Ask Douglas: How do we respond to the daily outrages?

Doing what is yours to do

I asked for questions from my readership in my last newsletter. Julia had a question about my not keeping up with the news in the last six months while I’ve been grieving. She asks:

Q: “What are the ethics of such an approach in the face of fresh outrages every day from Washington over which we feel powerless. Are we? Or am I just lazy or afraid or both?”

A: Thank you, Julia. So many people have been struggling some form of the same question. I interviewed for the Just Economy Fellowship last week and their first question was a similar one: “How do you deal with all the news of the world while still having hope?”

I’ve been hearing the term polycrisis lately, that we’re in an age of intersecting crises converge and amplify each other: growing economic inequity, climate change, crumbling institutions, political instability, increasing debt etc. I don’t have any useful answers to the issues themselves,¹ but I do know you can’t focus on everything. You can’t spend your time being outraged by everything in the 24 hour news cycle because two things: (1) that’s how the overlords make their money and (2) that’s how you’ll do nothing. Everyone should get off social media. It reduces human flourishing in the world, and it reduces human flourishing in you.

So how do we respond? Last weekend I was at a Center for Action and Contemplation retreat where the theme was what St. Francis told his disciplines just before he died:

“I have done what is mine to do; now do what is yours!”

Note that St. Francis didn’t tell his disciples to do what he did, but to find what is theirs to do. So I ask you, Julia, “What is yours to do?”

This newsletter is called Money and Meaning. I believe that life is made most meaningful when you respond to values that are independent of you. Kierkegaard said that if you think all meaning comes from you then you can just take it back, change your mind when it’s inconvenient. At that point, you’re a king without a castle, you’re a sovereign of a land of nothing.² You have to choose to believe in something in the world outside of you that pushes at you, that has some force over you, or else you'll never experience anything as really mattering.³

One of the great losses in modern times is the loss of values independent of our personal feelings. In our post-modern choice to believe anything, we don’t choose anything.

Right now, this world is pushing at us in so many ways. You have to choose something. So what is yours to do?

Karma yoga: knowing our dharma, and then doing it

Knowing what is ours to do requires knowing what we believe in. Since 1966, UCLA has been surveying incoming freshmen at colleges around the country. In 1996, it did a review of the first 30 years:

Especially notable are changes in two contrasting value statements: The importance of “developing a meaningful philosophy of life” and of “being very well off financially” In the late 1960s developing a meaningful philosophy of life was the top value, being endorsed as an “essential” or “very important” goal by more than 80 percent of the entering freshmen. Being very well off financially, on the other hand, lagged far behind in the late 1960s, ranking fifth or sixth on the list with less than 45 percent of the freshmen endorsing it as a very important or essential goal in life. Since that time these two values have basically traded places, with being very well off financially now the top value (at 73.6 percent endorsement) and developing a meaningful philosophy of life now occupying sixth place at only 43.1 percent endorsement (citation)

Without a coherent life philosophy, without meaning independent of ourselves, it’s no wonder so many of us are lost.

I’m rereading the ancient Hindu text, the Bhagavad Gita. The Bhagavad Gita opens on a battlefield with Prince Arjuna, the most talented archer in the land, in terror. He is in the midst of a bitter civil war and shrinks from the knowledge that in the upcoming battle, he will have to kill family, mentors, and friends. His fear has caused him to doubt and lose connection with his abilities.

The same thing happens to each of us. We have so much to offer this world, but fear and anxiety disconnect us from what we are able to do.

Arjuna is assisted by his faithful assistant Krishna, who is actually God in disguise. The resulting conversation is one of the great pieces of world literature, where Krishna reveals himself and Arjuna learns the path of karma yoga:

1. Look to your dharma.

2. Do it full out.

3. Let go of the fruits.

4. Turn it over to God.⁴

Arjuna and Krishna on the battlefield of our lives Source

In my own words: figure out what you are meant to do and then commit to it. Don’t worry about “success” or “failure,” instead accept that your actions are part of a much larger longer, final victory that we will won’t live to see, a victory in which Love wins.

The second half of karma yoga: letting go of the fruits, is the hardest. We moderns want results, want “impact.” Without them we burn out, we get discouraged (literally, “lose heart”). But to be fully devoted to something regardless of the return is a smaller win in Love’s ultimate victory over the ego. One of my favorite stories illustrating this is American Buddhist teacher Adyashanti, talking about his teacher, Arvis Joen Justi. When she was young, Justi had gone to Japan to learn about meditation, and after many years of training, was told by her teacher to bring it back to the West:

“I will never stop reflecting on Arvis’s great devotion to serving something that was important—something she loved. When she first started to offer teachings at her house, she would sit down after preparing everything, but nobody would show up. Still, she wrote a talk, set up her meditation room, and opened her house week after week. Sometimes, out of compassion, her husband would sit with her, but mostly she sat alone.

She continued to do this for an entire year without a single person coming. This was dedication! What service to the dharma, the Buddhist teachings, this was: not being in service to how many people appeared, to the numbers, or to normal measures of success, but to doing what she was called to do. After a year, one person came, and for the next year it was Arvis and that one person. They sat together each Sunday morning, and Arvis gave her talk to an audience of one. As word slowly spread, more people arrived, until sometimes she would have 15 or 20 attending.

Her dedication was a great teaching for me. It touched my heart because it spoke to what service is: the willingness to put ourselves in a position of giving, to be an embodiment of what we are dedicated to, and to put our time, our attention, and our energy into the most important things. Even when Arvis was sitting in her living room alone, she was in service to all the people who might show up in the future. Many years later, I ended up being one of them.”

Lineage holders around the world have been doing this, keeping faith, practice, and craft traditions alive so that those who might show up in the future, so they may receive, hold, and then pass it forward too. They have doing so for centuries, in times of empire rise, and in times of empire collapse. To love something or someone so much, without care of success or failure, simply to keep it alive, is the surrender of the self-referential ego. Justi opened her house to strangers for meditation for more than 30 years. When Adyeshanti became a famous teacher, Arvis Joen Justi moved to doing office work behind the scenes.

She followed her dharma. Just as importantly, even if Adyashanti never came around (or indeed anyone), she would have offered her teachings nonetheless. How many of us such great devotion? “And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.”

She found what was hers to do and did it full out.

So when people ask me if I feel despair about the world, I know it’s sort of a test of my empathy to talk about how I’m dealing with “everything.” But perhaps partially because of my personal grief for the last six months, I don’t engage in that talk. I can’t care about everything. My job is to do my duty, my dharma.

So I ask you again: what is yours to do? As the world pushes at what you hold precious and what you hold dear, how do you push back? Whatever your response, do it all out. And let go of the fruits. We never know how it will go and how long it will take.

Hope has holes
in its pockets.
It leaves little
crumb trails
so that we,
when anxious,
can follow it.
Hope’s secret:
it doesn’t know
the destination–
it knows only
that all roads
begin with one
foot in front
of the other. — Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

The most important thing

Parker Palmer said: “Let your life speak.”

Gandhi said: “My life is my message.”

The same is true of all of us: how we live our lives is our message. What most of us are saying is we are the most important thing to us. We say we want to do good, but what we really want is money, achievement, and recognition. We say we want to care for others, but what we really want to safety, comfort, and pleasure. Most of us would want to disagree, but we’re not really living an examined life. We say we believe in things, but we don’t have a coherent life philosophy and we aren’t living by one. Instead, we simply replicate culture, a culture we say we dislike but somehow replicate and reinforce for others. No wonder our kids think money or pleasure is more important than anything else; they don’t see us living anything else.

The Arvis story above is from Adyashanti’s lecture: The Most Important Thing: Discovering Truth at the Heart of Life. When people come to him asking for spiritual advice, the first thing he asks them is:

“What is the most important thing in your life? Not the top ten. The number one thing.”

Most people can’t answer that. Some will tell him “spiritual enlightenment” but he knows it’s a bullshit answer; most people don’t know what spiritual enlightenment is; and if they did, they most certainly would not want it. But more importantly, they don’t know what is the more important thing to them. So they agree to consensus reality,⁵ chasing (i.e. following) success, status, and attention in a pathoadolescent society. As any mystic would tell you, if we serve ourselves, we will end up with nothing.

Unsurprisingly, that’s what this culture wants you to do. Wanting “success” in whatever its form (money, fame, even “doing good”) is the difference between empire consciousness versus true consciousness. The only thing that God/Love wants from you is for you to be true to your dharma. The only way to find true consciousness is a practice of inner quietude. How many of us are sitting, just sitting, with ourselves and God? So how can we figure out what is ours to do?

When you find what is yours to do, do it. Don’t ever regret being a person of integrity. It’s the only way our souls get satisfied.

“Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word "love" here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace - not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.” — James Baldwin

Did you think this was going to go differently?

The ego wishes comfort, security, satiety; the soul demands meaning, struggle, becoming… All those whom we admire in history had to go through something, and when they did, they learned on the other side that they were still there, though the world was different. Then they began to step into their possibilities and felt more completely the support of energies within.”— James Hollis

As I’m sure you see, asking “what is mine to do?” and “what’s the most important thing in my life?” are really the same thing. Follow the action and contemplation, the karma yoga, the faith and practice to where it leads you. In the end, you will come home to yourself.

There you will also find Love. I asked Father Richard Rohr once to sum up Christianity in one sentence. He closed his eyes, paused, and said:

“Love is the origin, the goal, and the destination.”

According to Catherine of Siena, the path to heaven is heaven, and all the way to heaven is heaven. So to me, the path to Love is love, and all the way to Love is love (that also means all the way to hate is hate). Love what is yours to love, and let go of the rest. Perfection is not asked of you I fail at it daily in innumerable ways, big and small. Success is not required, just devotion to the path.

The soul knows: love is the path and the goal.

You don’t have to do it all. You don’t even have be to concerned with it all. It would be laughable to list everything you “should” be concerned about now. Let go of the “shoulds” of well-intentioned others. Limit your news. Stay away social media. Avoid the temptation of criticizing others for they do, or do not do. Less distraction. More presence.

I could be wrong, maybe spending a lot of time living in the news and social media is what was yours to do. I don’t think so.

Devote yourself to what is yours to devote to. Give it your all.

It helps remembering that we’re not the first people in this mess. The fall of Rome wasn’t in a day. It was like falling down the stairs over centuries. What did people do during this time? They created communities to preserve what they cared about: manuscripts, traditions, expertise. That’s the point. The dharma created the communion.

We can’t ask to not live in a time with crisis, this is our time. Same as it ever was. We can only embrace it and ask what is ours to do.

Did you think it was going to go any differently?

All the way to heaven is heaven. Have courage. Have heart.

Love what is yours to love. Do what is yours to do.

1. I see everything is a symptom of our inner not-enoughness but how helpful is that?

2. Father Richard Rohr makes a distinction between “growing up” and “waking up.” He says, “There are psychologically mature people that are entirely self referential.”

3. I’m paraphrasing something I found this in my notes somewhere, so this idea didn’t come from me, but I don’t have the source.

4. This summary from Stephen Cope’s The Great Work of Your Life. I am planning on holding a class on the Great Work of your life in September. Let me know if you are initially interested in participating.

5. Adyashanti notes that anyone great did not consent to consensus reality.