Jordan B. Peterson and Buddhism: Give your pain significance
How Buddhist practice and Peterson’s lessons help you take responsibilty and transform your suffering
To the casual observer, there doesn’t seem to be much in common between Jordan Peterson and meditation or Buddhism, but is there?
Jordan Peterson and Buddhism
When a Buddhist talks about ‘practice’ watch out. They (we) tend to use the word differently than the way its used when talking about practice in sports, the arts, or even in professions like law or medicine. Technically, the activity is similar, but the intention behind it and the goal are different.
One of my favorite living Western Buddhist teachers puts it this way:
Buddhism is fundamentally a set of methods through which we wake up to what we are and stop the cycle that generates and reinforces suffering. The forms Buddhism has taken in many cultures, including our own, may suggest that it is a religion. It is not. Buddhism is a collection of methods for waking up from confusion. Over centuries, the original methods were developed, refined, and expanded. Buddhism is fraught with schools of philosophy, cosmological descriptions of the world, and moral and ethical systems, including the various lay and monastic traditions, esoteric initiation systems, energy transformation methods, devotional practices, mindfulness practices, ways to cultivate compassion, pointing-out instructions for insight, elaborate visualization practices based on deities, and meditations on the ultimate nature of being.–Ken Mcleod, Wake Up to Your Life
‘Practice’ can refer to some, all, or none of the aspects of Buddhist practice outlined above.
Jordan Peterson doesn’t talk about practice per se, but the bulk of what he teaches requires practice to build competence. The core tenant of each aligns around the idea and practice of taking responsibility.
Peterson’s lessons focus on how to take responsibility for your words and actions, even thoughts and beliefs. Whereas with Buddhism, meditation practice helps you take responsibility for experience itself.
On this blog, I will describe the specific practices I’ve done and how they’ve impacted my life. But ultimately, all of the various fine-grain practices roll up into my primary intention as a Buddhist practitioner: to cultivate my capacity for attention and awareness, to transform my own reactivity so that I might help others do the same. In Buddhism, this is called a bodhisattva vow. This is why practice comes first. It is the fuel for my mission, it supports every other endeavor in my life. Meditation is the meta-skill that improves the competence of every other skill you have that uses your body, mind or heart (so all of them).
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Many of Buddhism teachings boil down to–or depend on, your ability to connect with, rest in awareness of and act your life with your attention on your intention. That’s exactly what the bodhisattva vow is about.
One translation of bodhisattva is, an ordinary person who acts like a true adult. And the bodhisattva vow can be thought of in terms of chaos and order, a motif that Peterson’s work has gone a long way to developing:
“In taking the bodhisattva vow, we are acknowledging that we are not going to be instigators of further chaos and misery in the world, but we are going to be liberators, bodhisattvas, inspired to work on ourselves as well as with other people.” — Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche
I experienced the power of the bodhisattva vow before discovering Peterson’s corpus. When I first read about it, I was energized by the significance it gave to the process of living.
The implication was: What I say, think and do actually matters? It went against a lot of what I’d learned in my time in academia, where everything was socially constructed and meaning was all relative and equal.
But in that impossibility, the magnitude of the suffering I was experiencing although great, was nothing compared to the significance of the possibility of transforming the suffering of others. And in that ultimate comparison, the suffering of my own being became bearable, even useful. This is the same Western notion that Peterson talks about often: pick up your suffering, bear it, and try to be a good person, so you don’t make it worse. Sort yourself out.
As it turns out, Peterson himself is no stranger to the power of vows. Having suffered through alcoholism and depression from a young age, he made ‘a serious vow’ to do everything he could to get his act together at eight-teen, and later, to commit to writing his opus Maps of Meaning. He prioritized this intention above anything else, it came first, and it enabled him to develop the work ethic which has produced a tremendous amount of content, which is now, years later is being distributed widely and helping countless people.
In the wake of diving into Peterson’s teachings, I’d say I’m doing difficult things (like publishing this blog) to sort myself out. I’m trying to put my life in order so that I can bear the weight of being. I’m trying to climb the competence hierarchy, to increase my status and resources, and to help others do the same.
This blog is partially an expression of that intention, partially a way to work on my writing skills, and partially a creative outlet to play and cultivate joy.
This blog itself is also a practice.
It’s a way for me to embrace and transform a long-ingrained mindset of lack and worthlessness. I’m using this blog to bring up my own craving for attention, need for existential and intellectual validation, and compulsion to teach and fix others–and to practice with all of it. To not ignore the wave of anxiety that follows hitting ‘publish,’ to not cow to the compulsion to check back on a post repeatedly for feedback, and to not overreact or run away from whatever disagreement or criticism it attracts. Sometimes criticism begs a response.
In a recent email exchange, Peterson defended himself brilliantly when criticized as an ‘Alt-Right’ father-figure in a Business Insider article. In the exchange, he clarifies his stance, approach, and intention:
Politically, I am a classic British liberal. Temperamentally, I am high in openness, which tilts me to the left, although I am also conscientious, which tilts me to the right. Philosophically I am an individualist, not a collectivist, of the right or the left. Metaphysically, I am an American pragmatist who has been strongly influenced by the psychoanalytic and clinical thinking of Freud, Jung and the psychotherapists who have followed in their wake.[…] I’m a university professor, a clinical psychologist and a public intellectual whose primary goal is the psychological and metaphysical strengthening and fortification of the individual.
Shortly after the tweet exchange went public, the journalist made a minor adjustment to the article, neither acknowledging wrongdoing nor taking responsibility for his mischaracterization. The reporter’s silence loudly demonstrates how little easily amended ideas are worth. The more responsibility you take for your words and actions, the more significance they carry, the less responsibility, the less significance. Another apt lesson modelled by Peterson’s actions.
In his own words, Peterson’s primary goal is an expression of his vow to help aid ‘the psychological and metaphysical strengthening and fortification of the individual.’ This, coming from a man whose daily schedule since 1985 has been to wake up at 8 am and work flat out until about 10 pm, six or seven days a week. He may not be a Buddhist or Buddhist practitioner, but his life (and life’s work) is an expression of his sincere devotion to the mission to help others sort themselves out. And that’s no joke man.
After his last public lecture on The Psychological Significance of the Biblical Stories, I made it a point to find out his opinion of meditation. I waited outside the lecture hall with a crowd of others, as he took his spot in the center of us, people gathering around close. After he finished answering the first question I called out “Hey Jordan!” to his back. There were probably fifty people huddled together in the moonlight outside the theater. He spun around to acknowledge me, we made eye contact, and it was like everyone else disappeared.
As I spoke, I could hear myself talking as if with someone else’s ears; my voice sounded uncanny, like when I heard myself on a tape recording for the first time as a kid. He casually responded that he and his wife have been practicing a form of Kundalini meditation daily, for the past 25 years. My own capacity for attention has dramatically increased after only four years of daily practice, so this explained his magnetic presence.
These are just a few of the resonances I’ve noticed between Peterson’s teaching and the Buddhist dharma as I’ve studied and practiced it. I find his way of teaching inspiring, and learn from both what he teaches and how he teaches it. I hope this blog serves to help others connect the dots in other ways in their own lives.
