Passion, patience and action as enlightenment
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:
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.
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.
