Category: people

Religions all promise some sort of salvation or nirvana. In one sense it’s their raison d’être, but at the same time it’s not necessarily why people believe. There are more far visceral reasons, that demand far more instant gratification. For a start, there’s the relief of having unanswerable questions answered for you by an incontrovertible source. Then there’s the sense of belonging and the gratifying consensus that binds it together.

The fact that everyone agrees with you doesn’t
mean you’re right, but it sure feels like it

The fact that everyone agrees with you doesn’t mean you’re right, but it sure feels like it. It makes you feel safe. Believers have a special need to feel something solid underfoot. Salvation may be the philosophical foundation, but community is the emotional one. It’s more tangible and it’s more urgent. After all, life comes without any assurance. We’d be lucky to get out of it alive, except that we won’t.

God is a powerful metaphor, and the Bible is one of my favorite books. Still, I’m an atheist. More importantly, I have deep reservations about religious community. I was raised in one. I rejected it in favor of another and subsequently rejected that too. To add to the confusion I’m now known as a sort of religious teacher, even though I wouldn’t put it that way.

So what’s my problem?

A community maintains itself by guarding its raison d’être. In practical terms, that means that members keep the faith by nudging one another towards consensus. It’s known as what’s right. In a religion you’re born into, this is usually a gentle, organic process starting in infancy. For converts, however, it tends to be more forceful.

Nothing can be allowed to shake the community’s solidity. Questioning its behavior or its leaders puts you out on a limb. Predatory Catholic priests are able to get away with their crimes for years because only someone with super-communal confidence dares point the finger. Such people are rare in spiritual congregations.

Believers juggle communal loyalty
with self-reliance at their peril

Even benign communities can obfuscate your own needs and perceptions. Religious traditions employ code to establish the communal bond, its sense of sharing and mutual support. Unlike mere jargon, religious code embodies sanctity and righteousness. My Catholic teachers entreated me to ‘be good,’ when they were really urging me to conform. To ‘Love God’ meant to not question Him. When I suggested that using my God-given brain was a way of honoring His creation, I was condemned as blasphemous, code for ‘watch out or you’ll be out.’

In Tibetan Buddhism, one’s teacher never gets angry or befuddled. Rather, he ‘manifests wrath,’ meaning that he puts on a show of anger because you need shock treatment, or silence because you’re unable to process the truth. You cannot be part of the community and question his motives. ‘The Path’ is itself code for steering clear of creative acts of discovery. When I eventually acted on the realization that I should find my own way or lose all self-respect, my connection to the community was severed. I was still there; I hadn’t yet even disrobed, but I was excluded from the circle of trust.

As awful as it sounds spelled out like this, the code smoothes it all over. As a fugitive from dogmatic Catholicism I was delighted by the Tibetan Gelugpas’ inclination to ‘debate’ every line of scripture. Once I understood the code, however, I saw that formal debate was a strict guide as to what could be questioned and what couldn’t. The ultimate argument is, ‘Because the Buddha said so,’ code for, ‘Don’t cross this line.’

Believers juggle communal loyalty with self-reliance at their peril. To break or even reconsider the code is to pull the rug from beneath your own feet. You stand to lose your teacher and friends, as well as the time and effort you’ve invested. You’re also cast adrift with awful, debilitating self-doubt, and no compass.

The losses are compounded when you challenge an adopted community as opposed to one you’re born into. Having made the daring leap from Catholicism to Tibetan Buddhism, I hung on tenaciously, studying the language and scriptures with a desperation I’d never brought to the Catechism. I had to prove myself, if only to myself. I squeezed myself into a stricter and more stressful lifestyle than ever before. I worked hard to integrate the code into my everyday thinking. I guess I knew it was my last chance at being a believer.

My goal was awakening, the permanent end of suffering. To quit that was to collapse into catastrophic banality, and that’s exactly what happened. My interest in the salvation of all living beings was overtaken by the need to pay rent. It took me years to catch my psychic breath.

Being righteous is different from being right. Sometimes
you have to turn your back on others to be true to yourself.

It was then that I recognized my motives as emotional, not philosophical. I revisited the lives of Jesus and Buddha. What mattered wasn’t whether they actually existed, but how they’d inspired me. Indeed, they continued to do so. My dream was to become as unflinching as them. They each turned their backs on the authorities, then forged their own. They aligned themselves not to the security of a community but to their own sense of integrity.

And yet both founded communities. They both expected ossification — not a theoretical danger but a social certainty. Jesus, said, “narrow is the way … few there be that find it.” (Matthew 7:xiv) The Buddha thought it hopeless to teach until he was convinced at great pains that there were a few ‘with little dust on their eyes.’ (Ayacana Sutta)

Unlike Catholicism, which was foisted on me, Buddhism was a crutch when I was psychically lame. The tools and the community healed me sufficiently that when the time came I was able to leap from my ivory tower and go on my way. Luckily, I landed on my feet. To ascribe it to destiny or karma is to retreat, pretending I have an explanation when all I have is a code word.

Being righteous is different from being right. Sometimes you have to turn your back on others to be true to yourself, to awaken to your own life.

 

My Dad hated to apologize for anything. “It’s a sign of weakness,” he’d say. True, he was a hard-headed Calabrian but I still thought that was a bit extreme. He was also a devout Catholic, but his concept of what a man should be wasn’t guided just by his beliefs. It began with his childhood role models back in the archaic toe of Italy.

I grew up for years watching my father confront, scream at and lambast his employees and family. I was afraid of and sometimes hated him but still, he was my role-model. I emulated his good qualities and avoided the bad ones as best I could. I internalized his fortitude but played down the macho image.

We like to think of ourselves as self-possessed,
but the fact is we all rely on a gender template

I didn’t want to pretend to be strong. I wanted to be strong. To my mind I was utterly different from him, but at the end of the day who knows? Like father, like son, no?

We like to think of ourselves as self-possessed, but the fact is we all rely on a gender template. We learn and grow. We fiddle with it, but big chunks are firmly embedded in our psyche. It takes practice to uproot them. I’m still stopped dead in my tracks by the realization that something I’ve just done, that I wished I hadn’t, came verbatim from my father. Oh my God, I’m him!

How human is that? I can’t imagine any other animal agonizing as we do about how to be. We always want to know the right thing to do. We also want to be sure of ourselves. It’s not easy. Moral guides are necessarily broad and open to interpretation. Look at how many otherwise good Christians favour guns, capital punishment and war.

For me, manliness has become about not giving in to testosterone. Women understand this about men. Having wrestled for millennia with the male need to be right and in control, they’re particularly sensitive to how stupid it makes us, especially about our own feelings. A man who can expose his feelings and cry openly is admired and prized by women.

In our attempts to do the right thing, we worry so much about what might happen that we miss what’s actually happening

On the other hand, no one likes a weakling. Our mindful ability to transform ourselves lies in knowing our feelings as we feel them and seeing our raw motives plain as day. Whether or not we exhibit those feelings is another matter, hopefully one of good judgement.

I try to keep my neurotic anxieties to a minimum. In our attempts to do the right thing, we humans worry so much about what might happen that we miss what’s actually happening. I’m quite sure that when Dad held his head up and refused to apologize, the aggrieved parties saw him as anything but strong. Nevertheless, he was unwaveringly sure of himself. That’s why when I notice myself swaggering like him, a red flag goes up. Before any harm’s done, I wonder, “Why am I so sure of myself?”

It doesn’t matter one bit whether I’m better or worse than you at something; the testosterone-fuelled drive to be better has no bearing on my intelligence, creativity or happiness.

Ask my family about me and they’ll tell you I was always strange. In my youth I acquired many unusual opinions, often for no other reason than that they were unusual. When I realized that they were all letting me down I switched tactics. I started to shed them instead.

For example, I turned my back on competition and found out that it doesn’t matter one bit whether I’m better or worse than you at something. The testosterone-fuelled drive to be better has no bearing on my intelligence, creativity or happiness. I stop to consider whether I’m acting out of strength or weakness. I’ve learned to live with the fact that I don’t have many answers, and that’s become my greatest strength.

Self-doubt’s depressing, but self-inflation is just dumb. I went almost nuts writing early drafts of my memoir The Novice. I thought the protagonist should be heroic, but the more I painted myself that way, the less believable ‘I’ became. My wife and my therapist read early drafts. Both said the same thing: ‘Be yourself when you write; be vulnerable.’ It was strangely difficult to figure out what that meant but sure enough, in time the protagonist became believable, likeable … strong. I adopted the same philosophy for life itself. It’s working out.

As Freud noticed, we cultivate our inhibitions until we intuitively fit in, but knowing when to let go of those inhibitions is anything but intuitive. It takes constant, conscious attention. It’s hard work, but worthwhile. To be blindly bound by the actions of those who went before us, to keep pounding our chests in search of attention, is something that humans alone can choose to stop doing. That’s when free will is a blessing.

I’ve given up on universal love. Perhaps it’s because I love my wife and family and have never been happier that I can finally let go of this pipe dream.

In my religious days I tried very hard to be a good boy and love everyone. It sounded fine in theory, but the fact was, people annoyed me. Again and again I found myself faced with two bad choices: to deny my feelings and pretend to care, or to accept them and not care at all.

I’m not as cranky as I used to be but still, I can’t imagine a world in which everyone loves each other. Something in the pit of my stomach says it would be weird. Without disharmony, how would we enjoy harmony? With universal love guaranteed, who’d bother with personal love?

Honesty provides the mental clarity without which compassion is profoundly incomplete

Having made that awful decision, I discovered something curious: I now care about people more than ever. It’s as if love’s one thing, compassion’s another. I guess they’re not connected, even though they’re always pronounced in the same breath. Anyway, I feel more honest now.

Speaking of which, I wasn’t surprised recently to see a poll rating compassion number one in a list of good human qualities, head and shoulders above all others. As I feared, honesty lay close to the bottom, unglamorous and unnoticed. It made me frown. Honesty provides the mental clarity without which compassion is profoundly incomplete.

The flip side of honesty is denial. The strangeness of human intelligence means that we can hide from ourselves and cloak our own motives. A suicide bomber denies the pain that actually motivates him, convinced instead that he acts for God.

To feel compassion for others is to recognize
your humanity in them, and theirs in you

Denial underlies everyday miseries as well as great evils. It enables us to stick our head in the sand, see what we want to see and ignore reality. Because of denial we pretend that our feelings don’t matter, that we’re good when we’re bad and bad when we’re good. For thousands of years it’s led us to believe that war is the road to peace, that killing is good. We know better, yet still we justify self-deception with easy rationalizations that wreck our judgement and destroy our peace.

Compassion is not an act of love but of acceptance. Its power lies in its ability to transform the mind that nurtures it.

Honesty is not negotiable when it comes to our feelings for others, so let’s be clear. Compassion is not an act of love but of acceptance. Its power lies in its ability to transform the mind that nurtures it. You don’t need to love or even to like the object of your compassion. However, you do need imagination. To feel compassion for others is to recognize your humanity in them, and theirs in you. Universal love is something else: it’s idealistic and abstract. True, it’s also appealing, but is that really what you feel? Do you love everyone you meet, or are you trying to be a saint?

This is brutal honesty. I know it scares people, but the higher qualities of the human mind cannot be scripted. There are no spiritual formulas. Honesty, compassion and love are not just ideas. You can talk about them and believe in them all you want, but in the end they’re things that you do.

There exists a pervasive, passive attitude that ‘soft’ qualities like love and compassion, respect and concern, are self-evident and have no need of examination, as if all that matters is being warm and fuzzy. That’s a mindless blunder. Compassion without clarity is a pale shadow of itself.

We all feel bad for the victims of Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian terrorist who shot and killed sixty-nine people one afternoon in 2011. Had you watched my face that day you might have thought I was expressing compassion, but in fact it was fear. I could have been there, but wasn’t. I might have been bereaved, but wasn’t. I patted my body and limbs, relieved to be whole and alive. As the facts came in, the feeling morphed into sadness. What suffering! What tragedy. Those poor people.

Compassion means ‘to feel together with’

All this is very human. It’s good, caring and decent, but there’s more. How about the shooter? How does he feel?

Are you shocked? Repelled? Who the hell cares how he feels?

Indeed, is the point of compassion to better understand the human condition, or is it to judge? Are the two mutually exclusive? Can we afford to confuse the two?

I am not confused. I detest Breivik’s actions. At the same time I try to understand them. Compassion means ‘to feel together with.’ There is no judgement in there, no taking of sides, no love and no hate. It’s a doorway out of the confines of my own attitudes, a way to understand beyond the self-centred perspective that contains, protects and blinkers me. Compassion is the greatest of all virtues because it enables us to step into a much vaster reality. It’s not easy. It’s scary.

My attempt to ‘feel together with’ Breivik isn’t the least bit warm and fuzzy. Honestly, it’s rather sickening to wonder whether, in a different time and place, that might not have been me. Compassion enables me see how he morally insulated himself, how he rationalized his actions, how he rearranged his self-image into one of martyr and hero.

You can’t deny negativity and admit the full scope of life

Of course I can’t match his thoughts. I have no way of knowing how close I might be to what actually happened, but that’s not the point. I’m not exploring his mind at all, but my own. I’m probing my full potential. It gives me insight into my own denial and its perversities. It’s unpleasant, but it’s true.

New Age gurus love to point us towards our ‘full potential,’ but who remembers that inhumanity is part of it? If you’re determined to be positive at all costs, to see only the good in people, to believe absolutely in success, health and longevity, you’re censoring whole chunks of your full potential, a good half of it in fact. You can’t deny negativity and admit the full scope of life. To try it is to set yourself up for disappointment.

It’s high time we stopped writing off the Breiviks and suicide bombers of this world as if we’re a species apart. How much more clearly might we then understand the twists and turns of the human heart? Who knows, we might even stop sidestepping evil and find the courage to face it head-on, to speak up and act before it becomes monstrous. Our missteps may be trivial compared to theirs, but they’re not of a different nature. Like us, these people are motivated by the basic human need to feel accepted, to be recognized for what they do. Like us, they’ll rationalize however they can and deny whatever they must to get that feeling of acceptance, even if it’s entirely imaginary, even if it’s perverse.

If we can relate to that, then we should. Only by understanding ourselves can we change in the ways we want.

 

Spouses protect one other. It’s part of the job description, though sometimes it gets out of hand. My father was prone to whisper-shouting at us, ‘Don’t tell your mother. It’ll kill her!’

He was exaggerating of course, but the urgency was real. He wanted to protect her from the pain of knowing something unpleasant, usually something we’d done.

Most of the time, Mum found out in the end anyway, and the longer we’d managed to keep the secret the more upset she’d become. She felt we were treating her like a child. There were occasions when her friends knew something she didn’t, much to her later embarrassment.

The fact is, many of Dad’s secrets were designed to protect him as much as her. I suspect he only dimly realized that, if at all. He didn’t want to witness Mum’s pain and have to stand by helplessly as she wept, cursed or nursed her resentment. He was used to being in control and nothing quite undermined him like his wife’s emotions.

Shielding loved ones from perceived threats is an instinctive response, but not always a healthy one. There are some lessons in life you learn only by falling flat on your face, but they still have to be learned. Being warned off or tricked away from trouble is no substitute for learning consequences the hard way. The pain of falling is a shock to the system that makes us think twice not just about what tripped us but about our outlook on life. “How could I have walked straight into that? Why didn’t I see it coming?” It’s how we learn and grow.

We feel at a certain age that we’ve earned the right to be in control, to not make mistakes and to not have to be humiliated ever again. This is fake dignity.

These things happen too often for comfort when we’re young: tracking mud over a freshly cleaned floor; getting on a bicycle before we can quite reach the pedals; falling for someone bad thinking we’ll make them good. The reality is though, we continue to make mistakes all through life. Opportunities for growth never end.

The trouble is that those opportunities are often painful, so we naturally resist them. As we get older, pride gets the upper hand. Like my father, we feel at a certain age that we’ve earned the right to be in control, to not make mistakes and to not have to be humiliated ever again. Like a ‘real man’ who never cries, this is fake dignity. We project our own fears on to our spouses and interfere with their growth, all the while avoiding our own. It does no one any favors.

Protective behavior is instinctive to begin with. In a long-term intimate relationship it becomes a more convoluted reflex. Before we can realistically change controlling behavior we have to see it happening in real time. This is the meaning of ‘self-knowledge’ or self-observation.

I was the observer of a controlling father, as well as his heir to this behaviour. I sometimes see my father acting through me, for example when I think I’m protecting my wife. It makes me cringe. Then what?

I have two choices: to feign ignorance or to face my weakness. And so I remind myself that my wife’s a grown up, and so is our relationship — at least, it should be if I want her respect. Isn’t that what marriage is all about?

The family pecking order evolves organically, almost randomly, but always ends up set in stone. That’s how it feels, anyway.

A therapist once told me, “Don’t make the mistake of thinking you grew up in the same family as your siblings.” What that means is that your own experience is formed as much by your relationships with them as by your own personality. In fact, your personality itself is formed within relationships, and those early ones run deep.

I was the third of four, and could go on for hours about why each of us turned out the way we did, but it wouldn’t get me anywhere. I’d be as wrong about as many things as I’d be right.

Still, there are some things I’m sure of. For example, I was the bad-tempered one. That’s how they put it anyway, and for years I went along with that judgement. I hated it, but couldn’t contradict it. From a young age I was moody, often explosive. The sad thing about this sort of labelling is that everyone grows into their roles and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. They triggered that sort of behaviour in me by simply expecting it. Seeing how they provoked me upset me even more. It was a downward spiral that I escaped only when I left home.

With that same therapist I learned to take a step to one side and find a new perspective. One day he said, quite simply, “Perhaps you had reasons to be angry.” His statement jolted me in two ways: first, I saw that I wasn’t an inherently bad-tempered person; just an ordinary person who got angry. Secondly, I finally saw that, at least some of the time, I had every right to be.

The first hurdle is the desire to change how others think, behave and feel. You might as well reverse the laws of gravity.

We all know it’s impossible to live in a family and never upset or be upset by them. The problem in our home, as in so many, was that nobody spoke out. You might say that I did, but you’d be wrong. I didn’t speak up, I exploded when I couldn’t keep it in any more. Just like the others, I usually bit my lip when things upset me. Who wants to pay the price for interrupting good family cheer?

My feelings came out eventually, but the timing was off and the real causes were obscured. They were rarely addressed in helpful ways. To complicate matters, my outburst also gave everyone else the perfect opportunity to vent their own anger. Emotions were expressed, but nothing was resolved. I was the scapegoat. Most families have one.

Expressing yourself effectively takes practice. The first hurdle is the desire to change how others think, behave and feel. You might as well try to reverse the laws of gravity. When you act with that in mind, they’ll react by digging in their heels. Expressing yourself means being honest and vulnerable, and to get past the urge to change them. That’s not easy, especially with people who know your buttons and how to press them.

The second step is to stop feeling victimized. This is tough. The temptation to revert to familiar roles can be overpowering at first. Whether you react defensively or aggressively, old family dynamics will slip seamlessly into auto-pilot.

There’s nothing natural about stepping away from old patterns. It’s a special skill that comes only with practice. It doesn’t flourish overnight. Wishing good thoughts and praying for change are all very well, but it takes effort to understand and express yourself.

It’s possible that your family will see your changes and treat you with new respect, but don’t count on it. Unless they work to develop those same skills, they may be as stuck as ever in their role-playing and their reactivity. That’s why the third all-important skill is acceptance. Remember, this is not resigning yourself to the status quo, but recognizing the difference between what you can change and what you can’t.

So what will change? Your level of stress, your self-respect and integrity. It will also change the dynamics in your family. At the very least, you’ll be able to come and go with head held high. In a best-case scenario they’ll start reacting differently, but that can’t be your focus. Their response always begins with how you approach them, and that depends on how you see yourself.

In my upcoming Summer workshop at H~OM Yoga Wellness we’ll be discussing family issues and how to face them. A daunting topic? You might say so. Even this one little item today about family guilt is a lot for one post. Still, let’s get the ball rolling.

And where else would we begin but with mothers? Mine wanted my brother and me to love one another no matter what. We fought and we loved, but in reality we did neither very well. The fighting never led to resolution, and the love was rarely more than a temporary truce. We were so different in outlook and personality that we found only small oases of common ground in a desert of mutual unintelligibility. Nevertheless, we tried, year after year. What kept our inclinations in check was the guilt of letting Mum down.

This way of ‘protecting’ our mother from reality colored my relationship with her for decades. I felt guilty when I left home to roam the world, then more guilt when I settled down to become a monk. I embarrassed her in the eyes of her friends, robbed her of the chance to show off the apple of her eye. At least, that was my take. I felt unworthy because of what I’d inflicted on her. To confuse things, I also blamed her for my rotten feelings of guilt, never mind that they were of my own making.

Then, after eight years of life as a monk, I returned to lay life. Still I felt guilt; not just when I did wrong but also when I didn’t. That nasty, burrowing feeling of self-inflicted blame is the worst. It’s what people think of when they throw up their hands and utter the despicable word: ‘guilt.’

How my relationship with my mother changed

Mum was in her eighties when we finally broke through the veil. She came to visit just as I was finishing the first complete draft of my memoir. Her eyes lit up at mention of it. I never imagined she’d read it. It was a dark confession listing all my childhood resentments, all my hidden feelings, all the disappointment with my family. I handed it over nervously.

She consumed it virtually overnight. Rather than being hurt, as I expected, she looked up with pride. Then we revisited those family years with a frankness I never thought possible. We reopened one door after another. The old parent-child roles dissolved and we spoke as fellow mortals. It was the most liberating time of my life – far more so than roaming the Himalayas and living fancy-free. Not only did we touch each other with trust, we also discovered that guilt wasn’t indelible. I learned about her guilt. Finally she said, “I didn’t give you enough support…, did I?” I blinked. That statement changed my life.

Stepping back from guilt

The first step is to clear away the confusion between
healthy remorse and self-destructive guilt

The big question, of course, is how do we step back from guilt? It’s not imposed on us but wells up from inside. It seems such an inseparable part of who we are.

The first step is obviously to clear away the confusion between healthy remorse and self-destructive guilt. Sometimes, no most of the time, it’s just a repetitive conditioned response; it feels so inescapable.

Retraining the mind

All this theory doesn’t change much though. Ideas can’t uproot habits. The thing is to retrain the mind. Mindfulness is a practical tool that makes you attentive not only of things around you but of those inside as well. You get to see your mind in action. Once you see it, rather than just being lost in it, change becomes possible.

Thoughts are quick, but with practice they come into focus. Mindfulness widens the gap between stimulus and response. That gap came in useful during the long reflective conversations I now had with my mother. I saw guilt lurking, and learned to keep it at arm’s length.

Mindfulness

Mindfulness is the key. The first step is to find people of like mind. Support and understanding help you accept your guilt, the first step to understanding.

Quiet Mind is my present-day group of like-minded people. I don’t teach because I’ve got all the answers. There are no real answers besides living itself. Life is a process.

In my upcoming workshop we’ll talk about these issues and more. It’s all very introspective. You just have to sit there and let the ideas percolate. They’re not my ideas. Actually, they’re rather old. You might recognize some from your childhood, before you learned to shut up and stop asking awkward questions. They’ve all been asked before, and brushed under the rug a hundred times.

We lift the rug and find that all that dust is far from banal. People who don’t know each other sit together and listen, sometimes to me, more often to the resonance in their own lives. In today’s busy world few environments encourage us to attend to our particular needs. At QM the de-stressing begins when you walk in. You don’t have to be anyone or do anything. You can speak up or be silent; it’s up to you. There’s no chanting, no prayer, no ritual, no lecture, no sermon. Join us. It’ll do you the world of good.

And, oh yes, we’ll be talking about family. How to accept them, how to change your expectations of them, how to see them as fellow mortals. No guilt!