The Dangerous Products of Blissful Detachment In The Absence of Definitive Morality

In light of my post last Wednesday in which I critisized the divorce of Buddhist and other forms of meditation from their religious contexts, their metaphysical and moral content, I feel as if I should mention this week's program of On Being, with the meditation teacher Mirabai Bush, particularly this passage.

MS. BUSH: So we at illuminations, we were trying to create an organization based on principles of what they call in the East, “right livelihood,” where what you're making is wholesome and contributes to — now we would say, you know, sustainability of the planet and the species.

MS. TIPPETT: Right.

MS. BUSH: And at the same time, the way in which you're doing it is helping everyone who is involved to wake up. Interestingly, we did so many things that when I, many years later, arrived at Google — because they wanted to have a program there where their engineers could learn meditation — so many of the same things that they've recognized about what makes a person more creative, more able to bring their whole self into work and to be able to grow from their work as well. And not think of it as “now I'll do my work and then I'll go home and be a real person.”

MS. TIPPETT: Right, right. But that has — that is a shift that still has a long way to go…

MS. BUSH: Oh for sure.

MS. TIPPETT: … in terms of American corporate culture and ideals and and practicalities.

MS. BUSH: Yeah.

MS. TIPPETT: The story of Search Inside Yourself. First of all, I love the story of how you, that you had to find that language. I mean, isn't it right that when you first just were offering a meditation course or mindfulness course it didn't take?

MS. BUSH: Yeah, actually I was — excuse me — my friend Meng, who's now written the book on Search Inside Yourself, called me up one day, I was at the — still running the Center for a Contemplative Mind and he called up. First of all he said, "when I was younger,” he had been through some difficult times and meditation had really helped him. So he'd been thinking for some time, at Google, that it would be really great to bring into the workplace. He'd been there since almost the beginning. He was engineer number 107. And when Google went public they told their engineers, who no longer needed to work if they didn't want to, that they could stay but they had to do something that would in some way advance Google's mission. But they could decide what it was. So Meng decided it was going to be bringing meditation. And he said, "I posted it and nobody signed up. I don't know what to do, and I heard you could help."

So I went out there and we talked and we looked around and what we identified was that people, employees, they are all quite young, very smart, graduated at the top of their class from MIT or Stanford, had been in front of their screens most of their lives. So, after talking for a whole day and figuring out what was going on there, I suggested that we could offer the same practices, but emphasize the practices that more directly cultivate emotional intelligence and that we could frame it in a different way. And so we called it — of course, they came up with this great name since they were the big search engine, Search Inside Yourself, and then the subtitle was, Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction. And we asked Danny Goleman, who also was in Bodh Gaya with us back all those years ago...

MS. TIPPETT: Right, right.

MS. BUSH: ...asked him to give a talk at Google about the relation between about why emotional intelligence is so important in the workplace and the relationship between meditation and emotional intelligence. He did that, and then we posted the course, and in four hours 140 people signed up and since then over 2,000 Googlers around the world have taken the course. And there's a lot of talk now about bringing mindfulness into the workplace and how superficial it is and how it helps bad people do bad things better and it doesn't help people question anything, it just makes them more satisfied with what they're doing. But this is a serious course and when you sit down and quiet down, become calm, quiet, stable, you have to do that in order for any kind of insight to arise, and it does. You do feel better usually, although sometimes, really disturbing emotions arise. But it needs to be taken to the next kind of level of depth in order for people to begin to question.

MS. TIPPETT: Right.

MS. BUSH: But this course actually offers enough time, practice, and teaching to help people do that.

MS. TIPPETT: I mean, yeah. I think that's an important and refreshing thing to name that you can be a great meditator and also remain narcissistic. I mean this can be superficial and it can be abused like any spiritual practice, like any political practice. But, Mirabai, something that really so intrigues me in your work is — and in some of your writing — is how you, like the language of emotional intelligence — that you've just been using and that's now so widely familiar, including in workplaces.

That what this tradition is bringing forward and bringing to the surface from modern people has this very noble lineage. You know, it's Buddhism that is the tradition that has focused on this for thousands of years. But you wrote about how in 1890 William James in The Principles of Psychology said that, "The faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again is the very root of judgment, character, and will." And, I mean, I don't think he was Buddhist but that is the intention, right? Of...

MS. BUSH: Yeah, that is the intention.

She addressed the questions I have about this attempt to translate, popularize and, most dangerously, secularize religious practices and how those can easily be abused.

And there's a lot of talk now about bringing mindfulness into the workplace and how superficial it is and how it helps bad people do bad things better and it doesn't help people question anything, it just makes them more satisfied with what they're doing. But this is a serious course and when you sit down and quiet down, become calm, quiet, stable, you have to do that in order for any kind of insight to arise, and it does.

If her course is serious, there are plenty which are far less serious.   I wonder if her background as a Catholic doesn't inform her intentions a lot more than she might want to consider.  If someone who doesn't have that background, with its moral requirement to not be self-centered and selfish and to always consider the moral consequences of your actions on other people, giving them these techniques won't reliably produce the same goals and be put to the same uses that Mirabai Bush seems to just assume will just, somehow, happen.  In the stories of the childhood of the Buddha he exhibited a deep faculty of compassion for suffering, living creatures from the time as an infant he watched the farmer plowing the field and he was aware of the suffering of the worms and other creatures who would be injured and killed by the plow.  The world today, especially the world of corporate culture, proves that there are lots and lots of people who seem to be lacking much if any of that same faculty of compassion or even reflection.  Business culture, capitalism, is based on exactly the opposite.  Like natural selection, which is derived from the same root, they are methods of competition, producing a winner who will defeat if not destroy competitors whose feelings, certainly, but in many cases even their very lives are not considered important or worthy of consideration.  I don't think teaching those people methods which can lead to coldness and a more disengaged efficiency is anything like reliably good.   In the context of corporate culture, it's more likely to lead to a more disciplined and effective competitor and predator who will, by the rules of that culture, rise and dominate.   It can be of use to such sociopathic types as are favored by that system,

The line between calm non-judgement and calm self-satisfaction is not an easy one to find, in the absence of continual moral self-doubt and questioning.

I find it extremely troubling that one of the corporations which Mirabai Bush has done work for is Monsanto, [About minute 48 in the unedited interview.]  one of the most predatory of corporations who have produced some of the most destructive pesticides and GMO products,  things that the young Buddha would have seen as being a total violation of the most basic of moral commandments.  Use her other client, Google's search engine to look for " worst corporations Monsanto" and see what comes up.  Amazingly, enough, she talked about how, in the past, she introduced them to the Buddhist meditation on loving kindness, designed to increase compassion for other beings. Monsanto, today, as they are regularly voted one of the worst coporations, dedicated to killing trillions of animals with some of the most destructive artificial pollutants ever devised by chemistry. Her work for Monsanto, among other corporations is discussed more in the uncut interview which I think should have been gone into far more because I think on such cases as that the integrity of her entire work founders.  No matter how much sincerity she may feel, herself, her involvement with Monsanto its subsequent history is what I would call a definitive repudiation of her program as a form of Buddhism or of any kind of promotion of morality.

Given that, I find her subsequent statements about working with those involved with sounding the alarm on climate change rather odd.

It will be the loss of belief in God and the long, long lessons of right and wrong that is the theme of the books collected into The Bible and in other scriptures that end our species, if anything does.   In my study of the Indian religious and philosophical tradition, especially the Buddhist tradition, that was one of the things I came to conclude.  Much as I respect the Buddhist tradition, especially the rejection of the caste system which was developing as a religio-philosophical holding, supporting an economic injustice during the early centuries of Buddhism, it isn't enough.  If the Jewish-Christian-Islamic tradition has much to learn from other traditions, there is a lot those have to learn from the widely despised monotheistic traditions, as well.

Sharon Salzberg, the famous Buddhist meditation teacher, who is mentioned in the interview, has a blog at the On Being website.   In a post earlier this month she made a statement that I found amazing,

In 1999, before the turn of the millennium, the Dalai Lama began talking about the ethical implications of radical income inequality. I’d never heard someone in a spiritual context speak about anything like that.

To which I said,

With all respect to Sharon Salzberg, and I do have a lot of respect for her and for His Holiness, the Jewish Law began to talk about income inequality from the time the Torah was first articulated, through the prophets, including Jesus and a continual line of religious people, through Gregory of Nyssa, St. Francis.... various theologians, religious activists and popes and other writers, certainly, on our time, the great liberation theologians of Latin America, Africa, Asia, North America, Europe, the great Black Liberation theologians.... You get the idea. It is tragic that someone who was so serious about pursuing the religious life, somehow, avoided the ubiquity of that same line of thought in that tradition. I have had someone who professed being a Buddhist, of the North American school, tell me that justice was an illusion, that there was no such thing as justice. I told her that if she were deprived of it she would certainly notice its absence. I am glad that His Holiness is emphasizing that teaching, which I think is implicit in the Buddhist commandments, if you will, from the oldest of scriptures, I just wish more Buddhists, as well as Christians, Jews, Muslims, etc. realized it is at the very heart of real religion instead of self-absorbed pseudo-mindfulness practice.

As much as I like Salzberg, if she was unaware of that tradition she couldn't have looked at it at all.  I found both this program and her post very disillusioning.