Heaven On Earth

As this month’s US section attests, homelessness exists in many forms. There is the public spectacle of those who dwell on city streets; there are the more private dramas of those who suffer, in whatever form, diminishments of the soul.

What is the connection between the homeless on the street and the homelessness in our hearts? In a world where time is short, which do we address first? Which is the most dire?

In the dialogue that follows, Roger S. Gottlieb examines questions such as these in the context of an imagined conversation between a “spiritual seeker” and a “political radical.” Clearly, these are clumsy labels, yet they remind us that partisans of either viewpoint have much to learn from the other. Spirituality, unhinged from any consideration of social consequence, grows obscene; politics, unless informed by matters of the heart, turns monstrous. Think of Rajneesh in a Rolls Royce, Stalin in the Kremlin.

Seekers and activists need each other. And the union need not be a marriage of convenience, but one of passion, spark, the eternal creak of the cosmic bedsprings.

— T.L. Toma

Radical: You talk about yoga, and meditation, and prayer, and the search for ultimate truth. But what is your spirituality in practice? It’s the pursuit of personal satisfaction while fleeing the world’s suffering and injustice. Some folks can’t afford to take time out for self-improvement workshops. Do you ever think about the battered women dying at the hands of the men in their lives, or the people killed because of U.S. aid to military dictators? Do you ever meditate on how we’re destroying the natural world?

If you’re really seeking the truth, and not merely some escape, then why are all the meditation centers in the country? Why not put them where they’re really needed? In the inner cities! Sure yoga and meditation and incense and soft music feel good. So does a week on a Caribbean island.

Spiritual Seeker: You’re so angry. What kind of change will you create if you’re dominated by these feelings? Will the world you build be so different from the one we have now? You say it’s radical social change you want. But what you really seek is power over others, and revenge for the real and imagined slights you’ve suffered in life. You say I’m escaping, but isn’t a good deal of your politics an escape from the fact that you can’t control life, that sickness and aging and disappointment are part of every life, and that we all have to die, no matter what political system we live under?

Radical: My suffering is nothing compared to what’s going on in the world. Children starve in Africa, women are raped, children are crippled by toxic wastes. Single mothers are locked into poverty, their kids hungry, any dreams of a decent life shattered.

Isn’t there a tremendous amount to be angry about? There are terrible powers working to destroy the world — terrible powers that must be fought, and beaten. And when we win, we’ll build a world where people have some real power over their own lives. We have to fight to do this, because the powerful never give up their privileges without a struggle.

And what are you doing about it? What injustice does all your chanting and meditation change?

Seeker: Do you really think having contempt for me will help anyone? You seem to be as out of control as the people you oppose.

You and I actually agree on a great deal. We yearn for a world of peace. We are both opposed to a society that treasures only money, pleasure, and power.

You think a world of justice and peace is possible. I think within each of us is the capacity to know God (or truth, or the Goddess, put it any way you like). There is a sense in which we both want the same thing: heaven on earth.

We’re not so far apart. We both admit that terrible things have been done in the name of revolution and religion. We’ve both seen radical politics mask violence and a lust for power, and pretentious spirituality come from people who are self-indulgent and self-deceived.

But there is a simple truth that you always fail to understand: hatred and violence can only create more of the same. You may think that you can reserve your anger for the oppressors. In the end, however, you will attack others who oppose your policies simply because they do not agree or will not obey. Until you have purified yourself of your need for power over others, your fear, greed, hatred, and ignorance will only mirror the evil you seek to overcome.

Radical: For very complicated historical reasons, communist revolutions in Eastern Europe and the Third World turned into totalitarian states. You use that fact as a pretext to condemn every radical political movement not led by saints!

In the early years of the Depression, one out of four workers was unemployed, and one out of three people had no steady income. The most important radical political response to all this came from the Communist Party. Now I have little real sympathy for the communists. They were in love with authority, rabid critics of anyone who disagreed, and allowed themselves to be completely dominated by the Soviet Communist Party. But they also organized communities to prevent unemployed neighbors from being evicted, defended civil rights, and helped form industrial unions with blacks and whites — for the first time in American history — working together to get decent wages and working conditions. Were they angry? You bet. But they made a difference.

Take another example. Women are angry at rape and the threat of rape, sexism in books and religions and politics and schools; they’re angry about the plight of women condemned to poverty and subservience. Out of all that anger came some important changes. Suppose you’re a married woman whose husband beats her. The cops often do nothing or act as if it’s your fault. The courts take forever. If you’re lucky, you’ll have a battered women’s shelter to call, where other women will take you in, help protect you from your husband. It was angry women who made such shelters possible.

You look at us and all you see is our anger; you don’t see what we’ve done. You don’t see that there is a certain kind of anger which is also a certain kind — and sometimes the best kind — of love.

Seeker: I don’t believe that thinking about people just in terms of politics — in terms of rights, and freedom, and equality of opportunity, and the kinds of work they can do — is enough.

We all want everyone to have enough to eat and a decent place to live. But most people in the United States have that. Are they happy? Have you ever taken a commuter train out of New York City at 5 o’clock and looked at the faces of these well-off suburbanites? You see fatigue, anxiety, hostility, sadness, depression. Their bodies are pampered. No one is oppressing them. Don’t they have what you say everyone should have? Yet they are miserable!

They are miserable because they identify with desires that can never be satisfied. Regardless of what they have, they always want more. More money to buy more things. More pleasures to take their minds off the pleasures they have lost. More status. More privileges. More sex to make up for the emptiness they deny but cannot overcome. And they think that this is all there is to life.

You want to create a world in which desires are satisfied equally and fairly. The sad truth is that desires cannot be satisfied. The life of possessions and desires makes for temporary satisfaction and long-term pain.

Spiritual teachings — not political radicalism — suggest something else is possible. If you practice Buddhist meditation, for example, you begin to understand the pattern of endless desires, confusion, and passion your mind creates. You come to experience an awareness and a center of compassion which is not bound by the cycle of wanting, having, and wanting more. Consider the Jewish practice of thanking God for our blessings, for being alive when we wake up in the morning, for the simpler pleasures that are ours. If you do this with attention and care, you start to replace craving and envy with gratitude, acceptance, and peace.

Will people really live fully just because their wages go up 15 percent, their working conditions improve, welfare benefits and social security payments rise, or blacks and women get equal opportunity to join the bored, anxious, and hostile upper middle class? Only a spiritual perspective and practice can demonstrate how ultimately hollow the pursuit of superficial pleasure is, and offer something in its place.

Radical: It’s wonderful to feel grateful for what you have. But maybe you shouldn’t have it. Maybe you have it at someone else’s expense. Maybe you only have it because society has given you privileges it denies others. Your wise and enlightened and holy traditions give women a lot less influence and respect than men. I once heard a Zen Buddhist teacher say enlightenment is “sleeping when you’re tired and eating when you’re hungry.” It could only come from someone who never changed a diaper at 3 in the morning or tried to eat dinner and feed two young children at the same time.

Spiritual teachers always act as if they’re beyond conventions, beyond ugliness and greed, beyond society. They’re not beyond society, but a part of it. Some harbor demeaning attitudes toward women. They pay taxes that support our government without understanding how our foreign policy hurts other countries. Many don’t seem to care about the way the rich exploit the poor. I asked a Taoist master what he thought about the effects of Reagan’s budget cuts on the poor. “Teach Reagan to meditate,” he said.

Without an understanding of politics, you repeat the oppression of the society you live in. You think your sexist views are natural and that vast inequality of wealth and resources is unavoidable. You ignore what is done with your tax money and in your name — because it’s not part of the here and now you emphasize.

You are trapped by the immediate contents of your mind, the moment-to-moment feelings you try to understand and shed. The forces that shape the world don’t come from what people think and feel at any particular moment. Suffering doesn’t arise because of one’s desires and fears, but from impersonal institutions and established social structures that everyone takes for granted. You ignore the ways social institutions shape who you are, how you live, and how you relate to other people. It’s great to be kind and compassionate to those around you, but to a peasant in El Salvador who is being bombed by planes paid for by your tax money, it really doesn’t make any difference how nice a person you are.

Above all, don’t tell me that everything happens to us because we choose it — not before you go down to Latin America where the rich live like kings while children starve, and those advocating land reform are shot; then see if you think we all get what we choose.

Maybe you’d reach enlightenment faster if you thought about it less. You can change yourself only by changing the world. How else can you overcome this obsessive self-concern that undermines everything you claim to stand for?

Seeker: The only person I really know is me; before I make the world so different I’d better start with my own life. How can I end war if I’m not peaceful myself? How can I save the environment if I don’t recycle my own garbage? How can I expect love and clarity in all the great big institutions if I’m not loving and clear myself? And perhaps if I make some progress in these matters on my own, then I’ll be able to share the gifts with those around me. Person by person. Heart by heart. That’s how change takes place.

You say I need to understand society and politics so that my spiritual practices don’t mask selfishness or escapism — so that I don’t repeat society’s mistakes. But who will help you to understand your own anger and hatred, and what they mask? What’s going to keep you from using the authority you may gain in a destructive way? All the communists had great dreams, or so they said. But the ones who succeeded created murderous totalitarian states. In this country, many supported the Hitler-Stalin pact because they were cowed by international communist authority; they trashed everyone who questioned them.

Every radical group seems to self-destruct from its own in-fighting. Are these groups models of the society you want to build?

You talk of participatory democracy and empowering the disempowered. But what do you know about how people change for the better? Where’s your technology of self-awareness? Does politics truly encourage people to work toward the best in themselves and others, or does it merely promote a narrow point of view? You may have sophisticated theories of economic development, political institutions, and so on. But transformation on a personal level is all that can really happen; it’s what we know best.

I look to the discipline of prayer, the insights of meditation, the spiritual models of teachers, sages, and saints who acted from some other place than their own grasping and compulsive desires. There are models of people wrestling with their greed and their passion and their anger, and winning; they go on to build their lives around compassion for others.

When spiritual teachers move into the world, they bring love, compassion, and calls for justice. They don’t do it because it’s “right” in some abstract sense; it is what they are truly meant to do. Go back to the Depression, to Dorothy Day and the Catholic Workers’ movement. She served, organized, fought. But she did it as a child of God, not a servant of the Third International. Look at Gandhi and Martin Luther King. They weren’t Marxists or socialists; they were spiritual leaders who made a difference. They saw real problems, and they did something about them, without hate or violence. When things were desperate they had faith in the power of a love they called God or truth — a love they saw in everyone, even their opponents. They brought people together by a bond other than anger. They helped people rise up without trampling others down.

Spirituality is more than meditation and soft music. It helps relieve human suffering. People with cancer feel helpless, fall into despair, and let the doctors take over. Spiritual teachers have gone into the cancer wards and said, “Look, this is your body. You can heal yourself through meditation, visualization, a change of diet. Regard the cancer as a teacher; ask yourself if there are lessons the illness might have for your life.” When people act accordingly, the cure rates go up. And when they have to face death, they do it with dignity and peace.

Radical: Cancer is a good example precisely because it is not a disease that has hidden psychological causes. Cancer — 60 to 80 percent, according to some — comes from the ways we abuse our environment, from toxic wastes, poisoned air, water, and food that we create. All the visualizations in the world won’t help. You talk about the lessons cancer can teach us. The lesson is that we have to act, together, to change the way we live. To do that we have to challenge those who have the power. Institute truly democratic control, and you’ll heal more cancer than a thousand prayer groups.

If all spiritual practitioners were like Gandhi and King — or the liberation theologians in Latin America, or the supporters of the Sanctuary movement in this country, or those in the peace and ecology movements — we’d have no quarrel. You know, Gandhi used to point to a picture of a starving peasant and say to his followers, “Examine what you did today; how much of it helped that man?” That was his measure of spirituality. How many spiritual seekers can say the same?

You claim politics can’t liberate on a deep, personal level. Yet women have discovered that what they regarded as their own personal failures are in fact social problems shared by a lot of other women. In Chile, before the army smashed the left, housewives, factory workers, and peasants had, for the first time, some say in how their country was being run.

Such changes are personal, but they’re more than individual. They give people a sense of solidarity, a sense that they are not alone in their pain. Such changes break through that devil of isolation you call the ego, and result in a sense of power — not power over others, but power with others. Isn’t this as much a part of spiritual life as meditating or singing God’s praises?

Seeker: Perhaps there is a spiritual dimension to political change. But there is a communion possible beyond that of people to people. It is a communion with the universe as a whole, with God. To move past the devil of isolation, people must move beyond their immediate social situation. For thousands of years people have had experiences of a deeper identity, beyond their isolated egos, beyond the isolation of their tribe, their race, their country — because we are something beyond our isolated egos.

With the threat of nuclear war, the damage to the ozone layer, global warming, everyone is “oppressed,” everyone is in danger. There is no enemy “out there.” The enemy is a madness that afflicts us all. We need a global awareness, a global politics, because we all share the same fate. Your whole way of thinking — good guys fight the bad guys — is out of date.

Radical: We’re all threatened by nuclear weapons and pollution, but only some of us get money and power through them. Agricultural laborers in Mexico get cancer from the pesticides that we export, even though these same pesticides are banned here. How much do they have in common with those who get rich off the transaction? Or the landlords who own the farms?

How can we change our economies to meet the environmental threat if they are controlled by a tiny segment of society?

During the Depression, the government implemented piecemeal reforms — social security and unemployment insurance — to gain the acquiescence of the workers. It gave only what it needed to. Those in control now may well do similar things for the global threats you speak of. A little cooperation among the big powers; exporting higher cancer rates to the Third World by doing there what they are not allowed to do here; big loans to protect the rain forests; regulation of consumption. Things will be a little less crazy, a little less dangerous. But the exploiters will still be at the top. The culture will still train people to be passive, to accept powers and values imposed from above.

Seeker: And in the meantime people live, and have children, and grow old, and get sick, and die. What do you have to say about this? Not much. You know struggle, but not acceptance. You know how to try to control things, but not how to let go. I have friends whose child was born with a heart defect and died at three months. Their pain didn’t come from injustice or oppression. It came from life. There was no one to blame. It wasn’t important whether they were white or black, rich or poor. They didn’t need a political organizer; they needed to learn lessons of grief and acceptance, they needed to make meaning of their pain and move beyond it. Afterward they told me they learned more about what real happiness is from having that sorrow; they learned to feel real gratitude for the first time in their lives.

You need a spiritual perspective to remind you of your humanity, to move you beyond the differences and antagonisms and help you accept and marvel at the special things we face as humans, not as workers or bosses, women or men. People grow and get old, seasons change, babies are born, friends and parents die. What does your political activism know about commemorating the mystery of all this, marking these moments and us to emphasize skin color, or gender, or religion, over the mystery of all this, marking these moments and processes with a ritual, a celebration, a song, a prayer?

Radical: Sure we’re humans before we are workers or bosses, blacks or whites, women or men. That’s the point. Before we can truly realize our humanity, we have to tackle those things that first divide us into workers and bosses; we have to confront that which encourages us to emphasize skin color, or gender, or religion, over issues of justice.

How can we liberate ourselves without first liberating society?

Seeker: How can we liberate society without first recognizing who we really are?

“Heaven On Earth” is included in A New Creation, an anthology of contemporary spiritual voices edited by Gottlieb. Gottlieb, an associate professor of philosophy at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, is also the author of Thinking the Unthinkable: Human Meanings of the Holocaust, and two studies of Marxism.

We’re thankful to The Crossroad Publishing Company for permission to print this edited excerpt.

— T.L. Toma