Politics in spiritual organizations

Student: I was wondering if you would say something about what happens in spiritual organizations. 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 ’70s. 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 I 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 a local diocese; one of Canada’s leading writers who’s politically very active and had a very deep and respected reputation as a pacifist, and his wife, and 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 ’80s. I had the opportunity to meet with a woman who lived in Victoria, who’d been a direct student of Ouspensky, 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? Organization starts with a certain set of principles and it becomes an ongoing entity. What happens then, and this was identified way back in the ’50s, ’60s, actually, and you can read about it in a book called The New Industrial State, John Kenneth Galbraith details it 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? Well, survival. Second one is growth. 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.

Now you can borrow a page from Sufism here, and this comes from my reading in that. I think it’s what Stephanie was commenting under her breath about. In the end we’re social animals. And in spiritual organizations that exist for any length of time, social agendas will come to dominate, and the organization will lose its vitality. 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—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 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 just finished a three-year program, developing teachers. It was without a doubt, the most challenging thing I’ve undertaken. I made more than a few errors in the formation and in the process. 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 envelop. 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. I invested a great deal of time in this. And re-formed a few months later, in which the intention was very, very explicit. And so 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 I also now had a group that all had the same intention, and it’s a good group. So we were able to proceed through the rest of it without a problem. It was 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 except in matters that do not matter.” 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 Kierkegaard, Peter F. Drucker.


You follow? 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: Nope, 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. “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.”

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

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

Student: They purged your apostates.

Ken: Well yes, except they aren’t really encouraged [laughs].

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. In another book, which is really heavy duty slogging, but it’s very interesting, called Against Essentialism. It’s a high level book on sociological theory. Against Essentialism, by Stephen Fuchs. He’s a professor out at Virginia. Basically, it’s a 200 page argument for non-self, without any reference to Buddhism, just coming out of his own research. It’s very good. 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.

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 this is not, “do away with the organizations,” because the only way to do away with the organizations is to have many fewer people in the world at a very different level of living.

A conflict of reason and patterns

Announcer: This question was submitted by Leslie in Canada: “For a few years, I’ve been a practice leader in a small meditation group. Lately, I’ve become more aware of the attachments that are a part of my drive to be in a leadership role. I’m noticing how ineffective my leadership has been in many ways and I’m getting internal messages to give it up. So my thought process is going like this. My practice has always survived because I don’t give up. Perhaps now it’s time for my practice to move forward by doing the opposite of what I’ve traditionally done. In other words, to not give up by giving up. What are your thoughts?”

Ken: Well, if you keep thinking like this, you’re going to end up completely tied in knots and nobody’s going to be able to undo it. If we try to reason our way out of things, particularly when patterns are operating, we really tie ourselves up very, very badly. And the reason is, the operation of the pattern has access to all our intelligence, all our reasoning, and basically we’ll never win an argument with a pattern. We’ll just end up in confusion, preserve the status quo, and it doesn’t work.

So rather than trying to reason your way out of this, when you’re with the group and the question of direction comes up, be completely in your experience. Don’t try to figure anything out. Be in what arises in your body, be in the whole mess of emotions that arise, be in all of the stories that will be flying through your head, be in the whole mess. If this prevents you from being able to speak at all, so be it. Or you may find that when you are in the whole mess, some kind of response emerges naturally and it’s clear what to say and you say it. Maybe it’s appropriate, maybe it isn’t. You’ll find out.

So the first thing is to be completely in your experience and work at resting in that. And when you develop the ability to rest from there, then you can also develop the ability to act from there.

What may be helpful here is what we call “the four steps of standing up.” The first is to show up, which is what I’ve been referring to by being in your experience. The second is to open to what is. So we open to the totality of experience, internal and external, everything, not editing anything. This doesn’t mean thinking about it. It means opening to all of the sensations, everything in our bodies, in our environment, in our emotions, the whole bit. Third is, serve what is true to the limit of perception. When you’re in this whole experience, you’ll sense where the imbalance is. You’ll have a sense of what to do and you’ll act.

And then you come to the fourth step, which is, you receive the result. When you act, not out of self-interest but out of the wholeness of the situation, you may or may not have seen things correctly or as they are, because there are always limits to our perception. If you’ve seen things as they are, the action is appropriate. Then one just moves forward. If everything blows up, then you get to see what you couldn’t see before and you just receive that result. So those are the four steps. Don’t worry about being a leader or not being a leader, just be completely in your experience. See what arises.

Why are you here?

Joe: This is Joe from Los Angeles. Is there a way to balance, not letting sangha devolve into a merely social situation and the fact that I really enjoy and get things other than practice out of being part of a sangha.

Ken: This is a very good question. It’s also a very important one. It’s not really a case of balance here. It’s a case of maintaining intention. Meditation groups, study groups are groups where people come to enrich or deepen their practice. And you’re quite right, there is an element of social interaction. And in many cases, the element or the component of social interaction over time comes to be more important to people than the element of enriching or deepening their practice. Indries Shah writes about this quite extensively in terms of Sufi groups. When that happens, the group has to be disturbed, broken up, so that the people who really want social interaction, aren’t interested, and the people who want to continue to enrich and deepen their practice, continue.

So that’s something that each participant in the group needs to monitor. There’s nothing wrong with enjoying the social interaction. But one has to be clear about maintaining the intention of the group and maintaining your own intention in participating in the group. Our emotional needs and other things can take that over. And that’s something we need to be aware of. So, am I actually deepening my practice? Is this helping me in my practice? Or am I going to sleep in some kind of way here? That’s a question we need to be asking ourselves about every aspect of life that we lead.

Joe: So once again, it’s paying attention to what’s actually happening.

Ken: Yes, that’s right. It all comes down to paying attention to what’s actually happening. Because as you say, there are many groups in which that social cohesion has become more important than practice. People will believe they’re still meeting for practice, but they aren’t. And if you really bring in practice perspectives, they resent it because it disrupts the key cohesiveness of the social interaction. Then you know the group is meeting primarily for social interaction and not for the spiritual work of waking up.

Joe: It’s interesting interacting with a person who’s new to practice at all, not particularly this form of practice, and to ask them, as you often do, “Why do you want to do this?” Because they often want things that, from my limited knowledge, I know that they’re not going to get, or at least not for a long time. So how to disabuse them of this?

Ken: Why do you need to disabuse them? You’ve heard what they say, give them what will be helpful, and you let them find out for themselves. And if they say, “You know, I was coming here because I wanted X, Y, and Z, but I can see I’m never going to get X, Y, and Z here.” And then you can turn to them and say, “Yeah, that’s right.”

Joe: You’re right. There’s an element of trying to control their experience in there that I should probably pay some attention to.

Ken: Yeah. I know it comes out of wanting to help them, wanting to protect them, but we can’t really do that. All we can do is give people the methods, support them in their efforts, and let them learn from their own experience.

Joe: I remember you once saying, and correct me if I get this wrong, but the suggestion was that how you respond to questions are things that you want to say. I mean, that you’re saying to yourself too. I’ve found that to be how I tend to interact around practice. I’ve seen that in myself, that I’m saying this because it’s what I need to tell myself. Or it’s something that I want to.

Ken: Yeah. And there’s always the danger then that we’re not really seeing the other person. And so we have to be careful there.

Joe: Yeah.

Ken: Okay, good.

Joe: Thanks.

The desire to teach

Announcer: Leslie in Toronto, Canada asks: “What qualities as expressed in Buddhist teachings support the capacity to teach. What can one do in meditation practice to develop increasing capacity for teaching?”

Ken: Well, it’s a bit of the Groucho Marx theory here. You may recall that Groucho Marx once said, “I wouldn’t want to join any club that would have me as a member.” And I’ve always found that, at least in Buddhism, that when a person wants to teach it’s a kind of red flag that they probably shouldn’t teach. Because, not in all cases, but in many cases, teaching becomes a source of identity or a fixation or a position for them. There are many, many spiritually talented people who don’t teach. But that doesn’t mean that they aren’t helpful to others. They’re often very helpful to others simply in the way that they live and interact with them without ever becoming a teacher in any kind of formal sense.

So I’m not sure that it’s really helpful to think about how to use one’s practice to develop the capacity to be a teacher or to teach. We practice in order to be present in our world, in order to be able to experience whatever arises. It may be in the course of our practice, we find ourselves in situations where somebody or a group of people sense something special or different about us and ask us to give them guidance. But then that’s just another experience for us. And we respond to that naturally and as appropriately as possible.

There are certain skills connected with teaching. They can be useful to learn. Some of those skills can develop from meditation, but others, probably easier just to learn them. What can one do in meditation practice to develop increasing capacity for teaching? Well, rather than focusing on teaching per se, cultivate the heart of compassion, so that you can be open and present with the pain and suffering of others, with the pain and suffering of the world. And then I think you’ll find that the world will tell you how you can be of service, how you can help. That may be through teaching, but it may be in many other ways, too. And it doesn’t really matter which way, because it all serves the same end.