Conversations with my father on Facebook

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.