Blog 2. The Calling.

I’d like to talk about our session with Kazu Haga, founder of East Point Peace Academy in Oakland, about nonviolence. Kazu seems to be a person who practices what he preaches, and that is really what I want to learn to do. Fundamentally, I’m looking for my calling in life. I’m looking for that thing that I can do all the time. I want to go to work at do that thing, and come home and do it more. I don’t want to live an apathic or checked-out life, ignoring all the injustice around me, and go to work every day to work on conflicts somewhere else in the world, someone else’s conflicts. I want to be integrated. One person, one life, one work.

Kazu talked about Gandhi’s philosophy, saying it contained three parts: self-purification, a constructive program, and satyagraha, the political action. I love concepts like the one of self-purification, as Kazu described it. Self-purification, in this case, means working on yourself, the inner work to reduce your confusion, your ignorance, and increase your ability to be an authentic, fully-realized person. For me this entails knowing and accepting all parts of yourself, dealing with pain and trauma, and taking care of oneself.

The constructive program was also an enlightening concept. The idea is that you spend most of your time working on the reality you’d like to see, rather than protesting or fighting the realities you don’t want. Then, when the status quo or the establishment threatens the reality you are working towards, you engage in strategic action to bring attention to that. It’s possible that I have over-simplified the idea. But the key point is that you don’t spend your life railing against the machine, the establishment, the evil in the world. You work towards the reality you’d like to see, you build community, you create livelihood, you do whatever it is you’d like to do, and then when you have to, you do something to disrupt the status quo or dismantle part of the dominant system. For me, the advantages of this approach are that 1) you won’t burn yourself out protesting or feeling terrible and 2) you will use disruptive action strategically, where you think it will make the most difference, not indiscriminately.

In terms of a constructive program, it’s clear to me that I want to build community. But it’s unclear to me whether the lack of community lies within me or without. The thing with me is that it doesn’t really matter whether there is community around me or not; in either case, I will not feel belonging. And it’s increasingly clear to me that that feeling has more to do with me than it does with others. It’s hard for me to see through my own faulty perceptions, to tell what is reality and what is my interpretation of it. Is the problem “in here” or “out there”? Maybe finding the community I seek is about integrating all the parts of myself. In my first version of this blog I wrote: “Insert Rumi quote here about inviting in strangers, emotions, for they are here to teach us something.” Here’s the actual poem (Coleman Barks translation):

The Guest House

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice.
meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.

Be grateful for whatever comes.
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

To build community I would have to trust others, which I don’t. I would have to be able to relax around other people, which I can’t. It’s frustrating to find, yet again, that I have to work on myself. But in Kazu’s presentation, self-purification did not precede the constructive program; it was simultaneous with it. So perhaps the two can proceed together – internal and external healing as one.

Kazu also said the Tao of Pooh is his Bible. Mine is a collected translation of Rumi poems.