Religions & Politics.., Buddhism & Mindfulness…
Beyond a partisan approach to awakening.
In what I think could be an ‘unconscious attempt to avoid responding at best to our human reality’, two distorted partisan camps always seem to emerge: Reduced Reality & Augmented Reality.
The first one tends to reduce the situation to a very pragmatic challenge of personal or group adaptation to the norms, through control. The latter tends to extrapolate toward grandiloquence, awe and infatuation of experience.
In the outside world, we can easily recognize the camps of Politics & Religions, but within politics and within religion the same split occurs. Liberals & conservators, progressive & orthodox, dogmatic & contemplatives, esoteric & exoterics…. In France we also have Asterix & Obelix two comics caricatures of a deep friendship that can turn quickly into the worst partisan division!
But joking apart, what we might fail to recognize is how deeply this reality game goes within the fields of meditation, in our minds and in the institutions. For example within the camps of Mindfulness & Buddhism, and within Buddhism itself within the different camps and vehicules… but it also can be seen within other more subtil spectrum of spirituality…
Welcome to the enduring game of Pragmatism vs Elation !
A Game of Thrones it seems, but seeing it solely as a power game would make us miss the most important purpose of this discrete yet primordial game: How to navigate through two very complementary forces of reality.
What there is, and What is possible.
Obviously, games of thrones there are, and they are very effective at distracting us from more important purposes. It seems that our unconscious attempt to avoid dealing with a constantly changing complex reality did not have to wait for the digital age to get us glued to our (inner) screens !
So, let’s try to dig a bit further into the different level of this game of complementarities:
–On the external level of our existence, religions manage what binds us together – the values – in order that we can act together for our common good. While politics manage daily life – the city – to better off the functionality and opportunity for everyone. Managing values and managing outputs are very complementary, it is about the management of our human activity. No?
But each side of this complementarity, taken on their own or wishing to function on their own, creates a serious bias then becomes a serious problem. Politicians and political parties end up functioning so much like religions, while religions get so political !
So politics & religion seem to be the first partisan split. But then within politics it keep splitting as liberal-conservative for example, and within religion as progressive & orthodox, dogmatic & contemplative, etc..
This apparently innocent game of augmented or reduced reality that rides the wheel of pragmatism-elation has shaped our socio-cultural evolution up to now. Depending on how we play that game, it will shape our future response to the malleable reality we have inherited.
If working as a ‘happy couple’ – doing the best of what can be done within what there is – our awakened response to reality could very well bring the eve of a socio-cultural very positive evolution. And that is what Up-Stream is all about.
If not, our unconscious bias can keep dissimulating themselves and continue to make us avoid the social and political reality, as well as our direct, conscious involvement with it. Thus it will re create and increase some of the negative trends we have been following.
Luckily, realizing the extent of that game opens a lot of doors toward a better management of this malleable reality of ours. But as usual, the work start at home:
– On the inner level of our existence , the split between more pragmatic Mindfulness techniques and more religious flavored Buddhist practices can create a duality that illustrates also very clearly what I have called ‘the unconscious attempt to avoid dealing with reality’. Mindfullness have a tendency to avoid socio-cultural-political reality by making people efficient without reconsidering the system, while buddhist will focus their attention of the here-after, having concluded that our socio-cultural-political reality is just an illusion compared to the dream of nirvana or extinction of manifested life. Those distorted views reduce our choices to: purposeless efficiency vs pointless existence or paradise illusion. One side promotes to be more efficient within our hamster wheel, while the other said there is no wheel, or oscillate between there is no wheel and there is millions of golden paradise wheels in the hereafter!
The effect on our mind of such mostly unconscious splits, will over reduce or over augment our vision. Both partisanship will tend to make us miss the crude yet malleable reality, but most importantly they will blear or conceal the change of paradigm & behavior that is required in order to foster in our world common good, fairness, education, intelligence etc….
–On an even deeper psychological level of our existence, such split or bias can also be noticed through the complementary game of ‘elaboration and non elaboration’ or ‘creativity and presence’. (the advanced tools of ‘projection & essence’ of our up-stream framework are meant specifically for the management of such level of complementarity). It is still the root game of ‘what there is and what we can do with it’, but just on a more subtil inner level.
As this root game grows out of balance, it slowly internalizes itself on the mind level and crystallizes as co-emergent beliefs & blindness. It will then externalizes itself further through communication bias such as proselytism or reclusionism, then on the activity level as deeds or non-action as well as performance or dogmas… Whatever the name or the aspect or the form it takes it still boils down to duality instead of complementarity and can easily lead to different sets of distorted camps …
Within Buddhism, the integration of such duality-complementarity gave root to the different major ‘vehicles‘. Reductionism led to hinayana and expansionism led to mahayana then vajrayana. Those 3 schools represent in fact 3 complementary aspects of spiritual development and tools, (stability, openness and activity) but ended up splitting structurally and mentally into major solid religious entities & conscious or unconscious beliefs and bias.
So, how to deal with all of that?
To go beyond those limiting prisms, we can first notice and realize that there is two aspect of reality that keep nurturing each other:
‘Non projected presence’ – what there is
&
‘Projected possibilities’ – what we could do with it
Their complementarity leads to awaken action, meaning action which is aware and includes various layers of reality – physical, psychological, emotional, socio-cultural, political- which are beneficial as a whole for our inner and outer prosperity and growth in our complex world.
Some might call it the happiness factor or happiness index, but we can simply recognize it as happiness promoting shared happiness.
It does so through an open, lucid and free communication flow, where humor, understanding and opportunities naturally flow toward common or greater good.
If we fail to dance properly with those two aspects of presence & creativity, we’ll end up stepping on the feet of reality – our life partner – and may ruin the dance, leading to an impoverished situation instead of a dynamic tandem.
The choice is ours!
Our presence and creativity can definitely recycle some of our old ‘partisan’ tendencies.
That is the purpose of Up-Stream training!
🤓
