Bending the arc toward justice

"The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice," the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr said in Selma, Alabama. Karma says we each ultimately get what we deserve. If justice is inevitable, what do we do right now? Does it matter?

It is, actually, all that matters.

Our actions now determine our future. They steepen the angle of the bend.



The Eightfold Path is the road to a moral life and liberation from suffering. If we are acting with wisdom, awareness, and ethics, then what is there to suffer about?

But liberation doesn't happen in a vacuum. While we work with our own suffering, we become more aware of the ways that others suffer. For the sake of ease in the present moment and creating a better future, we try at least not to increase that. Inevitably, I think, we seek to ease it, to help others suffer less -- not because it makes us uncomfortable to see suffering but because we see that we're all part of the same organism We are suffering and awakening together.

What we are suffering from is a disconnection from our true nature -- call it buddhanature, God, the ground of being, the universe -- and what we are awakening to is its presence in everything, us most of all. Everyone of us, without exception.

I've been contemplating justice recently -- partly springing from the events of this fall where the legal (aka justice) system did not hold white police officers accountable for the deaths of black men and the massive "social justice" movement that followed, partly because I have to lead a discussion of justice from a Buddhist perspective.

There's lots written about social justice from a Buddhist perspective* but I couldn't find a simple definition of what justice is. How Buddhist is that?

I invite you to contemplate justice, which seems like one of those things that are not easily defined but that we know. How do you know when something is just? How do you know when you see injustice? What is that based on? Is justice absolute or does it vary by the situation?

To me, justice means treating each person as a buddha, recognizing their inherent worth and dignity, and acting from our own. At the same time, we need to acknowledge that humans act out of confusion or neurosis and address that, not leave to the arc of the universe or their future suffering as recompense.

We have to start with ourselves, looking for and working with our own personal biases that keep us from seeing the perfection of others. And then we have to look at social institutions -- what assumptions are they based on? What are their intentions? To protect some at the expense of others? How can we protect everyone? 

David Loy, in "Money, Sex, War, Karma: Notes for a Buddhist Revolution," emphasizes the need to do that personal reflection. "If we have not begun to transform our own greed,  ill-will, and delusion, our efforts to address their institutionalized forms are likely to be useless or even worse. Even if our revolution is successful, we will merely replace one group of egos with our own."**

Loy observes that Buddhism may have a particular role to play in identifying the places where our collective awareness has become trapped and showing how to liberate from those traps, just as we work with our personal attachments.

 

Buddhas helping buddhas out of confusion, not demonizing them.

 

But sitting is not enough. Ven Panavatti observes

 Okay, it’s like this: When everything is good, we can sit on our cushions. When there are things to take care of, we should get up and do it. Even Buddha said it is hard for a person to make progress when he is hungry. Western Buddhists need to learn to reach before they teach.

Buddhas reaching out to Buddhas, not out of pity or in a bid to accumulate merit, just because we're all here, right now, together, bending the arc toward justice. 



*Here is a compendium of articles from the Buddhist Peace Fellowship on Social Justice and the Four Noble Truths

**If you want to walk through that process, I recommend bell hooks' "all about love: new visions."

Kleenex Karma

You know how it is when you're thinking about something and you begin noticing it everywhere? For me, this week, it was karma. I looked up the lyrics to a song and learned I could earn "karma points" by making corrections. I think those are like the ephemeral punk points or scene points rather than a constantly running total on a cosmic spread sheet -- but the popular conception of karma seems to lean toward the spread sheet.

Here's today's Dilbert:

That's now how karma works. It's not tit-for-tat. Karma, literally, means action. It is shorthand for cause and effect -- your actions have consequences, in the next moment and the next lifetime. Not listening to what's being said means you don't have that information; in the work setting, that may mean that you fail to do things that have been assigned to you and you get fired and can't find a new job and lose your house... In a relationship, the other person may decide you're not interested and move on. (None of this applies in Dilbertland, where no work ets done and no one leaves.)

Popular knowledge is a two-edged sword. On the one side, it's nice that more people know about the Buddhist teachings; on the other, they get it wrong a lot.

Companies whose products have become so popular that their names verge on generic -- like Frisbee, Kleenex, and Xerox -- have staff to police that.  At the newspaper where I work, we've received many letters warning us about referring to a large trash bin as a dumpster. Was it, in fact, a Dumpster? Or a knockoff brand?

Karma may be in  need of similar policing. Dilbert gets a pass. The karma points people get a written warning.

Something more serious awaits those who see material success as evidence of good karma. 

We might call this a belief in spiritual meritocracy. The implicit idea here is that our professional and financial growth depends on our spiritual merit, not on the presence or absence of social structures and biases. We are told that if we are grateful enough, if we put enough happy energy into the universe, then we will be rewarded with material wealth and earthly pleasures. (Think “The Secret.”) We are told that we actually can have it all: a rich spiritual life, leading to a rich material life.

You can have it all, a rich spiritual life and a rich material life. The problem is the "leading to." Spirituality that's practiced for material gain is false spirituality. It's manipulation, not exploration, a search for treasure, not meaning. It has no depth

For the last seven years I have dedicated myself to a Buddhist meditation practice ... As I have become more skilled, I have enjoyed moments of sublime bliss. And the more mindfulness I developed, the better I got at daily activities. I got a little better at surfing, playing poker, driving; the truth is, meditation helps me achieve whatever goals I set for myself, whether that’s being kinder to my friends and family, or earning more money.

One problem with a capitalist-inflected Buddhism is that it can lead us to a kind of spiritual cul de sac. I found that my practice was in an uneasy tension with my leftist politics. I found myself attracted to a glamorous Santa Barbara lifestyle that left me feeling unfulfilled and disappointed. I found that it became easy to deal with disturbing images in the news by dismissing the suffering of others as the karmic products of their own poor decisions. (They’re just not being positive enough!)

Karma doesn't forgive social institutions that lock people into poverty. The idea is misused when it becomes an easy way to dismiss problems rather than an opportunity to look at the causes that have created these effects.

The infamous Satya Nadella quote about how women shouldn't ask for raises but should wait for the karmic process to play out actually isn't that far off about the cause-and-effect action, on an individual level. But it fails to take into account generations of discrimination against women that also have contributed to their current economic status (and the need to ask for raises). In fact, by asking for raises, women are helping men to avoid the karmic effect of perpetrating discrimination.

Buddhism's not for the lazy. It asks you to look at your thoughts, speech, and actions, to let go of the explanations and justifications, to take responsibility for them and commit to using them for the benefit of self and others. It supports "leftist politics," in my understanding of what that term means. Renounce killing. Renounce intoxication. Feed the hungry. See the worth and dignity of every being, even those in prison.

Don't let karma become a flying plastic disc. Keep it a Frisbee.

Memories ... of the way we are

In my childhood, Easter was a days-long banquet of ritual, religious and cultural. Things start with Ash Wednesday and Lent, 40 days before. It was crucial to determine whether Valentine's Day would fall in that time period before deciding to give up chocolate. Then on Palm Sunday we received palm fronds on the way out of church, ensuring that any palm-frond duels would take place in the back seat of the car on the way home -- leading to the confiscation of the palm fronds by my mother, who made them into crosses that hung on the walls.

Thursday, the night of the Last Supper, meant visits to seven churches, easily accomplished in my heavily Catholic hometown. Good Friday was a solemn day -- no school, more church, but with a twist: all the statues were shrouded in purple robes except for a gory-to-my-eyes, life-like crucifix laid on the steps to the altar. Adults would kiss the hands and feet, where nails pierced the wooden flesh. I stayed far away.

Things lightened up on Saturday for the blessing of the food. We went -- again -- to church, this time cradling baskets containing my grandmother's homemade kielbasa, horseradish, colored eggs, a butter lamb, and other items whose names I could pronounce but can't begin to spell. The odor of the food blended with residue of musky incense for a festive traditional stink. No chocolate, jelly beans, or Peeps; those made their appearance on Sunday after we hunted them down in the places the Easter Bunny had hidden them.

Hats. We had hats. Women (and girls) had to cover their heads in church, so Easter outfits included hats. And corsages. My mother picked out my hat; my dad got the corsages. My corsage would have a pipe-cleaner bunny among the carnations.

I remember it well.

Or do I?

Many people think of memory as a video recorder, an incontrovertible record of events. Science, however, says that's not the case. In a recent study, more than 5,000 participants were presented with doctored photographs representing fabricated political events, with around half claiming to remember the false scenarios. The study, part of a decades-long program of research by psychologist Elizabeth Loftus, provides "a neat demonstration of how our memories are created in the present rather than being faithful records of the past," Time reports.

 

 
Memory is a complex mental function, tied to imagination, and there are many ways it can go wrong, scientists say. The bigger question is, why are we so attached to our idea of memories as fixed, unchanging possession? Time writes:

There are many reasons, but one is that memories are foundational for our sense of self. This is particularly true for early childhood memories (which the scientists tell us are the most unreliable of all). In her striking description of lying as a small child in her cot at St. Ives, Virginia Woolf noted that this wasn’t just her earliest memory; it was the moment she became the person (and the writer) she was. It is no wonder that we resist the idea that our memories are collages of disparate sources of information, assembled and reassembled long after the event.

Buddhists have long known that memories are ineffable and ephemeral. Mindfulness meditation -- as taught by the Buddha and updated by any number of scientists in the last 40 years -- is a practice to help us stay in the present moment, knowing that ruminating over the past or worrying about the future leads to suffering.

“Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.” -- Buddha

And yet, Buddhism also proposes that we carry the effects of past actions in our karma. Our

unexamined actions create habitual patterns, and we react from habit, not from what we see before us. Our view of the world -- whether it is safe, friendly, satisfying, beautiful -- is formed in large part by the views of our parents and caregivers, and the culture we grow up in. If we are raised to be suspicious of strangers, we carry that with us into encounters -- unless we examine our habitual thoughts pattern and practice changing them.  (Teacher Tyler Dewar details ways karma can be purified in this article.)

We also carry around the idea that a self, an independent and unchanging being, was forged by these memories. But if we simply look closely at the people we were in those photographs and compare them to who we are now, we can see that we've changed. We're bigger. Our likes and dislikes have changed.  Time writes:

Bracing as it might be, this new way of thinking about memory does not have to lead to self-doubt. It simply requires that we take our memories with a pinch of salt, and forge new relationships with them. They may be a kind of fiction, but the manner of their making speaks volumes about those who create them....  Whether the events happened or not, your biases and beliefs shape the kind of memories you form, and thus reveal the kind of person you are.

I am the kind of person who believes that memories are stories we tell ourselves and examining them can be revealing. Our selves are not solid but fluid, endlessly adaptable to the container we put them into. And our nature is ephemeral -- vast and clear as the sky, with wispy clouds of constructed selves that float and dissolve.

I'm also the kind of person who plays with Peeps. This is my time to stock up!

Labels

PS. Easter Monday is Dyngus Day. In my youth, it was said that the boys would tap the girls with pussy willow branches, and the girls would hit the boys with socks filled with flour in a bastardized version of an ancient fertility rite. Today, it's gender neutral.

What your face says

The law of karma says that actions have consequences. Some are visible immediately; others take longer. Some are as clear as the expression on your face. Others are more subtle.

Photos published in Shambhala Times of participants in dathun, a month-long meditation retreat in the Shambhala tradition, show the effects of four weeks of silent meditation.

Photographer Peter Seidler offered this comment:
This series of photos, titled “Before and After,” comes from a larger project called “Contemplatives,” a visual exploration of the physiological qualities of meditation practice. I set up the “Before and After” project to explore the observable effects on practitioners after long periods of intense meditation practice.

Read more here

Dutch photographer Claire Felicie shares the fascination with how experience is manifested in faces. But her subjects were 20 Dutch Marines, who were photographed before, during, and after their 12-month assignment to Afghanistan. Again, the faces tell a story.

Writing for Slate's photo blog, Heather Murphy comments:

No this was not a perfectly controlled scientific experiment, but there is no science to walking into a room, looking into a friend's face, and immediately knowing that something has happened.



What does your face say? Do you hold tension in your jaw, your forehead, around your eyes? Does knowing that give you information about yourself?

Look at the faces of the people you see -- what do their faces tell you about their lives, how they meet challenges?

Making the world safe

I pitched a fit at work this week ("pitch a fit: Urban emotional outburst using verbal and animated expressions." urbandictionary.com -- oh, yeah, that pretty much covers it). I usually employ mindfulness in the workplace -- drop the story line, rest in the middle of the vicissitudes, adopt an attitude of "what do we have to do now, in this minute?" Remember to breathe.

But this day ... there were notes waiting for me on my keyboard about issues I thought were already settled, people coming up to ask questions about things I didn't have the information yet to answer and who were huffy about the preliminary answers I gave them, capped off by a computer that was reluctant to get moving at the speed I needed.

That was all workable. But then I went to the spare work station (because we have backup plans for working with frequently uncooperative equipment) -- and it had no mouse. No f*ing mouse, as I loudly and repeatedly announced. The desk behind this one had a mouse but no computer, so the problem was fairly easily solved and my fit dissolved.

But I felt bad. A fit pitched cannot be unpitched -- and a couple of days later, at a going-away party for a colleague, a co-worker brought it up, not critically, but as uncharacteristic and (my tag) discouraging. If you're driven to fit-pitching, he said (not in those words), what hope is there for non-meditators to hold onto their shit?

Karma comes home.

I like to think that one of the benefits of my meditation practice is that I no longer react as if everything is about me; this is most noticeable for me at work. If there is a problem, then it is something to be worked with, not a blame to throw around. Let's do what needs to be done rather than getting caught up in stories about who's to blame or why we are insulted or what we would like to be happening in this moment. It has made work more fun for me and for others who work in my wake.

The skillful thing to do when there is no mouse is to find a mouse. Not to yell about why would there be a computer with no mouse. Unskillful.

Also this week, I listened to a talk on intention and the precepts by Mary Stancavage of Against the Stream Buddhist Meditation Society. Something she said stuck with me:

"When we're behaving skillfully, we make it safe for others."

In Buddhism, when you break a precept, you confess -- not for absolution, as in the Roman Catholic Church, but to take responsibility for your actions. So this is my confession. In the Roman Catholic Church a priest would tell me what to do as penance for my sin. In the Buddhist tradition, I start over, knowing that every day offers myriad opportunities to behave skillfully.

The person who practices the precepts gives freedom from danger, freedom from animosity, freedom from oppression to limitless numbers of beings, and in giving freedom from danger and freedom from animosity and freedom from oppression to limitless numbers of beings, she gains a share in limitless freedom from danger, freedom from animosity, and freedom from oppression.
(The Abhisanda Sutta)