More on patience and it’s relationship to emergence.
Roshi Bernie Glassman is a Zen teacher and an activist. In this interview with Andrew Cohen he describes the relationship between enlightenment and action: “practices for enlightenment,” he says,”have to lead to action in the world.”
For Glassman coming out of Zen Buddhist practice, enlightenment comes from reducing your attachments and cultivating sunyata, or emptiness. In a brilliant statement, Glassman connects this emptiness to action that is of the most valuable kind: action directed at an unknown outcome:
AC: How can we remain attentive to the severity of the crisis without being so overwhelmed by it that we become completely paralyzed by fear and despair?
BG: I think we become overwhelmed only because of our expectations?our expectations that we are going to be able to resolve the problem.
AC: I see, so that’s the key.
BG: Step by step, see it in its broadest perspective, and then do the things that you can do without any expectations.
AC: Without any expectations that you’re going to solve the problem completely?
BG: Yes, or even help it. You’re going to do what you can do, and something’s going to happen?who the hell knows what.
This is a tricky place to be. It’s what my friend Myriam Laberge calls “chaordic confidence,” a term I have adopted to describe a whole set of practices that allow us to sit in the unknowing and trust that order will emerge from the chaos.
Glassman argues that in terms of “doing” that we do what we can with what we have. To work on a problem you just begin to attack what is immediately in front of you. If you want to reduce greenhouse gases, start by driving less. Then find other things you can do, like inviting others to do the same. By assuming that the problem is too big for one person to solve, you abdicate your responsibility for being a part of the solution. Problems that are too big need multiple actors to contribute to emergent solutions. There is no top down way to solve world hunger or climate change or the perils of colonization. By being patient though, and directed to the work at hand, you add to what becomes the emergent solution.
AC: You’ve been saying, “The right response is going to happen”?and I believe you and I agree with you. But I still want to ask you, in terms of the dharma, what exactly is the relationship between that state of unknowing and the awakening of conscience that transcends ego?
BG: I think they’re the same state. But it’s not a passive state; it’s very active. And that active state is bearing witness. That’s, for me, the way to approach it. Instead of waiting for something else to happen, say, “Right now, I, to the best of my ability, will approach this situation from the state of not knowing.” I think that gives you the best shot at doing something. It gives people permission to do something from their state of enlightenment. And it means bear witness to the suffering; don’t run away from it. Bearing witness is really important. To bear witness is to sit with it?and by “sitting,” I don’t necessarily mean physically sitting?but to sit with it, and try to simultaneously keep coming from that place of not knowing. Stay with it and bear witness to it?then you can do something.
BG: I think they’re the same state. But it’s not a passive state; it’s very active. And that active state is bearing witness. That’s, for me, the way to approach it. Instead of waiting for something else to happen, say, “Right now, I, to the best of my ability, will approach this situation from the state of not knowing.” I think that gives you the best shot at doing something. It gives people permission to do something from their state of enlightenment. And it means bear witness to the suffering; don’t run away from it. Bearing witness is really important. To bear witness is to sit with it?and by “sitting,” I don’t necessarily mean physically sitting?but to sit with it, and try to simultaneously keep coming from that place of not knowing. Stay with it and bear witness to it?then you can do something.
Now, each one of us has got whatever attachments we have, and that’s why I say that the degree of our enlightenment is the degree of passion that we will have for the whole world. That passion will arise. Stay with it. Bear witness to what’s coming up. Out of that, action has to happen.
This is so beautiful: the degree of our enlightenment is the degree of passion that we will have for the whole world.” When we bear witness and do what we can, action has no choice but to show up.
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In Saskatoon, Raymon points to a new online atlas of urban Aboriginal peoples published by the University of Saskatchewan. He follows the link with this little note:
. . . high school students constantly involved in the process of identity always refer to the eastside/westside struggle . . . poverty, aboriginal ancestry, housing, municipal planning bias, all contribute to identity . . .
I left him a comment saying that the little bit of work I have done with Aboriginal youth in Saskatoon has been remarkable. You have young kids with multiple ancestries – Cree, Metis, Ukranian, Scottish – trying to get a handle on what it means to be Aboriginal living in Saskatoon. And to make things more urgent, the simple demographics mean that in 15 years, these guys will be in charge of the whole province.
I think this new generation of youth in places like Saskatoon, Prince Albert and Regina are leading the way. In around 2020, Saskatchewan will be a largely Aboriginal province within the Canadian federation, and literacy in multiple identities will be a huge skill to making that work. With the youth coming up now who are sorting out these issues there is an emerging generation of leadership who are going to create some fantastic new ways of reconciling the sometimes competing needs of these different worlds.
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I’m synching up my blogroll with my RSS subscriptions. This means that what you see on the left under “Good Reads” are actually the subs in my Bloglines account. I lament the fact that this means I can’t keep up with some very good blogs, because they either don’t publish feeds, or they publish partial feeds. It’s a time and convienence issue. Also, partial feeds just don’t work for me. The only site that manages to pull me with a partial feed is defective yeti. Everyone else usually gets a miss. I know this is not a quirk specific to me either. My advice to any blogger is turn on your feed and make it a full feed. Then you show up on your readers’ radar in all your glory!
I’m going through my old blogroll and checking who’s got their feeds turned on, so the list will change a little over the next week. After that, it’s synched and I’m rolling. Let me know if I miss you.
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One of the things I love about the connectivity of the Internet is that I end up finding people in my own backyard who are doing really interesting things.
So today, here’s a link to Jessie Sutherland a Victoria BC woman who is pioneering some reconciliation strategies using a set of tools called worldviewing which help people to understand their own world views and those of others.
Worldviewing entails three sets of skills:
1. Connecting parties to their fundamental worldview
2. Learning to engage across worldview difference
3. Regenerating Indigenous cultures and re-civilising Western cultures.
2. Learning to engage across worldview difference
3. Regenerating Indigenous cultures and re-civilising Western cultures.
Jessie is using these strategies with indigenous and non-indigenous parties where reconciliation is much needed in many fields, whether it’s residential school healing or Aboriginal title issues. She has recently published a book in both electronic and hard copy format called “Reconciliation from the Inside Out: Worldviewing skills for everyone.” And no matter where you are in the world you can engage in more of her work with a series of weekly teleconferences.
It’s great to have people like this out there. I wish she had a blog! I’ll have to settle for the odd email back and forth and promises of a future meeting next time I’m in Victoria.
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Sunday I was pleased to sit on a panel on the practice of leadership for the current cohort of learners with the Leadership Vancouver organization. The other panelists were amazing people: Marguerite Ford, Pam Goldsmith-Jones, and Bar-Chya Lee.
Each of us spoke for 10 or 15 minutes on practices of leadership, and then we answered questions from the participants.
Pam talked about embracing the call to action, quoting from a sign above the bar at the Cactus Club in Vancouver: “The House of Yes.”
Marguerite quoted Senator Nancy Heath and said that “a job worth doing is worth doing badly” meaning that holding back was inexcusable when work demanded to be done. And Bar Chya, using the eagle as his metaphor (familiar of course from Ojibway teachings) talked about the core practices of big view, big heart and higher go. When your view encompasses the world, your own struggles seem small. I talked about the practice of invitation as leadership and the connection between passion and responsibility.
When it came time for questions, one of the questions that came our way was “Don’t you get impatient?” We took our time answering that one – which sent the right message – but I was so patient that we had moved on before I answered it. So for those who were there, and others who may be listening in, here’s what I was mulling over saying about patience.
Patience is an absolutely required leadership skill. Things take time to happen, this is obvious, but more than that, if you are truly leading from a position where you are giving away your power to people, patience allows both for people to take hold of it and for collective intelligence to come into play.
Last week I was facilitating an Open Space meeting for an alternative school community in North Vancouver. To convene the closing circle, I simply took my chair, placed it in the middle of the floor, and placed a bell in the middle of the circle. Within about 10 minutes, all 80 people had followed suit, and I decided that I would just leave that bell there as a talking piece, and wait to see what happened. There was a fair amount of chatter in the room, but the evening had been so spirited and full of energy that I didn’t want to be the one to ask for silence and start the closing. And so I waited, and waited. After a couple of minutes of this a young man strode into the middle of the circle, grabbed the bell and started telling the group about the plans that had hatched in his small group session. When he finished he placed the bell down and others followed suit. It was a prime example of what happens when you exercise patience – soon the people take over and there is no turning back. But preempt that moment, and the people never know whether or not the circle is truly theirs.
Collective intelligence takes a while to emerge, and as we know from all the science on complexity and emergence, tipping points appear out of nowhere – strong signals in the noise around us – and when they happen, they happen quickly. As leaders, the thing we can do to help these along is to simply be patient. Hold the space and the belief that out of the chaos, order will appear and that it will be coalescing stuff into a direction that is more than what one person could possible organize. Leadership that works with emergence watches and listens and waits, and trusts that the collective intelligence of the group will come to the fore. When it finally does, it is something marvelous, and something well beyond whatever it was one was expecting.