A few days ago I posted a political article on Facebook
about the next presidential election, and the potential ramifications for the
supreme court, which looks to have 4 new justices appointed in the next eight
years. Since, at this point in my life,
the majority of my Facebook friends are of the same general political persuasion
as myself, I did not expect much pushback, if any. At first I only had a few likes and one or
two supportive comments. After about
half a day, however, my father posted a comment that was not supportive of the
article. In fact, his post was filled
with a lot of strong emotion and conviction against much of what the article
said, and many things not directly stated by the article, but which are often
included in these types of discussions.
I was surprised to see such a strong reaction from my father, as I
usually am in these types of political conversations, because he and I seem to
agree on so many other issues, and our deep values and convictions for life run
so consistently in parallel. Every time
politics is brought to the surface, I am befuddled at how differently we seem
to see things, at least on the surface.
But it is in just that qualification (“on the surface”) where the
practice of mindfulness can do its deepest work. Mindfulness helps me to drop beneath the
surface of things and begin to look more and more deeply into their heart. What I see on Facebook, in the way people
have conversations like these, is almost always, always a kind of superficial
listening with very intense, often angry or hurtful responses. But I have noticed, in my own and others’ interactions
about sensitive and controversial topics, that we rarely seem to listen for
what is going on beneath the surface of a discussion. Too often we do not take the time to sit with
the fears, grief and wounds that can underlie intense convictions. Though we know that our own convictions are
deeply shaped by experience, reflection, feeling and insight, it is hard for us
to remember this in a moment of disagreement, and it is often even harder to
acknowledge that someone else’s deep convictions arise from experience,
reflection, feeling and insight as well.
What was beneficial in my exchange with my father was that –
because of our relationship and my regard for him as a person – I did not
simply write him off as “an idiot” with views contrary to my own (as I
unfortunately might have had he been someone else, or had I been in a different
place that day). I was not stuck in my
views, and so I began to look more deeply at why he was saying what he was saying. I began to hear the hurt and disappointment
that my father feels with his government.
I began to hear a sense of despair and hopelessness that gives rise to
anger. I realized that his intellectual
convictions rise in part from emotional states that are present within
him. Rather than invalidating his
intellectual perspective, it helped me understand the soil in which that
perspective has grown as a human
soil, not to be despised simply because his viewpoints are different from my
own. As a result of pondering my
father’s underlying emotional states, I began to touch my own fears and
disappointments and anger regarding my government. I began to touch the ways in which I have
felt let down or betrayed, and I realized that many of my own intellectual
convictions can arise as ways to defend someone’s actions or assert a point of
view rather than sit with the discomfort of pain regarding government. There
is, ironically, so much powerlessness in the lives of individuals and groups
who live in a governmental structure that has, since the Gettysburg address and
before, been intended to be “of the people, by the people and for the
people.” In touching my own grief, loss
and fear about my country, I could better create space for those similar
emotions in my father to arise. In this
situation, it became less about battling out ideas, and more about sharing a
journey of discontent and confusion about a government gone awry. Instead of fighting against each other to win
the other over to an ideology – or to belittle another for having the “wrong”
ideology – I began to see us as two people on the same side, geared toward the
highest good for the nation, the world, and the people within it. I have my reasons for believing that certain
political convictions lend themselves more readily toward that, and my father
has his reasons for believing what he believes.
And – because I did not write him off as a whacko on the other end of
the political spectrum who, by nature of his disagreement with me, is obviously
uninformed, foolish or blind – I was able to look at where his convictions come
from and why. I didn't set out to make
him believe what I believe. But I did
accept his perspectives as an “antithesis” to my “thesis” – a kind of Hegelian
invitation to look more deeply at my own beliefs and see where they might need
adjustment or deepening, how I could move from thesis, through antithesis, to a
synthesis that accounts for both, something deeper than what I originally had
to offer. I remember reading Thay’s
writings in Living Buddha, Living Christ.
He says that, while from one perspective there are “right views” and
“wrong views,” from another perspective, all
views are wrong. By their very
nature of being a view from a certain perspective, they are conditioned and
limited. There is always another
perspective or point of view. Our unwillingness to acknowledge this and look to
understand and grow into other viewpoints is the cause of great suffering. When the Buddha was asked why the spiritually
inclined ascetics in India fought with each other, he said that it was their
attachment to views, their preoccupation with views, etc.
The process of engaging with my father, engaging with the
discomfort caused through having someone disagree with a sentiment I put forth,
and working with my habit energy of either shrinking or over-retaliating...
this process allowed me to come into a deeper place. And it made me realize that at the heart of
so much public and private discourse is a lack of respect for the other. I realized this because a key difference in
my interaction with my father about this topic, aside from my own practice of
mindfulness, was the deep respect I hold for him as both my father and a human
being. See, my father is a retired
school teacher. For over 30 years he
taught moderately to severely emotionally and behaviorally disturbed special
education students in inner city high schools.
In his late fifties/early sixties he became a chaplain, first in hospice, now in a hospital. In broad, general terms he has, as much as anyone else I know, modeled
humility and integrity throughout my life, and his life's story, shaped by the choices he has made and continues to make, is a
testament to courage, strength, kindness, and compassion. So I knew, on every level possible, that
there was more to our exchange than a simple conflict of two ideologies. I knew that there was the encounter one
person (me, Jonathan) was having with another (him, Richard). I knew that we both had and have something to
offer each other in terms of opportunities for growth and self-reflection. And I knew that if our focus was about
proving our convictions correct – or at least more correct than the other
person’s – then we would miss out on this deeper offering. And this, I believe, is the living out of the
second and third of the fourteen mindfulness trainings. The second is nonattachment to views:
Aware of the suffering
created by attachment to views and wrong perceptions, we are determined to
avoid being narrow-minded and bound to present views. We are committed to learning and practicing
nonattachment from views and being open to others’ insights and experiences in
order to benefit from the collective wisdom.
Insight is revealed through the practice of compassionate listening,
deep looking, and letting go of notions rather than through the accumulation of
intellectual knowledge. We are aware
that the knowledge we presently possess is not changeless, absolute truth. Truth is found in life, and we will observe
life within and around us in every moment, ready to learn throughout our lives.
The third is freedom of thought:
Aware of the suffering
brought about when we impose our view on others, we are determined not to force
others, even our children, by any means whatsoever – such as authority, threat,
money, propaganda, or indoctrination – to adopt our views. We are committed to respecting the rights of
others to be different, to choose what to believe and how to decide. We will, however, learn to help others let go
of and transform narrowness through loving speech and compassionate dialogue.
The humility here, to borrow from TS Eliot, is endless. We are invited in every moment to not react –
to create space between a trigger and our response to it, so that we can choose
more freely how we will respond. Sometimes
the best engagement is not on the level of ideas, but on the level of the
heart. The opportunity to reflect on my
own perspectives, to know the movements inside of me that give rise to the
ideas I espouse, and to understand myself and the other more deeply and with
greater compassion are worth the mindful pause even if I end up using the same
words I might have used before pausing (which is almost never the case). The listening, the awareness and the space
between my experiences and my judgments of those experiences are always worth
it. Because we are all going to have our
fear, sadness and anger about the world in which we live. And if we can help one another engage those
fears more deeply by engaging our own with authenticity and openness, then we
are on the right path. We are walking in
the right direction.
So as I end, I bring my left hand together with my right as
a lotus near my heart. And I bow to my
dear father, who – along with my mother – gave me life; I bow to his parents
and siblings, who shaped him into the person he has become, as he has in turn
shaped me into the person I am today. I
am a continuation of him, bearing that continuation torch in my own unique
way. And I honor and thank him for his
own version of the two mindfulness trainings I shared above. Because without that, I would have had to
fight so much harder to become the man I am today. It doesn't mean I have to agree with
everything my father thinks or espouses.
But it does mean I respect him enough to listen deeply for the wisdom
and insight that he continues to offer me.
I think that all of life is an opportunity for practice, if
we choose it as such. And all of life
can be fuel for conflict, if we choose that instead. At the end of the day, I can still say that I
don’t agree with this or that I do agree with that, but I do not need to carry
the energy of hostility or conflict in my heart. I recognize someone else trying to work with
his own energies of disappointment, anger, grief, fear, etc., as I am – as we
all are. I see a companion on the
journey, rather than an obstacle or an objector to my staunchly held
ideologies. I see a friend. A father.
A fellow human being. And that is
first and last. Before and after we
disagree at the level of the mind, we are, first and last, fellow human beings
on this earth.
