Thomas Merton and Interdependence

I have lately begun perusing Thomas Merton's Seven Storey Mountain once again. I've been interested in him for some time, at least since I first moved to Kentucky five years ago and saw his name on a list of famous people who had lived here. I purchased his famous autobiography over a year ago, but it has unfortunately just joined the seemingly bottomless stack of unread books on my floor and shelves. Earlier this evening I had just read a passage in H.H. The Dalai Lama's book The Power of Compassion on the topic of interdependence. Funnily enough, shortly after I picked up SSM and flipped it to a random page. This is what I read:

“You cannot live for your own pleasure and your own convenience without inevitably hurting and injuring the feelings and interests of practically everybody you meet. But, as a matter of fact, in the natural order no matter what ideals may be theoretically possible, most people more or less live for themselves and for their own interests and pleasures or for those of their own family or group, and therefore they are constantly interfering with one another’s aims and hurting one another and injuring one another, whether they mean it or not.”

I seem to encounter coincidences like these almost every day. Perhaps it has something to do with reading the same types of writers all of the time, but nevertheless, this intrigued me. I am no longer near my books, so I cannot track down the specific passage from the Dalai Lama that I read earlier, but he apparently echoes Merton's sentiments regularly:

A young child's affection does not come through faith; it is naturally very strong. I think the mistake we make is that when we're grown up, we start to think we're independent. We think that in order to be successful we don't need others—except maybe to exploit them! This is the source of all sorts of problems, scandals, and corruption. But if we had more respect for other people's lives—a greater sense of concern and awareness—it would be a very different world. We have to introduce the reality of interdependence. Then people would discover that, according to that reality, affection and compassion are essential if anything is ever going to change.

It is no secret that America, perhaps more than any other nation on earth, falls victim to the myth of independence to which both Merton and the Dalai Lama reference. Whether we are discussing financial productivity and success, or, on the other hand, the search for spiritual fulfillment like that which Merton documents from his own life in SSM, we find that society's subtle emphasis is on independence and narcissism. We see this in politics, where wealthy business owners extoll the virtues of the free market and limited government without taking into consideration that the government--which is to say the society as a whole--is in large part responsible for establishing the rules of the road that make it possible to be a successful businessman to begin with! We are reared in this country, by and large, to believe in the virtues of fierce independence.

And yet--as we see, it is only through recognition of our precious interdependence that we will find happiness and compassion.

Shambhala Training Level 1: Discovering Basic Goodness

Recently I attended a teaching of the first level of the Shambhala Training at the Lexington Shambhala Center. It was an illuminating experience. Our teacher was Dr. Lance Brunner, a music history professor at the University of Kentucky and apparently a world-renowned Shambhala instructor. He told us that he had just returned from San Diego, where he led a retreat, and said that he would be visiting New Zealand and Australia this summer to teach as well. I don’t know why he chose to tell us all of this, but it affected me positively: I knew then that we were in for a treat.

He discussed the paradox of starting down the Shambhala path, which is that, while on the one hand we are to enter our training without any great expectations for spiritual enlightenment or deep fulfillment, we are, too, drawn to Shambhala for a reason deep within us, something that we yearn for, whether it be peace, discovering and strengthening our inherent muscles of compassion, or simply learning a way to relax. We continually returned to this interesting paradox throughout the weekend.

The first evening of the training, we partnered up with another member of the class to learn two things about them:

1. What brought them to this place
2. One person to whom they are grateful

Perhaps unfortunately, everyone instantly teamed up with the person sitting nearest them, which paired me with my girlfriend Grace. Now, this was not ideal, but it did allow Grace and I to ease into the weekend with someone familiar. After learning about our partner, we then had to share their story with the class. As soon as he said this, my pulse began to race, my palms got sweaty, and my breathing rate shot through the roof. I was paralyzed with nervousness at the notion of having to speak to a room of perfect strangers. When my time came I was brief and to the point and immediately passed the baton to Grace.

Then the voices started. Wow, you really sounded nervous, Richard. Do you think they could hear it in your voice? That sure is a good way to make a first impression. Can’t you do anything without getting nervous? So it went.

Pervasive anxiety is an affliction with which I have been dealing for some time and to be honest, it is something I have long hoped a steady meditation practice would help me to cope with. So in spite of the admonitions to the contrary, I held this aspiration in my heart as we began the weekend. The incident Friday night further solidified in my mind the need to work on this aspect of my person as I delved into meditation that weekend. I resolved to do as the teachings dictate and return to the breath—in and out, in and out—as a means of regaining my sense of place and alleviating irrational thoughts and fears. This determination helped get me through some of the most rigorous moments of the weekend.

We learned quite a lot about each other in those brief introductions. One thread that seemed to tie everyone together was that everyone there seemed in some way damaged. I do not mean to be melodramatic—it’s just that you would not pay a huge wad of money to come to a weekend meditation course with a bunch of strangers if you didn’t have a damn good reason to be there.

The Shambhala Training is a five-part series based on the book Shambhala: Sacred Path of the Warrior by Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, the founder and spiritual leader of Shambhala International. Thus the training, like Trungpa Rinpoche’s book, begins with a teaching on the concept of Basic Goodness. Basic Goodness, as explained by Dr. Brunner and by Trungpa Rinpoche himself, is our inherent capacity for goodness; it is a type of goodness that has always existed. Indeed, it existed before dualistic labels turned our understanding of goodness into a good/bad dichotomy. This is, therefore, not relative goodness, but simply pure, unadulterated, Basic Goodness. And how do we tap into this Basic Goodness? Through the practice of meditation, of course.

Trungpa describes the practice thus:

By meditation here we mean something very basic and simple that is not tied to any one culture. We are talking about a very basic act: sitting on the ground, assuming a good posture, and developing a sense of our spot, our place on this earth. This is the means of discovering ourselves and our basic goodness, the means to tune ourselves in to genuine reality, without any expectations or preconceptions.

So that’s what we did. Sit. And boy, did we sit. We sat longer than I have ever sat before in meditation. It appeared to be twenty minute segments of sitting cut up by twenty minute segments of walking meditation (a practice with which I was heretofore unfamiliar), though I cannot be sure of the specific times as I made sure to not have a watch or cell phone on me during the training.

We sat together, walked together, ate together, talked with one another, and discussed the concepts of the training together in group discussion sessions. By the end of the weekend, even the people to whom I had felt the least connection somehow seemed to be friends. It’s inexplicable, really, because I didn’t get particularly conversatioinal or friendly with anyone else in the class, at least not in a conventional sense. But there is something powerful about sitting together and walking together and engaging in even brief moments of quiet contemplation and meditation that brings together people in a way that goes beyond mere words.

After the final session ended Sunday afternoon, I left convinced that I would return for Level 2 of the training, and that is still my intention. Grace and I put on our coats, bid our goodbyes and went back out into the world. The first thing we did when we sat in the car was to light up a cigarette. Even a full weekend of Shambhala training couldn’t magically break that habit.

Pema Chödrön - Why I Became a Buddhist