“Are the great spiritual teachings really advocating that we fight evil because we are on the side of light, the side of peace? Are they telling us to fight against that other ‘undesirable’ side, the bad and the black. That is a big question. If there is wisdom in the sacred teachings, there should not be any war. As long as a person is involved with warfare, trying to defend or attack, then his action is not sacred; it is mundane, dualistic, a battlefield situation.”
― Chögyam Trungpa, Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism
Systems are complex and interwoven. When we imagine or feel into a different world, it’s clear that mitigating symptoms won’t change the system. When we treat the symptoms, we are often perpetuating the problem itself or enabling the root cause to continue.
In many ways, critiques and analysis are part of the system of dominance and so reinforce it, even as we might think we’re making a difference. Instead of just engaging in a practice of evaluating and identifying symptoms, we can focus on creating the conditions for change. When we start with our own conditions, we can see they are a fractal of world change, change that is emergent and more complicated than we can plan for. As long as we feel compelled to hold onto the stories in ourselves that fuel dominance, our prescriptions for others will come from a warped and reinforcing-systems perspective.
It is far more difficult to do the work of rooting around in ourselves and changing our own behaviour than it is to analyze what is wrong with a system or to make recommendations for what everyone should be doing. The latter approach lets us eat popcorn and feel smart whereas the former means contending with the ways we are out of right relation with ourselves and others while also resisting the dominance trap of self-judgement.
In my own inquiry, some of the conditions that I can foster are: being in practice and returning, living as body and attending to body needs, noticing the things that hook me, being willing to listen, curiosity, wonder, love as an action, action as emergence, and radical compassion.
Creating the conditions involves two aspects. We do the work of letting go of the stories, identities, and behaviours of dominance. The other side of this practice is fully generative, living in the real possibilities of the present, not the future. What does now have to offer us?
We have been taught that to make change we need a plan, a strategy. As humans, our imagination is a gift, that we can create things in our minds and then figure out the steps to accomplish such a thing. And to be sure, there is complexity in thinking about the tradeoffs between beautiful and staggering achievements and the dominance and manipulation required to enact them. Cathedrals and pyramids are wonderous, and are also enshrined power structures. The concept of ‘modernity’ seems to me to be a world in which nearly everything around us depends on some measure of exploitation, of others and of resources, and also of invisible interdependence, relying on the work of thousands of other people without any sense of appreciation for each of their contribution to our wellbeing.
We can make change with a strategy but it is the kind of change subject to co-opting by the system because inevitably goal-setting is a reinforcement of the system itself. Instead, if we put the focus on ourself and the reality of the present, we see that much of what we call ‘reality’ when we are in the more typical state of past and future focus is actually just a story, a narrative, an often collective hallucination.
As I say these things, I am reminded that just by speaking these things I am perpetuating a lie, and thus, though my intention is to articulate something I believe to be true about how change is possible, I simply perpetuate the falsehood that anything is knowable.
Even the practice of creating conditions is that it disintegrates when it is called truth. Any truth that is, only is and can’t be named and explained. It falls apart under the weight of whatever might be called ‘good and bad’ or ‘correct and incorrect.’ Evaluation on a linear spectrum is meaningless when it’s put into a multiversal container of what is.
My experience of this involves the unsettling and exciting sense that there’s an unknowableness, something my body has evolved to feel as supernatural or divine. I am in a near constant state of questioning, and when I go to a place of ‘I know something’ there are interesting effects. I feel the initial rush that comes from being in analysis, synthesis, seeing something to be definable, I have the pleasure of arrogance, like ‘look at what I discovered!’ especially when I see that it seems to resonate for others, but soon enough I get another feeling, an uncomfortable body-sense like a residue of a chemical, the aches that arise from unnatural contortions, strain from trying to lift a boulder.
At the same time, trying on these various knowings and wearing them as costumes is fun. Unknowable as source means that all things are true equally as nothing is true, or at least definitive. But there is a body truth that can be felt, something I can trust until I start to narrate, as in meditation where the mind will be like “oh, I think I have gotten somewhere with this meditation!”
The results of the right conditions, I think, are quanta-like in this way. They involve a deep sense of peace that evolves from our removing urgency, they involve an anxious hypersensitivity when we let go of the defense structures of of blame and judgement. The conditions involve both the freedom of knowing I am not all-important or able to predict anything on any scale beyond the immediate, as well as the responsibility of seeing that I am fully the agent of my own experience, that I am in choice.