My Activism Exhaustion and the Buddha’s Path to Recovery

How to sustain the fight

buddha

As a young man, I was often a strident activist who saw the world in black and white terms. There was right and there was wrong. My sense of moral outrage and empathy for the suffering of others drove my actions. “Speak truth to power!” I was right, and I knew it. And I also became exhausted. So did my friends. Eventually, we stopped. Why?

The typical answer is that people grow up. They take on responsibilities. Children appear. Life distracts you from the stridency of youth. These things are true, but there is something else. After all, the exhaustion I experienced occurred long before kids and jobs got in the way. That exhaustion, I observed, was common among activists. I have wondered about it for a long time, and only recently did I get the clue—we weren’t, or at least, I wasn’t, doing the proper inner work and self care to sustain that kind of work. Robert Sachs, in his book The Buddha at War, shows us a lot about how to do that.

For starters, Sachs brings us back to Buddhist basics by focusing on the three poisons—ignorance, attachment, and aggression. When we carry these notions in our being, we are poisoning ourselves. When we release them and resolve them, we enable ourselves to begin the path of enlightenment. For our purposes, let’s just call it the path of sustained activism.

Here are a few insights that have come to me as I have contemplated these three poisons. The first, which surprised me, is attachment. We want things to stay the same. I want things to stay the same. Climate change in its very terminology says that nothing is going to be the same. That’s why it is climate change. The underlying fear is the loss of the stability we have known. In other words, it comes from attachment to what we have always known.

While Sachs drove this point home for me, Sophie Strand in her book The Flowering Wand mentioned something related. She spoke of “invasive species” as possibly being a response of nature to the changing ecosystems. Invasive, in this sense, derives its attitude from an attachment to how things were before the invasion. Certainly, the ecological balance we were used to is changing, but the fear of that change derives largely from the level of attachment we have to what existed before.

For me personally, both as a young man and today, the fear that comes from this attachment links directly to aggression. I mean aggression in words, attitude, action, argumentation, and protest. Public displays of aggression can be seen in protests at events like the G20 and the G7 summits, or in throwing paint on art, and so on. For me and many other concerned people, this aggression comes out more as a public shaming of people for living their lives—perhaps by taking a flight or driving their ATV or eating beef—because of its carbon footprint. Say what you want about the choices other people make, the shaming is an aggression, even if it is often a passive aggression. I have been guilty of these in my writing, and while they momentarily allowed me to feel clear and even superior, those feelings deflate quickly. They become animosity and in this way, poison my own heart.

The third poison is ignorance. I find this one easy to project onto others like climate deniers or strident activists who I am sure are wrong-headed in their attitude due to their ignorance. It makes me want to correct their ignorance. But I don’t think this poison is about the ignorance of others; it is about my own ignorance. Where is it, after all, that I do not know? Where am I ignorant? What are the limits of my knowledge? What can’t I see? For me, ignorance lurks most profoundly in those things that I assume to be true. Sachs says that ignorance has to do with not being able to see things as they are. Incomplete knowledge is ignorance, and the reality is that no one can see the full picture of climate change. But also, few can see that climate change might fill some spirit-level necessity we cannot understand.

I think that in our activism, seeing our own ignorance is among the most difficult things of all. We are activists, after all, mostly because we see something that we believe we are right about. How can we be right if we are ignorant? I suspect that is exactly the point. There are many situations in the world that require our attention and motivate our activism, yet the more certain we are about what we are doing, the more blind or ignorant we may be. This means that we need to look internally at ourselves. It is our inner being that is ignorant.

So What Do We Do?

If we are infected with these three poisons, what do we do to correct them so we can continue leading the change that is so necessary?

First, we need to get ourselves centered. A useful path I have found on this comes from Eckhart Tolle in The Power of Now. Tolle describes a meditation practice that takes one into the Now or the present moment. The only way into that is to let go of both the future and the past. This includes angers at the past actions of oil companies and the future worries about what will come with climate change and the new administration.

I have found that when I become aware of the Now, attachment disappears. Aggression retreats. Ignorance gives way to a knowledge of the present moment. In the moment, there is no aggression. There is nothing to be attached to because attachments are in the past or in the future. And in the present moment, there is no greater knowledge so there is no ignorance. The poisons are neutralized and new kinds of actions are enabled.

This centering in the moment prepares me for action. Sachs suggests that once we are centered, we can start our day with “the altruistic intention to be of use and service, and end it with reflection on the fruits of our actions and attitudes…” Coming into the Now releases my attachments, aggressions, and ignorance. Then, I can reflect to find that source of altruistic use and service, which may be embodied in the big world or in my writing. Or, it may also be embodied in the small actions I take on my land in alignment with the values of contributing to solving climate change—composting, driving less, growing my own food, choosing earth-friendly tools when I need new ones, and so on. We need to refuse fear by being in the Now, but we also need to contemplate a good intention every day, then reflect on it at day’s end. This is becoming a new staple of my journaling practice. It is also a road to the awareness I need now.

My discovery is that the climate abundant life depends completely on our conscious state of mind and how awakened we are spiritually. Or at least, it is for me. From the standpoint of the things that concern me, I expect a rather dismal four years coming up. Yet to do anything effectively in terms of resistance and moving forward, I will need to cultivate consciousness as a baseline activity. For without that, the danger of fear and the three poisons—attachment, aggression, and ignorance—becomes palpable, and in that space, it is impossible to be effective and life becomes miserable. It doesn’t need to be that way.

Anthony Signorelli