BG 182: Exchanging Dharma – Client and Colleague Mindsets

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Episode Description:

We’re joined by Buddhist teacher and scholar Hokai Sobol, as we continue exploring the different mindsets that we often take, while exchanging Dharma here in the West. In the last episode he described the Consumer mindset, and in this one goes on to speak about the Client and Colleague mindsets. He explores the healthy and unhealthy versions of each, as well as how each of the three mindsets differ from one another.

This is part 3 of a multi-part series. Listen to part 1, The Invisible Forces that Shape Western Buddhism and part 2, Exchanging Dharma – The Consumer Mindset.

Episode Links:

• Hokai Sobol : Practitioner, Scholar, Pathfinder, Buddhist Geek
• Herbert V. Günther

Transcript:

Hokai: Basically, the next role or the next relationship that we may establish or that we may face into from the consumer situation is the client situation. This is a structure, consumer-client-colleague, a three-fold structure wherein the client situation is significantly different from the consumer situation. While, in the case of consumer, someone else has something that we want to buy from them. In the client situation, if there is a client on this side, then what does it make the other person? The other person is probably a therapist or a coach. And usually, a client doesn’t want something from the therapist or the coach, but the therapist and the coach provide some sort of service to us through which we become better, we experience certain benefits, we feel better, we gain some understanding, and we expect this situation to be intimate but not trespassing. It concerns us and not the other person.

So, basically, when you are in a room with the therapist, you never talk about the therapist, you talk about you. So it’s a little bit self-centered, in that sense. And also, when you are in the gym with the coach or life coach or business coach or whatever, the person on whose skills you’re working is you, not the other person. Basically, in the client mentality or in the client mindset, you are still quite concerned with yourself and not very much thinking about other clients there. Not especially concerned with the coach/therapist—in this case, a Buddhist teacher—you are concerned that they provide a good service, but you’re not really concerned what happens to them after they turn the corner. This type of mindset, which is rather common in our culture, even if people out there don’t use a therapist or a coach for private services, they certainly go to a dentist. And…

Vincent: Or lawyers?

Hokai: Or lawyers, yeah, or situations like that or they take their car to a serviceman, to a repair shop, stuff like that. So, it’s a similar type of treatment that you wish to receive, and it’s a similar type of treatment that you are giving the other person. So, basically, these mindsets or these roles activate in the space between two people. You can’t really be a client without the therapist or a coach, nor can you be a consumer without someone else providing the stuff or the service you want to purchase. Someone else is the producer or, at least, a dealer of what you’re purchasing.

So, in the space between, no one has a total control of the roles, but we will tend to naturally react to that role which is being addressed on the other side. So, if someone addresses you as a consumer, it will be very difficult for you and it will feel unnatural to respond as an either client or colleague. Or, if someone addresses you as a colleague, you will not tend to look at them as a dealer and feel as a consumer. So, these roles or these mindsets arise on their own accord when both sides are somehow in tune with whatever the structure is, whether a client, consumer, or a colleague.

So, there is a healthy and unhealthy version of each, as I said. And the limited unhealthy version of being a client while in a dharma situation is that you will remain self-concerned. There will be great difficulty to surpass that orientational point. The horizon of your situation will seem rather restricted and flat. And while there may be many useful things in that situation, their scope, in terms of either transformation or moving you to awakening or whatever, will be extremely limited.

In the healthy situation on the other hand, one will recognize that there is a sort of professional dimension to the dharma exchange situation. That the reason the measure of someone’s expertise, and that you shouldn’t take services from someone who isn’t really an expert. We have this popular notion which is, fortunately, sustained by considerable research. And that is, that to master an skill, an average of 10,000 hours of dedicated practice is necessary. No, I’m sorry—the term is “deliberate” practice. And deliberate practice would mean that you keep moving the threshold of the challenge so that your skill grows through time and not that you practice the same thing throughout the 10,000 hours.

Another measure is 10 years of experience. So it’s either 10,000 hours of deliberate practice or 10 years of practical experience in a field that qualifies somewhat automatically for someone to be an expert. I believe that is just an attempt to replace the traditional master-apprentice situation that I described from the European past. Well, in a healthy situation, as a client, you would recognize that you really need to put into practice the advice, the admonitions, or the suggestions of the therapist or the coach that you need to do your best to really do your homework. And you would also recognize that unless you do that, the advice or the dharma cure will not help you unless you really do your homework.

On the other hand, as a client, being a healthy client, you would recognize that the other person would help much better if they are qualified for the work. And you will not only check their credentials, but you would also check with their former clients to see the satisfaction rates [laughs] or to judge for yourself critically if people had really had some benefit from the work of this dharma coach. And it’s a mindset that in its healthy version should be oriented towards benefit and expertise. Also, some people are wary that the approach or the techniques of the coaching should never, never, never, never, never or never, never, never be mistaken for traditional dharma instruction.

Well, you know, I’m also sort of a traditionalist, and I have a certain nerve becoming activated when I look at that question. But, the important thing is recognizing that each of these structures—consumer, client, and colleague—has its limitations, of course, and has its downside and has its pathological version. However, we must recognize that these same structures, once they are coupled with, as I said, in the traditional scriptures, we see that a healthy attitude must be coupled with serenity. Sometimes, you use the word “equanimity” in English. Yeah, it must be coupled with serenity and be coupled with clear understanding. The translator, Herbert Günther, would say, “Intellectual, spiritual acumen.” He would use that to translate the word “nyana” or “jnana,” namely, wisdom. It’s a clarity of understanding, basically.

So, if you use these attitudes, these conventional, cultural roles with serenity and clarity, namely, if you use them consciously and responsibly, aware of their effectiveness in creating really smooth structures to get things done, there’s no danger that they will create a havoc that they have in the society where, very often, they have been employed and inhabited by people acting neither with serenity nor with the intellectual or spiritual acumen.

Let’s move on. After the client, we have consumer, we have a client, and the third type of mindset that we may encounter also very often amongst students. And it’s also very much used by the teachers of Buddhism teaching in the West—that’s the colleague mindset. The word “colleague” is not only used in academic circles. As we know, there is an Electoral College in the United States, for example, and there is a College of Bishops and Cardinals in the Vatican. Those are examples of collegiality and of people being colleagues, namely being some sort of peers in a certain situation where they may choose the more senior or the better one among them. But, there is a sense of equality there or a sense of, at least, being of the same orientation and the same interest and having the same duty.

A colleague, as a mindset, is something that tells us that we can indeed become very much like the other person. Meaning that there is no more a gap between the two people so felt as it is felt in the sense of consumer. In the case of consumer, what separates the two human beings, it’s a thing, a something that has a certain value that must go from one to the other, somehow. It’s either a material object or spoken speech or a book or a program or simply, sometimes, even a presence. It’s something that happens in time and it’s time-bound, it’s often space-bound. And there is almost a feeling of jealousy on the part of the one who hasn’t yet received it. And there is an expectation of what it will do once they have it.

And then, there is this gap, there is discontinuity between two human beings. Sometimes, even people are, in the most extreme cases, people are sometimes even afraid of teachers. Meaning, they have this tremendous awe and this huge projection. But then, while a consumer is separated from the dealer and producer by a something, the client is separated from the therapist or coach by some skill or knowledge, a knowledge how to do something, and an expertise in something. And the problem is that a client does not really even imagine themselves going over that gap. A client always implicitly believes that only a small part of that expertise will suffice for them.

If I go to a psychologist, a psychological therapist, I will not expect of learning about psychology. I will expect them to apply that psychology on my experience, somehow, whether through techniques or in other ways or through medicines or whatever. And that I will get better through that, but I will not become a psychologist if I pursue therapy for 20 years. So, there is this implicit gap that remains there for a client mindset. And I don’t say everyone should pursue dharma with an orientation of becoming a teacher, at least, not in the professional sense, but I would say that it’s a waste of time pursuing dharma if you’re not really looking into ways that this wisdom might actually become native to you.
That you might actually recognize that the guru is living with you, day in, day out. And I’m not talking about the guru with the name and the face, but basically, the basic guiding principle of our mind.

And somehow, the gaps present in the consumer and client mindset, even if those roles can be very useful of organizing situations, even dharmic situations, the gap in those two mindsets must be healed through time and there must be a bridge there. And the bridge is, in the idea of collegiality, think peerhood in dharmic situation, namely that even the most accredited and the most experienced and the most realized teacher is another human being, and what they are showing us is, if it’s useful at all, it’s a potential there in us to become ourselves, perhaps not accredited, but definitely deeply experienced and deeply realized human beings like them. So the colleague is, of these three I’ve mentioned—consumer, client, colleague—the colleague is the first model that allows for that gap to be bridged and that allows for the idea that there’s an actual human being on the other side, and that we can really communicate because we are very similar, not because we are so different.

And also in the mainstream idea of colleague, what is allowed and what can serve as a basis for us in the West to come to terms with, you know, hierarchy and authority, at least for those of us who feel themselves to be post-traditional. Collegiality, being a colleague to each other does not necessarily exclude verticality in the relationship. So there is space there for authority and for looking up to someone, and for feeling genuine respect, you know, and genuine devotion, and genuine admiration and yet without resonating in certain pathological personality traits whether in the lower position, quote unquote, of the student, or in the higher position, quote unquote, of the teacher. Collegiality also introduces certain ways of organizing the collectives of students and the collectives of teachers to regulate themselves on the two levels. And also gives examples, like some of the stuff done in the universities. At least, we can copy some of the positive stuff. Not everything, but some of the positive stuff done in university can demonstrate how peers can, instead of covering up for each other, they can challenge each other to higher standards of their profession and to higher standards of humanity and human relationships. I believe these three models, in their healthy and unhealthy versions, in their limited and their awakened versions, offer a nice basis to look at the roles and relationships in the dharma exchange situation that many Westerners will find much easier to relate to than maybe the traditional stuff learned through textual study or through actually relating to an Asian teacher who is of a traditional mindset.