BG 163: Can Dharma Help us Turn the Corner?

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Episode Description:

This week we share a public talk given by Integral spirituality teacher Terry Patten and Vajrayana teacher Hokai Sobol, on the question of whether traditional Dharma can (or can not) help us turn the corner in a high-speed world. The talk was given in 2009 at the Boulder Integral Center, and was hosted by Buddhist Geeks. A description from the event:

In an imbalanced, accelerating world-in-crisis we face problems that cannot be solved, as Einstein famously said, “from the same level of consciousness that created them.” Many contemporary practitioners have turned to the Dharma as a source of that higher consciousness. But traditionally, the path was described as the way to awaken from the dream of human life, not to improve it. The traditions saw that as futile. But today, we no longer see life as an endless cycle.

We have an evolutionary view of ourselves and even of our spirituality. And we have seen the folly of “bypassing” our critical life challenges in an attempt to be “spiritual.” How does the wisdom and clarity of ancient Dharma have relevance and meaning in the midst of contemporary evolutionary challenges? How can spiritual insight and illumination empower us to more effectively meet the emerging challenges of our time?

Episode Links:

• EnlightenNext Magazine
• Andrew Cohen
• The Evolution of God
• Integral Heart

Transcript:

Terry: In the ad copy for this evening, we pointed out that it’s almost a cliché comment from Einstein that the world’s problems can’t be solved at the level of thinking or the level of consciousness at which they were created. For me, that insight, I don’t think I’d heard that quote from Einstein, but that fundamental awareness is what really drove me to Dharma as Vince was saying.

I felt that I had been born into an interesting time and that a kind of engagement with life had to be summoned forth that was beyond what I saw in evidence around me. I was involved in kind of the, you know, the left-wing, it was Vietnam-era SDS. I was a regional coordinator, marching the whole scene, and hen I realized that my fellow revolutionaries didn’t have the awakening to do something different, I realized I had to submit myself to something that was mysterious and really had to be at the cutting edge. And at that time we were right in the breadbasket of Westerners discovering the spiritual technologies of the East.

So I kind of plunged into that experiment and found a truly great teacher; Adi Da offered me an unparallel education and I remain just extremely grateful for my engagement with him. But I was disappointed, as the years went on, I didn’t see the Adi Da community directly engaging with the problems of the world in a way that had a hope of having a large-scale impact. And I was even more disappointed to see that Chogyam Trungpa, the other teacher, the one I almost went to, but I went to Adi Da instead, is that his group wasn’t doing it either.

And some of my friends began coming to me from almost any community you can mention with the same disappointment. “Gee, I talked to Adyashanti, and he helps me realize that there’s no problem, and I drop into a spaciousness and I’m just present and I’m right here. And I’m awake and there is no problem. But I still think this data on atmospheric CO2 is kind of disturbing, how come we’re not doing anything about it? I’m glad to be free of the kind of craven, unhappy, neurotic way I was engaging. There is a glimpse of a freer and more conscious and saner way of being, but I don’t see us galvanizing as a force to change the world. What about it?” And I feel like this is a question that a lot of us are asking and needing to ask.

So I’ve been engaging in a conversation with you, Hokai, for a while about this, and depressingly the first answer to our question is a series of negatives. Can Dharma help us turn the corner? Well, it’s a complex, rich subject and it has many answers. We’re really interested in the yes answers mostly. But I think we need to begin with some of the no answers, all the ways that Dharma can’t or doesn’t, or tends not to. And I think going into that deeply let’s look first at it in a way that touches in with the great traditions, which is where you’re really a rich authority. So let’s frame the discouraging news and begin there. Why can’t Dharma help us turn the corner?

Hokai: So, I’m the messenger with the bad news? And then he gets to, you know [Laughter] And then he gets to say, “however.” [Laughter]

I have studied an extremely archaic form of Buddhist spirituality for 10 years, and I continue to study it and practice it. It’s called Shingon in Japan. It’s so archaic that even Japanese don’t understand it anymore. Typically in Japan, Buddhist priests are concerned with funerals—almost exclusively is not what you mean, think if you haven’t been there, you may think they say the meditation, they earn a lot of money by basically burying dead people. And if you ask the Japanese people where Dharma can help us turn the corner or go any of the possible ways, they will just discard the question without answering it. That’s the face of public Buddhism in Japan at least.

What we know as Western Buddhism is something altogether different, and has to do more with our culturally, newly discovered—well, relatively newly discovered—need for authentic spiritual cultivation, or at least, inspiration from time to time, depending on the individual urgency. So, when we face these questions, we are, first of all, forced to recognize the complexity of the ways humans approach Dharma. Not just BuddhaDharma but any great spiritual system of meaning and path unfoldment and Realization, whether as presented or as actually embodied.

Basically, when we say, “Can Dharma do something for us?” there’s this famous American, “Can we do something for Dharma” right? I think we shouldn’t look at those two separately. Dharma is not something that exists apart from—it’s a famous Buddhist dictum, “Dharma doesn’t exist apart from the nature of your mind.” But it’s cryptical. When we say that, for most of us, it’s cryptical. So, basically Dharma doesn’t exist separately from our lives, maybe more in line with how we understand the way we exist. Buddhists love to talk about mind, but in the Western meaning, mind is something internal, and invisible, and, well often inconsequential. Who cares about mind? At least that’s the mainstream take on the mind. It’s lives, basically. That’s the actual felt, tangible actions and consequences of those actions. But that’s what Buddhists mean by mind.

So Dharma doesn’t exist separately from the lives we live, that should be the starting point. The richness of our lives should be, in a way, reflected in the richness of Dharma. However, as Westerners, being exposed to a variety of Oriental teachings, we have mainly embraced those teachings that happened on the cushion, to a large degree. We have not been so much effective on creating natural and organic extensions of the cushion-based practice. When I say cushion, I don’t mean just the round zafu. I also mean any type of formal practice that you may, or I may do on a regular basis, including writing journals or stuff that is not associated with cushions, typically.

So, in beginning to answer these questions, we must face the limitations of some typical Dharmic stereotypes. First, cushion-based practice being one of them. There’s not much that cushion-based practice can do for us to turn the corner. If I understand the expression correctly, “turning the corner,” means actually influencing the world of humans, and bringing about a huge cultural change with economic and political ramifications. I don’t see a cushion-based practice—only maybe as a part of the solution, maybe an important part, maybe the fundamental part in some types of death, but definitely not the solution.

Even the Zen people, famous for obsessing about cushions, and what’s inside them, because of the time they spent warming them up. [Laughs] It’s like the chicken. Even they first came up, don’t just do something sit and then the second wave was done just sit, do something. Or as the Japanese master Katagiri first taught in America about emptiness, and then he said he had this book later on, you have to say something. That’s, basically, the wave through which even the more conservative and the more traditional Buddhists, whether Oriental or Occidental, have went through already. So we know already that cushion-based or cushion-limited practice, or any formally limited practice is not sufficient to help us turn the corner. Again, us, meaning the whole humanity. So, this is the first negative, and I’m quite emphatic about this. It’s not sufficient.

Terry: So I’d like to expand on that because I think there’s a lot of other ways that the answer is no. It’s almost like, because this is such a vital question, I kind want to let’s bounce it off each other even more aggressively. For instance, not only is that true, in general, about cushion practice, I agree. Isn’t it true that most of the lineages end up having their first priority being perpetuating themselves, and their second priority is being to embrace the consciousness of people so that they preserve themselves in the best form possible? And any transformational revolutionary effect beyond the perpetuation of the lineage is sort of the secondary or tertiary, I think that only the greatest lineage teachers really feel that they have the potential to begin to address.

Hokai: An obligation, not just the potential.

Terry: Well, relatively few even tackle it. Beyond that, then you’ve got all kinds of splintered out Dharmas, teachers who’ve gotten outside of the lineage for one reason or another, purposely or they’ve gotten thrown out who are doing something in a renegade fashion. And who would like to do something revolutionary, but because of a lock in the societal fabric already, in which we’ve got a culture war between modernists that have a center of gravity that’s more traditional versus those with a center of gravity that’s more post-modern. They make the fight to the death of those two kind of locked into, that’s got us in the gridlock that we are in, in terms of our politics. The machinations of people like us are a distant sideshow that has relevantly little influence on the central thrust of what’s happening, in terms of the monumental decisions that are really critical at a time when the crisis on the planet is calling for a real response.

I think a lot of us have the sense, were part of a decadent culture that’s fiddling while Rome burns, and we are, too, and we shouldn’t be. And Dharma asks something more from us, and all we’re able to do is maybe emerge from a craven neurosis to a moment of clarity that’s, at least, able to be happy even in the midst of all that difficulty. We don’t have a way to come together and cohere in what would rightly be a movement of conscious individuals reasserting their responsibility for their world, which is what really is asked of us, each individually.

Hokai: Oh wow. Well, can I say something?

Terry: You better. [Laughs] Look what you have to deal with.

Hokai: Let’s go back to traditional [Terry laughs], just for a while, just to make sure we have covered the fundamentals. Originally, Dharma, meaning all traditional spirituality, in this case. Let’s go wider, beyond just Oriental. All the great spiritual traditions have appeared in a world where human culture, because of technological reasons, first of all, and because of limited number of humans at the time, did not have the power to threaten the world. To threaten the natural world, to threaten the limits of the resources in the world, to threaten each other. Many cultures existed in spatial isolation, or distanced enough from each other to feel safe, which is now an impossibility. We can’t even plan to achieve that in the future because we’re going in the opposite direction. We’re not just closing on each other, we’re mixing up to an incredible degree all over the world.

So, basically, Dharma appeared in a situation where warnings and instructions on the importance of digging into the fundamentals of human culture and working to transform the culture, not the individual mind, was extremely important. So, that type of instruction couldn’t even appear at that time. Because if you simply practice non-violence, meaning if you did nothing wrong to anyone, there was nothing that could go much wrong on its own accord. But, at this moment, in human history, if you just passively don’t do anything wrong, this may be the greatest evil. Because if you’re capable of not doing anything wrong, then you are one of rare humans who are extremely equipped of doing a lot of good. And if you don’t contribute that good, a certain destructive or a certain skeptical or a certain small-hearted attitude may prevail in the world. Thus, allowing the culture, equipped with an incredible technology now, to actually wreck havoc all around us. We can see traces of this havoc already taking place, right?

So, basically, we open these Dharma books like we open the simple ones, like the New Testament, which is explicit, or the Buddhist Dhammapada, and we don’t find much about the necessity of working with culture, of developing new networks, new ways of being strong and influential in the world. We don’t find much in that sense. Even in the Judeo-Christian tradition, which is more than Oriental ones, interested in the world, even there. And then, in the Oriental traditions, especially in the Buddhist tradition, we find nothing. I mean, not a trace of the urban awareness, there’s no urban awareness anywhere. There’s some natural ecological awareness, like typical Chinese Zen (Chan), influenced by Taoism and stuff. There’s Tibetan Shamanism, and then, there’s these highly scholastic, contemplative, transcendental, philosophical Buddhism that is beyond the marketplace.

So, basically, this negative is not a criticism of Dharma, in any way, but it’s only an appreciation of the context of the historical and cultural context within which the teachings arose, and gave a lot of instructions of what was recognized as urgent, precious, and important. But, fortunately or unfortunately, the world has changed incredibly during the last two or three hundred years. We find ourselves missing some of the links that would reintegrate those profound spiritual principles with this newly emerged situation, therefore, creating a tension of sorts for some potentially, culturally, and politically transformative spiritual action.

Terry: When I see it operationalized, what I see is kind of a three-stage thing. People might feel very upset and motivated to make some kind of positive contribution in our world, as it is, being counter-Dharma and through disciplining themselves and submitting themselves to a real science of transcendent development they gain access to a kind of root sanity, stability, and dignity, and clarity, which they’re no longer bound by all that neurosis.

But, then, there’s another move. There’s a pre-trans version of that motivation to do something. There’s a kind of deficit-based, anxiety-based motivation. And then there’s one that’s rooted in a kind of fundamental freedom that can emerge on the other side of a certain amount of self-development. And I think the traditional Dharmas and lineage traditions have had to grope so much with the anxiety and fear-based motives for making some sort of contribution. And they’ve helped to cultivate a kind of non-dual, non-attached freedom from that bondage. In general, that’s what they’re going to offer is their “one size, fits all” kind of contribution, and it’s not enough anymore.

Right now, we’re in the context, in this country, most of you have probably, at least, seen this magazine published by Andrew Cohen’s community, What is Enlightenment?, now renamed in EnlightenNext. And Cohen’s constant drumbeat, he’s actually evolved lot over the years, and I like some of the things that have come in to his teaching relatively recently, which have to do with enlightenment is, itself, evolving. Enlightenment is the combination of the absolute consciousness with the relative world as the relative world evolves. What it’s like to stand in that absolute
consciousness simultaneously with the relevant arises of the world evolves. And this rapid accelerando of cultural evolution, and interconnection, and multilayeredness of the inner and outer worlds over the last, particularly 50 years or so, has especially asked enlightenment to evolve, and one of the things that it most needs to express itself as is not simply a subjective access to higher states of consciousness for individuals or even for a small practicing community, but moral action in relationship. And so he’ s really standing as a kind of demand and call for conscious individuals to take responsibility for the larger world, and particularly for the evolution of culture.

Now, there are a lot of controversies in contemporary spiritual culture. One of the biggest ones has to do with the very role that Andrew Cohen takes, which is this guru role. There are a lot of people who feel that the very structure of guru-devotee, master-disciple, contains within it problems relative to spiritual authority, individual responsibility, and want to draw a line in the sand and say that we’re now in a democratized post-guru zone. And so there is a problem even with someone like Cohen taking that role and making that demand and standing… And see there is an interesting thing that happens when somebody makes that move. If I’m a teacher of one kind, I try to model what you should do. In other words I come, and if a humble heart and devotion, and a deep surrendering into loving connectedness with the world and a service and worship, in all directions at all times, is what I’m recommending, I try to be that. And to the degree that my practice allows me to be a demonstration of that, you have an experience of me teaching that is congruent in a certain way. Whereas the guru role is actually a different role. Instead of just being an exemplar of the behavior of the devotee, the guru says, “No, I stand in relation to you in a dynamic in which I’m the other pole.” So somebody like Andrew can be what looks on the outside like kind of a righteous asshole, you know? And yet, if God, if Reality is making a demand on all of us as individuals, a teacher standing as that righteous demand can be serving a function. Some of us don’t like that, it’s complicated.

There’s so much kickback against things like the guru principle, so much controversy around whether we need to return to more traditional routes, and since we’re in a Christian world that has to have a Christian form, for most of us, or Jewish, right? And then there’s controversy over the guru issue, there’s controversy at every stage. How can we come together in a cultural movement that would have enough coherence so that we could effectively ally ourselves? We’ve got so many countries that are dividing us up from one another; coming to a level of coherence so that we could be a powerful influence on the culture at large seems almost hopeless. This is one of the no-answers to whether Dharma can help us turn the corner. Look at the criteria we have to meet. They’re stacked up, we have to do so much. It seems almost impossible to overcome all those obstacles. So these are things that eat at me that are non-traditional, because I’m standing in a place that’s outside a traditional school.

Hokai: Two things happen when we discover the insufficiency of a certain model of Dharma. One is very unfortunate, we may give up on that model—it’s very unfortunate. Like cushion-based Dharma, we see it doesn’t do it. It doesn’t effect the shift we were expecting, not only in our own lives, but we expected it to touch the lives of every living soul we encounter—bird, cat, fish, human, angel, hope, love, all sorts of beings, right? You know, we were like hopelessly naive. And then it’s easy to give up or say, well, it doesn’t work. It may have worked if I started when I was 11 years old, or 6, like His Holiness, but I’m like what 56 or 26, whatever, it’s too late. So I can only hope, to have some therapeutic benefit of it, that’s like giving up.

The other thing that can happen when we discover the insufficiency of a certain model is that we recognize that this is a critical point in our own journey and in the journey of that model, and that we should actually, at that point, decide to continue this practice, and to bring ourselves to a point of crisis like working with a koan, not on the cushion this time, but all the rest of the time, with the question, how does this model fit into my life, how does it really fit? It’s like discovering you have a little grain of sand or a little stone in your shoe, and then purposefully not taking it out. It seems like—do you say “counterintuitive,” yeah? Yeah. But it’s actually the way to go, yeah, because this is a precious stone. This is like the grain of sand that reminds us to walk gently and to walk consciously, so we don’t want it out of the shoe. But we want something to happen with that grain of sand. We want some sort of transformation to occur, through which it would find its rightful place in the mosaic of our lives. Somehow this piece, this precious piece, doesn’t fit in many lives, of people.

Now, one thing to do is not stand alone in this; one thing to do is actually connect with people who both feel the insufficiency of their formal practice, and who are not ready to explain it all away with their Karma, which many people masochistically do, and who are not ready to explain it away with, “Oh, yeah, I must put more effort.” Well, what if it’s not about effort? You know, you’re not stupid, you’re not lazy. Something really real could be going on here.

So while not abandoning the model of practice which has felt itself in your life as insufficient, we should discuss ways and search for ways of really making the grand discovery of how to bring new birth, to a new form—we like to use the word, “integral practice” nowadays, right? Well, that’s what it’s about. So it’s not just taking the—how do you pronounce Lego or Leego?

Audience Member: Lego.

Hokai: Lego, yeah. It’s not just taking all the Legos and playing with them to find the right combination. It’s not just mechanistically putting and stacking together all the components. It’s about finding a binding, a connecting purpose and the binding meaning to both the cushion-based practice and the street-based practice, and career, and the marital bed, and the kitchen table, and the economic movement, and the media, and all the rest. It’s about finding some new thread, some new meaning that can connect it all, and through which the current of authentic life-transforming spiritual practice can flow again. Is that too abstract?

Audience Member: No.

Terry: Yeah, this is bringing to mind some of the foundational assumptions that I’m bringing to this conversation that I think many others of you understand, but it might be good to make them explicit. You know, one of them is that the way that dialogue is engaged in the public sphere right now, it’s all… I’ve been watching it, maybe some of you’ve been aware of this too. A fellow named Robert Wright recently wrote a book called The Evolution of God, which is about the history of the Abrahamic religions. It’s more or less a materialist’s detailed historical analysis of when in history has the scriptures been interpreted in ways that are more war-like, or more tolerant and more peaceful. And overall, over time, they’ve evolved in a more tolerant and peaceful direction. And he kind of traces this and relates it to a thesis in a previous book of his called Nonzero, which kind of suggests that there is an evolutionary selective process that tends to make us more benign and more loving in some sense, over time. And this is kind of his overall thesis of his career. His book has been attacked by a number of evolutionary biologists who are pretty doctrinaire, flatland materials, who don’t want to believe that there’s anything but random chance going on in anything, in any kind of privileging of values, or something like cooperation or Love seems to them like an overlay of belief on what ought to be hard science.

This is where the popular mind of our times is… in other words, it’s very hard to find general public agreement even about some of the basic premises that are most obvious to all of us. If you’ve had your heart awakened to any degree spiritual, that conversation is irrelevant. And yet, in mainstream journals, it’s a matter of huge contention. And that contention is taking place wholly within the world that we would call the “blue state world.” This is between the modernists and the post-modernists. Whereas there is an enormous body of people who are—unfortunately as we see by what’s been happening lately with the right-wing talk radio and Glenn Beck and all the rest—the degrees of ignorance and fear on the basis of which a large number of the red state electorate is making its decisions, the kind of buttons that are pushed and the reflexes that are jogged by various media memes, they’re not even things that would be a good faith participation in the kind of dialogue we’re trying to have here tonight. There’s a very, very deep closure.

So it seems to me that we ought to be having a conversation that is awake to the truth that I was pointing to, that Andrew Cohen has been blowing his bugle about now for several years. I think that we each do have a responsibility to be engaged on behalf of a world that works. In some way, we ought to each be a part of what gives birth to a kind of consciousness that could be transformative. Now, that’s an imperative that I feel as an aspect of my own spiritual understanding. My own identification has grown over time to being just myself, and not just my family, and not just my ethnic group, and not just even human beings to having a kind of cosmocentric orientation. And the obviousness that if there is no responsibility where I stand in this larger system, if I don’t have some sense of… some real sense of which I am responsible, then there can’t really be any locus of responsibility.

If I say, “Oh, no, Barack Obama should be in charge of this or my senator or my congressmen should be in charge of this, or the leader of my religious order should be in charge of this, and I don’t bear responsibility.” If everybody behaves that way, we’re sunk, right? Somehow, there’s got to be a responsibility that pervades, that’s completely distributed and that shows up in some form right here, and right where you sit wherever you are sitting, right? It’s got to be true. And yet finding a way to manifest that that we can believe it has any kind of really substantive contribution that has any chance of making a positive difference, this is a really tough koan. I think, we are all dealing with.

Now, I think Dharma does make a difference because there’s nothing else that’s as inspiring as the living sense of spiritual reality that we have hopefully touched in our moments of most-profound illumination. When we’ve been alive to the enormous power of spirit in this moment, alive, kind of breaking through the veil, and awakened into a heightened consciousness, we know that we’re touching into something that is powerful beyond conception that everything could really be different. We feel motivated to try to make it different. And for generations, people have gotten lit up like that. The best they’ve been able to do is influence a few other people, maybe even create a movement. And yet, we are in a situation, in terms of evolutionary moment, in which nothing short of a massive movement, a series of generations of saints of really self-transcending, white hot leaders is what’s going to be called for. And how would we congeal our effort? Well, I don’t see how anything could happen without a strong spiritual influence. And there is a kind of Dharma of that kind of commitment that is called for in some sense.

So isn’t it interesting that outside of this insistence on Andrew Cohen’s part, which I think is significant, I actually, I really respect him from doing that. I’m not his student at all. But I think that what he offers there is significant. But outside of that, looking almost everywhere in the contemporary spiritual scene, I see very little of this kind of ardent clarion call that we must pay attention and become agents of change, and that there’s a transformational responsibility that we have to call each other to. I don’t see that conversation going on very much. Why isn’t this topic that we’re discussing here tonight, the most common topic in every spiritual community across the world, particularly the Western world, where anybody who’s educated ought to be asking this questions?

Hokai: It’s embarrassing.

Terry: It’s ridiculous.

Hokai: No, no. The topic is embarrassing.

Terry: Well, expand on that.

Hokai: Today, they say I must repeat it, I said it’s like dropping your pants down in front of a lot of people. It’s embarrassing, because for most spiritual teachers, it’s embarrassing.

Terry: Because they don’t have much to show?

Hokai: Yeah. [Laughter] I mean, to a certain extent, yes. It’s true. If they have been trained systematically, then they have been trained to avoid these issues. These are potentially highly divisive issues. One who is working on increasing or unifying, gathering and harmonizing ones community does not bring divisive issues. Does not bring those divisive issues especially in the context of spiritual discourse. Perhaps, there is a section in the Buddhist Center about this, but it’s done in the non-meditation time. We want to, actually, sit, close our eyes, and work with this. There’s no way.

But, let me just give you an example how we build a illusory, basically—when I say we, I’m not patronizing anyone, I really mean myself also, for a long time—how we build an illusory image of spirituality? I’ll give you an example of a 9th century Japanese founder of the school in which I’ve been trained, who was the Emperor’s best friend. On weekends—well, on weekends, you know like on weekends—exchanging poetry with him, basically creating elite cultural artifacts, at that time, most of which have been preserved because it was in the Emperor’s archive so we know they did it. Who instituted, on the second year of his arrival in Japan after traveling to China, instituted a grand yearly ritual for the benefit of nation. This was a Vajrayana Tantric School. It’s something similar to the function of Tibetan dances, which they perform for the sending away the evil forces, subduing the destructive ones, increasing longevity, harmony, and everything which is good, and blessing the turn all existence of Dharma or, at least, the life of His Holiness and stuff like that.

So, basically, the idea that right spiritual practice was supposed to deeply affect the world, and avert misfortune, and protect fortunate and productive cycles of existence, is not something extremely new. There has been this idea, especially with the Tantric schools who have, of course, employed magical and ritualistic means of realizing this function of spirituality. They were never massively sitting, like 100,000 monks sitting on the cushion and wishing for the nation to not be attacked by enemies. So they were actually doing something about it. They were performing a collective magical act, which at that time, is a political act. So, basically, 12 centuries have passed since and we just want to do our ritual.

What we’re discussing here is what is the appropriate form of ritual today, and what today has the power of a magical act. That’s what we’re discussing basically. So, we’re not really introducing some radically new idea with this part, but basically we’re discussing a new form of something, which has already appeared.

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