Tara Brach - Awakening from the Trance of Bad-Othering (2020-09-09)

Episode Date: September 11, 2020

Awakening from the Trance of Bad-Othering (2020-09-09) - Great spiritual leaders of social movements teach that true transformation arises from realizing our interconnectedness, and the light of the divine in each being. Sadly, through human history, much suffering has come from perceiving others as bad-others, flawed humans who are excluded from our heart. This talk looks at how our stories and mistrust of others—in personal relationships and in our society—can lead to cycles of violence, harm and deepening alienation. We then explore the inner process that helps us shift to "bad behavior, not bad human" and allows us to respond to suffering with love-in-action.

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Namaste and welcome. I'd like to begin with a favorite story. Some of you will remember. It's about our origins and in this a little girl is asking her mom, well, how did humans come to be? And her mother said, well, God made Adam and Eve and they had children. all humankind was made from them. And she asked the same question later to her father,

and he said, well, many years ago there were monkeys and the human race evolved from monkeys. She's confused, goes back to her mother and says, you know, you said we're created by God. Dad says we're developed from monkeys. What is this? And her mom responds, well, there is very simple. I told you about my side of the family,

and he told you about his. And I really enjoy this, and I share it when I remember, because it's so common that we feel that we are right, and that others, it's just a matter of degree, but in some way they're inferior or bad when we're holding that position. And, of course, the more charged, the sense of I'm right and you're wrong, the more distance and hostility and mistrust in the relationship. and in our larger society, when it's charged, that's when we have more oppression and war. I've noticed in recent days one of the most regular questions I get is how can I communicate with somebody who has different beliefs, who disagrees? And in today's world, that's causing much estrangement and pain. So the title of tonight's talk is Awake,

from the trance of bad othering, bad othering. And if you've been with me for a while, you know it's a theme that I reflect on regularly, and it's such a deep source of suffering. I'll start with a book that I re-encountered recently from Dr. Seuss. And he wrote this when he was 80, and it was one of his last. And it's called The Butter Battle Book. and you've got the yukes on one side who wear blue clothes and the zooks wear orange. They live on opposite sides of a wall.

And their conflict is that the yukes eat bread with the butter side up and the zooks with the butter side down on their bread. And this is very offensive and threatening to their cultural sensibilities. So it's a seeds of a growing mistrust and bad othering. and it leads to an escalating arms race. It starts with slingshots. One side develops a slingshot and the other develops an even better one. And the arms race goes on and on and they're one-upping each other until it finally gets to a small red bomb that neither side has any possibility of defending against.

And they all have to live underground with generals on both sides poised to drop the bomb. and the book ends, and this is unlike any others I've ever read of Dr. Seuss, the book ends where the yuk, who's a narrator, asks his grandfather, the general, for their side. Who's going to drop it? Will you or will he? To which grandpa nervously replies, be patient. We'll see. We will see. We're living in so much uncertainty. We don't know what kind of primitive reactivity might overtake. And what we do know is ultimately no one wins when there's bad othering spiraling, when there's an us-them. There's no positive social change. It's just that circling of violence and hatred.

And whoever is on top temporarily, whoever has... the better slingshot for the moment has to organize resources in defense to maintain their power, which they could do for days or for centuries. And everybody on some levels living underground because of the danger. In other words, everybody has to armor their hearts because they're armoring against the sense of badness out there. So if there's a mindset of us against them, of good us against bad others, we're watering the seeds of distrust and violence.

We know this in our personal relationships. I mean, most of us have gotten caught at some point in that bad othering dance of anger and blame, maybe with a family member or your partner, work colleague, where each person is in some way triggered and whoever thinks the other started at first, it doesn't matter so much, because in some way, each is feeling hurt, a need to defend, a need to attack, unmet needs,

each is feeling right, and then they're blaming the other for causing trouble and pain, and then as they put out their blame that deepens the wound and injury, and there's more triggering, and it just keeps going. So if it's not addressed in our personal relationships, the mistrust and anger and hate keeps us separate from each other and our own hearts armored. We can't be really free. And we also know in the larger society that there's so much anger of right versus wrong, the good side, bad side. There's so much dividedness right now, this right as I'm speaking, whether, you know, on and passion and anger, masks for COVID are, and of course around the upcoming elections.

social justice movements and environment, you might be thinking this isn't just about a different opinion about butter side up or butter side down because my side really is right and good, that we're trying to protect against violence and hatred and destruction. And I know that mindset and feeling because my mind goes like that when I'm not real conscious. It's on some level, there's that kind of real rightness and wrongness. But here's the thing. When I am honest and pause and deepen attention to the perception of us, them, it really is bad othering. And my heart is tight and contracted when that's going on. I'm not living from a sense of wholeness and awake hard, a sense of true connectedness with all of life.

of belonging. And that's why I call it a trance, the trance of bad othering. Because I know, in my own experience, that I'm living in a smaller place, and I'm participating in a consciousness that perpetuates harm. I think of leaders of spiritually based social movements, like Gandhi, like Martin Luther King. And the teaching is that true, societal healing, real transformation, needs to be rooted in the realization of our shared belonging. Many of you know how Martin Luther King famously put it that we belong to an inescapable network of mutuality tied in a single garment of destiny. There's a reason those words have resonated for so many in our heart of hearts.

bad othering blinds us to this truth. It keeps us at war. And sadly, it's a war no one can win. I mean, the Zooks and the Yukes, they've got it. It's like the only true win is when we awaken to our shared belonging. This does not mean that we don't fight for what we believe in. That we don't fight for freedom, for democracy, fight against inequities. against social injustice, that we don't take care of our earth, we have to.

And it doesn't mean in our personal relationships that we don't go for what we need in terms of boundaries and safety and respect. But here's what it does mean. It means that we ground our efforts in our caring for life, in our caring for the greater good, not in our hatred of bad others. The hatred can come up, but we need to process it and get down to the caring. So this is our inquiry, and I really am including myself in it. I'll share more about my own process in a bit, but how can each of us dedicate to waking up from bad othering? You know, for the sake of our own spiritual freedom and societal healing. How can we do that? So we'll look at the pathway that awakens us from this trance.

Of course, there are many different ways of processing. I'm going to emphasize three pieces. And the first is being able to see the stories and beliefs that keep us separate, that fuel mistrust. Then being able to allow and nurture and bring presence to the feelings underneath them in ourselves. We have to make that U-turn and do that inner process. and then intentionally including others in our heart. Because our habit, our primitive habit, is going to be to push away,

so it takes intention to evolve ourselves. Okay, so first part, bad othering is fueled with beliefs, and they're most basically beliefs about human nature. And many of you are familiar that our beliefs and our thoughts then create our feelings, which of course circle around and create more of the thoughts, that then creates our behaviors, our character, and our destiny. So core beliefs about human nature are shaped by society. We're thinking society's thoughts, but there are different streams in society.

And our core beliefs are also affected by the quality of our attachment bonding with caregivers. and they're also affected by our generational experience of safety and belonging, our lack of. So here's a super simplified way to say it that the more violent of society and the more poor attachment bonding and the more personal and generational trauma, the more there's going to be a feeling of threat and we're going to have beliefs that are based on mistrust and they're going to come in the shape of bad othering. another super simplified kind of a context for this, that in Western society, the view of human nature was expressed in our, the predominant view for a very long time, expressed in our founding myth, which, as you know, that we are fundamentally flawed and thrown

out of the garden. I'd like to share Annie Dillard's take, wonderful writer. She says, somewhere and I can't find where. I read about an Eskimo hunter who asked the vocal missionary priest, if I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell? No, said the priest, not if you did not know. Then why, asked the Eskimo earnestly, did you tell me? So our primary, most impactful beliefs about bad self, flawed humanity, of course they were highlighted by Hobbes who described humans as essentially selfish, Buddhist creatures. And without any rules or regs, we would just devolve into savages. But this view hugely affects our world. It affects economics. It's how it's the basis for structuring capitalist economies that are organized around presuming

selfishness. It's the basis of a lot of politics because we can see how mistrust shapes decision making, policies, information flow. But here's the thing. In the West, over the last few days, decades, alternative views of human nature have emerged. Increasing number of evolutionary psychologists and philosophers and biologists are proposing a much more benign view that basically says we're fundamentally good. And we're on this evolutionary trajectory to manifest that towards increasing awareness of our interdependence, expressions of empathy, compassion, and actions that serve the greater good.

And you can see in many, and the evolutionary scientists are pointing to our primary strength, which is collaboration. That's what has allowed us to flourish, which means basically extending our caring and cooperation beyond kin group in widening circles. In my own readings, I've been interested in seeing this termed as self-domestication, which is if you think of it with animals, just the way we selected qualities of tamedness

and cooperation in animals like pigs or cows or sheep, amongst our own species, we are self-selecting for pro-social qualities like friendliness, collaboration, empathy, because cooperation amongst our own species is really what allows homo sapiens to survive and flourish. So those qualities have the best chance of surviving and passing on genes. That's what gets passed on. Now, you might be looking at current day humans, and so I just remind you, this is over a period of thousands of years, a few steps forward, step back, that kind of thing. But what's important here is, in this view of human nature, our trajectory correlates with our increasingly integrated brain that includes a prefrontal cortex,

which is a site of communicating and compassion and mindfulness, and that we are evolving these potentials for cooperation and love and harmony. And that's the same wisdom and understanding that is held in most spiritual paths, the sense that of oneness, of belonging to one life, one awareness. And the spiritual paths offer models of humans who have, have manifested that potential, Jesus, Muhammad, Buddha, and many other awakened men and women. So that's the first piece, is that we're on this trajectory towards realizing our mutual belonging, our sacred essence, and these same scientists readily acknowledge that we're the

cruelest of all animals, that when our primitive system dominates, when fear and aggression dominates, we can cause unparalleled harm to ourselves, to each other, to other species, to our earth. So our evolutionary predicament, the forces that are kind of working at each other, we have this survival brain, this primitive survival brain that's organized around danger and threat, and fear from the survival brain fosters the story of a bad other and the mistrust. And that was predominant for millions of years. And then just in the last 20,000 years or so, we had this leap of development in our prefrontal cortex and more integrated brain. So we have this alternative story of who we can be that's emerging. But when the primitive brain is dominating, due to triggering

of fears, that same old story of humans' basic badness, you can't trust others, emerges. And when instead we're operating from our more recently evolved brain, we realize our connectedness and we see bad behavior but not bad humans. And this is important. I'm going to come back to this. We see bad behavior but not bad humans. It's a different story. We trust basic goodness.

That leads to love and action serving the greater good. I'll share a little story. this traveler comes to the gate of a kingdom. He's planning to settle there, and he asks the gatekeeper, well, what are the people like here? And the gatekeeper says, well, what are they like where you came from? He goes, oh, not very friendly.

Everyone's out for themselves, greedy. They can be really mean, dishonest. Then the gatekeeper says, you'll find they're the same here. Next traveler comes. Ask the same question. Well, what are the people like here? The gatekeeper asked back, well, what were they like where you came from?

Oh, generally caring, thoughtful, truthful, generous, you'll find them the same here. I like that because the story we tell ourselves creates our feelings and our behaviors and shapes our reality. You know, with our thoughts, we create the world. And there's much impact on every part of our life. And there's a lot of research now and clinical work that shows the impact of our stories. And it's so interesting to me, the research shows that most people, when they're caught in the trance of bad other, they imagine themselves to be basically virtuous and caring, and perhaps those closest.

But when asked about others, they don't know so well, mistrust rules. what's found is that we can think we're right and even think we're more virtuous but still hate ourselves in fact i have found that bad othering deep down puts us at war with ourselves because we're not really at home in that judgmental mistrusting self it's interesting that even that when we do think others are bad or wrong or dangerous they immediately pick pick it up. We humans are very sensitive, so it only deepens mistrust and distance. So, a cartoon some years ago, a dog on a psychiatrist's couch who's saying, you know, it's right on my fence. Beware of dog. How is that supposed to make me feel? So we pick it up how others are

experiencing us and mistrusting us. And then as I mentioned already, research shows that the more we do trust others in a basic way, we then can see bad behavior, not bad human. The good news, if you are willing to investigate with courage and awareness and kindness, your beliefs and stories, in other words, if you're willing to shine the light of presence on them, they can shift. And this is true for racial bias, and this is true for our most basic sense of mistrust towards others. So I want to pause here, and we'll just do a brief reflection on this, and you can explore it more on your own. If you'd like to, you might come into sitting in a way that you can close your eyes and deepen your attention. What is your story of human nature? What's your

perception of your basic human nature, your basic nature, is it that you're basically a good loving person, that you're virtuous, caring, honest, or not? And just to check in, what about those you're close to? You might bring a few to mind. Are they basically good or basically flawed? Can you sense a kind of intrinsic loving in them, awareness, morality? Bring to mind someone you feel some conflict with. What's your story about who they are? Are they a bad other? Not trustworthy in the deep ways?

Not basically loving? Is there some basic badness? Or do you sense them as basically good, perhaps like you, but with bad behavior? What about those you don't know and have strong disagreement with, perhaps bringing someone to mind? Is there basic badness, not to be trusted, as having any basic capacity for love, ethics? Or is there bad behavior, not bad human? Have you had experiences? perhaps spiritual experiences maybe in nature or with other people or meditating.

When your story felt like it was shifting, moments of realization where you sensed we all are part of the same net, same intrinsic life and awareness, capacity for love. Some were injured than others, but we all belong to each other. Who would you be if you assume that even those with bad behaviors have the same essence, the same awareness, wanting to live fully, to feel love? How might that affect your life? These are the words of the meditation, teacher, and spiritual guides Sri Narasar Gadata. He says, when you look at anything as separate from you,

you cannot love it for you are afraid of it. Alienation causes fear and fear deepens alienation. It's a vicious cycle. When you know beyond all doubting that the same life flows through all that is, and you are that life, that awareness, you will love all naturally and spontaneously. When you know beyond all doubting that the same thing, same life flows through all that is. And you are that life, that awareness. You will love all

naturally and spontaneously. So you might take a few breaths and either open your eyes if you'd like or if you'd rather listen with your eyes closed, that's fine. The first step is seeing our stories. Seeing our stories lets us know that stories are just stories. They're not the truth of reality. And that enables the next step, which is we can then bring presence to the feelings underneath the story and bring some nurturing and compassion to them. Even with the trajectory towards collaboration and trust and feeling belonging, our species has clear regressions. And when unprocessed fears come closer to the surface, here we are. They're going to be in all of us, huge spikes in mystery. trust, fear, and violence.

And I mentioned how in Sotschev, one of the big questions that's come up, how to talk with people who disagree. We can't have meaningful conversation and relating if we're bad othering. Others will know and they'll defend. So the first step after we see our story

is to do that U-turn, I talk about, will we bring our attention inward to bring more presence to the feelings that are there? So, for instance, with one person who asked that question, when I asked her what was coming up, you know, around the story of bad othering, there was anger and there was this, the belief that, well, if they're thinking like that, and this had to do with unconscious racism and some other things, how many others are and how much more suffering they'll be, you know? So, and then I said, well, what's under that anger? and she felt fear. And we kept on saying that whatever arises, let it belong. And I want to remind you of that, whatever you find under your stories, hatred, anger,

fear, to say this belongs. This wave is part of the ocean. We'll give you space to let things keep on processing. So that's what she did. She let her fear belong and kept allowing. And if you keep allowing, you'll get to the root sense of the vulnerability that's there. So she allowed the anger, allowed the fear, and underneath the fear, she felt that sense of caring about people who were suffering,

people who were the target of racial violence and other kinds of violence. And that's when she could bring nurturing, bring a really gentle presence to her heart that was just very tender. and sense the goodness of the caring, and then have the intention to let that be the grounds of engaging, of being able to speak. Now, I want to share my own experience, which is very similar of this process of being mindful, of bad othering, because I notice frequently, especially when I'm listening to the news,

that I'm living inside a story of us then, of a bad other and could be individuals or groups whose words and actions have in my mind caused harm and will cause more harm in the future. And with that comes a feeling and a perception of badness. It's not like I'm thinking, oh, bad behavior. It's just all becomes bad othering. and when I go underneath the story, what's going on in my body, and I could say in the last few weeks, is a sense of alarm. I can feel my nervous system is kind of sending out warning signals, you know, danger, danger. And again, it has to do with more damage, more hurt in the future. And if I let the fear that's with that alarm be there, as with the woman I described that we work together in.

satsun, underneath that is caring. And then I open to that and let that caring be as full as it is. And if I open to that caring fully, then I'm able to go to step three, which is include the other, include those who have considered as bad others in my heart. If I've gotten down to that caring. Then I can look through more awake eyes and see more clearly that it's bad behavior, not bad human. I can begin to see how anyone that behaves in ways that causes that kind of a suffering is coming from trauma. Anyone who's cut off from empathy coming from trauma. So it's not, it becomes not so individual. It becomes just this away. awareness of this is the layer of the psyche that's in all of us, that when it's afraid, it acts in ways that cause damage.

The yukes and the cooks, how they just kept spiraling, we become part of that. And when it's activated, there's only damage that's caused. So that brings, it's just remembering that, brings for me, this deep wish for healing wherever that primitive mind is dominating and also this yearning for my heart to really include all others. So as I mentioned, when I'm in the bad othering trance, my motivation is that my heart's contracted, that I know I'm going to be part of the harm unless I do that inner process. And again, the words from St. Norsearchad doctor that I read are really, really very inspiring to me that if you look at anything as separate from you, you cannot love it,

for you are afraid of it. Alienation causes fear and fear deepens alienation. When instead you know beyond all doubting that the same life, the same awareness, flows through all that is, and that you are that life and awareness. you'll love all naturally and spontaneously. We have to remember our mutuality, our connectedness. So these are the three steps. Seeing our own story of bad othering, bringing presence and care inwardly to those feelings,

and then including others and moving towards a sense of we. And as I mentioned, if we can get to our caring, then we can see others in terms of bad behavior, not bad human, and we can see their own vulnerability, becomes much easier to engage an undefended, non-aggressive way. Van Jones, who I bring in with some regularity because I feel like he models love in action, often he describes how when he talks with someone

with very different views, which he does often, he really listens and he says that he can find something that makes sense in what they say something he can relate to and feed it back and that begins trust there's always something that we share something that we share about and care about no matter how different a person's views are and a couple of years ago van brought together in west virginia families and professionals who were struggling with the opioid crisis and still are in West Virginia, and also a group from South Central L.A. who were struggling with the crack epidemic. And his idea was to bring these two very different groups, very different cultures,

raised social history, bring them together so they could explore what they've learned from their different struggles that also, of course, have so much in common. So there they were in West Virginia and they sat down in this conference room, they helped facilitate a dialogue to see what they could learn from each other. And what really struck me so strongly was how Vand started the process. He had asked them each to bring pictures of loved ones they lost in the epidemic. So one by one each brought out the photo and shared it with the others and just talked about the person who that person was in their life.

And then they looked at each other in an entirely different way because there was a grounds of trust. They palpably had a sense of, oh, human being like me, same essential life and caring about life. And they were then able to talk in a way that they could really share much of value for each other. So, friends, this evening, awakening from the trance of bad othering. And we started with our beloved Dr. Seuss, who really talks about violence, whether it's

mental or physical towards the perceived bad other, just creates this, we get imprisoned in a spiral of hate and separation. And we also know that we are faced with suffering in our world, with, threats to democracy, horrific inequities, racial violence, damage to the earth, we need to act, not to wait. So the key is can we respond, not react? And can we respond not with bad othering and more violence, but can we act out of love for the life that lives through all of us? And what I'm seeing that so inspires me is that many beings around the globe have been in our awakening to this, to this dedication to not being caught in bad othering, this dedication to realizing our inescapable network of mutuality, realizing that.

Many are realizing that true healing, both in our personal relationships and our society, means evolving. our consciousness. It means love in action. So I'll share a final story. Mahagosananda was a Cambodian monk, and he led peace marches through Cambodia following the great massacres of the Cambodian people by the Khmer Rouge. And immediately after the killings, great masses of Cambodian people were placed in refugee camps, like 50,000 people. Great heat. and surrounded by barbed wire, and they were told that if they gathered for prayer, they'd be shot by the Khmer Rouge. But Maha Gosananda set up a kind of temporary temple,

and he rang the temple bills and thousands gathered. And these are people that had lost everything. They lost their homes and their loved ones in this horrific systematic genocide, which is, it's been called the killing fields of Cambodia. So there they were. And he began to chant in Cambodian and in Sanskrit, this simple chant that it's one of the first verses of the Buddhist teachings. And it goes, hatred never seizes by hatred, but by love alone is healed. And he chanted it over and over again.

Hatred never seizes by hatred, but by love alone is healed. And slowly the voices began to pick up and share. with them and pretty soon nearly 25,000 people were singing this and they were weeping because in the 10 years it had been since they had heard the Dharma, it had been 10 years since they had heard the truth, the way. And this was the truth greater than their suffering, the way of love. So this is our path and it's profoundly relevant to today, to tomorrow, to these next weeks, to go beyond bad othering and act.

Act courageously. Act out of love. Act out of realizing our mutual belonging to this precious life. Act with those close in. Don't wait to practice in some grandiose way. There's degrees of bad othering. And practice with those of difference. Our freedom is the way of love.

So we'll close together. and do a brief meditation on this. Again, I invite you, as I often do, to take a moment to bring your attention inward. You might close your eyes if that's helpful. Scanning your life right now. You might sense where you are bad othering someone. Ideally, you might choose a personal relationship. Let it be more close in.

But if not, it's fine to choose bad othering that's happening in a societal way. as you choose a situation, take some moments to review and sense what's the worst part of what the others doing, saying, the way they're being that brings up that sense of bad other, and become aware of what your story is about them, your belief. And they wouldn't behave this way if they loved me or if they respected me. They wouldn't be believing this or acting this way if they cared about others. Whatever it is that brings up a sense of badness. And then sense the feelings that come up as you bring this person to mind.

You might sense the worst part of what they're doing or saying again to keep you connected. What's most hurtful, damaging, distressing. And then just feel comes up. Is it anger or blame, hatred, perhaps like me, alarm? And with whatever you notice, let it belong. Make space for the inner reactivity. It's part of our nervous system. It's a wave in our ocean. Let it belong. And as you let it be here, keep sensing with gentleness. What's under it? What's the real vulnerability? You wouldn't be reacting unless there was something you really cared about, but you feared for. What is it?

Listening inward. What is it your heart cares about here? And it might help with your hand on your heart. And with real sincerity, sense under the feelings, the vulnerability, the place where you're really caring about something. nurture that with a tender presence. Honor this as this caring, this tender presence, as you're more whole, true nature. This is the expression of your basic goodness, your more evolved being. And from this space, from this tenderness, include the other in awareness, sense under their behavior that you might perceive.

as harmful, bad, sense what might be driving it, their own vulnerability, whether it's trauma or woundedness, fear, confusion, and since under their vulnerability, the aliveness that wants to live, the awareness that wants to wake up to loving, let your heart include their being They belong as a mutual part of this alive net and sense your intention as you move forward with them and in life for your actions to serve understanding and healing, your intention for love in action. Hatred never ceases by hatred, but by love alone is human. healed. This is the ancient and eternal truth. Namaste and thank you for your attention, my friends. For more talks and meditations, and to learn about my schedule or join my email list,

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