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Activism with Hope and without Anger How can anyone remain calm after reading the news of the day? The suffering of innocent people tears at our hearts. The malice and stupidity of the perpetrators raises outrage. The realization of our complicity plunges us into despair. And yet, we know that we cannot maintain our commitment to activism without a sense of hopefulness. Hopefulness can be a great help in restoring our serenity. Followers of Teilhard can find consolation in his view of evolution toward a Utopian future. What is evolving, he teaches, is consciousness. The primitive consciousness of plants, whereby they can follow the sun, for example, gives rise to the somewhat higher consciousness of animals. With human beings, consciousness reaches an entirely new level, bringing the self-reflection, reasoning, free will, loving relationships. The 14-billion-year evolution of the universe, it seems, has a purpose: to bring about this epitome of consciousness, the human species. But is this the end of evolution? It can’t be; we are still far from a perfect world. Then what is the next step? Human minds will evolve into a higher consciousness, bypassing the slow genetic mode of natural selection and proceeding through cultural evolution, through education, religion, the arts, and the institutions of society. This higher consciousness will stress cooperation and nurturing rather than competition and aggression. Finally there will be peace. How can we be sure that this Teilhardian view is right? To some extent, we can’t be sure. Yet Teilhard argues convincingly that evolution is not merely a random, by chance process. Rather, it is the working of the divine creator towards a specific goal, this state of higher consciousness, and we all participate in this continuous creation. We can take hope, then, in the understanding that the universe did not labor these 14 billion years to bring forth this extraordinary phenomenon of self-reflecting human beings only to abandon us to the vicissitudes of nature and our own folly. Of course, our survival is not a sure thing. We cannot simply sit back and wait for divine intervention. But we can take comfort in the understanding that as insight and compassion grow in our hearts, we will become engaged in whatever way we are called. We will be caught up in a growing movement to bring about the new society. Still, as we examine ourselves and observe others, we realize that we are not yet perfect. Even within the peace movement we see dissension among ourselves and anger towards the targets of our activism. Anger injures our spirit and reduces our effectiveness. Nonetheless, anger has its usefulness. When disappointments come along, we can become passive, even depressed. “What’s the use?” we may feel. The problems overwhelm us. Psychologically, a bit of righteous indignation is just the thing to rouse us. A kind of continuing intellectual outrage can spur us on to greater efforts. This kind of anger can be quite compatible with wisdom and serenity. Anger becomes destructive, however, when it lingers too long, when it colors our decisions, when it destroys our serenity. It may feel good in the moment, as we vent our emotions in shouts of derision, but it is not good for us, nor is it effective in achieving results. Anger, like other destructive emotions, cannot simply be willed into submission. A structured program of meditation can be helpful, and the centuries-old tradition of Buddhism offers an accessible approach. The vipassana (insight) tradition goes back to the oldest Buddhist teachings, consisting of sitting in silence and focusing on the breath. As distractions occur, they are simply noted, but not followed, the meditator simply returning to a focus on the breath. When used in dealing with anger, the meditation time is used to become more and more familiar with one’s anger, when it arises, what it feels like, how it dissipates. With time this kind of awareness spills over into daily life. With familiarity with our own anger comes an ability to own it as our own, not blaming the anger on someone else, not saying “You made me angry!” In the third stage, we recognize that the anger is not necessary or useful to us and we allow it to fade away. Another approach is the loving kindness meditation stemming from the Mahayana tradition. Visualization is used to picture ourselves in joyful circumstances, making the image as vivid as possible by calling on all tour senses to contribute. Then we picture ourselves at a time when we needed comfort, again making the image vivid. We then send the serenity from our first image to our second image with the affirmations: “May I (you) be filled with loving kindness,” “May I (you) be well,” “May I (you) be peaceful and at ease,” “May I (you) be happy.” The process is then repeated with the second image being a loved person, then an acquaintance, and finally an “enemy.” A third approach is the Tonglen (Taking and Giving) practice of Tibetan Buddhism. Tonglen comes from a Tantric tradition which holds that we are capable of transforming any negative into its opposite. Here again visualization is used. The inhaled breath is visualized as bringing in and completely filling our body with an obnoxious vapor, malodorous, accompanied by strident sounds, ugly and in every way unpleasant. At the height of the in breath, we visualize it as instantly transformed into its opposite, so that we exhale a pleasant vapor, a golden light, sweet and fragrant, accompanied by a beautiful melody. As the practice proceeds, we assign our destructive emotion, in this case anger, to the inhaled breath and its opposite to the exhaled breath. Our breathing, then, transforms our anger into compassion. These practices can be powerful in softening our hearts and replacing anger with love. Accompanied by a resurgence of hope, they can help us engage in peacemaking with serenity and love. Dom Roberti |