Beyond Right Or Wrong
By bell hooks
Issue 258, The Sun Magazine
URL: https://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/258/beyond-right-or-wrong?authuser=0
Highlights
“Real safety is your willingness not to run away from yourself.”
Talking with her enabled me to bring the issues that trouble my heart out into the open.
The point is that we rob ourselves of being in the present by always thinking the payoff will come in the future. But the only place ever to work is right now: we must work with the present situation rather than with a hypothetical possibility of what might be. I like any teaching that encourages us to be with ourselves and our situation as it is without looking for alternatives.
That means I aspire to end suffering for all creatures, but at the same time I don’t deny the reality of the present situation. I give up both the hope that something is going to change and the fear that it isn’t. It’s all right to long to end suffering, but somehow it paralyzes us if we’re too goal-oriented about it. Do you see the balance there?
Yet it seems very hard for people to fight racism and sexism without any hope for an end to them.
The main issue here is aggression. Often, if there’s too much hope, you begin to have a strong sense of an enemy. Then the process of trying to alleviate suffering actually adds to the suffering, because of your aggression toward the oppressor.
That we’re all the same, really; we just get stuck in different ways?
If you can keep your heart and mind open to those people, and resist any tendency to close down toward them, perhaps the cycle of racism and cruelty can start to de-escalate.
deciding that cultivating openness is how you want to spend the remaining moments of your life.
openness actually starts to emerge when you observe how you close down.
A big part of developing compassion is being honest with yourself — not shielding yourself from your mistakes, or pretending nothing has happened. The other big component is being gentle. This is what meditation is about, but obviously it goes beyond sitting on a cushion. In practice, you begin to really see your moods, attitudes, and opinions. You begin to hear this voice — your voice — and how it can be so critical of yourself and others. You develop a growing clarity about all the different parts of yourself.
Meditation gives you the tools to look at all of this with an unbiased attitude. A lot of having compassion toward oneself is a matter of staying with the initial thought or the initial arising of emotion. This means that when you see yourself becoming aggressive, or getting stuck in self-pity, or whatever, then you refrain from adding things on top of that — guilt or self-justification or anything else that increases the negativity. You work on not spinning away from your situation as you find it, and on being kinder toward the human condition as you observe it in yourself.
if I unconditionally accept myself, then what’s my motivation to practice further?
Like you, I feel that blame isn’t very useful. But you have also said — for instance, in reference to male teachers who abuse their power and seduce female students — that accountability is real. How does one give up blame while embracing the idea of accountability?
you must be willing to see suffering as suffering. Obviously, the less you are caught up in your own hopes and fears, the more you can see suffering straightforwardly.
Accountability here means being honest, incredibly honest. You see that harm is being done: you see someone harming a child, an animal, another being. You see that clearly, and you wish to lessen that suffering. Then the question becomes one of how to proceed so that the person you see as the problem becomes accountable, willing to acknowledge what he or she is doing.
Seeing how much it takes to become accountable yourself, you try to find skillful means to communicate with this person so that barriers come down, rather than get reinforced. It has everything to do with communication: how can you each hear what the other is saying?
I feel that the teacher’s role is to wean students from dependency, from the parent-child view of life, the theistic view.
Theism doesn’t have to do only with God; it has to do with the feeling that you’re incomplete and need something or someone outside you to make you whole.
Accountability, on the other hand, doesn’t offer that kind of support. There is no hand to hold. No matter what other people say, when it comes down to it, you are the only one who can answer your own questions.
I’m interested in how mindfulness can illuminate vocation, helping us know when we need to let go of one path and move toward another. Do you still grapple with these questions?
There’s always the simple answer of moving to a different field, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But just changing the outer situation doesn’t get at the root of the discontent, doesn’t address the true source of suffering. What we need is to look directly at suffering — at what causes it, at what makes it escalate, and at what allows it to dissolve. The first step is to acknowledge that no matter where we go or what we do, we are always going to experience both positive and negative feelings — and that this is a fertile situation.
So you realize how much of it is in our minds: whether we’re in an overwhelming work situation or a very simple one, we still have to deal with our minds. That’s why some teachings say that no matter what is happening in your life, it’s always showing you the true nature of reality, the true nature of your mind.
It all comes down to being very, very attuned to one’s emotions — to seeing how one is attached to the pleasant and averse to the painful. We must work again and again on learning to open and soften rather than tighten and close down. It comes down to realizing that wisdom and compassion are contained in this life, just as it is. No matter how simple or complicated our life, it can make us miserable, or it can wake us up.
People need a lot of caring support before their suffering can turn into compassion. What usually happens to people without that support is that great suffering leads to more suffering.
How can we use suffering to transform ourselves and those with whom we come in contact?
For me, the spiritual path has always been a lesson in how to die. I don’t mean just the death at the end of this life, but all the falling apart that happens continually. The fear of death — which is also the fear of insecurity, of not having it all together — seems to be the most fundamental phenomenon we have to work with: because death is an ending, and endings happen all the time. Things are always ending and arising and ending. But we are strangely conditioned to want to experience just the birth part and not the death part.
education as the practice of freedom