Insurgent Heart: A Vipassana Manual for the Guerrilla Yogi — {15} Afterword
MINDFULNESS: A Balm or a Bomb for Babylon
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?
MINDFULNESS:
A Balm or a Bomb for Babylon?
In our dreams we have seen another world, a world decidedly more fair than the one in which we now live. We saw that in this world there was no need for armies: peace, justice and liberty were so common that no one talked about them as far-off concepts, but as things such as bread, birds, air, water, like book and voice…This world was not a dream from the past, it was not something that came to us from our ancestors. It came from ahead, from the next step we were going to take. And so we started to move forward to attain this dream, make it come and sit down at our tables, light our homes, from in our cornfields, fill the hearts of our children, wipe our sweat, heal our history. And it was for all. This is what we want. Nothing more, nothing less.
~ Subcomandante Marcos
HUMANS HAVE LONG IMAGINED an ideal condition in which the “kingdom of God” and the “kingdom of man” are in perfect alignment. From jihad to the kingdom come, from zion to the beloved community, from the stateless communist society to indigenous alignments of human activity with the greater forces of the universe, people have envisioned a society which is the manifestation of spiritual perfection.
While utopian visions may provide a useful north star for some of our social movements at times, they have also sown seeds of our world’s greatest tragedies: from the crusades to the con- quest of the Americas to Al Qaeda and ISIS, state communism, the killing fields, and cults of all flavors. The efforts to attain symbiotic perfection on the individual and collective levels of human existence is so compelling that the impulse arises again and again. And yet efforts are so fraught with suffering that many simply give up the aspiration.
The question how do we all get along together? has dimensions that are material and spiritual, social and individual. The most simplistic proposals put forward by utopian idealists tend to insist that either 1) the process of individual spiritual salvation brought to scale will result in the material liberation of society as a whole; or 2) that the emancipation of social- productive relations will inevitably result in broadly-shared spiritual blossoming. People who are invested in both aspects of change are drawn to propose that the two issues are fractal: essentially the same problem at different scales.
Part of where so many utopian efforts fail, I believe, is a false-equivalence of the spiritual and social projects. Though we may long for a grand-theory that aims to resolve the mani- fold dimensions of suffering in the world, I have come to believe that the inner revolution and the outer revolution are ultimately distinct. At different scales (internally, between individuals, and within large human systems) the nature of “liberation” and the mechanics of the process toward liberation seem to have meaningfully distinct qualities. They are founded in related but distinct human problems and rely on related but distinct mechanisms for change. Each project may support or harm the other, but they cannot be entirely dependent upon one another nor should they be seen as essentially the same process. To treat them as the same, or to insist on their meta- morphical and metaphorical harmony, might not allow us to fully explore the depths and potency of the dialectical alchemy between them that is mysterious and real. {1}
DIFFERENT PROBLEMS / DIFFERENT SOLUTIONS
At the heart of existence — of the process of being and becoming — is a grief, an agony, a torment that no amount of social security, universal healthcare, racial or gender equality, worker ownership, free childcare, basic income, education, or any other transformed social relation is going to heal. The problem of human dissatisfaction will not be solved by creating stable material conditions because no conditions are ultimately stable enough to be satisfying. The mind itself is not stable enough to be satisfiable.
And just as the goal of social revolution cannot primarily be one of spiritual awakening — because it doesn’t address the root causes of human suffering— the goal of spiritual awakening cannot reasonably be collective liberation. Social oppression is not merely a function of aggregated individual immorality. Oppressive dynamics are systematized in human relations in ways that are beyond the conscious moral acts of individuals.
For example, most of us need to buy food. The exchange of money —itself congealed and alienated labor power — for that commodity necessarily involves the exploitation of someone’s labor. We may make ethically-based choices about the social impact of our consumption — boycotting one product or another — but we cannot be held individually responsible for the basic fact of a worker’s exploitation in commodity-creation because we are born into a web of social relations in which money is used to control the labor power of others. {2}
Capital has a beingness to it, a kind of artificial intelligence. It survives and thrives because of conditions that propel and permit it to seek growth beyond any single human’s effort. It will only die — or cease to reproduce itself — when the conditions are no longer favorable. It is not a question of mass enlightenment about the nature of reality but rather of transformed social agreements about the nature of society.
While the social revolution will not rid the world of loneliness, despair, or immorality, we are nevertheless still called to work toward this revolution because the profound hardship that arises from the oppressive toxicity of our social relations can still be greatly alleviated. A society can be structured in ways that are supportive of the human spiritual effort — of whatever flavor — or can make it much harder.
How we interpret the world may influence how we explore the nature of the Self. What we do with our vipassana insights may influence how we see the world. But how a person learns to analyze and interpret the history of the world and the nature of society has nothing to with the ability to clearly perceive the nature of reality as experienced directly by the senses. They are not the same thing.
Society can’t wait for all individuals to get enlightened before it is free. Each individual can’t wait for society to be liberated before they get free. And so we move forward.
ENGAGED BUDDHISM
Of course, many people believe that the pursuits of political and spiritual perfection are entirely at odds. But one need not probe too deeply to sense that Marx himself had a rather religious attitude toward the working class, the inevitability of revolution, and the faith in its ability to provide individuals with a sense of spiritual completeness.
Part of the leftist critique of the contemporary mindfulness movement is that it provides a balm for Babylon rather than a bomb. It is accused of trying to sooth the suffering caused by our social conditions on an individual level instead of applying pressure to the larger power-structure to enact change at a collective level. Navel-gazing is an avoidance of the real work of organizing! might be a good summation of the critique. Of course this has roots in historic leftist thinking: religion being an opiate of the masses and so forth. {3}
While I believe sati (mindfulness) can social value, I also believe it should be honestly acknowledged that it is not a tool that the Buddha designed or taught for social change. It’s goal has essentially nothing to do with the transformation of material conditions of human society. While he certainly encouraged leaders of his day to commit to basic moral values and frowned upon corruption and wickedness in the world, the Buddha largely deferred to established oppressive social relationships during his lifetime in order that his teachings find a protective home in his social reality. {4} It is therefore understandable for critics to point out that his teaching has dimensions that can be seen as condoning — or even augmenting — social harm rather than decreasing it.
On the other hand, there are certainly ways that these tools can be integrated into liberatory social practice for the betterment of our social movements and of society in general. Activists can learn to have more caring and transformative relationships with their thoughts, emotions, bodies, and each other which can have a profound impact on the quality of organizing. These practices should be explored and exploited. But it is best not to pretend that in doing so we are bringing the practice home to its true work as the Buddha intended. And it is essential that we also acknowledge and wrestle with the places where these impulses of inner and outer transformation may be at odds with each other.
The relationship of any spiritual tradition to the work of social change will have its own particular dynamics to explore. In some, the projects are explicitly entwined. All seem to have elements that can be used to defend and inspire both right and left-wing movements. The contemporary growth of progressive “socially engaged” Buddhism and the rise of right-wing nationalist Buddhist movements around the world demonstrate that Buddhism is no exception. It is not inherently a tool for one or the other, no matter how much its proponents feel in their heart of hearts that it might be.
Many of us have bent over backwards trying to make the Dhamma fit our political viewpoint. It is one thing to contort our minds to make it all fit: those acrobatics are only natural and are part of the process. But is another thing altogether — a far more insidious thing — to try to contort the Dhamma to reaffirm our ditthi (view).
Contemporary secularized mindfulness — as propagated in the west — promises satisfaction over disenchantment, fulfillment over renunciation, acceptance over discernment. It has been pointed out by others how this contortion fits the capitalist consumer culture very well. But we can also see that in the field of contemporary spiritual activism it is often this dumbed-down, decontextualized, capitalist, colonialist, buddeoisie “mcmindfulness” which is also easier for progressive social movements to digest because it doesn’t call upon the practitioners to test the boundaries and tensions between the inner and outer work, between the personal and the social. It glosses over them to avoid the complexity that would actually make the relationship more rich.
When we re-center the radical nature of the Buddha’s call to liberation from sense-desire, it actually becomes harder to integrate into our social justice work because most activists aren’t interested in the destruction of craving. They want a better night’s sleep and to prevent burn-out from their overwork. The goal of social revolution is to improve the cycles of social production and reproduction. The goal of Dhamma is not ultimately about “self-improvement” at all but rather to escape from the cycle of reproduction of Self entirely. No reasonable social change movement would aim for the cessation of becoming. On a basic level, the goals don’t match.
These mismatches are not trite and we gloss over them to the detriment of our deeper work — internally and externally. This tension in the relationship of honest Dhamma (rather than “mindfulness”) to social justice work is an investigation we should not shy away from because it is the only way mindfulness actually has a meaningful chance at being part of a transformation of society rather than a tool and victim of further exploitation and alienation. These uneasy places (and many others) are not easily resolved but they provide us with a foundation for important conversations.
For social change, we need metaphorical balms and bombs. We need healing from our wounds of historical trauma but we also need to dismantle and restructure society so it stops making those wounds.
NON-VIOLENT GUERRILLA TACTICS
When we incorporate the methods of guerrilla warfare into our vipassana practice we generate particular orientation toward the pursuit of inner liberation. As we digest this integration, we can also fold this guerrilla yogi orientation back into the world of social change. In doing so we see that it may give us a kind of refracted clarity regarding some meaningful aspects of our approach to creating a more just world. Through this double-digestion of guerrilla metaphors and spiritual insights, we can build the foundation for a social re-expression that maintains the principles and militant notions of guerrilla warfare but that has integrated the full expression of non-violence, love, compassion, and peace.
Even with the spiritual dimensions excluded, each chapter of this book outlining the guerrilla strategic framework can provide guidance for our non-violent movements for social change. I hope these can be investigated. For now, I will focus my reflections primarily on the places where the learning of the guerrilla yogi can have resonance with the strategic imperatives for social liberation. There are a few places which seem to get to the heart of the project trying to use some of the wisdom of the Dhamma to support our non-violent social justice movement.
As a starting place it is essential to acknowledge that the left already lives in the basic formula of a guerrilla movement. We are in the minority position. We are poorly funded. We are disorganized and largely leaderless. We are motivated. If the left could understand itself this way and strategize and organize appropriately we might refine or tap into a range of new approaches that could significantly increase the potency of our strengths and decrease the impairments of our weaknesses.
UNITY AND DIVERSITY
Contemporary activists want to feel the goodness of unity but not at the expense of ignoring our differences. Because of our allergy to the hegemonic flavor of many solidarity efforts, a lot of lamentation has been expressed about the silo-ing of movement work. The divergence of priority, analysis, cultural norms, and strategies within movements focused on racial justice, economic justice, gender equality, and environmentalism (for example) is seen as a threat to that most cherished leftist attainment: solidarity. But if we consider that solidarity is in many ways akin to the spiritual call for concentration, we may appreciate the ways that in their diversity our contemporary movements for change are intuitively prioritizing a deeper value. Understanding how the forces of mindfulness and concentration work together in vipassana practice is one framework that can help us develop healthy approaches to both in our organizing.
As we know from previous discussion, concentration — the ability to maintain a firm connection with an object over time — is powerful and necessary capacity in our meditation practice, but it will always be haunted by its patriarchal and non-investigative shadow. Concentration is a kind of control that can easily be overdone. In its effort to stabilize it can repress and obfuscate reality and undermine our path. Because of this, the guerrilla yogi must be extremely careful that their concentration be developed only when in service of mindfulness — the actual transformative tool of insight.
One fundamental way that concentration can be ensured to serve mindfulness is when it is oriented not to stabilize an object but rather to stay with it over time as it changes. The guerrilla yogi does not depend on or over-value the experience of absorptive concentration jhana which creates a powerful sense of stability between mind and object. They trust, instead, that the practice of kanika samadhi (momentary concentration) can ultimately lead to the same power of mental concentration, indeed to vipassana jhana, but it does so by being in concurrent relationship with reality rather than overriding it.
Coherence for a moment is actually all we need. If we let the connection go and allow for a new coherence at the next moment and the next, we will be far better off than insisting on or aiming for a fixed solidity of attention over a long period of time. In this way our efforts toward concentration strengthen the mind’s ability to see the true nature of all phenomena.
Our movement work can likely benefit from a similar understanding. As concentration serves a necessary repressive function to the flood of fabrications and mental impulses, solidarity organizes the energy of a group to generate enough power to make impact in the world. Mindfulness, on the other hand, has a natural investigative quality that has more resonance with an appreciation of diversity. In social change work, we want to move forward collectively but not at the expense of an appreciation of our diversity — which proves to be as complicated a task as finding the right balance of concentration and mindfulness.
Notions and practices of intersectionality — that aim to create solidarity across a range of diverse experiences of oppression—have metaphorical resonance with a balanced approach to the vipassana practice of the guerrilla yogi. The work of coming to intersectional solidarity, though, can feel conflictual and chaotic and therefore exhausting and depleting. Just as without any concentration our meditation practice struggles to connect meaningfully with any object, without any base of solidarity, the tendency to get caught in conflictual process without direction is the shadow of diversity.
We need some concentration — some boundaries to our attention — to create a basic sense of stability in our practice, just as in the movement we require some basic sense of cohesion to fruitfully hold whatever conflict or difference emerges. If we never get a sense of the beautiful taste of togetherness we can lose all inspiration to stay connected. But if stability and unified strength are all that is valued, we lose the underlying dynamism and trust that fuels our search for a deeper wisdom and freedom.
Just as in meditation, this kanika solidarity approach to social change may often look messier than one based on an repressive unity. It will also likely not have as many of the dramatic signs that we intuitively read as “progress” — like those that come from a forceful punch of movement power. But this orientation will invite us to be sensitive to the more profound, if more subtle, cohesion that can and does arise between people in varied ways if we are aiming for it. And it will feel more real and more nourishing because it is not phony or built on erasure of difference, as traditional solidarity can be. That reality and the energy that comes from it quenches us over the long haul in ways that the more enthralling and ecstatic experiences cannot.
Kanika solidarity can also give us access to meaningful connection with people who we may even consider our enemies: people who hold fiercely opposing positions than us around most points of social liberation. Brief periods of alignment that don’t have expectation for long commitment can allow for the connection to be pure and meaningful in a way that moves a position forward without threatening greater antagonism, paving the emotional path for future relationship and perhaps eventual long-term solidarity.
In fact, mindfulness hardly the only other mental quality besides concentration we need to develop. Social change movements that are only obsessed with the need for greater unity and greater strength are also in some ways akin to a vipassana yogi concerned only with concentration and energy while disinterested in the other bojjhanga (factors of awakening) of mindfulness, investigation, rapture, calm, and equanimity. As vipassana yogis, sometimes the cultivation of these other factors complicates our efforts toward energy and concentration in ways that we don’t immediately value. They can seem like distractions. But without their development, our inner movement is skewed toward a kind of inner fascism. Without the purification of motivation that comes from these, or the development of the pañcabalāni (five powers) of faith, energy, mindfulness, concentration, and wisdom, or the pāramī (ten perfections) of generosity, morality, renunciation, wisdom, patience, honesty, determination, loving-kindness, and equanimity — or any number of other associated heart-trainings — our efforts will be misguided and undermine themselves. In their dull ambition they actually become obstacles to our development. These other qualities of mind are not only good in and of themselves and they don’t merely balance concentration and energy: they all purify and strengthen each other in dynamic interplay. In the end, our energy is not tainted by striving, our concentration not flavored by craving.
Because of our fixation with power and energy in our social movements, they also can incline toward fascism. In what ways might we benefit from the broadening of the priorities of our revolutionary training? What would it mean if our campaigns were equally concerned with calm as they are with energy? Or generosity as much as determination? Not just as a value but as a revolutionary necessity? In what ways might we resist these practices as distractions because they are threats to internalized patriarchal models of collective movement building?
Recognizing this, some revolutionary theories value democratic process as an essential component to the program of power-building. What else might there be beyond that? If we treat movement-building as a practice in the way of a guerrilla yogi, we won’t be disheartened by the immeasurability of our progress. We will recognize the non-linear as essential and understand and integrate the value of the lessons we are learning along the way.
This is one place where our individual capacity to be in healthy relationship to our emotional and physical world, to our triggers and our habits, can help us be more helpful participants in group dynamics. When we can learn to access genuine interest, compassion, forgiveness, and care for people who are sometimes dramatically different than or difficult for us, we build the capacity of a group to move forward through what would otherwise be insurmountable challenges. Our ability to take responsibility for our emotional world and hold ourselves capable of transformative dynamics within them is essential to our individual and collective growth.
Some of these kinds of Buddhist principles will be easier to integrate into our justice work than others. Some may not be appropriate. The most difficult things to reconcile between the Buddhist framework and external revolutionary work are groupings such as those of viveka (seclusion), viraga (dispassion), nirodha (cessation), vossagga (release). While these are essential to the path of enlightenment, they can feel like a direct threat to the work of movement building. After all, their opposites: community, passion, creation, and attainment are often the quintessence of our frameworks for social change. In one path we try to build, in the other we learn to dissolve. We don’t need to reconcile these if they don’t fit, but we should keep the conversation open, especially if the individuals within our movements are called to fulfill these spiritual priorities for themselves.
Mostly our inner incoherence as a movement is experienced as squabbles, annoyances, and frustrations with comrades. But if we were in a revolutionary moment or actually held social power, we can imagine the consequences of these tensions could be much more intense. During the Algerian war of independence, French forces used countless deceptive tools to undermine the cohesion of the FLN. They augmented distrust, heightened paranoia, and spread factionalism. Like many revolutionary forces, the FLN barely maintained cohesion through the end of the conflict. The solidarity they did maintain was often secured through repressive violent purges and deceitful power-plays within their own organization. This orientation continued as independence was won and infected the new state to its core.
If we do not have different spiritual and social practices to fall back on and that are ingrained in our structures, this movement toward repressive unity will always be the human default in times of organizational stress. There are few revolutionary movements that are able to trust the slow burn of the kanika solidarity approach. Out of an honest and legitimate fear of division most fall inwardly and outwardly into violent tactics of repression during their campaigns and again into the states they come to control.
Perhaps the spiritual notions such as “honesty” or “wisdom” or “generosity” are not themselves the perfect analogs to what an organization needs to practice radical change. But what might they be instead? What might be the 7 factors of collective liberation? How do we determine what they actually are vs. what we want them to be?
ATTACK THE WEAK POINTS AND CHIP AWAY
Without the narrow fixation with (and measurement by) solidarity, power, and energy, our movements’ approaches to the use of power externally can also be transformed.
The basic strategy of a guerrilla campaign is generally to avoid large confrontations of fixed positions. Instead, it is to quickly attack where the enemy is weak and immediately retreat in order to gain as many victories as they can and avoid the devastation that results from trying to attack the enemy’s strongholds. It is a lesson we ignore to our detriment. Of course we should be fighting against everything that is wrong, and have a long-term vision to defeat our most entrenched elements of social adversity, but we may gain a sense of strength and momentum when we primarily gather our effort around easily winnable campaigns.
The non-violent guerrilla campaign understands itself as an irritant that is committed to a long-term process of chipping away. We fight where we can win, no matter how small or petty a victory it might seem, and from that we gather supplies, momentum, intelligence, confidence, and recruits over time — not worrying about the perfectly aligned and perfectly coordinated battle. When we can converge with others and fight together in a more momentous way, great, we should. We must value the small victory like the air of each breath.
We should be ready for the internal struggles that are bound to play out when we try to organize across significant difference: attend to them when it is fruitful and leave them behind when it is draining our power. Not avoiding conflict but sensitive to the boundaries of our growth, we come together, we disperse. We come together, we disperse. We come together, we disperse. We don’t become enchanted with the coming together and in the dispersal we see no loss. Over time, as a result of this orientation toward prolonged struggle, we build greater demonstrable power as a mass movement.
THE REVOLUTIONARY SPIRIT
We may also benefit from recognizing that revolutionary fervor — as it is commonly recognized — may be more of a personality disposition than a political one. If our revolutions only have space for people who are loud and angry, or are just dominated by them, we are going to exclude the participation of 90% of the population of any community.
Organizers are often trained to agitate the undeveloped frustrations of workers and citizens, inspire them to act out of frustration. This is understandable and can be incredibly effective. It often takes crisis for people to mobilize around their care. But it is also worth exploring the possibility of organizing around other emotions. What would that look like if what we commonly deem or recognize as a “revolutionary attitude” were not so narrowly defined? Could patience be a revolutionary emotion? Or equanimity? Can we imagine an un-agitated revolutionary? What would that mean about the process of transformative change? Could it change the primary role of crisis as crucible? Can love truly be a primary force for cultivating revolutionary change? Joy?
THE DIMINISHING BREAK-THROUGH MOMENT
As meditators we are forced to go through the highs and lows of how the mind can experience reality over and over again. There are times of incredible struggle and times of incredible elation. When we are in the midst of their spell, we are often convinced that each will last forever. We rarely wonder why the painful times don’t go on — we are just relieved when they disappear. But we chronically interrogate ourselves — or the practice, our teachers, or the world around us — about why the insights don’t seem to last, why the times of clarity and release seem to so easily become overwhelmed with the clouds of confusion and stress.
This is just the truth of uncontrollability, of conditions and conditionality. We also come to learn that if we follow the lows all the way to the bottom we open up to greater range a the top. Coming to terms with this by experiencing the full spectrum over and over again is one of the most important parts of our meditation practice and is the most direct doorway to our liberating disenchantment. This lesson may also be useful for the broader movement which similarly suffers from disintegration after victory, the falling apart after coming together, the loss of momentum after a big win. If we can accept, adopt, and integrate the conditional nature of this process and divest ourselves from fantasy of ever-increasing momentum and the disappointment of disintegration, it may help mature and strengthen our approach over the long-run. If we aren’t so enchanted by the thrill of winning or so disheartened by the pain of loss, our relationship to the whole process is transformed.
Equanimity is this profound acceptance of the truth of reality, based in understanding, that is the source and the gift of this process over time which will help our movements burn at a cooler rate, move at a calmer pace, and weather the ups and downs with greater integrity and faith.
WE WILL BE FREE WHEN WE ARE READY TO BE FREE
We have many examples of people’s movements overthrowing an existing power structure but then not having the collective maturity to be able to actually maintain power or protect society for very long. From the Communards in France to the Arab Spring across North Africa we have seen the lesson play out over and over again — that our desire for liberation may exceed our capacity to be liberated. It is of great benefit to be humble and conscious about this fact.
For the yogi, this gap between gusto and capacity is persistently clear. We want to be free from greed, hatred, and delusion but we do not have the capacity of mind to actually be with reality in all its volatility without them. We come to see greed, hatred, and delusion as the entirely understandable responses of the untrained mind to deal with the flux of formations, to get some kind of hold on the great unleashing of our kamma.
Can we recognize this in our communities as well? Can we see the ways which our violence, our poverty, our addictions, our fantasies might serve as protections? Protections from outer influence and further exploitation, from reckoning, gentrification, from bearing the weight of our past actions or truly feeling the pain of the harm that has been done to us and that we have perpetuated?
In our meditation tradition, the yogi must come to acknowledge that their mind is not yet trained, not quick or stable or tender enough to fully bear the intensity of reality as it unfolds moment to moment. That the stream of pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral experiences is actually too overwhelming. But the yogi also recognizes that it is simply a matter of training, of practice, and that through moments of increased capacity, of being with a difficult mental or physical sensation with great peace even for a few moments, the faith in our ultimate capacity and potential for total liberation is developed. In this way we come to see that we will be free when we are ready to be free, and there is nothing we can do to control that process more than simply apply our practice to our unfolding being as much as possible.
Our society may be similar. We want freedom. We want to end human exploitation, violence, oppression, addiction, and deception in all their forms. But we can also see them as crutches, as ways of managing a world as best people are capable of right now — as horrifying as that might be. This doesn’t mean we don’t continually strive for greater perfection, or lose a sense of that possibility and hold ourselves capable of more. But it does mean that we recognize that we don’t have the skills or understanding yet about how to do it fully. We cannot even get along with our families or our colleagues — how should we expect the world to simply fall into alignment with our fantasy of freedom? Our world will be free when it is ready to be free.
QUIET EMANCIPATION
To hope for a world without conflict is to hope for a world without gravity or rain. Violence is a shortcut to power when understanding and interest aren’t present in a greater quantity than pain or urgency or greed. Perhaps we don’t need to aim for a vision of a perfect static utopia but rather one that at least has processes, practices, systems by which it is managing, attending to, negotiating, and overcoming conflict: one that has the tools to work with what arises and, when it doesn’t, knows to pull back rather than create more harm.
On the left, we must push both a program and a process. Why not let go of program and just focus on process? Because, as guerrilla yogis we know that practice can only be successful if allowed to bear fruit under certain conditions of baseline safety for some period of time. True honest communication and exploration between people is very hard under conditions of oppression and so the process itself must be determined, to some degree, by an enforced alignment with the greater program. It is another form of concentration. Those conditions can be framed as some kind of quietude, spaces and patterns where the tendency toward interpersonal volatility are dampened, where conflict can still arise but in a container that can hold it, or give space, protection, healing, when needed. We can create spaces where joy and celebration can emerge in a way that is not distant from pain and trauma and the shared work we do to heal. Whether this is a counseling session, a meeting, a classroom, a block party, a community forum, or some formation we don’t yet know, many of the principles are shared. Conditions matter on the road to conditionless freedom.
It seems unlikely that profound social change at scale will come by the pursuit of consensus — certainly not in time to prevent a climate crisis— and so it is easy to get frustrated by process. As the guerrilla yogi needs some concentration to allow for mindfulness to do its work safely, we need power to defend the parameters of dialog that can lead to liberatory agreement. Knowing that change which comes only through the enforcement of power can create such misery, we must always ask, do we want power enough to win? Do we want responsibility enough to win? When we are in power do we spend as much energy instilling healthy social process as we do trying to push forward our agenda and maintaining our authority?
It is probably realistic to expect a future world where personal violence still exists, where anger is not contained or held in healthy internal process all the time, where greed and delusion play out in painful ways. But we can easily imagine a world with less organized violence: violence coordinated by race, gender, capital, bureaucracy, or other forms of concentrated power. We can imagine a world in which there are fewer social positions in which people can steal from others, harm others, abuse others, or ignore the needs of others, and the ballast that this would give the heart in the wild seas of change. The people who dismantle those systems will be greatly informed if they also understand how to do so internally and are inspired by how good it feels.
We don’t become enlightened by fixating on the person we wish we were and manifesting it. Rather, under conditions of profound commitment to doing good and refraining from harm we make a concerted effort to understand who we actually are in a profoundly intimate way and thus the fetters to our freedom dismantle themselves.
If we lived in a society with greater power to enforce ethical behavior — which is to say our social-relations of production and consumption — and also a greater commitment to collective processes of investigation and understanding, we could come to live together with more vitality, equality and, ultimately, liberty. If so, it is important to remember that the world we are aiming for is not outside of the world we are living in — it is inside it and available at any moment.
We also might consider that in the end, our vimutti (emancipation) might be samatho (tranquil, quiet). That throughout the process of social convulsion, of conflict and agreement, of control and release, of resonances and dissonances, we might develop a way of being that learns from these movements of society, generating patience and determination and love as we get deeper and deeper to the heart of the matter. The path of the guerrilla yogi requires that these resonances and dissonances be engaged in their fullest way possible to fuel the deepening process of liberation.
Pau.
NOTES
{1}
This chapter is entirely insufficient for the problem it is trying to address. I do believe one meaningful exploration of the relationship between individual and social transformation could be made by a thorough rigorous reflection on and refraction of Theravada Buddhist abhidhamma and Marxist materialist frameworks. It would be a worthwhile endeavor and a wonderful contribution to both fields and to that of “spiritual activism.”
In particular I believe the question of the nature of mind and of matter and of their relationships as described in notions of dialectical materialism (Marx) and dependent origination (Buddha) deserves a serious theoretical and practical treatment.
And I am not going to do it: now or in the future.
Until someone does, my hunch is that the most fruitful and frustrating tensions between our efforts to transform the inner world and the social world are rooted somewhere in the dissonance between Buddha’s notion in the Dhammapada that “The mind is the forerunner of all phenomena; they have mind as their chief; they are mind-made,” and Karl Marx’s view that, “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness,” as he states in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.
{2}
To entirely extract ourselves from the social dimensions of production and consumption is one solution that avoids participation in exploitation but it then also withdraws us from social significance and leverage to change. Avoiding capitalist relations may give us some reprieve. And this reprieve can be essential to our regaining our sense of humanity, of de-alienating ourselves and our labor. But the avoidance itself doesn’t hurt capitalism.
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The full quotation is more interesting than is usually considered, if still inadequate.
“The foundation of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man — state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.
Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.
The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.”
Marx, K. 1976. Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Collected Works, v. 3. New York.
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One of the great disappointments for the honest yogi who deeply values their own liberation and the liberation of the world will at some point be the Buddha himself.
By all legitimate accounts, the Buddha consistently expressed individual salvation as the priority in his teaching. A myriad of socially-beneficial values and actions are encouraged and developed along the way toward this goal, but one would be very hard-pressed to find an expression of radical leftists social vision in the Pali texts. The Buddha was not really a social disruptor. Over and over again he appears comfortable with the class divisions of the pre-feudal society in which he was born and raised: comfortable with hierarchy, with baseline social inequality. He sought to influence the core ethics of that society and how the social relations were subjectively experienced and enacted but (in a way that would not be dissimilar from contemporary bourgeois paternalism) did not seem interested in revolutionizing the structural nature of those social relations.
To this day, during the long ceremony that ordains a man as a Buddhist monastic, he must answer the question of whether or not he is a slave; an archaic question used to ensure that people were not using the monastic sangha as an escape from that particularly oppressive human social relation.
While currently women cannot fully ordain as monastics in most countries because of later-era sexism, the weaknesses in the nuns’ order were instilled from its inception. The Buddha’s reluctant admission of women into the monastic sangha came after great effort from Ananda (considered the most dedicated male monastic advocate for the bhikkhuni order) and with the conditions of extra precepts. Some of these additional rules may very well have protected them in practical ways. But mostly they protected the Buddha from social criticism while they burdened the nuns with restrictions that would weaken their long-term struggle for survival.
The Buddha is regularly lauded for his openness to receiving sangha members from the lowest social caste, but this was a trait shared by most renunciate sects of the time and was in no way unique to his order. (To get a fuller picture, read: The Social Dimensions of Early Buddhism, Uma Chakravarti. Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers; 2008)
A few words must be said about the Mahayana and Vajrayana traditions, whose ancient texts commonly denigrate the traditions of early Buddhism (in which vipassana practice is rooted) as the hinayana, “lesser vehicle.”
Because these practitioners take a “bodhisattva vow” to liberate all beings before themselves, there is a popular and broadly-shared notion that they are naturally in more perfect alignment with a vision for social liberation than the Thervada-descended lineages who appear to them to be overly self-interested.
Firstly, I follow historians in considering these “greater vehicle” teachings to be disconnected from the direct activity of the historical Buddha. The imperative to forgo one’s own enlightenment for the sake of saving all beings, and committing to a path of countless rebirths to ensure that eventuality, is a teaching that is at profound odds with the clear and direct expressions of the Buddha to attain arahantship in this very life — or as soon as possible.
There are other discrepancies regarding the essential nature of the mind that arise from these schools which I wonʻt go into here. I will just point out the basis of my opinion that the Bodhisattva commitment is inherently flawed as a revolutionary social-change strategy: Since those old texts are not talking about the material salvation of all beings but rather their spiritual salvation, the strategy is fundamentally evangelistic. The scheme for world liberation would require all beings to eventually become Buddhists — a dubious and profoundly distasteful social change strategy that is probably incongruent with the values of most contemporary leftists and Buddhists — if they ever stopped to think about it.
I consider the Mahayana and Vajrayana traditions as no more and no less naturally aligned with a vision for world-liberation than the Theravada, though the complexities of the dynamics are different and won’t be explored in any more detail here.
Click here for Chapter 14 (PROTRACTED WAR:
Land Reform / Crisis / Building a Regular Army)
