May all billionaires be free of confusion
Because the world would be better for all of us if they were
We are at risk together, or we are on our way to a sustainable world together. We are each other's destiny.
— Mary Oliver
In my previous two posts in this series on loving-kindness, I talked about offering loving-kindness to oneself and others in need, and also to a person about whom you veel “neutrally” (or the closest you can come to that).
Now, we’ve reached what some consider the most controversial stage of things: offering loving-kindness to someone who feels hard to love.
The news recently has offered me many potential candidates for this lately. Maybe you too?
It’s hard not to vilify people with a track record of taking harmful actions, and even seem to delight in them. Harder still to see our fate as bound up in theirs, to see that we are interdependent. It might even seem negligent, to consider meditating on our shared destiny when they’re attempting to take or destroy the things we value. I get that. The point here is not to roll over and let them do what they want. It’s to gain clarity on what is happening, and what we can do about it.
Here’s the key takeaway with this step: according to Buddhist philosophy, the reason why people engage in harmful actions is the same reason why we can have compassion for them. Because they are being poisoned.
No, really. More specifically, difficult-to-love people are seen to be deeply afflicted by one or more of the Three Poisons: greed, aggression, and confusion or delusion. The more people partake in these poisons, the further away they get from safety, peace and happiness, and yet the more the poison of delusion itself keeps convincing them that just one more dose will get them closer.
For example, consider:
Greed: The more money our billionaires du jour earn, the more visible they get, and thus the more they seem to feel self-conscious about the way that they look.1 So greed’s not really working out for them, at least in the way they may have been taught to believe it will — by improving their sense of safety and self-worth. But they just keep doubling down.
Aggression: Wealthy people have also doubled down on protecting themselves and their wealth in recent weeks, hiring not just personal bodyguards to protect them from the people they’re exploiting, but even private firefighters2 to theoretically insulate them from the impacts of the climate change that many of them are helping to cause. They’re also attempting to take over parts of the government by force that are not theirs to run by law. Rather than making them safer, this has placed them further at risk for aggression by making them the target of increased public anger. But they don’t seem to understand that.3
Delusion: We all share the same water supply, and when the water runs out, it’s gone, whether you have private firefighters on the payroll or not. We’re not likely to look kindly upon the ones who’ve drained it, no matter what kind of fancy accessories they’re wearing. Ignoring or denying these truths doesn’t make them not-true. But many wealthy folks aren’t able to see this, either. They really seem confused as to why those of us who don’t command the GDP of a small country don’t admire or support their selfish actions.4
It truly must be hard, to have so much in the way of material wealth and power, and yet such an impoverished understanding of such basic truths.
There’s a Zen story along these lines that I’ve been reading lately to my son, from the book Zen Shorts, that helps to illustrate the difference between malevolent confusion and un-f#$-withable clarity.
In it, the narrator’s uncle lives inside a grass hut, wearing nothing but a humble robe. One night, a thief breaks in. The uncle apologizes profusely for his poor hospitality – he has nothing to offer his guest besides his ragged garment, so he takes it off and gives it to him. The thief, confused and a little afraid, grabs the uncle’s only worldly possession and beats it.
“So sad,” the uncle sighs, as he looks out from his doorstep at the clear night sky. “Too bad I could not have given him the moon.”
The message is this: the real flex is not in having everything or being able to compel others to give you what you want, but to be so disinterested in greed and aggression that nothing can truly steal your sense of contentment. (In other versions of this Zen story, the thief realizes this, and comes back to ask the humble hermit to be his teacher.)
Enlightenment itself can be seen as achieving this state of un-f#$-withable clarity. This state is often symbolized by the moon in such stories: luminous and illuminating, gentle but indestructible.
Alas, poor modern-day robber barons. Too bad we cannot give them the moon.
Here’s another important concept for this step of mettā meditation: the Buddhist notion of “causes and conditions.” Everyone has their own unique causes and conditions that lead them to take this or that action. Bad soil produces bad crops. And sadly, our current culture often produces poisonous ones.
People afflicted by greed are confused about what will bring safety, peace and happiness to their lives because we live in a culture that glorifies money, and promises it can buy these things.
People afflicted by aggression are confused about what will bring safety, peace and happiness to their lives because we live in a culture that glorifies violence, and promises that those who wield it can commandeer these things.
So, if we wish to counteract the impact of these poisonous views on the difficult-to-love beings in our lives in mettā meditation, we might silently offer a phrase like this: “May they be free of confusion, and the causes and conditions of confusion.”
Or, as my Midwestern family members would say: Bless their hearts. Which, if you’re not fluent in Midwestern, can be translated in numerous ways. It can genuinely mean “Wow, poor things.” Or, it can be a classy way of saying, “Wow, #@$%@ those @Q#E$@.”
For me, some days, if I’m being honest, it’s a little bit of Column A, and a little bit of Column B. Such is life, for those of us (most of us) who aren’t perfectly enlightened yet.
“But wait,” you might be saying. “Back up. The difficult people in our lives are not evil, they’re just confused? Isn’t that letting them off a bit easy?”
Well, look. You don’t have to think like this. But that is the radical invitation on offer from Buddhist philosophy here. It’s also the radical invitation extended by many thinkers beyond Buddhism, from Jesus Christ to Thich Nhat Hanh and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.. It is premised in the notion that our interrelatedness is a higher truth than the dog-eat-dog worldview of the deluded. It is premised in the idea that someone who is really wise, really smart, with a deep and radical understanding of our interdependence, would not go poisoning our shared water supply, or dismantling our school system, or making it easy for mentally unstable people to buy machine guns.
This means that to say that someone is confused, in a Buddhist sense, is about as bad an insult as you can hurl within a tradition that values nonviolent speech.
Given this interrelatedness, we’re also not wishing all difficult-to-love people a stress-free tropical getaway, paid for by taxpayers, so that they can have a nice time. We are hoping that those who wield outsize power do not continue to wield it in deluded ways because this would be better for everyone. Not just them.
Moreover, rather than leading to complacency in the face of unskillful action, I would argue that this kind of meditation leads to the most skillful possible responses.
Practicing loving-kindness, we may find that we are able to see clearly the greed and aggression practiced by leaders and corporations who are clinging to power, and that we want to join in the efforts to stop them from taking more than their fair share.5 We can also wish that they be freed of delusion and compelled to clean up their messes, instead of drowned in a vat of their own self-created acid rain. Because otherwise we risk watering the next generation of poisonous crops, reaping more war instead of the peace we crave.
Practicing loving-kindness, we may find ourselves developing a level of emotional maturity that makes it possible to regard these seeming paradoxes with equanimity, rather than seeing them as hypocrisy. We may find ourselves channeling the kind of love that Dr. King spoke about during the Civil Rights era, a love that is not “some sentimental and weak response,” but instead a “force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life… the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality.”
Practicing loving-kindness, we may find ourselves feeling into a more centered baseline mind-state than one characterized by endless rounds of emotional reactivity and political pettiness, in response to every unskillful action we witness on the news or in our communities. We give ourselves every opportunity to acknowledge, with no hedging or caveats, that “Yeah, I think these people are being poisoned, and I’m glad I’m not in their shoes.” We also give ourselves the chance to say, “I wish they weren’t in them either.” We give ourselves the chance to develop a political position characterized by both moral clarity and compassion from which to operate, which is to say a position of sanity.
Which means that ultimately, offering loving-kindness to the difficult people in our lives is not just a gift to them. It’s a gift to ourselves.
I don’t know about you, but I’ll take it.
I’ll conclude here with some questions about “people who are difficult to love,” to take up next time you’re meditating (or rage-journaling, as the case may be).
What person in your life — or in the news — feels most difficult to love in this moment?
If so, why is this? Do you see one particular poison – greed, aggression or delusion – as being their primary affliction, or are they present in some combination?
Is this person aware that the poison they are taking is poison? That is – are they aware that what they are doing is not just hurting you, or others, but them too?
Who might have taught them to take the poison?
Who taught you not to take the poison?
Did you have the same teachers as this difficult person?
Did you have the same opportunities to practice as this difficult person?
What else might be driving this difficult person’s delusion?
How might the world become a better place – for you, for others, for them – if they could be free of their delusion?
When you offer them loving-kindness, i.e. by imagining yourself saying the following phrases to them as you bring them to mind, what happens? Do you feel a sense of softening, a sense of resistance, something else?
May you be safe.
May you be peaceful.
May you be happy.
May you be free from confusion and delusion, and the causes of confusion and delusion.
Your turn: I’d love to know how this meditation goes for you, if you care to share in the comments. And may you, too, experience moments of safety, peace and happiness, amidst the political din of this week and the ones to come.
See also: this related NPR story.