Insurgent Heart: A Vipassana Manual for the Guerrilla Yogi — {7}
Retreat: Encirclement / Escape
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 7~
Retreat: Encirclement / Escape
The guerrilla combatant ought to risk his life whenever necessary and be ready to die without the least sign of doubt; but, at the same time, he ought to be cautious and never expose himself unnecessarily. All possible precautions ought to be taken to avoid a defeat or an annihilation. For this reason it is extremely important in every fight to maintain vigilance over all the points from which enemy reinforcements may arrive and to take precautions against an encirclement, the consequences of which are usually not physically disastrous but which damages morale by causing a loss of faith in the prospects of the struggle.
~ Ernesto “Che” Guevara
One of the greatest military threats to a guerrilla band is the enemy’s tactic of encirclement. The superior occupying force discovers a guerrilla encampment and creates a perimeter around it at some distance. Slowly, the formation tightens around the base like a noose, and the guerrilla unit is attacked from all directions at once, with no easy route of escape. This traps the partisans in a defensive position — something they take great pains to avoid because it exposes their massive strategic disadvantage. The risk of high casualties, demoralization, and lost initiative cannot be overstated.
For the guerrilla yogi, a similar scenario of encirclement by the forces of Mara is one of our greatest threats and challenges. When certain conditions come into alignment, we find ourselves besieged by powerful, overwhelming entanglements of rage, terror, grief, doubt, or self-hatred. When these confluences of dangerous conditions arise we find ourselves trapped in a kind of vortex of hindrances from which it can be very hard to escape and within which we can suffer great setbacks.
There are certain formulas of deep-seated doubt or anger, confusion or greed to which each of us are most vulnerable. They seem so much a part of us — the perspective they offer seems so fundamentally true — we are entirely susceptible to their spell. On the other hand, they are so deeply engrained that they are largely invisible to us. They often provide the basic platforms from which we build our selves and the world around us. We rarely get enough distance or stability to see them clearly.
Sometimes we refer to these formulas and dynamics of entanglement as “karmic knots.” The phrase is intended to show how our inner constructs of personality are the result of many factors in our lives, many formed very early on. The families we were born into, the communities, the threads of culture and habits within our direct lineages and those outside of them, and whatever ancient forces are at play in our make-up, met the challenges of our childhoods in specific ways that tended to engrain certain patterns of defensive internal and external behavior. We all have them and they are the most delicate and profound teachers for us.
All yogis will encounter craving and aversion throughout any normal range of meditation experiences, and the depths of even mild hindrances can be humblingly profound. We try at first to be mindful of whatever experience we are having and implement our normal range of tactics to come into meaningful relationship with whatever is predominant. But encirclement by a karmic knot is not simply succumbing to a greedy impulse or getting angry (though under the right conditions those kinds of experience can get the ball rolling toward an overwhelming attack of doubt and self-hatred that would qualify as a karmic knot). Encirclement is a dire situation in which you are faced with the possibility of an overwhelming loss and an extreme setback in your struggle for liberation: getting lost in a black hole of self-hatred, doubt, despair, hopelessness, or worthlessness that can be all-consuming.
Sometimes these experiences are related to past trauma, and those triggers can be understood more easily. Other times, childhood experiences that may have been less dramatic but nevertheless powerful, instill deeply held negative beliefs about ourselves or the world around us that ripen under the right conditions. Often we don’t precisely know where our karmic knots come from but they are familiar demons, sometimes subtle ones, that are so hard to see because they seem so true.
Over time we can begin to get a sense of the various conditions that lead to us to getting caught in the net of our karmic knots. For example, a particular kind of insight experience leaves us vulnerable to a challenging memory or a chronic pain. There arises a deeply held negative belief about ourselves in the context of a little bit of low energy. With our defenses down, these thoughts fuel profoundly challenging emotions we don’t have the capacity to be with mindfully, which then create more negative-thought propulsion, and voila: we have the kind of confluence of conditions that has us spiraling into a black hole of despondent hopelessness.
Many practitioners fail to recognize that there are very real dangers along this path that must be taken seriously. When we deepen our exploration into the nature of conditioned phenomena and begin to see their nature of dukkha, we are not always well-prepared for the shock of this reality and for the intensity of the psychological distress that it can provoke. Insight itself can be powerfully disturbing when we penetrate the empty, insubstantial, or dissolving aspect of things. Yogis with pre-existing mental health challenges — especially ones that have not been or are not being treated by medicine and therapy — are most vulnerable to these negative consequences. But even the most psychologically in-tact people can be profoundly troubled by what they encounter in the mind and we must be responsible in our training how to manage these mind-states. All of these realities must be treated with the greatest respect and care.
A black hole is a mass in the universe that is so dense, so heavy — whose gravitational force is so great — that nothing escapes it, not even light. For us, that would be to say that all of our goodness gets swallowed up in the pull of these karmic knots. When we lose connection to our own goodness we are truly lost and must proceed with extreme measures of escape and withdrawal. If we are not careful and engage in dramatic retreat we can be led into a chasm of despair and darkness, in the worst cases even psychosis, because we have not learned how to escape them in time.
Under the strain of being constantly pursued, and of being forced to speak in whispers perhaps for weeks on end for fear of betraying themselves to the enemy, seasoned fighters not infrequently broke down and became demented.
~ Alistair Horne, A Savage War of Peace
RETREAT
A little piece of advice. You see an agent, you do what we do: Run. You run your ass off.
~ Cypher, The Matrix
The guerrilla yogi should do everything in their power to avoid encirclement. As when the guerrilla band gets encircled by the enemy, it is usually the result of a gain in their knowledge of us, and a deficit of our knowledge about them that puts us in a particularly vulnerable position.
Part of the sorcery of a karmic knot can be convincing us that we need to engage them more deeply: We don’t even know that we should run. Even if we do, we donʻt respect the inadequacy of our minds to meet these entanglements fruitfully and in arrogance or desperation we dive deeper into trouble. It can take us a long time to learn the signs of an impending encirclement and even longer to appreciate the need to run. The guerrilla yogi must recognize as soon as possible when they are outgunned and should do their best to retreat, to actively withdrawal from engagement, because they know they don’t stand a chance.
If we stay and fight we will be defeated, and will have failed twice: once by the enemy, and once by our selves. We will have doubtlessly called upon the forces of aversion and conceit in your attempts to vanquish the enemy and in doing so will have cultivated the very forces we are trying to overcome. This is the ultimate challenge for the guerrilla yogi who should try at all costs to use only the tools of wisdom and love to defeat the forces of greed, hatred, and delusion. Any time we rely on those “three poisons” of greed, hatred, or delusion we have already lost the fight.
…if after all there is no other alternative the best way to escape is to break through the enemy lines in the middle of the dark and flee to the hills.
~ Alberto Bayo Giroud
When we find ourselves being attacked by difficult forces in the mind and body and are wondering about the potential success of the battle, the first question we should ask ourselves is,” are we actually being mindful?”
When we watch our fear, pain, doubt, gather momentum, are we truly able to be mindful of these targets? Have we the genuine interest and relative objectivity that this entails or is our attention motivated by aversion or craving? This discernment can help us determine if we can truly engage the object in a way that is fruitful or if are we undermining our practice by reinforcing the tactics of greed and hatred. As long as we are trying to change what is happening, to override, to overcome it, it is not mindfulness — it is aggression, and with aggression we will always lose.
If we find that we can be mindful of the fear most of the time, we should stay engaged. Check it out, explore and try to understand the nature of what you are watching: what is it? how does it feel in the body? But with a karmic knot encircling us, this is not easy. The emotional undercurrents are often unseen and overwhelming. When they are seen, they are things like shame and self-hatred, terror, profound self-doubt: not things that are easy to be mindful of because their gravitational pull is so powerful. We identify with them so strongly we cannot see them clearly. They have a hold on our hearts, they know our secret keys into these dark places, and we are sometimes powerless against them.
Because of the threat of encirclement, one of the most important trainings for a guerrilla yogi is to perfect their plan of escape. Always have an escape route (or two or three) set up for situations of encirclement or attack and develop the ability to use them in subtle and more dramatic ways. This kind of mobility and sensitivity will save your life and your morale over the years of struggle.
It is generally better to overreact at first, to engage in a more dramatic retreat, if it saves you from devastating bombardment. In the case where we are overwhelmed by the attack and we succumb to these sophisticated forces, there are always secondary tactics to be implemented, but they almost always come at a heavy cost and it is much better to never get to that point. Over time, we learn to see which engagements we can actually win and our escape routes become more sophisticated and secure.
The guerrilla must live to fight another day and for that reason the withdrawal is as important as the attack itself…
The guerrilla must know and understand that:
(1) No encirclement is complete enough that it can’t be broken. There is [sic] always weak links and these must be found, probed and exploited. Note where the units link-up.
(2) Proper intelligence can counter the special surprise blow. The guerrilla must always be on his guard.
(3) When the enemy attacks with his trained bands of hunting packs the guerrillas must fall on them and ruthlessly destroy them. Provide diversions. Hit the enemy’s base. Cut him off. When an area is under enemy attack, increase activity in other areas.
~ Handbook for Volunteers of the Irish Republican Army
This essential technique of retreat is actually rather simple: run. In the case of the guerrilla yogi, escape means moving away from the difficult object. The only question, with often the most humbling answer, is how far must one go to reach safety? Sometimes, it is simply a matter of moving the attention away from the fear that is gripping it and coming back to our home base, like the breath or a touch-point in the body. This is the basic training of versatility of mind. In the case of overwhelming encirclement, though, this will generally not be enough. If the experience is related to sexual or physical trauma, often nowhere in the body will feel safe enough to anchor the attention. Perhaps we move the attention to sound targets. Often, that is not far enough. The space around us? Opening our eyes?
If all that fails, and at some point it surely will, we should get up, go outside and take a walk. Get some fresh air, try to take in the sounds and lights and space around you. Keep your mind from returning to the black hole. Sometimes this requires great vigilance and determination because the gravity of the knot is so seductive and there is simply no way to safely engage it under the current conditions, even outside of formal meditation. Use your physical energy to dissipate the overwhelming intensity that has built up in the mind.
Then we get more serious. Take a bath. Grab a stuffed animal. If it makes you feel safer, lock your doors. Get under the covers and “hide from the hindrances,” as my own teacher is fond of saying. Cultivate wholesome mental qualities with urgency and commitment in order to override and shut down the momentum of the unwholesome ones. Go to a distraction: read, watch a movie, get a treat for yourself. Bring in beauty. Taking in some healthy pleasant stimulation — nature, art, music, a movie, reading, etc can save your life. Talk to a friend. We are trying to incorporate a process of finding safety for the mind when it is under attack by overwhelmingly powerful forces. We will need the buoyancy, we need to feel good, we need to get away, recalibrate, run to the hills, heal our wounds, and regroup.
In a rare expression of the need for retreat from a monastic meditation master, Mahasi Sayadaw, in his grand treatise on Vipassana practice, demonstrates the need to take breaks. Speaking of kamavitakka: thought based on desire directed to sense-pleasures, he writes,
If kamavitakka, etc frequently occur connected with any sense object, this object should be ignored without any regard. If such thoughts arise at every moment of contemplating and noting, the practice of contemplating and noting may be better stopped for a while. Much benefit may be accrued to some persons by putting off the contemplation and noting when yearning desire goes to the extreme or when becoming over-anxious and over jealous. When it so happens, it would be proper to completely halt the contemplating and noting for a period of two hours, or three hours, or half-a-day, or a whole day, or a whole night and then to have a light talk with other persons staying together with you on extraneous matters as a diversion. It would appear even necessary also to go on pilgrimage, to do the worshipping and pay homage to pagodas. Moreover, bathing washing of clothes, etc. be done. If desirous of going to bed, sleep for some time to keep the mind at rest without contemplating and noting.
~ Mahasi Sayadaw
Sayadaw describes these tactics for kamavitakka but they are equally relevant for byapadavitakka: thought based on ill will, malevolence, directed to killing, destroying, harming; and vihimsavitakka: thought based on cruelty, injuring, hurting, directed to causing harm and injury to others. One can see that depending on conditions we may take a short break or a long break — long enough to go on pilgrimage! How many of us are humble enough to retreat that far? Too few. And it is to our detriment.
Without these tools, or if we go beyond our own capacity to reel ourselves back from the edge, the mind will use its own powerful defenses of dissociation, addiction, unwholesome gratification, and, in extreme conditions, even psychosis or dissociation in order to find a sense of safety. If this happens, it may not be the end of the world — we can often recover — but depending on the severity of the trauma, there is a heavy price to pay for experiences of deep dissociation and it is always imperative to try to avoid them at all cost.
Dissociation or, more dramatically, various types of “conversion disorders” can be our system’s own protective circuit breakers that function to protect us from places that are too painful, when the voltage is too high. But it is very blunt and powerful mechanism that can reinforce a trauma response, which is simply something that we will have to take more and more careful time to untangle later, until we learn how to retreat. Over time we learn to see the signs, get a scent of the impending attack in the air, and can withdraw to safe distance before real danger emerges.
The organization, combat capacity, heroism, and spirit of the guerrilla band will undergo a test of fire during an encirclement by the enemy, which is the most dangerous situation of the war. In the jargon of our guerrilla fighters in the recent war, the phrase “encirclement face” was given to the face of fear worn by someone who was frightened. The hierarchy of the deposed regime pompously spoke of its campaigns of “encirclement and annihilation.” However, for a guerrilla band that knows the country and that is united ideologically and emotionally with its chief, this is not a particularly serious problem. It need only take cover, try to slow up the advance of the enemy, impede his action with heavy equipment, and await nightfall, the natural ally of the guerrilla fighter. Then with the greatest possible stealth, after exploring and choosing the best road, the band will depart, utilizing the most adequate means of escape and maintaining absolute silence. It is extremely difficult in these conditions at night to prevent a group of men from escaping the encirclement.
~ Ernesto “Che” Guevara
My old boss used to joke, “When I retreat, I attack!” and this is exactly the motto of the guerrilla yogi. We will come to trust that it is true, that it is actually stronger and wiser to run when we need to run, than to abstinently fight a battle we have no hope of winning, one that will strengthen the enemy and weaken ourselves. There are many times where we do greater harm to our enemy and service to ourselves by running away rather than digging our heals in and fighting. It may appear cowardly, it may not have the ego-satisfaction of engagement, but it fulfills the only formula that matters,
Before we treat the practical aspects of guerrilla war, it might be well to recall the fundamental axiom of combat on which all military action is based. This can be stated: “Conservation of one’s own strength; destruction of enemy strength.”
~ Mao Zedong
In June of 1812, Napoleon’s Grande Armée of 680,000 soldiers crossed the Neman River to confront the much weaker Russian army. As French forces pursued them, the Russians retreated eastward: evading serious engagement and luring the French deeper into Russian territory. As the Russians retreated, behind them their own Cossack guerrilla forces burned grain fields and storehouses throughout the countryside and torched their own towns and villages to the ground. Russians surrendered vast quantities of territory to the French — but it was charred, lifeless land that prohibited them from sustaining themselves on the spoils of their victories. This combination of retreat and scorched-earth tactics denied the French any decisive victories and caused them to advance faster than their supply lines could keep up with. French soldiers were unable to sustain themselves from the ashed lands they had conquered. When they desperately abandoned their camps in search of food, they were quickly ambushed and captured or killed by local forces. With no grasses to sustain the horses, the animals were slaughtered to feed the thousands of famished soldiers: the army ate its own calvary. Without horses, soldiers march on foot, leaving cannons and supply wagons abandoned along the roads, with no way to pull them.
When Napoleon finally reached Moscow, in what should have been his great victory, he found the city abandoned. Local police had set fires across the city with the intention of burning Moscow to the ground, forcing the French to frantically scramble to save the city they had just conquered. Technically they were victorious but the city was destroyed and their army was decimated — degraded in supplies, numbers, and morale. Immediately, the brutal Russian winter set in for which Napoleon’s forces were entirely unprepared. In December, a coup d’état was sprung against Napoleon back at home so he fled back. A few weeks later his entire Grande Armée retreated from Russia, with only 27,000 soldiers remaining. Not only was this expedition a disaster, it profoundly weekend Napoleon’s reputation and set the stage for his eventual downfall. The Russians had, as Bob Dylan once wrote, “won the war after losing every battle.”
The Russian retreat needed to be committed, swift, and profoundly unattached in order to keep the French in pursuit and irrecoverably weakened. For yogis, these same three qualities must be learned, and for many of us they take years of humble practice, of getting obliterated by fear, rage, or grief, before we are even willing to learn this important tactic.
In general, guerrilla units disperse to operate:
I. When the enemy is in overextended defense, and sufficient force cannot be concentrated against him, guerrillas must disperse, harass him, and demoralize him.
2. When encircled by the enemy, guerrillas disperse to withdraw.
3. When the nature of the ground limits action, guerrillas disperse.
4. When the availability of supplies limits action, they disperse.
5. Guerrillas disperse in order to promote mass movements over a wide area.
~ Mao Zedong
RESISTANCE AND RE-ENGAGEMENT
Much of our social and cultural training is to imagine a warrior as having a certain set of qualities: ironlike, macho, direct, disinterested. We easily internalize these same ideas about strength and take them into our spiritual training — largely to our disadvantage. Of course the spiritual path does take enormous courage: the depths of vulnerability that we subject ourselves to are beyond comprehension. But there is no need to be ideological or stubborn about the strategy. Most of the time the macho approach simply doesn’t work and people spend their lives hardening their hearts by trying to destroy the parts of themselves they don’t like rather than develop a relationship with them of interest and kindness; a relationship that eventually untangles them from within.
The first stage of building a healthy relationship is learning to move away. (This is often as true for our families as it is our karmic knots, which is no coincidence). Developing this spiritual instinct helps us see the unwholesome motivations that are often at the heart of our enthusiasm for engagement. Mara is prepared for an all out war and can use our own twisted motivation against us. But delusion is not designed to hold up against the slow undermining of a guerrilla front and will ultimately break from the pressure. Like the Russian army in 1812, sometimes that relationship means giving way, allowing these phenomena to burn through, but keeping our distance ahead of the fire and burning up our “Selves” in the process — with nothing left to conquer.
When we retreat from rage, we may allow it to burn through us like a wildfire. At first, we may feel like we are giving up ground and surrendering to the enemy, but if we do it right, we see that we have lost nothing; indeed there is no thing to lose and no one burned by the fire. This is the ultimate understanding of anatta, or non-self. If it is our ego pushing us into the fire, we will be burned — even if it feels like we win — because it is “we” who wins. But if we enter with humility the ego gets burnt up, even if we lose.
The enemy encircles China, the Soviet Union, France and Czechoslovakia with his front of aggression, while we counter-encircle Germany, Japan and Italy with our front of peace. But our encirclement, like the hand of Buddha, will turn into the Mountain of Five Elements lying athwart the Universe, and the modern Sun Wu-kungs — the fascist aggressors — will finally be buried underneath it, never to rise again.
~ Mao Zedong
Our biggest obstacle to learning and valuing retreat is often our own stubbornness. When it comes to skillful engagement with overwhelming emotional entanglement, a yogi’s desire for courageous battle frequently makes them reckless. They don’t see the profound danger in engaging in a battle they have no chance of winning, oblivious to the harm that can come from being bashed by the brutal pounding waves of a tsunami of hopelessness or confusion. We are seduced into the black hole by our egos but by the time we see that we are in slippery territory it is already very dangerous. We may have the sense that we “should” be able to go further, we “should” be able to fight deeper into the darkness. After all, aren’t we here to fight dragons? But in this we forget the most basic aspect of our training as guerrilla yogis: we are outgunned, outnumbered, outmaneuvered and that our essential strategy is to run directly for the hills to protect ourselves, to reserve our strength, to keep the mind buoyant enough to keep going rather than succumb to the quagmire of our karmic knot.
On occasion the yogi will not heed the warnings of their teacher encouraging them to withdraw and they end up in a psychiatric emergency which could have been easily avoided if they were humble enough, trusting enough, or wise enough to run. It is a confluence of delusion, ambition, anxiety, and arrogance masked as spiritual virtue that will get yogis diving headlong into an inescapable vortex of suffering. With appropriate care, these kinds of experiences can eventually be healed from, but sometimes the cost is losing sight of the path altogether. At first the notion that retreat is the approach most aligned with our spiritual principles and ambitions can feel deeply counterintuitive. Especially in the realm of karmic knots where the belief that we are in control of them is often central to the experience. But if we learn to evaluate the tactic we will undoubtably see that it is motivated by and strengthening of care and wisdom and thus is indeed the appropriate response.
Yet we don’t want to use “training wheels” and we resist. We are arrogant and deny the validity of the fear in our hearts. We do so at our own peril. It is only attachment to identity that keeps us from surrendering to a better way. It is not infrequent that we transition a yogi out of retreat against their desire because they are not willing to stop the momentum of their descent into the darkness. They don’t see the danger and they don’t see the attachment that is at the heart of their stubbornness.
Battles in Arabia were a mistake, since we profited in them only by the ammunition the enemy fired off… We had nothing material to lose, so our best line was to defend nothing and to shoot nothing.
~ T.E. Lawrence
Once the mind begins to appreciate that it cannot successfully go into direct conflict with its most deeply entrenched hindrances, often only after a series of humiliating defeats, there can finally be an acceptance of a new way. Once we turn the corner and begin to experiment, we slowly start to learn how to keep ahead of the gravitational fields of the black holes that would pull us in.
Over a life of practice, we become more sensitive to the early-warning signs of an encirclement or a “multiple-hindrance attack.” Having scouts ready throughout the land, ready to notice even a subtle a shift in the winds, can lead to better intelligence and more rapid and efficient response. The earlier these storms are seen building, the less dramatic an escape is necessary, the less dire the engagement. Over time, recognizing that these kinds of black holes are a part of our basic psychology and inner structure, we should be able to detect them approaching when they are still quite far off, far off enough at least to be able to get out of there with plenty of time — perhaps even without getting wet.
But we must begin by appreciating the strategic advantage we have in discovering and maintaining a true safe-house. A New York Times journalist covering the Algerian Revolution wrote, “As the United States learned in Korea, it is singularly difficult to destroy an enemy enjoying the sanctuary of an inviolable frontier.”
Indeed, as we strengthen our capacity to run, to evade, to hide in the mountains until we find safe passage, this confidence allows us to begin to engage the forces in small, homeopathic, doses. It is the confidence not to betray ourselves. Because we know we can run to safety, and have learned to do so, we can begin to allow ourselves to dip our toes in the water of terror. When we know we can find safe harbor, we allow ourselves to be caught by the wild gales of the heart without fear. Over time, our confidence in these storms grows and need to retreat lessens as we learn to navigate these strange and uncomfortable terrains.
Always remember that Sandino fought against the Americans for seven years without once being cornered in spite of his pursuers’ many thousands of perfectly trained men with motorized units and dozens of radios beaming concentric rings around the Sierra de Segovia where our hero was fighting.
~ Alberto Bayo Giroud
Eventually we may come to directly engage these forces of the mind fruitfully, but we must always do so with extreme caution and humility. What our karmic knots ultimately need is profound patience, genuine interest, and love. This is what it means to be able to finally engage these parts of the mind fruitfully, and so the approach is also the result. But we must also come to understand that we don’t have to make them go away in order to be free. We don’t see them as our biggest obstacles. Rather, they are the results of our deepest wounds, and so clearly the source of our deepest understanding — the ultimate crucible of our awakening. We too often conflate freedom with getting rid of these parts of ourselves but it is only our identities that are caught up in their resolution, not the mind itself. That is not the point of our practice. Our desire to get rid of them is actually part of the karmic knot itself: the very hardest part to disentangle from. We must remember that the universe will never rid itself of all black holes. It doesn’t need to. It doesn’t try to. It isn’t threatened by them. They arise and pass dependent upon conditions. For a long time — in all likelihood many years — our primary tactic in relationship to our karmic knots is learning how to escape, move away, protect and heal ourselves, and reground for when conditions are more favorable. If we become friends with these forces over time, all the more beautiful.
The mind that longs for freedom is also afraid of freedom and will set up landmines, will try to sabotage our progress and undermine our insights throughout our campaign. We must have compassion for these parts of ourselves that are afraid of freedom, understanding that they are not wrong and that sometime our motivation for release is an arrogant avoidance of the pain.
Even before we try to connect to these wounded places with love, we must learn to see that getting out of this kind of vortex is itself an act of love. It should not conceived of as a failure of some mental factors, but as the strengthening of others. It is the activation of love and good will toward ourselves, toward our minds and bodies. We are motivated to protect ourselves from overwhelming defeat because we care. It is replacing the subconscious self-hatred motivation training with compassion and kindness at the times when we most desperately need it. Developing this reflex is fundamental training for any guerrilla yogi.
After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, Hawaii’s local Japanese community was on the defensive. On the mainland US, American citizens of Japanese descent who lived within 100 miles of the coast were sent to internment camps, subjected to severe restrictions in their movement and rights, and had enormous amounts of property confiscated. This extreme degree of relocation and confinement was not practical in Hawaiʻi because Japanese-Americans made up almost 40% of the territory’s population. But Japanese-American religious leaders were sent to internment camps on the mainland and local communities were not allowed to congregate. On the small island of Lanaʻi, members of the Hongwanji Buddhist Temple knew the stability of their community and the sanctity of their church were under threat. Within a matter of months, they were notified that their church was going to be confiscated by the plantation and given to a Christian denomination.
The altar of this particular temple, crafted in Japan, was made of beautiful wood carvings and adorned in gold leaf and paint, and held the ashes and relics of generations of family members. It is hard to convey the deep connection a Hongwanji community has to their altar. Along with the reliquary, many consider it the most sacred part of their community. Late one night, members of the congregation snuck into their own temple and quietly dismantled their altar. Carefully wrapping each piece in cloth, they tiptoed to their cemetery and buried their altar and their bell — until an unforeseeable time in the future when the war was over and they hoped they could recover, rebuild, and restore the physical heart of their community.
Eventually, social conditions did change — the war ended and the racist restrictions on Japanese Americans were lifted. And while the old church was never returned to them, the Buddhists found a new building and began the next chapter in the history of their community by unearthing and installing the altar in its new home.
Realizing they were in hopeless situation, they did their best to protect their most sacred possession until conditions returned to their favor. These are the essential tactics of the guerrilla yogi.
When a guerrilla unit, through either a poor estimate on the part of its leader or pressure from the enemy, is forced into a passive position, its first duty is to extricate itself. No method can be prescribed for this, as the method to be employed will, in every case, depend on the situation. One can, if necessary, run away. But there are times when the situation seems hopeless and, in reality, is not so at all. It is at such times that the good leader recognizes and seizes the moment when he can regain the lost initiative.
~ Mao ZedongClick here for Chapter 8 (Diversion: Distraction / Misdirection)
Click here for Chapter 6 (Distrust: Suspicion / Investigation)
I hope you have enjoyed what you have read so far!
