Writing Violence: Thoughts on Authenticity and Spiritual Bypassing

Here in Minnesota, we woke up to over 16 inches of fresh snow on the ground. Most of the city was shut down last night, and people are trying to dig out today. Me? I was out taking pictures, including the one above of my street.

So, I was interested to see what might come of the last post, which isn't my regular writing style. In particular, what I am curious about is the ways that we can write authentically about difficult, disliked patterns and ways of being in the world. Friday's post was about aggressiveness. Competition. Excessive effort. Turning one's spiritual practice into a contest. And also the voices in our heads that can arise from such energies.

Peter left the following comment, which I can imagine was how others felt that read the post:

I enjoy the energy in your post -- but find all that hard-ass, motherfucker language of little interest. too testosterone-laden and agressive for my taste. neither meditation nor blogging (nor living for that matter) is a contest.

i find that there's enough suffering in the world, without creating more under the guise of practice.

First off, those like Peter who are regular readers of this blog know that I'm not given to tossing foul language around carelessly. Most of my writing steers clear of it because it's not necessary for the situation. I actually tend to respond in a similar way to profuse cussing as Peter did to this particular post. Adding cuss words to angry writing tends to bend both the reader and writer towards more anger. And adding cuss words in other kinds of writing often just causes distraction, confusion, and/or aversion in readers.

However, one of the weaknesses, in my opinion, of much spiritual writing out there is a failure to express the fullness of experience, and then use that expression as a way in to understanding the deep truths of this life. What I find is that the bluntness, rawness, even nastiness that sometimes litters our minds and even our actions gets abstracted, shunted, even turned aside out of a belief that presenting such stuff will just cause more suffering. Or is categorically wrong, a no-no for people on a spiritual path.

Let's take a specific example from Friday's post.

Zazen posture seems to be a big deal for a lot of people. Those who can't do the full lotus posture often spend months and even years trying to emulate it, thinking that this it is a requirement for awakening. And when the body inevitably gets sick and/or old, there's a certain amount of grief and suffering that comes up for those who are attached to sitting full lotus, and now can't.

Being in a group, especially during retreats, can ramp up this kind of energy. I've experienced this myself. You've been doing zazen all day, your entire body aches, and yet you look around, and most everyone else is still in full lotus, or half lotus. And what do you do? You stay in lotus, even though you're literally on fire with pain.

What's the mind look like under these conditions. Well, it's probably something like this: Better do full lotus motherfucker - none of that half-assed seiza bench shit.. If you are honest, that's what it looks like. Maybe your mind doesn't have the cuss words, but the aggression that brought you to keep sitting when you really shouldn't includes an aggressive, sometimes really nasty narrative. There's no getting around that.

So, here's the thing. How do we write about such experiences?

How do we convey them authentically, embedded in the teachings we've been given, so that others might gain some insight?

Maybe more importantly though, how do we stay true to where we are at, express fully where we are at, without minimizing or exaggerating?

Because what I see in myself, and also in so many others doing spiritual writing, from the most beginner student to the most seasoned teacher, is a tendency to dance around the heat of that which we collectively have deemed taboo.

Anger. Hard-assed aggression. Violent thoughts. Rage.

These are some of the experiences that we "spiritual types" avoid, minimize, cloak in psychological or other abstract language. And why? We're triggered. We're afraid. We don't know how to handle it. The teachings tell us these things are destructive, cause suffering, and shouldn't be indulged in.

And it's absolutely true that violence, rage, aggression, excessive anger - all of that is destructive, suffering producing, and blinding us from our inherent wisdom.

Yet, I also think it's no coincidence that these very same places tend to be the most common shadows of people who are in religious and spiritual communities, or who have committed themselves to such a path. We have a sense of the destructiveness of those various forms of violence, and yet instead of truly facing it within our selves, we do all sorts of bypassing and then wonder why we can't seem to be open around conflicts that appear in our lives, our communities, even online.

Consider, in contrast, something that is more palatable to work with. Like grief. Or guilt. Or fear.

I have heard some amazingly beautiful, detailed talks linking deeply personal experiences of grief to profoundly universal teachings about grief. No mincing words. No avoidance. Just raw experience, which is then transformed into wisdom, and in doing so, is an expression of compassion for all of us who also are experiencing grief.

The same doesn't seem to be true when it comes to working with violent tendencies. Grief is embraced by spiritual types, whereas rage, for example, is almost universally rejected from the beginning. And that's the problem. It's rejected from the beginning, instead of taken in, fully experienced and documented, until it drops away.

It is any wonder there is so much war and violence in the world.

I'm fiercely interested in how I, and others, might navigate this territory more honestly, more clearly, exposing enough of the rawness to ourselves and others without falling into the swamp of it. What did the mind of the man who was shaking his fist at that bus Friday afternoon look like exactly? Who was that "me" which came and then went, but will come again and again if it goes unexamined?

Because just saying he was angry, he was indulging in anger, he was attached to an outcome, he was this he was that - just saying that doesn't cut it. It cuts what IT was off.

Last night, I was snowed in. I listened to a podcast interview with Buddhist teacher Reggie Ray, during which he describes a practice called "Dark Meditation." Essentially, it's going into complete darkness and staying with whatever comes up. After the interview, I went into my bathroom, covered up all the entry points of light, and sat for an hour in the darkness. Very interesting. You know your body is there, the bathtub is there, the toilet is there - but you can't see any of it. And it doesn't take long before you start feeling disoriented, not in an awful way, but in a "what is this experience" kind of way. The natural curiosity each of us has, but which often is blocked, comes forth rather easily from the darkness.

Where is the natural curiosity towards the violent, rage-driven aspects of our lives? Why is it that instead of curiosity, so often what arises in response to "internal" violence is guilt, shame, and/or fear?

What was so interesting to me about writing that post on Friday was that when I began, it was mostly going to be about calling out the aggression and attacks I saw in The Zennist's and Uku's posts. And yet, as I wrote the post, it became clear to me that doing that wasn't really fair or helpful. In fact, not only that, but it would have been reproducing the very patterns I'm talking about here. Take a look at these guys. Talking shit about their fellow practitioners. Look at how angry their words are. We should be kinder to our fellow practitioners. Blah. Blah. Blah. All of that is true, but it's only part of the story. I'm like them too. You are like them too. The only difference is that I didn't put a post out like that.

So, what's behind the desire to shame them? What is it about angry and/or violent writing, angry and/or violent thinking, that either seductively draws us in or makes us run far, far away? And what can we do about it?

That's what I became interested in while writing that post Friday. And this post is a continuation of that, in it's own meandering way.

p.s. The Blogisattva Awards are out. This blog won the Best Achievement Blogging Opinion Pieces or Political Issues award. Thank you all for the recognition. But mostly, as I said Friday, seeing all those Buddhist blogs located in one place, where anyone can access them and drink in the wisdom, experience, and folly, is really excellent. Bows to us all.

Overriding the Desire for Social Acceptance

There is a strong desire running through most of us to both appear happy and healthy to others, and to actually be happy and healthy ourselves. When the latter is absent, often the pressure to put on appearances is heightened. Others worry, and you don't want others to worry. So you try to manage yourself and also others by sweeping all the shit under the rug. Pretty damned screwy.

It's vitally important to explore the rough edges that appear in your life. To not automatically default into a view that says feeling depressed or sad or upset means you're faulty, in need of therapy, or some other such story. It's true that some of us fall too deeply into despair or rage, for example, and need to go for intensive help of some sort. However, I believe in this modern world littered with psychologists and spiritual programs emphasizing psychology, it's really easy to embrace the story that you're in trouble, and need to "do therapy."

One of the symptoms of all of this is over-emphasizing "positive thinking and acting." I found two recent posts addressing this issue, which are worth a look.

The Dalai Grandma has been writing, among other things, about her experience with needing a kidney transplant. One of the reasons I'd recommend her blog is that she presents the whole situation honesty, and in detail. Sometimes, she's living in hopefulness and joy. Other times, she's cloudy and disconnected. And still other times, it's crankiness and frustration. In other words: reality.

I don't like to be told to look on the bright side, though of course there's a reason I undertook this kidney transplant, to live much better, much longer, once we're through this. But as for putting a spin on my experience, there is this experience, what it is, in total, though it's only that - experience. Today it's been unpleasant. Much of the day in bed trying to be warm, cold sweats, blurred vision, inability to concentrate, nose running. Immunosuppressants are very strong. My nurse told me to eat when I take them (3 times a day) and that cut down on stomach pain and belching. At least I'm not nauseated. (I know, that's thinking positive. And at least I haven't come down sick in some other way, and there are many ways. And I'm not "in rejection." In other words, this is working fine. A good recovery.)

It seems to me it's best when whatever one might call "positive" thinking comes out naturally, manifesting through one's experience, and not out of an attempt to please or pacify or avoid. And we don't need to be dangerously ill in order to experience a shift in perspective about something that we've suffered over in the past. But obviously, when such things come, the intensity is hard to ignore.

Emma over at the Chronic Meditator has some similar reflections in her latest post.

Here's what I'm exploring...

If I have a day when I feel miserable, bitter, and very ungrateful about being sick...should I feel a preference that this day not be that way? Should I feel a preference that I feel at ease and peaceful being sick? Or should I have no preferences ?

For me, this exploration is very rich. I'm suddenly allowing all these really difficult feelings to flow through my body - boredom, frustration, anxiety about the future, terror, emptiness, and despair. I know this all sounds really miserable, and not like 'good news' at all, but I have this strong feeling that allowing these feelings to flow is really my path.

I resonate with this sense of flow, and letting go of claiming or privileging one set of experiences over another. One of the challenges I have experienced with allowing this kind of flow, or paying attention to the flow, is that it shows you the instability of "yourself" and your identities. People ask you how you're doing and you aren't quite sure what to say. Who am I? becomes more central of a question, which probably means you're pointed in the right direction, but it also shifts how you interact with others - to the point, where some of the significant people in your life might struggle to relate to you, and you to them.

When faced with this awkward, unstable ground, I often, you often, all of us often choose some sort of bypass. Positive thinking is just one form. But the point is that instead of feeling awkward, unstable, and not terribly in knowing, we opt to do something that plugs us back into the socially accepted field. In other words, we opt to maintain social acceptance over discovering who we truly are.

This shouldn't be something we "get down" about. It's pretty hardwired into humans to do what we can to maintain some level of social acceptance. But I think awakening in this life requires some bucking of that, some willingness to override that collective impulse that drives us to turn away, disown, and even hate part of our experience.

p.s. The image is a nod to my sister, who loves Napoleon Dynamite. I didn't care for it much to be honest.