Listen to thisIn another lifetime I was a spiritual seeker. I spent much of my free time reading various forms of scripture from religious traditions such as Christianity, Taoism, Sufism, Bahai, Buddhism, Voodoo, and Hinduism. I practiced yoga, tai chi, veganism, vegetarianism, attended sweat lodges, threw the I-Ching, fasted, and engaged in different forms of meditation and prayer. I sought out gurus and spiritual teachers and spent considerable time in their company at retreats and workshops.
For a decade or so, the quest for spiritual experiences and understanding was near the center of my life and I still carry many of the teachings that were gifted to me in the way I live today. However, as I have gown older, the urgent necessity to search for spiritual experiences and knowledge has waned considerably. Of course, this would appear to run contrary to the developmental theories that would suggest that as I approach my mortality, my need to understand the purpose of my life in spiritual terms would increase, not decrease.
I have thought about this and as I have gotten older, I sometimes wonder what happened to that hunger for salvation, transcendence, enlightenment, or at a minimum wisdom. But then I am reminded of a teaching I received from a guru nearly 40 years ago. At the time, I was powerfully impacted by the teachings of a spiritual master who taught a version of yogic practice derived from Advaita Vendanta Hinduism. His name was Jean Klein and I found his very presence transformative and highly compelling. I attended yoga retreats, meditations, lectures until I became convinced that I needed to join him in his work as a disciple. So I scheduled a one to one meeting with him to ask him to take me on as a full time student. In our meeting he listened to what I had to say and then after a long moment, he told me that I could certainly join him or any other teacher. I could take on a variety of teachers or spiritual practices if I wanted to, but at the end of the day he told me that there was no discipline for me.
At the time, I was severely disappointed and felt a powerful sense of rejection and failure. I never went back. But, over the years, Jean Klein was right. There has not been any one path or any discipline that has been compelling enough to hold my attention long term. In a way, I guess you could say, I am simply undisciplined. Or perhaps, my lack of discipline is a gift that has allowed me a certain freedom to seek what life has to offer. Without a disciplined or disciplinary focus, all my spiritual training has melded together into an appreciation of living force as it saturates my experience as an embodied transit point of limitless creative production. What I experience as me is so full and rich with everything that life is, it is all I can do on any given day to at least try to be present to some small portion of it. But I have an intuitive understanding that what I experience as a life is stunningly miniscule in relation to the infinite field of creative production that is life itself. That said, I also know that without my life and all its idiosyncratic twists and turns, the rest of everything would be impoverished. I also know that this is the case for all of us collectively producing the world.
There is an old and somewhat hackneyed Buddhist teaching that says that if you want to achieve enlightenment, you must learn to chop wood and carry water. It is often interpreted to mean that enlightenment (or a full living comprehension of everything and one’s place in it) can best be found in the mundane acts of living. For me, I no longer seek any kind of enlightenment, but I am interested in what I can learn from simply living as fully as possible, given the inherent limitations and infinite capacity of how I have to come to be this person I am currently.
During my time of spiritual exploration, I became interested in land-based forms of spirituality and how they played out in gardening. I became fascinated with the way one could work with the land and the spirits of the land to grow food. I read quite a lot about this and designed a quite successful garden built in a spiral with open space for animals and insects to take their share. I tried very hard to work in harmony with the land and found it quite rewarding both in the work and in the crop harvest. Like most of my practices, the details have faded over the years and while I still try to work with whatever land I am on with a degree of sensitivity and conscious attention, I no longer carry out the more prescriptive elements of what I had been taught.
That said, there was one story I have retained over the years that has caused me reflect many times in relation to how I have lived and worked. The story goes that there was a spiritually oriented commune that was practicing spiritual gardening following all the precepts of a particular school. They had diligently laid out the garden in the prescribed fashion, done the plantings as instructed, allowed space for animals, insects, and spirits and yet their crops were failing, They contacted the teachers of the school of spiritual gardening that they were following and asked for help. The school sent out a couple of representatives to go visit and see what had gone wrong. They toured the garden and then gathered the members of the commune together. They complimented them on their diligent adherence to the principles of spiritual gardening. They then asked how often they watered the garden. The response was silence. In all their work they had not thought to water the garden with any regularity and this was why it was not thriving. To repeat the Buddhist adage, they had literally neglected to carry water.
The importance of paying attention to the material and mundane aspects of our relationships with all things is critically important to our ability to live in harmony with the circumstances of our lives. I remember my guru Jean Klein being asked about paranormal spiritual phenomenon such as past lives, telepathy, levitation, and so on. His answer was that undoubtedly such things are possible, but they are a distraction from the real work of spiritual exploration, He described them as the carnival, lots of flashing light and sounds, fun to ride on but nowhere you would want to live.
The power of the mundane, beyond the lights of the carnival is where I believe the best work with others is achieved. To work relationally in the ways proposed by the field of CYC is a quite ordinary kind of practice. It is composed of engaging in the daily routines of living in a space composed of young people and adults. There is quite a lot of cooking, cleaning, hanging out, daily hygiene, as well as games, walks, outings and so forth. There are of course spectacular moments of remarkable behavior that can involve high emotions and acts of violence or love. These disruptions of the daily work can be very compelling. But, I would argue that at the end of the day, they are the carnival and not anywhere to live.
They are compelling though, and at times it can seem as though the spectacular is what makes the work worthwhile. The fascinating world of exceptional behavior. We spend an awful lot of time, thinking, theorizing, documenting, strategizing, worrying, and fantasizing about what to do about young people’s mad behavior. At times it can appear as though the day to day acts of living together pale in comparison to the spectacular acts of malaise that erupt periodically in the work we do.
Of course, this fascination with extreme behavior or emotional upset is not unique to CYC. It is a global cultural obsession. Everywhere we look there are theories about why the behavior of young people is so disturbed and what we might do about it. I was reminded of this by a recent article about the impacts of social media on young people’s mental health. The article begins by stating:
There have been increasingly loud public warnings that social media is harming teenagers’ mental health — most recently from the United States surgeon general — adding to many parents’ fears about what all the time spent on phones is doing to their children’s brains. While many scientists share the concern, there is little research to prove that social media is harmful — or to indicate which sites, apps or features are problematic. There isn’t even a shared definition of what social media is. It leaves parents, policymakers and other adults in teenagers’ lives without clear guidance on what to be worried about. “We have some evidence to guide us, but this is a scenario where we just need to know more,” said Jacqueline Nesi, a psychologist at Brown who studies the topic.
I am struck by several things here. The first being that we as a culture are seemingly obsessed with protecting young people from harm, even when we are not sure that something they are doing is actually dangerous. We issue warnings that something (in this case social media) is causing our young people to be deeply and profoundly unhappy and lonely. In our concern, we look to anything unfamiliar as the possible source of harm. In this, we are seeking out the spectacular, the flashing lights and sounds of social media as the source of our children’s malaise. It is flashy, it is new and we don’t understand it, so we create it as an object of worry. If we could just get our children away from the carnival, all would be well.
But there is another cultural imperative that emerges in the article and that is the necessity for adults to worry about young people. The article state that “It leaves parents, policymakers and other adults in teenagers’ lives without clear guidance on what to be worried about.” To be fair, the quotation refers to the lack of specific information about what parts of social media might be harmful. However, I would argue that adults are trained to worry and to look to experts to tell them what to worry about. In previous generations, this worry was centered around morality and we had an array of what has been called moral panics. Stanley Cohen describes a moral panic as the creation of a social concern that is produced by moral entrepreneurs, promoted through mass media coverage, and then taken up by politicians. This can lead to new laws aimed at enforcing moral codes and controlling behavior.
Moral panics have included drug use, promiscuity, rock and roll, communism, homosexuality, movies, and fashion trends, to name but a few. Recently we have seen a resurgence of moral panics related to drag queens, transgendered young people, critical race theory, and socialism among others. Moral entrepreneurs and politicians have warned that young and impressionable children need to be shielded from what are portrayed as morally dubious influences. But I would argue that this is the carnival, where there is a lot of noise and mirrors, but no evidence to support the allegations of harm or the imperative to worry.
The social media scare mimics the moral panic playbook, but draws on a different set of entrepreneurs. The new carnival barkers are the purveyors of worry over the emerging social coordinates of mental health. Put simply, we now have mental health panics. Social media is one, trauma is another, faulty neurology/biochemistry are on the list, while music, alcohol, drugs and sexuality make the transition from moral to mental health. The list of social phenomenon that create mental health issues for young people is fluid and expansive with new contributions arriving with regularity. The messages of mental health panic evoke fear and concern and place young people under ongoing surveillance to monitor any slip that might indicate a serious mental health issue. The flaw in all of this is that the evidence to support any clear causal connection, or even to give an unambiguous definition of what mental health means. In short, this is yet another carnival and carnivals are not ideal environments in which to raise children.
What is left out of the mental health panic discourse is the actual material lived reality of young people. While we are encouraged to worry about things like drag queens, social media, hip hop, and sexuality, young people worry about being shot at school, recruited into a militia as a child soldier, inheriting a ecologically compromised planet, having limited access to meaningful education and employment, having access to clean drinking water, food insecurity, gun violence in their neighborhood, among other concrete actual concerns.
The antipsychiatrist Franco Basaglia was once asked if he believed schizophrenia was real. He responded by saying that he didn’t know, because the society that we live in was so extremely dysfunctional, it was not surprising people were driven crazy. He said, however, that if we could shift our society so that it actually cared for people, and then schizophrenia still existed, perhaps we could say it was real. In our terms here, if we could dim the lights of the carnival so we could see what was really effecting our children, then perhaps we could do something to make their lives more tolerable. In a very real sense, we are like the commune trying to grow a garden without enough water. We need to come home from the carnival and water our garden.
