The four steps of standing up: a review

Ken: Saturday, October the 24th, There Is No Enemy. Afternoon session.

There are a good number of loose ends to tidy up, and I think the first one will be from this morning. We were going through the four stages, but I was going through the four steps of standing up, and the first step, just to review here, is showing up. The second step is opening to what you experience. And I said there were several techniques which could be used for that. One’s the five-step practice, which allows us to open more deeply. Another is the primary practice, which works both broadly and deeply.

Student: Did you give us the primary?

Ken: I gave it in previous retreats and we’ll be putting something up on the web fairly soon. I’ve been working with a group of volunteers. Laura’s been working with me on this too. It started off as a simple project transcribing podcasts. It’s no longer a simple project. And one of the things that’s come out from a stockbroker in Switzerland, I think, or Germany, that’s Clemens. He wrote this neat little thing, which if you’ve been listening to a podcast and you like a section, note where it begins in time and note where it ends in the time. And he’s created this thing—and we’re going to get it up and running I hope in a month or so—where you just type in those two times, it goes to that thing, clips it out and gives it to you, and you’re like, “Whoa.’ He’s got a whole bunch of clips, and one of them is the primary practice, so I can put up a link to that where he is just gone through and said, I’d like that one just clip, clip, clip. And that just opened up all kinds of possibilities. So we’ve been messing around with that stuff. And the whole idea is to make the information in all of the podcasts more accessible to people.

Then third step is serving the direction of the present, and your work in discerning, figuring out the direction of the present is going to come primarily from your work at stage two. And then you have to serve it. That is move into action. And that’s where I offered the framework of the four stages of conflict. And that’s simply one way of looking at situations. I have found that looking at difficult situations in terms of conflict, actually a very useful way and people say, “It’s such a negative way,” but as you experienced in the fire circle today, when you really look at it this way and you really go into it, you begin to see what actually needs to happen for something to work. And so it’s not really a very negative way, it’s a way of actually producing a lot of positive because you really find out what is going to work. In the pencil exercise you haven’t got any possibility of working that exercise effectively except through building a relationship. Who would’ve thought.

And in my own experience, many, many conflicts arise simply because the relationship aspect has been neglected. And that when you invest that additional energy in the relationship, an awful lot of conflicts just disappear. They vanish because the conflicts have been calling attention to the fact that there are problems in the relationship.

And then the fourth is receiving the result. Now receiving the result is accepting what you’re experiencing, and not trying to make it something else. So, receiving the result is letting go of control of the attempt to control one’s experience. And this is very closely associated with compassion. And I want to give an example of this, which came from my business consulting and I just found it very, very powerful.

Receiving the result: an example

Ken: I’d had a relatively sleepless night, just didn’t sleep well. And I went to see a client, one of the businesses I work with. And he was extremely upset. He was so upset that he couldn’t sit down. He was just pacing around his office.

Student: Talking about you about something else?

Ken: Something else, yes. And I said, “What are you so upset about?”

He says, “Personal matter. Not suitable for us to talk about.”

I said, “Well, if you’re this upset, it’s certainly affecting your ability to do your work. So I think it comes into the domain of coaching. So, let’s talk about it.”

Okay, now this is the person, middle of his life, let’s say forties. He’s gay. He comes from a very conservative family in the midwest who’s quite religious, and he has a brother who’s straight. And so it turns out that my client, who’s gay was earlier in his life married, and has a son who’s straight. And his brother who married a woman who’s a member of a fundamentalist church. And so he joined the church. They have a son who’s gay. And so my client’s gay nephew, if you can follow this, was entering his senior year at university or college. And his father had said, “I’m tired of you living this gay lifestyle. I’m not funding you your final year.” And this nephew had gone through deprogramming, things like that just to keep the relationship with his father. He knew it wouldn’t change anything. So he appealed to his uncle for help, like “What do I do?” And my client’s brother, anticipating this, had called him and said, “If you intervene in this anyway, I’ll regard it as a declaration of war.” And so this is where I entered the scene.

My client, all the old hurts were up. He was concerned about his nephew. All the old stuff that he thought he’d worked through with the family was just up. He was just so upset and very, very understandably so I asked him a few questions and said, “Look, contact the university. I’m almost positive they will have a fund set up so that you can make an anonymous donation. It’ll go to your nephew.” And as it turns out, they actually had a fund explicitly set up for this purpose so people could make anonymous donations and they would be funneled to a particular person, and no one knew where they would come from. He could take care of his nephew’s education, not a problem. And then he just paced around the office saying, “He’s nuts, he’s crazy, and etc., referring to his brother. His brother right now was the enemy. And I was sitting there with about three hours sleep.

I said, “Just a second.” I sat there thought for a while, I said—and I’ll say exactly what I said in that conversation. I said, “Well, your brother’s not crazy. He’s fucked.”

My client said “What?”

I said, “Yeah, he’s fucked.” That got his attention. He sat down and said, “What do you mean, Ken?”

I said, “Well, you look at it from this point of view. If he accepts that his son is gay, then he loses his church, and maybe he loses his wife. That’s unacceptable. And if he accepts the church’s teachings and maintains those relationships, then he loses his son. That’s unacceptable. So the only rational solution for your brother is that his son’s not gay.”

Now, I bring this up because it’s a very good example of not accepting the result. And what prevents us from accepting how things are when things transpire is usually our belief systems. Because belief is about making the world conform to what’s we’re holding inside. That’s why we can try to control things and make it fit so that we don’t have to change. And that’s exactly what this person was doing. And my client actually got it. He went, “Oh yeah.” And he’s still very upset, but it opened up a door. It opened up a door for him.

Seeing what we couldn’t see before

Ken: So when we serve the direction of the present to the best of our ability, a lot of different things can happen. But I’m just going to put them into two categories for our discussion. One is, things work out—okay, that’s nice. And the other is, it’s a big mess. Our work at that point is again, to apply There Is No Enemy and receive that result. And in doing so, my own experience is that we will generally see what we couldn’t see before. And I say that any lesson which does not diminish our ability to make further efforts is cheap, no matter how much it costs. Now we got to see something we couldn’t see.

Student: And that’s the compassion.

Ken: Well, receiving the result, not trying to control it, not trying to make it fit, letting go of trying to control the experience. That’s the essential gesture of compassion. And if you look, when somebody is in pain, can we be with them without trying to control the situation? And many times people see somebody in pain, the first thing they want to do is to get rid of the pain. They’re trying to control the situation so they don’t have to feel the discomfort. That’s not compassion. First step is can we just be there? And it’s only by being there and letting go of all of our own ideas about what should happen, things like that, that we may have any chance of actually seeing what might actually be of assistance. And sometimes—and you hear this again and again—all the other person wants some companionship, just someone who’s actually there. And this is certainly true of people in hospice situations or trauma or something like that. They’re often so fragile, they don’t want anybody doing anything to them. But having someone who is willing to be there in their pain is extraordinarily meaningful. And that’s essential compassion. Only when you can really be there, can you see the possibility of seeing if anything further would be of help. And because you’ve made the effort to be there, then the other person may be open. If you read books like Who Dies or Healing into Life and Death or whatever it was, that one by Stephen Levine.

Student: I thought, How We Die.

Ken: No, Who Dies is one, but there is another one,

Student: Healing Into—

Ken: Living and Dying or something like that, which has a lot of very practical exercises, but all of them consist of first coming in and just being there and then seeing what’s possible, not coming in with an agenda. David, do you have a question?

Compassion as method or as a result

David: I just wanted to comment that I feel that one of the things desirable at that point is to be heard and not changed. Yes, there’s a big difference. Yeah.

Ken: Yeah, that’s a very good point. So, now the topic of this retreat, There Is No Enemy in one sense it’s about working with anger, because aversion that fundamental mechanism within us, is what creates enemies, is what generates the whole notion of enemy. And one of theses I’ve been working with is that the sense of an enemy out there arises because we are averse to something that’s arising in us. So that’s one way of looking at this. The second is there is no enemy. You can also see it as a philosophy of compassion. And one of the reasons I haven’t talked explicitly about compassion is there are two ways of looking at compassion, and they’re both important, but I’ve chosen to emphasize one. You can look at compassion as a method, and you can look at compassion as a result. And in this case, I’m looking at compassion as a result, which is why I’ve been stressing a lot of other methods, the result of which will be compassionate action. And the reason I do this—probably several reasons—but the one that I’m thinking of is that I’ve seen many, many instances where people have tried to figure out what the compassionate thing to do in a situation is, and it’s just been a big mess. Whereas if you adopt the principles of the situation itself, and you really apply those deeply, the result will be compassion.

I’ll give you an example of this. We all know about the conflict between unions and management.

Student: Between?

Ken: Unions and management. What is the genesis for unions? Bad management. If managers actually applied good management principles, there wouldn’t be any unions. They would naturally treat their workers fairly, compassionately, if you wish, because they’re a vital part of the enterprise. And so unions are a reaction to bad management. You get the same thing in medicine. You get the same thing in all kinds of organizations. You get the same thing in families. Good parenting will produce people who are open and sensitive to the needs of others. The reason people are shut down to the needs of others is because somebody shut down to their own needs. So, here I’m looking at compassion as a result and a very, very important result.

Compassion: the definitive spiritual quality

Ken: This I’ve mentioned in previous retreats, but not all of you may have heard me talk about this. If you look at the great religions of the world, one way of looking at them is to look at what they specialize in. Christianity specializes in devotion. Buddhism specializes in insight. We have all the stuff about wisdom and piles of logic and stuff, but very, very good specialization there. Hinduism specializes in ecstasy, bliss. I asked a Jewish friend of mine, “What does Judaism specialize in?” [Laughter] That’s the joke part. But what Judaism specializes in is the law.

Student: The law?

Ken: The law, Torah. And so you have these intricate debates and interpretations of Torah, what a lot of Jewish teaching is built on. And subtle and profound, and also some respects, highly problematic. But I’ll get to that in a minute. One can go on and on. But that’s enough for our purposes.

Student: Islam?

Ken: Islam? Devotion, Allah, all the Abrahamic traditions devotion is a very important element. Sufism specializes in ecstasy and insight, but Sufism doesn’t regard itself as Islam. Sufism says, “We are currently using Islam as our vehicle.” That’s a whole nother thing. The Sunnis and the Shiites are always trying to get the Sufis ejected. Bahaá’í is a reaction to some of the more stringent aspects of Judaism and Islam. And as far as I know, the Bahaá’ís regard their prophet as continuing the lineage of the prophet of the biblical prophets. Yeah, so I don’t know enough about Bahaá’í to know exactly what they specialize in. Pardon?

Student: Mercy.

Ken: Mercy. Okay. So, Jainism specializes in purity. It’s an Indian religion, ultrapure, J A I N.

Student: Jainism.

Ken: Yeah, it’s pronounced “jane,” but it it’s spelled J A I N. if you say “jane” they say, “No, ‘jīne.”

Anyway, so I found this very interesting. Yet all of these religions teach compassion. Why don’t they specialize in compassion? I mean, Christianity teaches compassion. Islam teaches compassion. Buddhism certainty teaches compassion. Why don’t they specialize in it? Why? Because it’s so damn hard. And you can look at their areas of specializations are all ways that they exit from compassion. You can look at their specializations as ways that they exit from compassion. I’ll say that again. You can look at their areas of specialization as ways that they exit from compassion. Compassion is extremely hard because when you live a life of compassion, you are an ongoing response to the pain and suffering of the world. Now, to me, compassion is the definitive spiritual quality.

Emptiness: a gate to compassion

Ken: In Buddhism, we have this idea that some kind of insight or wisdom or awareness is the definitive spiritual quality. But I had a very interesting experience a few years ago, which culminated in a wonderful conversation with a colleague of mine who had been a student of Lama Yeshe back in the early seventies. And I had some very deep questions. And he, as most people do with my very deep questions, they just laugh. Not sarcastically in the thing, just I asked this question and they just laugh. And then they come out with something usually quite wonderful. And what this person came out with, he said, “Well, you have to remember what Lama Yeshe said.” “What did Lama Yeshe say?” “The reason we seek to know emptiness is so that we can be compassionate, we can exercise compassion. Because as long as you’re holding onto any belief about yourself or any idea of yourself, you aren’t able to be an ongoing response to the pain and suffering of the world.” I thought “That’s wonderful.” It was a really wonderful thing to hear because we usually regard compassion as means and emptiness as wisdom. And this perspective actually flips the two. Emptiness or non-self—whichever way you want to put it—is the means to becoming compassion, to being the embodiment of compassion. So that was one take on it.

A second take came from reading Brian Victoria’s book, Zen at War. Now, Brian Victoria is an Australian Zen teacher, I think. And he was very disturbed to find that many of the great roshis unequivocally supported the Japanese war effort. And in particular bought into the completely specious interpretation that the Japanese army was the instrument of karma. And so what it was doing was sorting out the universe, etc. I mean, this is as specious a view of things as the crusaders were doing the will of God, back in the 12th century, which was a similar justification.

Student: Isn’t that what any paranoid schizophrenic worth their salt was going to say?

Ken: Perhaps. Yeah. So, he explored what was the Zen institution’s relationship with the government, etc. And he wrote this book called Zen at War, which goes into this in some detail as well as the Pure Lands sect in Japanese Buddhism. And he found that some priests and some roshis completely supported it. And these were people who were regarded as having a very serious level understanding and ability, and others didn’t buy into it at all. And they were during the war, relegated to country temples and things like that kind of shut out of the whole system. Suzuki Roshi was one of those. Relegated, yeah. And Suzuki Roshi was very low ranking. At the best of times. He would’ve been a very low ranking priest in the Zen hierarchy in Japan. But when he investigated the distinction, well, as I read this book, this is very interesting because we find the same thing in Christian priests and the same thing in the imams in Islam. So I started asking myself, what is the quality which allows you to see the inequities and suffering created by your own culture when you don’t have any possibility of stepping outside your culture?

When you step outside your culture, you go live abroad, you come back and look at your own culture, you can see, “Oh, that doesn’t make any sense. They do it differently over there,” and so forth. But when you live in your own culture, you don’t have that opportunity. But there are some people who are able to see the inequities and the suffering they cause as other than natural law. And the conclusion I came to is it’s not insight, which allows you to see that; it’s compassion. So this makes compassion a lot more important than insight.

And the third take on this for me was when I read Karen Armstrong’s book, The Battle for God, which is her usual, highly detailed, very informative history of fundamentalism in the Abrahamic traditions. It’s very interesting, but she’s really a historical scholar and she’s got to wade through all of that stuff. But she makes it very, very clear that the transition comes when the way that you’re viewing the world through your religion becomes a belief and an ideology. The moment it becomes an ideology, you now have the justification to eliminate anybody who doesn’t buy into it. You have the one truth. And so you lose the relationship with compassion. And she sees that as when a school or a tradition loses that connection with compassion, then they become an ideology and then they move into violence.

And along the same lines, I used to be on the AIDS Interfaith Council when the AIDS epidemic was raging. This is back in the late eighties, and I was Buddhist representative. It was mainly made up of pretty liberal Jewish rabbis and a number of quite well-informed Episcopalian, Methodist, and to some extent left-leaning Christian clerics. But there were a smattering of us, like me from Buddhism. But there was a fundamentalist minister from Orange County. This woman—I never learned her name—but I saw her in action a couple of times and she really, really impressed me because here’s this woman who’s coming from this fundamentalist thing, and she would just stand up with all of these people of totally different political persuasions and just tell them how it was in her community. Very courageous.

And she just said, “Look, if you come into our community and you tell people that they have to accept gay rights and things like that, they’re just going to close their doors, you’re never going to get anywhere. But if you come in and you tell them how people are suffering, you’re going to find that their hearts are open, and they’ll do everything they can to help you.” And that was exactly the case. And so I just thought she was wonderful because she just called it straight as it was. And very recently I had another experience which I found very interesting.

I was at a panel discussion at University of Southern California on the role of religion in a global world, or that’s a bit of a redundancy, but in the modern world, global society. And most of the discussion was pretty dry, but one person had been on a government panel seeking to develop policy in an area that was an important concern to a number of religious groups. And so they had brought in leaders of all of these religions to help them have a discussion on what the policy should be in this area. And in the morning session, they had this discussion and it had just gone absolutely nowhere. They just fought with each other and disagreed and things like that. So over lunch, the people who were facilitating this got together and said, “Okay, well that was hopeless. Let’s try another approach.” And so they brought in three or four scenarios and said, “In this situation, what would you do according to your religion?” And they went through three or four of these, and they were stunned to find that every religious group decided to do more or less exactly the same thing. That’s the response to these difficult situations, the exercise of compassion. But they justified it for completely different reasons.

So, they could agree on the action, but not on the reasons for it. And this is something very, very important to remember: that how we arrive at things is actually less important than what we do. And too often we want people to arrive at things for the same reason we do, but then we’re trying to control things. Just a second, Roger.

The empty boat

Ken: So, in this retreat, what I’m presenting here is the possibility that when you actually approach the world using the techniques and tools that I’m trying to get across to you, even without thinking about compassion, you’re going to find yourself being in the world in a way which is the expression of compassion. And many of you have probably heard about the empty boat. If you bump into a boat in a fog. People heard this one. It’s usually presented as: you’re rowing in a boat and you bump into a boat, and you start yelling at the person who bumped into you for getting in your way. And then the fog clears enough to see that the boat’s empty, so your anger disappears. And this comes up in Chuang Tzu, but where he goes with it is actually very different from that more modern interpretation. And I want to read you this excerpt, or Thomas Merton’s summary of this:

He who rules men lives in confusion;
He who is ruled by men lives in sorrow.
Yao therefore desired
Neither to influence others
Nor to be influenced by them.
The way to get clear of confusion
And free of sorrow
Is to live with Tao
In the land of the great Void.

If a man is crossing a river
And an empty boat collides with his own skiff,
even though he be a bad-tempered man
He will not become very angry.
But if he sees a man in the boat,
He will shout at him to steer clear.
If the shout is not heard,
he will shout again,
And yet again, and begin cursing.
And all because there is somebody in the boat.
Yet if the boat were empty,
He would not be shouting,and not angry.

The Way of Chuang Tzu, The Empty Boat, Thomas Merton, p. 114


Now, here’s where the difference is:

If you can empty your own boat
Crossing the river of the world,
No one will oppose you,
No one will seek to harm you.

The straight tree is the first to be cut down.
The spring of clear water is the first to be drained dry.
If you wish to improve your wisdom,
And shame the ignorant;
To cultivate your character,
And outshine others;
A light will shine around you
As if you had swallowed the sun and the moon.
You will not avoid calamity.

A wise man has said:
“He who is content with himself
Has done a worthless work.
Achievement is the beginning of failure.
Fame is the beginning of disgrace.”

Who can free himself from achievement
And from fame, descend and be lost
Amid the masses of men?
He will flow like Tao, unseen.
He will go about, like Life itself
With no name and no home.
Simple is he, without distinction.
To all appearances he is a fool.
His steps leave no trace. He has no power.
He achieves nothing, has no reputation.
Since he judges no one,
No one judges him.
Such is the perfect man.
His boat is empty.

p. 115


And the reason why this I think is important is that when your own boat is empty, then not only will you never encounter opposition, you’ll never meet an enemy. You’ll also be free to respond to what arises in the world around you and respond to as you’ll become an ongoing response to the pain and suffering of the world. Okay, Roger.

Spiritual organizations

Roger: When you were talking about Zen at War and the political situation, I was wondering—it’s not anywhere near on the same level— but I was wondering if you would say something about what happens in spiritual organizations when people … My experience has been that there’s usually some sort of a political mechanism operating that is not spoken, and that causes people to do things that are completely opposite from what they’re professing.

Ken: Yes. This is a question that arose for me in the early seventies. And at that time I was living in Vancouver, and it was exactly this question. The way I put it was, “How do you build an organization which does not inevitably betray its principles?” which think is what you’re talking about. And I talked with a number of people in Vancouver, a very senior Catholic priest who had lost out in a power struggle for the bishop position in local diocese; one of Canada’s leading writers, politically, very active and had a very deep and respected reputation as a pacifist, and his wife, several other people. And they all gave me basically the same reply, which was. “Impossible, can’t be done.” And I agree with them for reasons I’ll explain in a minute. But after I came back from the three-year retreats, I was visiting Vancouver, and this is now 10 years later in the early eighties. I had the opportunity to meet with a woman who lived in Victoria who’d been a direct student of Ouspenski, who was one of Gurdjieff’s close associates, and put the question to her over dinner. And she looked at me and said, “Very interesting, very interesting. It all comes down, as Mr. Gurdjieff would say, it all comes down to who likes whom.” That’s a really important thing to remember.

So, what happens? The organization starts with a certain set of principles. and it becomes an ongoing entity. What happens then? And this was identified back way back in fifties, sixties actually, and you can read about it in a book called, The New Industrial State, John Kenneth Galbraith. Details there, but there’ll be many other places. Organizations bring to power those people who serve the interests of the organization, not the principles of the organization, the interests of the organization. What is the first interest of an organization?

Student: Survival.

Ken: Well, survival. Second one is growth. And sometimes because in modern capitalist organizations, growth is essential for survival, then they come down to the same thing. So, people who are going to ensure the survival of the organization come into power and things change. And it always happens.

Spiritual work is asocial

Ken: Now, you can borrow a page from Sufism here, and this has come through my reading in that, and I think it’s what Stephanie was commenting under her breath. In the end, we’re social animals and in spiritual organizations that exists for any length of time social agendas will come to dominate, and the organization will lose its vitality. And the vitality will go into social connection. And there’s nothing you can do about this because we’re social animals. To preserve the vitality, the spiritual vitality and spiritual work is essentially asocial. One has to remember that.

Asocial. Okay? Then the only thing you can do is disrupt the social structures sufficiently so that the people who are interested in the social structures get fed up and leave. And the people who are interested in the spiritual work stay, it’s the only thing you can do. And so in Sufism, you have many groups and the teacher will just disappear when things reach … And everything will fall apart. And then you’ve got to find your teacher again, and he will leave no forwarding address because to leave a forwarding address would be to allow things to continue. I’ve experienced this myself. I’ve just finished a three-year program developing teachers. It was without doubt, the most challenging thing I’ve undertaken. I made more than a few errors in the process. And I’m pulling this out because there’s a quote I want to get. I think I can get it fairly easily here. But in the middle of it, we hit a crisis in the way the group was working, and it was exactly because of what I’m describing.

I had made a certain decision about something, and it was very interesting. A third of the group thought it was the right decision, no problem. Another third of the group, they didn’t care. And the other third of the group felt I had made the wrong decision because it destroyed social cohesion. And what was most interesting is that third of the group felt that they were speaking for the whole group. So you can see how that would develop. And so I blew the whole thing up and said, we’re on indefinite hiatus. And that just scared the bejesus out of everybody. And then I had long discussions with everybody in the group, invested a great deal of time in this, and reformed a few months later in which the intention was very, very explicit. Several people dropped away in that hiatus. And what I was left with was a smaller group, which made things more workable in and of itself, but also now had a group that they all had the same intention. So we were able to proceed through the rest of it without problem. And it is a very important experience for me. Here’s the quote that I mentioned the other day from Drucker, which touches on this topic,

Because man must exist in society, there can be no freedom in except in matters that do not matter.

Student: Say that again.

Ken: This is the first half of the quote.

Because man must exist in society there can be no freedom except in matters that do not matter. But because man must exist in the spirit, there can be no social rule, no social constraint in matters that do matter.

The Unfashionable Kierkegard, Peter F. Drucker

You follow?

Student: So that’s the social

Ken: Pardon? That’s the asocial aspect. I’ll read it again:

Because man must exist in society there can be no freedom except in matters that do not matter. But because man must exist in the spirit, there can be no social rule, no social constraint, in matters that do matter.

Put this into an organizational setting. You’re free to do whatever you want in an organizational setting, as long as it doesn’t matter to the organization, as soon as it matters to the organization, no, you’re not so free. But when it comes to spiritual practice, you have to be free to go wherever you want. Because you have no idea where it’s going to take you. And we live in that tension. That’s where we live.

Student: The second point there?

Ken: But because man must exist in the spirit, [otherwise he’s dead] there can be no social rule, no social constraint in matters that do matter.

Roger: So, it sounds to me like what you’re saying is that spiritual community is sort of a oxymoron.

Ken: It has to be handled very, very carefully.

Student: You purged your apostates.

Ken: Well, yes, except they actually purged—

Student: I said, you purged your apostates. It was necessary for the survival of the mission.

Ken: Yes. But this is where things come around.

Functioning as an individual in a world of organizations


Ken: And another book, which is really heavy duty slogging, but it’s very interesting, called Against Essentialism. It’s a book, a high level book on sociological theory

Student: Against?

Ken: Essentialism. Stephan Fuchs. He’s a professor out at Virginia, F U C H, Stephan Fuchs. Anyway, basically, it’s a 200 page argument for non-self, without any reference to Buddhism, just coming out of his own research. And it’s very good. But he points out such things as: “Traditions are formed by those who do untraditional things.” They define the new tradition. Traditions are not defined by people who do traditional things. Okay, that’s interesting.

So, now I do want to make a point here. We’ve been talking about what happens in organizational settings. Organizations are necessary. We cannot function in the society without the level of organizations that we have. So it’s not do away with the organizations because the only way to do without the organizations is to live many fewer people in the world at a very different level of living. The question is, “How do you retain your ability to function as an individual in the world that is populated by organizations?” And my own feeling is that all of the emphasis on leadership is a distraction from that question. That’s why I really find the whole stuff on leadership very irritating. It’s distracting people from what the essential question is. “How do you live as an individual in the world.” As an individual with your own sense of power and worth, etc, in a world which is populated by organizations? And of which you’re necessarily going to be a part. Other questions? We have a few minutes before. Very few minutes. Yes, please.

Student: The empty boat sounds like a recipe for pacifism. I mean, an empty boat doesn’t come down from wherever to Los Angeles and start teaching Buddhism and just react, right? Passivity, I meant not pacifism.

Ken: Yes. You reminded me of one of my favorite quotes. “The opposite of courage is conformity, not cowardice. Even a dead fish goes with the flow.” I love that one. Being an empty boat in this sense doesn’t mean being passive. It means very definitely not reacting. And it also means discerning with extreme acuity, the direction of the present, because then you are moving in accordance with, and you’re helping things move in accordance with how are they’re evolving. So you can have tremendous influence, but it will seem that you’re doing nothing. And you find this reflected in the Tao Te Ching. There are various translations, but this is the one that I know: “The best leaders are only known to exist because the people think they’ve done it themselves. The next best are loved and admired. The worst are hated and feared.”

Now. So, it doesn’t seem like you’re doing anything. You may be actually working very hard. So it isn’t pacifism. It’s working in accordance with things. And that’s why nobody notices. And another example is the way that Thomas Cleary opens his introduction to The Art of War. And the emperor is ill, and he sends for the most famous physician in China, and the physician comes and heals him. And the emperor says, “I hear you have two brothers, our, are they also physicians like you?”

And he said, “The oldest of us is able to detect illness before it enters the house. And he takes steps accordingly. So nobody knows anything about him. The middle brother, he’s able to detect illness as soon as it enters a person, and take steps accordingly. So a few people in our neighborhood know something about him. As for me, I respond to the signs of illness, prescribe potions, stick needles in people. So my reputation is spread far and wide.”