Insurgent Heart: A Vipassana Manual for the Guerrilla Yogi — {12}
THE REVOLUTIONARY SPIRIT:
Discipline / Determination / Faith
Table of Contents
~ Preface
2. Indigenous Knowledge: Bhavana
3. Contact: Aim /Attack / Harass
4. Mobility: Bases / Fluidity / Agility
5. Distrust: Suspicion / Investigation
6. Medicine: Metta / Divine Abodes
7. Retreat: Encirclement / Escape
8. Diversion: Distraction / Misdirection
9. General Strike: Invisibility / Cessation
10. The Guerrilla Band: Camaraderie / Community
11. Independence: Responsibility/ Self-Retreat
12. Intelligence: Education / Reporting
13. The Revolutionary Spirit: Discipline / Determination / Faith
14. Protracted War: Land Reform / Regular Army / International Support
15. {Afterword} Mindfulness: A Balm or a Bomb for Babylon?
~ Chapter 12 ~
THE REVOLUTIONARY SPIRIT:
Discipline / Determination / Faith
These forces should have a strict discipline, a high morale, and a clear comprehension of the task to be performed, without conceit, without illusions, without false hopes of an easy triumph. The struggle will be bitter and long, reverses will be suffered; they will be at the brink of annihilation; only high morale, discipline, faith in final victory, and exceptional leadership can save them.
~ Ernesto “Che” Guevara, Guerrilla Warfare
Within the scope of historical guerrilla movements there is an enormous range of structure in regards to hierarchical command and centralized coordination. Every movement must define these structures according to internal and external conditions specific to their situation. All orientations will have their strengths and weaknesses. But even in the least coercive guerrilla formations that seek to create a society that is entirely free from hierarchy, some level of obedience to authority is necessary.
We live in an era where among the left-leaning there is a broadening assumption that an egalitarian and democratic ethic is assumed to be best in all circumstances. Activists increasingly hold authority — even temporary authority — as suspect. It is an understandable stance, and generally the result of a healthy affirmation of personal dignity and resistance to oppressive human systems. But this resistance has a shadow: the tendency to tear down all leaders is something that frequently holds movements back from gaining power and momentum. Vague leadership leads to lack of direction and tendency to get bogged down in process and indecision. Fear of action can be confused for inclusivity and patience. It is again a place where we must embrace paradox in order to make the most of the dilemma.
Over the centuries, lay and monastic Buddhist communities, like all others rooted in patriarchy, have at times supported abusive and manipulative behavior by their leaders. This reality helps fuel the contemporary concern that unrestrained spiritual authority has too deep a tendency toward corruption to be an effective model. While this is a vital concern whose charge will be of great value when brought into Buddhist community in healthy ways, it must also be balanced with the ability to use the benefits of authority when it is of value to ourselves and to the system as a whole. It is good to acknowledge that some people have more experience and training than we do, more profound understanding of vipassana insight than we do. If we accept this then some degree of sublimation of one’s own impulses and ego and submission to the guidance of a teacher is going to be fundamental to progress along the path.
In the old days, monastic teachers were often stern and severe. They were not there to entertain: they were at war with the greed, hatred, and delusion in your heart and were going to give you as little room as possible to evade the confrontation they were dedicated to. Burmese monks would hold a fan in front of their faces when giving Dhamma talks to make it clear that the teaching was not about personality — as a protection from the projections of their students onto them. Nowadays, lay teachers in the west are expected to be funny, engaging, likable, worldly, friendly, emotionally and temporally available, without rough edges or fault. People want their teachers to be a projection of their own fantasy selves and will abandon them at the first sign of disagreement or firm boundary-holding.
In any revolutionary army, there is unity of purpose as far as both officers and men are concerned, and, therefore, within such an army, discipline is self-imposed… because only when it is, is the soldier able to understand completely why he fights and why he must obey. This type of discipline becomes a tower of strength within the army, and it is the only type that can truly harmonize the relationship that exists between officers and soldiers. In any system where discipline is externally imposed, the relationship that exists between officer and man is characterized by indifference of the one to the other. The idea that officers can physically beat or severely tongue-lash their men is a feudal one and is not in accord with the conception of a self-imposed discipline. Discipline of the feudal type will destroy internal unity and fighting strength. A discipline self-imposed is the primary characteristic of a democratic system in the army.
~ Mao Zedong
There is a lack of strong ethic or expectation of commitment. People bounce from teacher to teacher, abandoning a method at the first sign of difficult challenge, critique, or even boredom. Like a child, a yogi doesn’t want to hear the word “no.” But until they are mature enough to see the powerful forces of delusion at play in the mind, they must subject themselves to some degree of mirroring and restraint in order to learn.
Part of the problem today is certainly capitalism. Conventional yogis are tempted to relate to the process as consumers — shopping around until they find someone who tells them what they want to hear and in the way they want to hear it. People know that their teachers are not Gods. This is refreshing and necessary. But the pendulum can swing so far as to not respect the teacher at all. A common attitude is that the teacher is working for the student, hired as a consultant or therapist, and this is extremely dangerous for the yogis, for the teachers, and for the future of the Dhamma. The yogi is never pushed to hear the truth beyond their delusions and teachers are more and more compelled to speak what is profitable and popular rather than what is true.
Further, in such an army, the mode of living of the officers and the soldiers must not differ too much, and this is particularly true in the case of guerrilla troops. Officers should live under the same conditions as their men, for that is the only way in which they can gain from their men the admiration and confidence so vital in war. It is incorrect to hold to a theory of equality in all things, but there must be equality of existence in accepting the hardships and dangers of war.
~ Mao Zedong
Students should be very careful about selecting a teacher. But when they do find someone they can trust, it is important to resolve to staying with them. This doesn’t mean we submit to abuse but certainly through challenges, disappointments, and conflicts. A yogi will be profoundly hindered in their progress with only their own preference as their guide.
Yogis who do commit to a teacher discover for themselves how refreshing it is to be humble, to be grateful, to acknowledge that there are others who know more than they do. This is true even if, especially if, they also seem to share many of their imperfections. It can be truly inspiring to learn that what you want to be true may not always be the truth, and the the actual truth may not be what you want to hear. We will benefit from an attitude where we seek to have our eyes cleared and the truth revealed, not one where we seek to have our views reaffirmed. Something is wrong with our motivation if we are not open to learning and just want to shore up all the beliefs we want to maintain about ourselves and the world. To receive the help and guidance of a teacher and feel that sense of gratitude and dedication is fulfilling and powerful. To find a teacher that you respect and trust and are willing to follow is a wonderful and an essential component to the path.
When I first met my own teacher I quickly realized that I had found someone who I trusted: who understood my practice, my mind, who had herself been thoroughly trained and understood her own practice and mind better than anyone I had ever met. While I have learned things of great value from many people, I have had only one teacher. I needed nothing else and I knew I didn’t need to shop around. When one has found master why go search for flavors of mediocrity?
While a guerrilla yogi ought to acknowledge the authority of a teacher for guidance, instruction, and to occasionally lend them faith, they also know that can never depend on their teacher to provide the fundamental impulse toward revolutionary change. It is their own determination and longing for freedom which must be the ultimate force behind their endeavor.
The basis for guerrilla discipline must be the individual conscience. With guerrillas, a discipline of compulsion is ineffective.
~ Mao Zedong
If we rely only on self-direction, we will inevitably be motivated by forces that we do not acknowledge or even see. If we only learn to rely on externally imposed discipline, we wont learn how to operate on the edges of our motivation and never learn to distinguish discipline from something like determination, which is a more profound and healthier relationship to our behavior. Ultimately, dedication and determination are much more vital than discipline because on some level discipline is always going to be a behavior that is enforced based on an idea of how things should be, rather than internally born from that reality itself. It is imposed rather than inspired, and while it may at times be necessary, we should never imagine that discipline requires even a fraction of the potency that determination does. Over our entire practice lives we can learn to be skillful about the places where we trust our own decisions, where we are experimenting with them, and where we voluntarily place ourselves in conditions where a kind of discipline is protected and encouraged/enforced. All of us need to explore this range of terrain and learn to make wise decisions and evaluate the outcomes.
More than any other soldier the fighting morale of the guerrilla must be on a very high plane. Every volunteer is imbued with aggressive confidence in his fighting skill and the importance of that skill to his comrades and to his people. This pride will lead him to do the apparently impossible — and the “impossible”will seem easy as a consequence. His enthusiasm will be infectious and generate such power that no force on earth can stop it. For the fight he is engaged in is worthy of nothing less.
~ Handbook for Volunteers of the Irish Republican Army
Early in our practice life we generally come to see that there is a wavering point between our determination to get free and our desire to sleep, check our email, read the news — or really do anything besides sit. Do we want to be liberated or do we just want a cookie? Do we really want to be free or do we just want things to be the way we want them to be? Often we will find that the wanting of the sense-object is stronger than the wanting of freedom from wanting. In these circumstances, three related outcomes are very likely:
1) We succumb to our more base wanting;
2) We feel bad about it; and
3) We believe we should be more disciplined.
On one hand, it is important for us to have successful experiences with something we might call “discipline” — restraint or engagement that is not based on preferences. The experience of moving past a strong resistance to practice — of deciding to get up and sit at five a.m., for example, when we would normally be asleep — builds up a sense of freedom from the gravitational pull of unconsciousness. Restraining our compulsion toward addictive physical, verbal, or mental behavior can lead to a sense of possibility, self-confidence and strength — of our power for piercing through the mass of delusion.
On the other hand, there is a kind of discipline that we can generate that is not particularly healthy, not conducive to our practice. This kind of discipline overrides the investigative capacity of the mind. It deadens the ease and flexibility that we are trying to cultivate. It reinforces a hardness of mind, a stiffness of spirit, an overly tight control — rooted in aversion or ambition — that crushes our spirit and prevents learning. Discipline may or may not be motivated by wisdom and so we must treat it as a dull tool. We want rigor but not obsessive perfectionism.
They used to think me boastful when I said so: but my confidence was not so much ability to do a thing perfectly, as a preference for botching it somehow rather than letting it go altogether by default.
~ T.E. Lawrence
If we rigidly hold ourselves to a fantasy ideal, we risk losing the chance to learn about the pushings and pulls of the human heart. Sometimes we see an array of dietary discipline that confuses the energizing effects of control with the peace of wisdom. It is not uncommon to hear people say things like “Be mindful about how much food you take,” which is actually an indirect request to restrain one’s consumption — something quite different than the meaning of the word sati in Pali. There are likely many good reasons to be careful about how much food we take or consume — but it is not entirely a matter of mindfulness. In fact, the ability to be mindful of decisions made in craving or aversion is actually very important. We need to be able to have a relationship of understanding with these parts of ourselves in order to understand them — something that pure abstract discipline can cut us off from.
Any of our Arabs could go home without penalty whenever the conviction failed him: the only contract was honour.
~ T.E. Lawrence
If we resolve to go through suffering rather than inflict it on the world around us, it takes courage, confidence, and discipline. There are times when we must do what we don’t want to do, when we drag ourselves to the cushion or chair to sit with ourselves even when it is the least compelling thing we could imagine. But the strongest discipline is one rooted in our own personal experience, our own desire to be free, not in an idealization of another or hatred of our selves. We are not trying to create an authoritarian internal police state. We are not recreating the thing we are fighting against. Rigor, yes. Enthusiasm and zeal, yes. Determination that is flexible and dynamic, in which we can learn, observe, recognizing that the deepest change comes through understanding, yes, but not hate-based control or suppression.
In the regular Arab Army there was no power of punishment whatever: this vital difference showed itself in all our troops. They had no formality of discipline; there was no subordination. Service was active; attack was always imminent: and like the Army of Italy, men recognized the duty of defeating the enemy. For the rest they were not soldiers, but pilgrims, intent always to go the little farther.
~ T.E. Lawrence
How does our enthusiasm become internalized? It happens as we build faith, as we encounter more and more challenging obstacles and are able to face them clearly, with compassion and clarity, and are less and less subject to every whim and fleeting compulsion. As we find more and more comfort in a greater and greater terrain and are able to move with more ease through a range of challenging territory, our rigor becomes more natural and invigorating, not compulsive or self-subjugating.
THE REVOLUTIONARY SPIRIT
The officers must be men naturally endowed with good qualities which can be developed during the course of campaigning. The most important natural quality is that of complete loyalty to the idea of people’s emancipation. If this is present, the others will develop; if it is not present, nothing can be done.
~ Mao Zedong
While the guerrilla approach to the Buddha’s path resists enforced uniformity, there are elements of attitude that can be seen as broadly shared. First and foremost, one must be a revolutionary. One must aspire to the total liberation from suffering for themselves — in this lifetime or in another. The complete uprooting and destruction of greed, hatred, and delusion. Love and sympathy unrestrained for the plight of all beings in all directions. People are drowning in the great flood. The Buddha’s way offers a raft, a shore, an island, but most people demand only warmer water. This is what distinguishes the revolutionary from the appeaser, the person whose mind is bent on freedom from the person whose mind is bent on accommodation who is just looking to be “more productive,” find more “work/life balance” or some such thing. This process is a takeover not a makeover. Which is not to say that the guerrilla yogi is dogmatic or closed to tactics of temporary strategic compromise: they do at times let themselves find temporary sanctuary in pleasure. But whatever nourishment they take in rest from the battle is always understood to be in strategic service to the larger cause. We may make mistakes, we may lose our way, but we try as best we can to always keep our eyes on the prize: The utter destruction of craving and aversion, the uprooting of ignorance, the fulfillment of the holy life.
We were a self-centered army without parade or gesture, devoted to freedom… a purpose so ravenous that it devoured all our strength, a hope so transcendent that our earlier ambitions faded in its glare.
~ T.E. Lawrence
The qualities that count as revolutionary mature over time and a broader and broader palette of mental and emotional experience can be folded into what might be considered revolutionary characteristics.
If we think only certain qualities are ultimately able to uproot the enemy, then only a fraction of our experience will ever hold up. In a workplace, only a small percentage of people are going to be the types who are natural agitators, organizers, rabble-rousers, but an organizing campaign must allow for the people who are not those types to feel they have a stake in the struggle, and join it bringing their special gifts and talents. The agitated, rabble-rousing, angry, zealous — yes — but also the bored, the sleepy, the mischievous, the scared. The revolution must include everyone.
Social revolution is haunted by its dependency on a limited range of motivational forces for its success: anger, intensity, enthusiasm, tenacity, crisis, etc, and therefore suffers even when successful, from lack of coherence and longevity. Very few people can stay angry forever. Nor can they stay agitated, excited, rebellious for very long. At some point, people want to rest, live their lives, go to work, play, raise their families. They don’t want to stay in unending revolutionary fervor. Even if they did, most cannot. It is not human, it is not natural. Those that can, the Lenins of the world, are a little demented. It is more natural to have periods of intensity and periods of rest, periods of clarity and periods of uncertainty. It is possible to have a sense of determination underlying all of this, a drum or heartbeat behind the action, that doesn’t pretend that the motivating force of change is going to be constant. We can learn to have a consistency within that changeability that is more natural, more attainable, and ultimately more powerful. It holds the key to a resiliency that prevents us from abandoning the path every time we feel disillusioned.
One of the basic questions that we need to look at is how to convert merely rebellious attitudes into revolutionary ones in the process of radical transformation of society. Merely rebellious attitudes or actions are insufficient, though they are an indispensable response to legitimate anger. It is necessary to go beyond rebellious attitudes to a more radically critical and revolutionary position, which is in fact a position not simply of denouncing injustice but of announcing a new utopia.
~ Paolo Freire
PARADOX
Because of the consistency of changeability, the guerrilla yogi will benefit from trying to live in, lean into, and learn from paradox. There are many forces required in our engagement that may seem in conflict with one another. The resolution of them is not merely a process of bringing these forces into “balance.” At the very core of our practice life might be the dynamic rhythms, resonance, and tensions between the mental factors of spiritual urgency (saṃvega) and patience (khanti). I once asked a great teacher in Burma, the Mya Taung Sayadaw, about the tension between them. How do we reconcile this tension in our hearts? But he couldn’t answer my question because he didn’t acknowledge any tension. We must have saṃvega. Yes. We must have khanti. Yes. There is no contradiction. The Buddha describes this using an agricultural metaphor: though a farmer must hurry to prepare the field on the appropriate day of the season — plow the earth, plant the seeds, and water them — he cannot then command them to grow and bear fruit according to his own preference.
The path to full awakening must be considered as the most extreme example of this dynamic. A yogi commits to develop these important qualities of mind but cannot control the timeframe in which they ripen. We cannot simply put a quarter into the machine and get our prize. But neither is it a slot machine of pure chance. As the 14th century Chinese hermit poet Stonehouse wrote, “getting free isn’t luck.” Conditions matter, intention matters, action matters — practice matters — but the road is long, mysterious, and unpredictable. So effort must be made urgently, but non-attachment to outcome rooted in a patience far beyond patience is also required.
What is patience beyond patience? The word patience, as we tend to use it, connotes a kind of posture of forbearance held for a time until inevitable and eventual satisfaction. “Just be patient” usually implies that your prize will come if you wait. It still is ruled by and dependent upon hope for a future outcome. But to be truly patient we must give up hope, give up longing, because while we all want peace, nothing is a greater threat to peace than wanting. This is not hopelessness as despondency. It is the hopelessness of peace that is not invested in the future at all.
Concentration and mindfulness can themselves feel contradictory at times and at other times are mutually dependent. Love and wisdom, body and mind, intensity and relaxation, narrow or open awareness, deep or surface, resistance or surrender, dukkha and nibbana. In the list of the seven bojjhanga, or “factors of awakening,” factors on either side of the list can seem contradictory: Investigation and concentration, energy and calm, rapture and equanimity. We have no coherent self and yet we are entirely responsible for our actions. We can free ourselves from hope without drowning in hopelessness.
To put forth energy toward a goal without any expectation of accomplishment, of outcome, is one of the hardest things for the human heart to accomplish. The entire life of practice can be seen as a giant tool of purification of motivation. As we come to see how so much of our motivation for practice is rooted in clinging and craving to certain experiences or certain fantasies of a future self, an investment in the experience of the next moment. To put forth our full effort and have no attachment at all to what comes next is a true miracle — more than any other fantastic magic that the saints have come up with in their times. The humility of perseverance, the purity of heart that is its fruit, is a precious doorway to freedom.
This doesn’t mean that the guerrilla yogi walks around all day long with perfect motivation. It means they are committed to the greatest humility in seeing over and over and over again how most of the time their motivation is more rooted in craving and aversion. This degree of honesty is of paramount importance and not as a matter of self-denigration but in fact as one of wisdom because we start to see all of these impulses as impersonal, as rooted in nature and the trajectory of ancient kamma.
In the Vesali Sutta, the Buddha encouraged his monks to consider the body with nibbida — defined variously as “revulsion,” “disgust,” “dispassion,” or “disenchantment” and reflect continuously on it as such. He then went into seclusion for several weeks. During that time, sixty of these monks were so demoralized by the disgusting nature of the body that they killed themselves or “sought an assassin” to do it for them. Upon emerging from his retreat, the Buddha asked Ananda, “why does the community of monks seem so depleted?” Ananda informed the Buddha of the tragedy. The Buddha immediately asked Ananda to gather the remaining monks before him and proceeded to describe to them about how mindfulness of breathing should be enjoyed as a pleasant abiding,
Monks, this concentration through mindfulness of in-&-out breathing, when developed & pursued, is both peaceful & exquisite, a refreshing & pleasant abiding that immediately disperses & allays any evil, unskillful mental qualities that have arisen. Just as when, in the last month of the hot season, a great rain-cloud out of season immediately disperses & allays the dust & dirt that have been stirred up, in the same way this concentration through mindfulness of in-&-out breathing, when developed & pursued, is both peaceful & exquisite, a refreshing & pleasant abiding that immediately disperses & allays any evil, unskillful mental qualities that have arisen.
~ Buddha, Vesali Sutta
The Buddha wasn’t wrong to encourage disenchantment with the body, but the intensity of that realization must be counter-balanced with the buoyancy of wholesome pleasure. One of the great balancing acts in practice is to be sobered by these insights while not growing embittered or drowning in despondency or despair. We come to understand that nothing is stable enough to ever satisfy the hunger of the mind. The mind itself (arising and passing each moment based on conditions) isn’t stable enough to be satisfied.
A heart bent on satisfaction will only find suffering. A heart inclined toward unbinding from expectation will undoubtably attain freedom. The most important mechanism of liberation is disenchantment. Weariness — even to the degree of revulsion — with the conditioned world and the heart that keeps searching for stability within it, is a key factor in the success of the revolutionary mind. We need to ultimately feel the dukkha of the oppressive and exhausting tendencies of the mind. It is the only way to tap into the “desire for deliverance” that propels the mind to the final stages of liberation insight. But when tired or otherwise vulnerable to the forces of doubt, we should stay away from this feeling of repugnance with the body or the mind. That frame of mind will tend toward despondency and depression instead of liberatory animation — and this should always be taken into strategic account. We can learn instead how to focus on and adhere to the pleasant side of practice in order to keep our efforts buoyant.
We can watch a nature show on television and be inspired by the beauty and wonder of it while at the same time feel horrified by the imprisonment of beings in the cycle of consumption and re-production, the stress of continued existence. Our practice should be rooted in humility and compassion for ourselves and all beings living under the powerful dictatorship of saṃsāra, of craving craving for continued existence. If we do not allow this kind of openness to paradox — to allow both to be true — the mind tends to teeter between overzealous faith and hopelessness.
The spring itself was a thread of silvery water in a runnel of pebbles across delightful turf, green and soft, on which we lay, wrapped in our cloaks, wondering if something to eat were worth preparing: for we were subject at the moment to the physical shame of success, a reaction of victory, when it became clear that nothing was worth doing, and that nothing worthy had been done.
~ T.E. Lawrence
As guerrilla yogis, we need to learn to acclimate and find familiarity and safety within the full terrain of the body and mind. We must learn to be as agile in the jungle of doubt as we are on the mountaintop of zeal, as stabile in the ocean of wonder as we are in the desert of hopelessness. As free in the green pastures of contentment as in the valley of the shadow of death. This is the essence of vipassana: not controlling terrain but knowing the full terrain of existence so intimately as to not be seduced or disturbed by any of it, to have no preference for one or the other, no clinging to any states of existence. We cannot fake it and there is no way to rush it. We must go through it all over and over again and feel the glory and agony of it all, and the pain of our own clinging and rejection of it all — for this, in the end, is our true challenge, to recognize and not resist the pain in the heart that is always there.
To be of the desert was, as they knew, a doom to wage unending battle with an enemy who was not of the world, nor life, nor anything, but hope itself;
~ T.E. Lawrence
While the Buddha’s path of vipassana is considered the most direct path to enlightenment, the road is not straight and we will have to weather great challenges when it seems like we are lost, or stuck, or going backwards.
This is why in the 5 faculties (iddhipāda) faith (saddhā) precedes energy (viriya), concentration (samadhi), mindfulness (sati), and wisdom (pañña). The mental support of conviction, confidence, faith are power bases for our mind’s effort and their undermining is our greatest concern. Viccikicca, doubt, loss of faith in ourselves or in the path is absolutely the greatest threat to our practice and our success, threatening our access to all that lies up river. This is not meant to imply that we don’t question the path or the teachings or our method, but this form of doubt is a doubt that is disinterested, disconnects us, that believes in, is driven by guided by, hopelessness and meaninglessness and despair.
When trudging through the desert of dryness, we cannot expect ourselves always to be perfectly equanimous and simply relate to it without any agitation. We can remember to observe our dislike, or hope, our wanting of something else, something more exciting, anything, to be happening rather than what is happening, and recognize that we simply need to keep on the slog, that we cannot trust our minds at all in their analysis, interpretation, and evaluation of our experience. It will help us to find that small spark of willingness, of chanda, hidden as it might be beneath shadow’s of doubt and resistance, and just keep moving and acknowledge that the pain is not about the object “out there” but of the wanting within our own hearts.
In a war of long duration, those whose conviction that the people must be emancipated is not deeply rooted are likely to become shaken in their faith
~ Mao Zedong
Even when we lose track of the breath or practicing metta but find ourselves getting repeatedly and overwhelmingly distracted, we have to see that there is almost always a thin thread of connection that we can maintain to our anchor, our primary object. The problem is mostly the standard we hold ourselves to. If we allow that the mind is going to wander off, and that there is no way of keeping that intense clarity of mindfulness of breath all the time, we attune to what degree of attention is there and let that be enough. Soon we will find that we have much more consistency and concurrence that we ever thought we did, but that it may ebb and flow like the tides.
Owing to the loss of big cities and the hardships of war, vacillating elements within our ranks will clamour for compromise, and pessimism will grow to a serious extent. Our tasks will then be to mobilize the whole people to unite as one man and carry on the war with unflinching perseverance, to broaden and consolidate the united front, sweep away all pessimism and ideas of compromise, promote the will to hard struggle and apply new wartime policies, and so to weather the hardships.
~ Mao Zedong
When there is hardship we have to lean on our faith. When there is no faith, we fall back on courage. When there is no courage, we fall back on our training. When our training is insufficient, we fall back on the teachings. When the teachings don’t inspire, we take a break, remembering that countless other people have encountered these same obstacles you are facing and have persevered. We may need to rest but that does not mean we give up. And if we give up, that is only for a few moments. We can be ready to pick the sword back up in the next. Even if our break lasts a few years, that is nothing in comparison to the lifetimes we have been at it — moving in and moving away.
There will be setbacks. What matters most in these times is not merely doing the right thing but the undercurrent of our character that keeps us going. We can align toward a thread of evenness through ups and downs. We cannot stop them from happening but can we be willing to ride them all the way through to the end? Sometimes we have to go to the darkest recesses of the mind. When things fall apart and there is equanimity, it feels liberating. When there isn’t, the same experience can be terrifying. Other times we find ourselves in the desert of the doldrums for days, weeks, or longer. We can lose our orientation. It takes an undercurrent of faith, and incredible perseverance, to not deny fear or bewilderment and to gently try to make sure we are still watching and noting each arising and passing as best we can.
Old Don Antonio taught me that you are big as the enemies you choose to fight, and as small as the fear is big. ‘Choose a big enemy, and it will make you grow as you confront him. Lessen your fear because if it grows, it will make you small,’ Old Don Antonio told me one rainy May afternoon, in the house when tobacco and words reign.”
~ Subcomandante Marcos
A few years ago as I walked to the open-air dhamma hall to open a weekend retreat, our entire space was swarmed by millions of flying termites. All of us were covered with them: in our hair, in our mouths and ears, and under our clothes. They were everywhere. We turned off the lights and covered ourselves in shawls. I tried my best to orient the yogis to our retreat and encourage them to persevere. The next day, the termites had all died and were covering the floor in a thick exoskeletal carpet. As we cleaned the hall, swept off our beds and rededicated ourselves to the practice, I discovered that only one yogi had decided to leave the retreat. Her note read, “I’m sorry but I am just not enlightened enough to sit peacefully though a swarm of termites crawling all over my body.” I understood. But the truth is that none of us were so enlightened. That was not what kept us there. It was the longing to be free, the aspiration to be liberated from dependence upon conditions that kept us invested in the process.
During our closing circle, many yogis reported the same insight: when they focused their determination to explore the direct sensations of the termites on their skin they realized that it was not entirely unpleasant. In fact, many found the light tickling touch to be mildly pleasant. It was only when the idea of what was happening penetrated and took over their mind did they find themselves in agony. But when they noticed it as thinking and returned back to the direct sensations, they were calm and engaged. They had broken through an important aspect of our suffering related to the difference between concept and reality. They did so not because they were free but because they so deeply wanted to be.
The Arab army was so weak physically that it could not let the metaphysical weapon rust unused. It had won a
province when the civilians in it had been taught to die for the ideal of freedom: the presence or absence of the
enemy was a secondary matter.
~ T.E. Lawrence
Click here for Chapter 13 (INTELLIGENCE:
Reporting / Education / International Support)
Click here for Chapter 11 (Independence: Responsibility/ Self-Retreat)
