks of our life, And according to the theory of the predictive brain, our brain’s core function is to keep us safe, and it it does so by conserving energy. The brain is constantly, usually unconsciously, making predictions in order to conserve a energy. As an example of Proffitt‘s research, he took two groups of people to a hill. One groups was in poor physical condition, another group was in excellent physical condition. He asked each group to share their perceptions of the steepness of the hill. Those in poor physical condition reported the hill to be significantly steeper than those in good shape. Their brains were telling that that it would require much more of an energetic burden for them to climb the the hill than those in good physical condition. When those in good shape were saddled with a weighted back pack, the seemed steeper. And- here is the connection to Coan’s work- when someone they cared about stood next to them, the steepness of the hill decreased. In other words, standing next to a person they cared for represented an energetic resource. Connection is a resource.

Anyway, Coan was sharing his failure to find a mechanism that turned on to allow trauma to be released via handholding to one of his colleagues asked Coan a question: “What if your baseline assumption is backwards?” Meaning, what if the the mechanism that turns on occurs when we are not connected? What if the increase in energy usage occurs through disconnection? What if the assumption of an isolated individual as the baseline for “normal” is backwards? What if our energetic burden is less when we are connected to others, and it therefore requires more energy for us to function when we are alone?

Wa La.

All of his experimental results now made sense to Coan. He realized that to study humans in isolation is to study humans out of their natural context. We are made to be connected. Our “normal” context is relationship, and to be outside of relationship represents an increased stress burden on us leaving us less energy for flourishing/learning/safety. “Self regulation” represents an energetic burden on our bodies. We are made to mutually regulate. Unchosen isolation is stressful…it hurts.

So yes, Belonging is crucial.

And not Belonging is stressful. Think of all of the people who stressed by all of the way it is possible in our society to not Belonging. And think of all of the ways that we shape and shift and change ourselves, that we are warped by our conditioning, in order to Belong.

Seeing the tension yet? Belonging is a human requirement, but the tensions come in with all of the ways that we accept the harmful ways that our society functions by in order to fit in.

And yet, if fitting in to Belong to a toxic society was the only option, we would not have had people like Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, Jesus or Buddha. We would be stuck with just trying to “fit in”. As MLK put it, “In an insane world, a sane person must appear insane.” In an insane world, courageous people who refuse to abdicate their humanity must be willing to stand out- to not Belong, to practice what King called, “creative maladjustment” and what Brene Brown calls "shame resilience".

So now we have a tension between meeting our needs for Belonging versus courageously choosing to maintain our humanity in a toxic society.

Hmm…

This where is our Bodhisattva practice (or any contemplative practice) comes in. The question becomes, what does our practice teach us about what it is that we actually Belong to? Belonging to a culture of consumerism, of cruelty, of ignorance, of patriarchy, of White Supremacy, of what bell hooks names Imperialist/White Supremacist/capitalist/patriarchy, might help us to maintain a superficial and short term sense of safety.

But a safety that requires us to sacrifice our humanity is really no safety at all.

What do we do when we silently sit and don’t move? We settle, we watch our minds flit from this, to that, repeat endlessly…But gradually we note gaps where we settle just a little. We just breathe. and we experience a context of Belonging that is not connected to our ideas of status, of our ideas of success, our ideas of what our current stylistic aesthetics might be, or the food we eat, or our ideas of our current president, or our thoughts about Stephen Miller. We begin to experience and grow our awareness of a connection that is always there, a connection that includes and transcends our human relationships. A Buddhist fried of mine who practices in the Tibetan tradition, Derek Rasmussen, once went on a long, 9 month retreat. And he said that he realized then that there is no such thing as an “individual retreat” because we are never alone, we can never be reduced to our “individual” selves. We are always in relationship, with the trees and squirrels and rain, and our breath connecting us to the whole world. We begin to realize a Belonging that isn’t dependent upon social norms of right or wrong, good or bad, punishment or reward.

What MLK ultimately realized, and what gave him the courage to live and speak from love, was not the acknowledgement that this put his life at risk. The fact of the matter is that our lives are always at risk. What our practice helps us to grow in is the awareness of is exactly what we are risking in the choices that we make. MLK came to know that though there were risks in speaking out, not speaking out was a greater risk. To understand, as he put it, that “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.” This means that when other beings are harmed, our own interconnected lives are also put at risk. So to not speak and work against such harm other beings experience also impacts our own humanity. We lose our souls. For MLK, to not speak truth became a greater risk to his interconnected self then the potential loss of his own individual life.

With practice, we can grow in awareness of the fact that we cannot ever sever our Belonging, and that no one else can cut us off either. We begin to realize that we can relax into this transcendent, always occurring Belonging. We can begin to open and trust life.

This frees us.

This trust in the force of life itself frees us from having to fit in. It frees us from having to sacrifice any aspect of ourselves. It frees us from having to twist ourselves into something “acceptable” to those in position to determine acceptability. And it frees us to live in accordance with our values rather than by our conditioning/karma. It frees us to live for the sake of all beings. And to think through and work through the concrete the implications of this. It frees us to be creatively maladjusted from a ground of love for all that we are always connected to, including each other. It frees us to defy all that constrains our humanity for the sake of all.

May all beings be well.

This is my attempt to make my thinking visible mostly to myself, but hopefully in way that serves others also. As a U.S. raised Zen teacher, I practice here and now and within the limitations of my culture and conditioning. I practice as means of expanding my conditioning as a white, male, cis-hetero (pronouns he/his) American who was raised Catholic. This means that my work entails translating a philosophy/religion/practice of Zen from an Asian perspective, and specifically a Zen perspective that peaked in Tang China, into the time and place of 21st century America. The good news is this kind of translation is exactly what keeps Zen alive. Also, this practice functions in a way that we necessarily address our conditioning and its limitations. Anyway, writing here is my attempt to share and think through how I am working to keep my practice alive at this tumultuous time and apply to the world of here and now.

My intention is to write about my always in process translation of Zen as it applies to the personal, political and cultural as a means of liberating all from suffering.