Clarity for Teachers: Day 2
‘Until you are clear about everything, listen to those who are.’
If yesterday’s advice went down smooth as a well-aged single malt, this morning’s one-liner has me spitting my coffee. Who are these people who are clear about everything? Do they exist? They don’t sound like people I want to listen to — they sound like the kind of person you hope you don’t get stuck next to at a dinner party.
On a grey afternoon last spring, I sat round a campfire with a group of students and a guest teacher. It was a soulful crowd, their hearts troubled by the climate crisis, searching for ways to ground themselves and actions worth taking. There was a moment in the discussion. A student had asked a question, and reflecting on the response he’d received, he thanked the teacher for his humility and said, ‘I guess none of us has a map with all the answers.’
At which, the teacher’s partner interjected, ‘I think you’ll find there is a map, and it was laid out by the Buddha and his disciples, two and a half thousand years ago!’ This unexpectedly forceful claim was met politely, but I remember thinking — man, these Buddhists can get away with some mad shit! Imagine how it would go down in that circle, if I were to insist that there’s a map with all the answers and it was laid down by Jesus and his apostles back in AD 33.
But somehow I don’t think that’s what’s in play here. This advice is trickier than it looks.
At this point, I need to bring in something that’s not spelt out in the advice itself, but that Charlie brings out in his own commentary. ‘The sign of not being clear,’ he writes, ‘is feeling any drama at all about anything.’ However much you know about how to be clear, that knowledge will fail you at the point where you get caught up in drama — and when that happens, the most helpful thing can be the perspective of someone who isn’t caught up in the drama, who can ‘help you see that the drama isn’t all consuming, and maybe even have a sense of humour about it’.
I get a glimpse here of something relational: a dance of learning to slip the trap of drama, in which there are moments when I can be that person for you, and moments when you can be that person for me. And it brings to mind a passage from the German Jewish theologian Franz Rosenzweig, from a letter he wrote to his sister-in-law:
You know, you needn’t feel bad because you lack the power to ‘tell yourself the whole truth’, for once, for your own good. Believe me, no-one has this power; no-one can help themselves. Though the world is full of people who try to make themselves believe that they can, they succeed no better than Münchhausen did when he tried to pull himself out of the mire by the scruff of his neck. Each of us can only seize by the scruff whoever happens to be closest to him in the mire. This is the “neighbour” the Bible speaks of. And the miraculous thing is that, although each of us stands in the mire himself, we can each pull out our neighbour, or at least keep him from drowning. None of us has solid ground under his feet; each of us is only held up by the neighbourly hands grasping him by the scruff, with the result that we are each held up by the next man, and often, indeed most of the time (quite naturally, since we are neighbours mutually), hold each other up mutually. All this mutual upholding (a physical impossibility) becomes possible only because the great hand from above supports all these holding hands by their wrists. It is this, and not some non-existent ‘solid ground under one’s feet’, that enables all the human hands to hold and to help. There is no such thing as standing, there is only being held up.
Maybe it’s possible to become clear about everything, maybe it isn’t. What matters here is the word until — in the meantime, as long as you know you’ve not reached that kind of total clarity, however much you’ve learned about how to be clear, don’t stop listening.
Becoming clear about everything isn’t a goal to be ticked off. The world in which we find ourselves isn’t a tick-box kind of world, and when we overlay our experience of being in this world with a goal-oriented, tick-box approach to reality, we lose sight of the dance, the endless interplay. At some level, the world in which we find ourselves has the quality of a joke, rather than the quality of a checklist.
That’s the quality of Rosenzweig’s web of mutual upholding, where somehow we can hold each other up, despite having no solid ground to stand on. It’s the quality I think I can make out in today’s one-liner — it’s not about looking for the kind of person you wouldn’t want to get stuck next to at a dinner party, it’s about how to avoid becoming that kind of person!
Västerås, 5 March, 2020
This is the second in a series of reflections on the verses of ‘A teacher’s advice on how to be clear’, Charlie Davies’s reworking of the classic Buddhist text, ‘Advice from Atisha’s Heart’. I’m writing this commentary as I take part in the Clarity for Teachers course. You’ll find more on Charlie’s work on the How To Be Clear website. He promises to publish ‘A teacher’s advice on how to be clear’ soon as a set of cards.
