Joseph Conrad presents us with dire and compelling images of ‘what evil lurks in the hearts of men1’, exploring in his turn of the century novel, Heart of Darkness, geographic, political, and very personal levels of malevolence. His setting, the ‘dark continent’ (as Africa continued to be called) and Western human rights atrocities are examined through the eyes of Conrad’s naïve, but increasingly questioning narrator as he seeks out the shadowy Kurtz, the anti-hero of Heart of Darkness, a rogue ivory trader consumed by his self-aggrandizing needs, greed, and lack of compassion – ego, in the context of last week’s posting. (Think Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now.)

Gandhi describes having ‘only three enemies’: the British Empire, the Indian people, and himself. He ranks these three adversaries, in order of the challenge they represent to him and, counter-intuitively, places himself at the top of this list, pleading little or no influence over ‘him’.

Shared in the above is the, again perhaps counter-instinctive view that the ‘heart of the matter’ lies not outside of ourselves, but within. And our challenge is less in identifying and cataloguing our ‘enemies’ transgressions, strategizing means of, at best protecting ourselves, at worst revenging the insult / attack; and more in cultivating means of self-examination and compassion. Rather lofty goals!

My mentor and friend, John Heider, in his re-working of the Tao Te Ching, offers a simple, first response to ‘encounters’ – a 1970’s euphemism for an attack. He suggests reacting to criticism or challenge in a manner that will shed light on the event; remaining centered and viewing the encounter as a ‘dance’, not a threat to one’s ego or existence. But just how might one approach this prescription?

A useful mindfulness practice – and starting point — is contained in the Metta meditation, often translated as a ‘loving-kindness’ or ‘loving-friendliness’ meditation. The process is very much like peeling an onion. . . in reverse. At its core, it represents a simple recitation of blessings, compassionate affirmations and assertions, and, as the translation indicates, kindnesses. It begins, however, by directing our attention to ourselves, the ‘heart’ of the onion; then progressively working out through the layers to the ‘really difficult folk’ in the outer rings, our enemies. Jack Kornfield describes this process as ‘stopping the war within’ – before we address the war without. The intent is to purify, forgive, and accept ourselves (our hearts) – well before we take on the really big and long-entrenched challenges of those with whom we struggle.

As a preparation for this form of mindfulness practice, you might try a simple exercise as follows:
– Take a cleansing breath or two.
– After settling, think back over your recent life experience and identify two good deeds you’ve done.
– As you examine each of these deeds, consider how their performance affected your consciousness, how they made you feel, the impact on others, the ‘after-glow’, the resolutions that may have followed.
– Consider the precursors of these two acts, what led up to them, what choices you made that facilitated, allowed these actions. How did you get there?
– Consider the ‘unconditionality’ of these actions. Were they ‘agenda-free’? Performed without expectation of ‘repayment’.

Metta is intended to address ‘how the heart acts’, fostering simple, compassionate, perhaps altruistic, and connecting (with others) / unifying awarenesses; in place of divisive, alienating, isolating, perhaps vindictive or acquisitive postures. In essence the intent is to ‘train the puppy’, in Kornfield’s parlance, replacing a set of counterproductive behaviours with more salutary ones. The goal is to not merely suppress the former behaviours – but to substitute generosity for greed; benevolence for hatred / resentment; compassion for self-absorbing, self-serving behaviours. Cancelling undesirable behaviours with desirable ones. It’s not very effective to pronounce ‘bad dog’ – without offering a viable alternative.

The process is a simple one – as are most things associated with mindfulness. As you begin your sit, having settled and centered, recite to yourself a variation on the following cycle of affirmations / intentions:

May I be well, happy, and peaceful. May no harm come to me. May no difficulties come to me. May no problems come to me. May I also have patience, courage, understanding, and determination to meet and overcome inevitable difficulties, problems, failures in life.

Then progress to the next ‘layer’: May my family. . .

Then on to my teachers. . . my friends. . .my neighbours. . .all persons who are strangers. . .my enemies. . .all living beings.

Like most contemplative activities, this simple recitation is not intended as ‘intercessory’; neither requesting, nor even expecting all these desirable states to appear in our lives – just because we asked for them. The intention is to subtly and regularly – even each time we sit – to adjust our ‘heart’ to a more open and compassionate posture.

Next week: Right speech, the transition of loving-kindness into the other 23 ½ hours. (Read any good P G Wodehouse lately?)

1The Shadow knows. . .

Whoever it was that penned that inane (but obviously catchy), 1970’s commercial for Kellogg’s waffles, I’d wager mindfulness practice might have been one of the more remote sources of inspiration for them. As the pedantic and whiny father makes his case, attempting to guilt his eight-year old (but unbending) son into surrendering his frozen bit of dimpled cardboard, how prophetic is the framing of the classic clash of ego’s (over Eggo’s, trivially enough in this case).

With my wife away for the weekend not so very long ago, the ‘window of opportunity’ opened on watching a movie or two that were let’s say not at the top of her viewing list. Harry Brown and Avatar found their way into the DVD player and with them the shared theme, among others, of the tension and its ‘resolution’ between the Us(es) and the Them(s). For Harry, the aging pensioner, living out his declining years on a housing estate in a rough section of London in the UK, the opposition comes clad as a group of older adolescents, largely treating the estate environs as their personal playground, content to bully and terrify residents who had the misfortune to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The defining moment in this case is the assault and killing of Harry’s longtime friend bent on challenging the young toughs and refusing to live in fear of them. The event catalyzes Harry, long since content to have put aside a lethal skill set developed during his war years in favour of an attempt at a life of tolerant coexistence, when he too is confronted and threatened. His systematic, vigilante-style, ‘elimination’ of the gang’s members escalates with the predictable tragedies mounting on all sides.

Avatar too explores the consequences of (in this case, literally) alien agendas played out in an insular and self-serving fashion in the absence of understanding of ‘the other’s’ position – or even any interest in determining what that might be. As with Mr. Brown, it’s not hard to generate sympathy for the ‘victim’ – never a challenge distinguishing the white hats from the black – cheering each unlikely ‘victory’; but never quite losing sight of an ominous truth behind, that (much less trivially this time round) the issue is once again a clash of ego and all that that implies – with no clear good guys, only (temporary) winners and losers.

Mindfulness practice is sometimes described as developing a state of egoless awareness. Buddhist wisdom identifies two classic impediments (sometimes benignly referred to as ‘hindrances’) to this process: greed (attachment) and hatred (rejection or avoidance of relationship) – directly attaching both these barriers to relationship unity to the ego of the individual. Both are clearly played out in the two films above. For the ‘human colonizers’ in Avatar, the primary interest is in securing a supply of a valuable mineral – the impact on the indigenous population be damned. For Harry, it’s avenging his friend’s death and ‘sanitizing’ the estate of a hated blight.

Our inclination, when desirous of or challenged by a person, group, or situation, is to first wash it through the filter of the ego. Is this something that will enhance my state? Is this a threat to my security, prestige, position? Then, more often than not, have that circumstance become the focus of our action; almost invariably at the cost of relationship. The defense of the ego becomes the distancing act of separating me from the other. The I want what he/she has or I want to prevail and force my will on him/her become our prime directives. Most meditative traditions endorse a ‘letting go of’ as a substrate for a more peaceful and fulfilling life, less absorbed with acquisitive or adversarial goals. Nevertheless our culture seems bent on endorsing the opposite: ‘he who dies with the most toys wins’ is replete with the cultural values of both acquiring and competing/dominating. Evidence of our increasingly litigious natures is seen everywhere, with the knee-jerk response being the evaluating of almost any situation first through its potential for a ‘successful suit’.

Laurence Freeman, a meditation teacher in the Christian tradition, examines this plight from the standpoint of our approaching relationship as an essential duality, more bent on maintaining our individuality, our uniqueness, our ‘difference from’ – than on fostering, in his words, a ‘oneness’ or unity in relationship. James Cameron’s cinematic conceit for this same concept is a literal joining with, an empathy for all organic entities. For those who haven’t seen the film, the ‘crippled’ human hero is made whole by taking on Pandoran form (the indigenous residents) – quite literally ‘walking a mile in his shoes’; with the extended metaphor of peaceful coexistence centering on one’s awareness of, respect for, and sensitivity to the needs and wishes of all beings from other humanoids to trees.

Mindfulness teaching then provides a vehicle for a much more positive spin on the ‘leggo my eggo’ jingle of some 40 years ago – far from it being a challenge, a throwing down of the gauntlet, an ‘I want what you got’, they advocate a ‘letting go of my ego’. Just how practice suggests we do this is the subject of next week’s blog.

[For those sports fans amongst us, the answer does not involve tossing one’s waffles onto the ice at the Air Canada Centre in protest over the Maple Leaf’s abysmal season!)

As a recent psychology graduate and newly minted employee of our local hospital, I was called upon frequently to present to all manner of groups; often asked to expound upon stress, it symptoms, sources, and to offer some presumed solutions and management strategies. The tack I came to adopt most often was to define stress as our natural response to change. I would dutifully outline Hans Selye’s General Adaptation Syndrome as the process through which organisms, human and animal alike, struggle to restore order, to return to what ‘was’ in their lives, once this familiar comfort zone had been upset in some fashion. His language, while biologically precise, inadvertently pathologized ‘change’, incorporating it as the villain setting in motion a ‘syndrome’, variously defined as a disease, disorder, or set of symptoms. His labels, too, of stages of coping within this syndrome, as one gradually decompensates over time, convey the pejorative, perfidious nature of change: respectively, the Alarm, the Resistant, and finally, the Exhausted stage.

A second favourite inclusion of mine was a table sometimes referred to as the ‘Life Change Scale’, presuming to attach a value to each of 30 or so ‘life events’ ranging, depending on the version of the scale, from ‘death of a spouse’ (98 points) through ‘getting married’ (26) to ‘going on vacation’(5). The ‘values’ of events one had experienced within the past year are totaled and purport to provide an estimate of how ‘stress vulnerable’ one might be – less than 150 = OK; 150-300 – better watch your change meter; greater than 300 – you’re euchred! The message is similar – change, regardless of its presumed ‘goodness’ or ‘badness’, will get you. And the ‘solution’, to the extent one is able to make such choices, it to limit change; thereby minimizing one’s stress levels.

Lovely! As I reflect on this now thirty-plus year old ‘wisdom’, I marvel at how many ways the assessment and attendant prescription got it wrong. No question that Dr. Selye’s mice, swimming helplessly and hopelessly (if we can anthropomorphize rodents for the moment) in their inescapable pond, gradually succumbed to their ‘stress’. And equally, no doubt, events like moving house, getting downsized from one’s long-term employment, or having a close friend become pregnant (although it mystifies me as to why this event shares equal stress value with starting to date again in adulthood – I suppose it depends upon how close a friend that now fecund acquaintance might be!) are indeed likely to amp up one’s stress-o-meter. Where the impassioned plea to ‘control your stress by controlling change’ leaves the tracks is in its identification of change as the root of this evil. Rather like blaming a highway for causing auto accidents. Not to mention the fool’s errand and arrogance of presuming to ‘solve’ this state by controlling anything as unpredictable as change!

Three decades later and in a decidedly less certain and more contemplative headspace, I am prepared to let change off the hook. Like the 401’s of our lives, it appears much more likely that it’s how we approach and utilize this ‘highway’ than it is something inherent in the ‘tarmac’ of change itself that requires our attention. Two pillars (essential truths) of Buddhist teaching are often translated as ‘impermanence’ and ‘unsatisfactoriness’. For better or worse (often the latter), we continue to struggle with and deny these ‘truths’, generally being quite unhappy ‘when things fall apart’ (to borrow Pema Chodron’s book title) – when enjoyable, desirable states metamorphose into something less so, underscoring both the inherent transitory (read, changeable) nature of all things and (to quote the controversial Richard Dawkins) the dominant tendency for such mutated states to less functional (appealing and desirable) than their immediate predecessor. We neither want the good times to stop rolling (attachment); nor their less attractive replacements to hang around (avoidance). We become frustrated, disappointed, resentful, even cynical over our ‘loss’, (obsessively) clambering (like those little ‘Selyean’ mice) to return to what was (dry land) and fearing the alternative – what is (a deep, dark puddle).

How mindfulness practice prepares us for a much more adaptive (and less neurotic, blame-casting, and fearful) way of dealing with the inevitability of change is contained in the practice itself. (Sadly, reading about it isn’t enough!) A prime directive (if you will) in formal, meditative practice instructs us, as we are inevitably drawn away, distracted from our focus (the rhythm of our breathing, our mantra, etc.), to notice this departure; then letting go of whatever has distracted us, to return to our focus once again. This simple cycle holds the very seeds of dealing adaptively and acceptingly with the ‘impermanence’ of, in this case, our focus – no one expects to hold that concentrated anchor for more than a few moments at a time. Despite our best resolve, we will ‘change’, evolve away from; this is what is. It’s neither bad, nor undisciplined, nor avoidable; it just is. Far from ‘controlling’ ourselves, we accept, even embrace change; far from regretting, judging, being disturbed or frustrated by the place to which we’ve ‘mutated’, we simply note it – and return to the breath.

So change happens – as the (slightly sanitized) saying goes. To villainize and resent it; to (superstitiously) prepare ourselves for it by becoming so constricted in our hopes (lest we be saddened and disappointed when they too vaporize, as they must) that we dampen our enthusiasms and celebration of what’s (happily) happening right now, is to revert to what I might have prescribed in those early years: control what you can, then duck. Sitting with, observant and non-judgmental as the river flows on, seems a more sustainable, reality-based script.