The Dark Side of Community

 In holistic education, there is often a great deal of attention paid to the value of communities. Community, as the word suggests, is about "communal ties", and this idea often relates to the idea of interconnection that is highly valued in holistic circles. However, I would like to suggest that communities are not always necessarily about celebrating commonalities and getting along with everyone. There is a dark side to community, as witnessed in famous "cults" throughout the world, where people begin to suspend their critical thinking in favor of attachment to a greater whole. The other dark side of community is that it can stunt a person's growth by granting them a sense of identity that is neither complete nor completely genuine. Sometimes the ideal of community overshadows the complexities that make up and individual.
   Are there ways to avoid succumbing to unhealthy attachment to communities? I think an important element in all of this is to understand the ways that unmet needs get projected onto communities, as though the latter were universal "cures" for many of our psychic wounds. Depending on how the leaders of the community will respond to these projections, one will either succumb to the illusions of an ideal, all providing community, or will start to develop a more realistic understanding of what it means to serve a community. Letting go of the fantasies one has about communities being all-giving and "always gentle" could be one way to get on with the real work involved in community building.

Larger Conversations

I have to really appreciate the discipline of school and work, as well as the wonderful conversations I have been having through the portal. I am also learning the value of being able to see myself as part of a larger conversation. Sometimes, engaging in these larger conversations is a way of letting go of attachment to one's own opinions and sense of self.
   I also have a better sense recently of what most engages me in education, namely the sense of an expanding consciousness. Christopher Basche (2008) has written about a kind of collective classroom which extends across many years, and which captures the growing momentum of an engaged kind of learning. I think this corresponds to the notion that karma does not disappear; rather, it tends to remain and take on many forms in the future. This is why, even though I may not benefit too much from taking courses, I am at least able to appreciate the experience of contributing to a larger community that extends beyond myself.
   Taking courses is also different from other communities I have been in, where I have made poor decisions or judgments and had to pay the consequences for those decisions. In engaging in a room where everyone is equal, I have a chance to enjoy the give and take process without having so many decisions to make on behalf of others. I believe that for this reason the ideal classroom experience blends leadership with a respectful dialogue, and it is also a training ground for making decisions in a bigger life arena.

Bache, C. (2008) The Living Classroom: Teaching and Collective Consciousness (SUNY Pr, 2008)

Acceptance of Moral Life

 Moral life is an interesting topic that I have not explored, because I am often afraid that it's not possible to assign a single absolute moral meaning to things. Nor is doing so particularly desirable, because it's often the case that what seems right in one situation is not right in another. How do we deal with judgments that we are not doing what we are supposed to be doing at every moment in life?
   I think it's always important to respect the other's view: in fact, I think this is a moral principle in itself, to try as hard as one can to put aside their own moral judgments and to try to understand things from the others' position. I have to admit that I have not always been very good at this point. For example, whenever someone else is making a judgment regarding how I should conduct myself or what I should be doing, I immediately go to my own judgments ("no, what this person says is definitely not right", or "they shouldn't be telling me how to act"), without getting a sense of where that person is coming from. In this way, I am too defensive about allowing others' moral sense to invade my own. The opposite attitude is not to try to guard oneself at all from the judgments of others: if someone else has an idea that could be useful to me, why not entertain it and try it out? Being more open to suggestions is something I would like to try, but it requires the utmost relaxation: I am open only insofar as the ideas that others have are not a fundamental threat to my true self underneath the opinions I have accumulated about things.
   This "relaxation" however is not to be confused with apathy or a kind of passive resistance to suggestions. For example, a person might "go along" with something not because they truly are willing to try it but to avoid having to face conflict with someone else. This approach of passive resistance is not going to work well, because it ends up making a person feel disengaged and alienated even when they are going through the motions of doing what is "right". A different approach might be to realize that my resistance is only a sign that the other person is a close part of myself that hasn't yet gained full expression or recognition. When I own that part of myself, I am no longer trying to separate from it; I can embrace it as a newly discovered part of my being.

Many identities

Tonight I watched a documentary film as part of my course assignments called Between:  Living in the Hyphen (Nakagawa, 2005). It talks about what it feels like to exist in between multiple cultures. I resonated with this idea that one's culture can have a lot of say in how one aligns oneself as well as the locations of meaning that a person has around themselves. I also believe it's important and valuable to know a person's location(s) in terms of how they identify themselves: not necessarily in terms of a physical location but more like an inner narrative that helps a person to know how they might be seen by others and where they might be in their personal time lines of life.
  Knowing that the sense of identity shifts might make a person conclude that there might not be any point in knowing "who" one is. Can a person ever establish an identity if they are coming from completely different cultural worlds? However, I don't quite agree with this view, because knowing one's ideas about who one is can help a person recognize what kinds of meanings they see in the situations around them. In a conversation between friends, for instance, there could be a knowledge of the exact same words between both friends, but this doesn't necessarily mean that the two friends will see the same meanings in those words. Their cultural locations may be so different that it is impossible to locate a particular point of agreement. But if I know where I am coming from with some degree of clarity, I might recognize where I don't see eye to eye with someone else: it's not about "one person seeing the truth" vs "the other not seeing the truth" but more about differences in what the person's priorities and values might happen to be. The "truths" we live are not fixed in stone, but are based on the lives we are choosing to forge for ourselves moment to moment.

Nakagawa, Anne Marie, Between: Living in the Hyphen. https://www.nfb.ca/film/between_living_in_the_hyphen/

Living in the moment?

During the process of organizing for the mindfulness youth camp coming up in two weeks, the thought occurred to me that there are so many ways of approaching mindfulness and meditation. To present it in one shot is not going to have a good impact on youth, since it might end up presenting much more than can possibly be applied. A case in point: when we describe meditation as "living in the moment", we don't necessarily mean being fixed only on the present (since this would be very limiting). It means that the mind is fully with even the memory, as it is happening in the moment. There isn't a past even to return to, even though one's memories continue to remain present. Though this is a subtle distinction, it is noteworthy because it allows practitioners to really be with whatever is arising in their minds.
   It is fascinating to reflect on whether young kids can really benefit from meditation. I suspect that anything which involves relaxed stillness and silence can be healthy for children, because it lessens one's attachment to fleeting distractions. The other thing is that, going back to this idea of "presence", meditation can help the students let go of the idea that they should give up or get rid of past memories. The main thing is that memories are always in the present, so we can see them arising without giving into their power to pull us into a fictional "then".
 

Wilber's Rule

Getting home from meditation tonight (and after a lengthy battle with an assignment), I found the following quote by Ken Wilber. It reads

  "I have one major rule: everybody is right. More specifically, everybody—including me—has some important pieces of the truth, and all of those pieces need to be honored, cherished, and included in a more gracious, spacious, and compassionate embrace."  (Wilbur, 2000)

I love this quote, because it captures a holistic moment. Can you imagine if people walked around believing this? There would likely be fewer disputes in life, and much more harmony. Why? Because I think that people desperately want to very much feel validated in their perspectives. Most of the time, people believe in their hearts that either they are "right" or the other person is "right". There is a very entrenched idea that the world would fall into chaos if people started to admit that perhaps every experience has a certain amount of validity. But quite often there is more chaos if people believe they have to prove something in order to feel that they have validity in the social worlds they inhabit. 

Instead of thinking this way, what would it be like for people to believe that all walks of life and all people have some valid sense of experience or thought that is worth sharing? How would one feel if they just adopted such an attitude into their life? Perhaps they would argue less and be more curious. I also suspect that such an approach might give more room for people to allow each other their own view, while not rejecting themselves or each other outright.


Wilber, K (2000), Collected Works of Ken Wilber, Vol III

Seeing Oneself in the Picture

It can be a helpful exercise to really see what's happening inside of oneself and to take it for what it is, rather than trying to sugar coat it in some ways. I am thinking about the expression "self-befriending" as an act of totally and completely understanding one's emotional states but with a full and complete awareness.  Why is this act of self-befriending so difficult? I suspect it's because people miss the awareness part and jump directly to simply reacting to what's happening within. I see some situation that feels painful to me and automatically, I feel as though that situation itself were a multiple choice test: choose the correct answer and the person will stop suffering. But it isn't so easy and this and sometimes the awareness of the situation is enough to know how to deal with it.
    What would it be like if, instead of indulging one's impulses or trying to suppress them, one were to simply observe the inner pain that these impulses arise from? To observe the pain, in other words, without trying to react to the situations that give rise to that pain. This requires a certain mindset of not straying into theories about why certain pain arises or what one can do about it, but actually to learn to be fully clear about the pain itself without needing to escape it.