Monthly Archives: December 2016

Announcing our Summer Retreat for 2017!

This will take place as usual at Anybody’s Barn, Worcestershire with our usual mix of meditation, talks, discussion, arts and free time. The dates this year are 18th-25th August, and you will be able to book for the initial weekend only if you can’t manage the whole week. Our theme is five basic principles of the Middle Way. Please go to this page for more details.

5 Principles

No speak the language (1)……on being disarmed, and perhaps re-skilled

french-3-mime

It’s just over a year since we decided to live in France, my wife and I.  We hadn’t planned to when we bought the house, but having moved in we decided to stay, instead of using it just for holidays.  The decision sort of made itself.  Perhaps the journeys back and forth were too exhausting, and there were other reasonable justifications we both agreed on.

We haven’t regretted it so far, although there have been challenges for us both; some we saw coming, some we didn’t, but none were overwhelming and most gave us sense of achievement as we tackled them together.  I’ve taken up new pursuits and my wife is enjoying a much-deserved freedom from the tyranny of round-the-clock shifts as a hospital nurse in a collapsing NHS.

But I’ve been challenged by not being able to speak or understand anything other than simple French.  I learned French at school over sixty years ago and learned it well, without ever being required to speak a word or listen to native speaker.  I read 19th century French literature (Moliere’s ‘Le Misanthrope’) and more – at that time – modern novels (Alain Fournier’s “Le Grand Meaulnes” – a kind of French ‘Catcher in the Rye’):  about three stuttering pages per 40 minute lesson. Yet though I passed my written exams well enough, I could hardly utter or understand a spoken word.

So since arriving here I’ve had to start the linguistic journey again from scratch, and from a different starting point: person-to-person communication.  One of my first efforts at making sense was in a local shop selling electrical items.  I had practised asking (in French) “Do you sell the things that allow a British plug to be inserted into a French socket?”  In the shop, the meaning was somehow totally derailed, either because I’d used the wrong word for plug, or socket, or allowed, or inserted; or all of them; or because my accent was unintelligible;  or because I was awkward and self-conscious;  or because I’d neglected to say the customary polite “Bonjour” on entering the shop.  I left without an adaptor, the shop assistant indicated somehow that they hadn’t got what she thought I wanted, and my feelings of hurt pride were soothed by her saying in English (and looking) “Sorry” , as I left.

Listening to spoken French is even more of a struggle.  We have a next door neighbour whom we met when we first went to look over the house and its untended overgrown jungle of a garden.  The estate agent had told him I spoke good French, and he followed us round keeping up a running commentary in almost unintelligible Norman dialect, from which I managed to catch an occasional familiar word, but hardly any sense whatever.  But his friendliness was infectious and, on parting, I felt in fine good humour and was able to thank him for his kind welcome which, I stammered in schoolboy French, had “touched our hearts”.

Reflecting on this later, I felt I had perhaps over-done the emotional loading in delivering this phrase in an unfamiliar language to a stranger.  The whole experience felt surreal, as I had no idea if he had understood what I said, or what impression it had made on him. I felt  uncomfortably ‘disarmed’.  It’s no co-incidence that, in using that particular word, I admit to having lost my ‘weapon’, language, or ‘weapons’, there being many others at my disposal.   On further reflection, it dawned on me that I always speak to impress or, as that is too much of a generalisation, attempting to impress is often a feature of what I say  (and write).  What impression am I trying to create in others?  It’s a daunting question, and so important to me that I get to the bottom if it, that I shan’t try to answer it here, maybe another time.

The surreal quality of living in France where I have a very diminished capacity for communicating using the comfortable conversational language of everyday life, the ‘vernacular’, has gradually faded, but is still around.  For one thing, now my ear is a little better attuned to French voices, and I’ve started to notice that, as far as my understanding goes, everyday French is much more straightforward and simply constructed than the French I learned at school.  People talk about the weather (I thought this was just a particularly English trait), and exchange ‘small talk’ (some of which escapes my understanding),  involving nods, smiles, sighs, tuts, sympathetic shrugs and head shakes of the familiar “Oh dear!” kind.

All this might seem blindingly obvious, but to me it’s a revelation, and it’s almost as if I’m learning how to communicate with my fellows from scratch.  For one thing, I’m having to give thought to what I want to say before I open my mouth.  Time and again, I realise that my default position is to impress, instead of to communicate a need or to respond to someone else’s.  This just doesn’t work.  If, as I suspect, I am trying to impress the other with my presumed superiority, communication becomes a battle of strength: either I prevail and ‘conquer’, or I submit and ‘grovel’.  Sometimes, I think, I do both!

So, I’m learning, communication seems to work much better from a position of parity of esteem, not a battle of wills.  So far, so (provisionally) good as a working theory and as a daily practice……..(more to follow on this)

 

The Middle Way on Trump

When polarities become extreme, we need the Middle Way more than ever, and the election of Donald Trump as US president polarises not just the US, but the world. That’s not just a polarisation between those who voted for him and those who desperately oppose him. Amongst those who do not support him, some urge adaptation to new ‘realities’, others eternal resistance to the normalising of this unpredictable new power in the world. The new US administration currently seems to offer horrible visions for the future: galloping global warming, mass round-ups of US immigrants, potential abuse of executive and legal power in the US on an unprecedented scale, and the untrammelled exercise of autocratic power by Russia.

What is the Middle Way in response to such? It’s not a compromise or just an appeal to moderation. As always it requires us to go back and rethink our starting assumptions. The Middle Way involves the identification and avoidance of absolute assumptions, both positive and negative, and in many past political conflicts, those absolutes have been ideological ones. Bush caused conflict because of the inflexibility of his neo-conservative view that liberal democracy could be imposed on Iraq. Reagan and Thatcher caused conflict because of their inflexible faith in market mechanisms.donald_trump_as-a-young-man

But Trump isn’t like that. He is not an ideological absolutist. He has changed party at least five times. Has been recorded contradicting himself on numerous occasions, for example on this video. Nobody can accuse him of being inflexible in terms of ideology. He crosses the lines between traditionally liberal positions (e.g. investing in infrastructure) and traditionally right wing ones (e.g. tough on immigration). So does that mean that Trump is a pragmatist who exemplifies some version of the Middle Way between ideological extremes? Unfortunately not. His positions are so variable because they apparently don’t even have a basic level of reflectiveness and consistency behind them of the kind that we generally expect from successful politicians. Far from being stuck in a dogmatic, left-brain model of how the world is or ought to be, he apparently hasn’t even reached first base in assembling a basically coherent ideological view of the world about which one might be dogmatic.

So what is Trump’s absolutism? From the evidence available to me, it seems to be just egoism. His view of the world is that he can’t be wrong or acknowledge weakness regardless of his inconsistency, and the beliefs that he holds to absolutely are just that what Donald Trump believes in right now is right. That makes him an ultra-pragmatist in the worst, not the best sense – that is, of someone who will follow political expediency based on very narrow values. He doesn’t flip-flop because he’s so integrated that he’s provisional, but rather because he’s not even integrated enough to hold an ideological position.

What about the thinking of those who voted for him? The dominant absolutism here seems to be one of nostalgia or idealism about ‘making America great again’, together with absolute rejection of ‘the establishment’, crudely identified, regardless of their actual merits or demerits. You don’t have to go into any further social or psychological profile of Trump voters to identify that tendency. These feelings seem obviously to have been absolutised, because they have not been weighed up against any assessment of the strengths and weakness of Trump’s policy or personality. Of course I don’t know whether or not that’s the case with every Trump voter, but there seems no reason to question it as a reasonable generalisation.

So, of course, Trump isn’t absolutely wrong, and nor are his voters. But I agree with his ‘liberal’ critics in being extremely concerned about the situation. His level of dogmatism is not even grown-up, to the extent that many people in the world have no idea how he is likely to act or how far he means what he said in the campaign. The Middle Way is quite compatible with overwhelming confidence in one position or another, precisely because we have recognised that we have no justification for absolute positions, and therefore a respect for evidence and the power of coherent provisionality and a clear rejection of absolutism. That confidence has to be politically opposed to Trump.

But what about the ‘you can’t normalise this outrage’ argument verses the ‘realpolitik’ argument? The Middle Way always requires us to accept the conditions, but one of those conditions is the tendency for people to socially normalise what was once considered utterly unacceptable and then forget that they have done so. That can work positively to make people forget how much better today’s world is for, say, for ethnic minorities, women, children or LGBT people than it was even 50 years ago. However, it can also work negatively to  enable the persecution of minorities to become normalised when it wasn’t before, as it did in Nazi Germany. We always need to maintain a wider awareness of the possibilities than the people in power would like us to have. So, recognise the reality of Trump but don’t normalise him. Don’t let him take over your consciousness too much. Take breaks from politics to get perspective. Remember the standards you had before Trump.

As a British person, I’m not in a position to contribute to bringing down Trump, but he is nevertheless likely to affect my life profoundly. I’d like to support all Americans who oppose him, and wish you the best of luck in removing him as soon as possible (whilst, of course, trying to engage positively with the Trump voters). That’s a politically partisan wish, but not one coming from unreflective absolutism. As far as I can see it demonstrates an application of the Middle Way, which is a method of dealing with both internal and external conflict without false neutrality. Your understanding of the Middle Way, of course, may be different because it depends on the conditions you are addressing in your life. You could conceivably reach a different conclusion whilst sincerely and reflectively applying the Middle Way. But since most readers of this blog are likely to share many features of the overall cultural and political context of the modern West with me, I doubt it.

Related: Introduction to Politics and the Middle Way

Picture: Donald Trump as a young man (public domain picture)

Poetry 127: When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer by Walt Whitman

nght-sky-1209124_960_720

When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

This weeks poem was suggested by Jim Champion (and is featured in the excellent TV series, Breaking Bad: Season 3, Episode 6).

Image courtesy of Pixabay.com

The MWS Podcast 112: Sharon Salzberg on an introduction to Loving-kindness Meditation

Our guest today is the internationally renowned Buddhist meditation teacher and best-selling author Sharon Salzberg. Sharon co-founded the Insight Meditation Society at Barre, Massachusetts with Jack Kornfield and Joseph Goldstein. She’s been leading meditation retreats around the world for over three decades and in many ways has become the leading advocate for the practice of metta or loving-kindness meditation in the West. Her books include Lovingkindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness, A Heart as wide as the world, The Power of Meditation: A 28-Day Program, Real Happiness at Work and Room to Breathe: An at Home Meditation Retreat. She’s here to talk to us today about loving-kindness meditation, her forthcoming book Real Love and a new online initiative she’s recently started called The Boundless Heart.


MWS Podcast 112: Sharon Salzberg as audio only:
Download audio: MWS_Podcast_112_Sharon_Salzberg

Click here to view other podcasts