journal
Exploring Spiritual Diversity with Respect for Self and Other
May 6, 2008
It is estimated that there are around 4200 religions in the world today, but it is impossible to know the exact number. Religions are also always growing and changing, so offshoots can come about within a matter of days, weeks or months and spawn whole movements. They can also die or come to an end as quickly. There are also many systems of belief that would not necessarily be characterized as “religions”, such as the those held by small, indigenous groups around the world or such as agnostics and atheists, who do not necessarily congregate or follow similar precepts or philosophies. There are also thousands of people today who call themselves “spiritual but not religious”, but who otherwise do not describe or define themselves or their beliefs.
In this country, we tend to be familiar with the three major world religions as they are classified today: Christianity, Judaism, and the Muslim faith. Following close behind would be Buddhism and Hinduism, although depending upon the place of residence (region) and the level of education of an individual, these last two might even be unknown or only known as a name.
An individual’s religious and spiritual beliefs are usually a complex mix of influences from childhood, ancestral lineage, culture, and nation. Even someone who has grown up only exposed to Christianity is likely aware of many different denominations and of the differences between them. Furthermore, because of the Internet and globalization, we are all exposed to more religious and philosophical beliefs and values than ever before in human history. Whether we live in the Australian outback or in among the skyscrapers of New York City, it is unlikely that our spiritual lives have not been at least slightly influenced by some other religious, spiritual, or moral philosophy or world view. As Lee Irwin, Professor of Religious Studies at the College of the City of Charleston put it to me in one conversation: “Spiritual development and evolution in contemporary 21st century America—the world—is highly eclectic. The resources that are there for people to draw upon are vast compared with any other generation. We are inundated with potential tools for learning.”
It is particularly imperative now in the wake of much violence perpetrated over centuries of human history in the name of God and religion, most recently 9/11, that we find ways to explore human spiritual diversity with openness and respect. I choose to not use the word “tolerance” because I feel that this word implies blocking out the dissonance that is often caused by difference. Rather, it is in the very center of dissonance that we can find the ability to be open to another’s experience of life. Maintaining a receptive mind allows us to hold our own sets of beliefs and practices while allowing others the freedom to have and express theirs, as long as boundaries are respected. It also puts us in the position of being open to change in ourselves inasmuch as we might wish for change in others. But more than this, it is only in the synergy of exchange and dialogue that we can find and respect true diversity.
However, despite what may be our desire for openness and at the same time that we are exposed to so many more spiritual beliefs, tools and resources, we may find ourselves wishing others would be like us. The world’s history of wars being fought over religion shows that the impetus to force others to think, believe and act as we do is an integral part of our ancestral legacy and the human condition. The question then is whether we can overcome this primal desire to force others to believe what we do, or whether we can find another way. Particularly in the U.S. which was founded on the principle that each individual must be free to pursue his or her happiness without persecution of his or her beliefs and way of life, the ability to find a way through our ego attachments to our own “rightness” is imperative.
As a person who has always had a strong spiritual life, I know intimately how easy it is to fall into judging and denigrating others’ beliefs. Yet I also fervently hold that there are reasons we live in a world of such great diversity. As the Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader and spokesperson for the Tibetan people and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, has said, we are lucky to have such a wealth of choices for finding happiness. On the other hand, I also know that I can be so conditioned to see the world through a certain lens that I may not even be aware of my own biases and prejudices.
This fact was brought home many years ago when I was listening to a talk by the Cherokee or Tsalagi teacher, the Venerable Dhyani Ywahoo. She was telling the story of the origins of the her people. She said that they had come from the constellation called the Pleiades or the Seven Sisters, to seed the Earth with their wisdom–their DNA. As I heard her words, I suddenly realized with a shock that she was telling this story as a matter of factual truth. My schooling in the western educational system had ingrained in me the premise of Darwinian evolution–that humans had evolved over thousands of years from an ape-like creature without influences from any extraterrestrial agents. Furthermore, despite my openness to others’ beliefs, I was not prepared to consider it a possibility that something anthropologists would call a “myth” or a “creation story” to mean something not factually true, but only symbollically true, was perhaps a fact. Yet I also knew that if I was going to be able to embrace her fully as human and to be open to learning from her, I also had to be able to change my own perception of what constitutes “truth” and “fact”.
This moment made me understand in some small way how we in the West continue to suppress indigenous peoples. While I had long understood that Europeans had committed genocide of the Native peoples of this continent in the name of Christianity and that this was wrong, I had not considered how western science had similarly denigrated and suppressed indigenous cultures and beliefs and how both of these legacies continue to inform a society-wide prejudice against them, what has been called by Native scholars, a “genocide of the mind”.
This realization then called up a quandary in me: I knew that many fundamentalist Christian groups claim that the separation of church and state in this country is a form of oppression of their fundamental right to believe what they wish and to their freedom of speech. I also had to consider the factual truth of the Adam and Eve story if I was going to give credence to a similar story among the Cherokee. In the midst of these contradictions lay the seed of how to balance out the need to protect every human beings right to free speech, freedom of worship, and freedom of belief with the need to also allow free and open dialogue. For instance, I do not believe that many fumdamentalist Christians would be open to their children being exposed to beliefs other than their own and that their desire is largely to force their own beliefs on others, including the belief that those who do not believe what they do are “damned.” On the other hand, I do believe it is possible to foster an atmosphere of mutual exploration and openness which can then mitigate the tendency towards the use of force or coercion.
We can see the playing out of this tension in what it means to protect our basic freedoms in our workplaces where, due to non-discrimination policies and practices, we may feel we cannot talk about our moral values, religion or spirituality without risk to ourselves or others. Labeled “political correctness” at its worst, laws that protect us from imposing our own beliefs on others or visa versa can be construed so rigidly as to prevent the free and creative exchange of beliefs and ideas.
This came home to me in the 15 some years I worked in two state universities where I served foreign language departments and programs. In this capacity, I both taught and employed students from many countries, classes, and racial, religious, moral, philosophical, political, and educational backgrounds and beliefs. Even if I had not been bound by state and federal laws protecting equal rights, it was imperative to me personally that I not make assumptions about another’s beliefs or background. It was also imperative that I not impose or appear to impose mine on them. Yet if I completely disallowed any mention of value-systems, spirituality, faith, or belief, it would have also shut down the creative capacity to develop friendships and intimacy with one another. Or to have an environment that was supportive of each individual’s basic wholeness and humanness.
While it is not appropriate to demand that others participate in rituals or adhere to a particular set of beliefs in order to remain employed or to be the citizen of a country, it is also counterproductive to not allow free and open dialogue. As we have seen in many totalitarian regimes such as the former Soviet Union, suppression only serves to create depression, anger, frustration, despair, and stagnation. As with many of the terrorists who instigated 9/11, many of whom grew up under conditions of cultural and religious oppression, any measure that disallows the free exchange of ideas or that uses even subtle force or coercion to gain compliance under certain conditions can erupt in more radical actions such as violence.
On the other hand, there is a difference between having the intention in taking up a conversation to convert another, versus the intention to learn and share from one another. It is certainly true, as Eckhart Tolle writes in A New Earth that if we believe our beliefs are the only right ones, we are in the grip of ego and not serving a higher truth. Indeed, one of the main reasons I became disillusioned with Christianity as a teenager was rooted in the words “the Chosen People.” I could not hold to a value that only Christians were loved by God or were capable of going to heaven.
As a manager, I believe I struck a perfect balance and engendered an atmosphere of mutual exploration and openness that benefited all of us. Whether a student was a devout Mormon who spent his summers evangelizing for the church or whether she was a student who wished to be given the right to go to a private space in my place of employment to do her prayers to Allah at sunset, I set out to create an environment in which respect was given and expected as long as others did the same. I did this by engaging my own and others’ natural curiosity. I wanted to know who they were–what were their parents like? What about the town they grew up in? What religion or belief system did they grow up with, if any? What did they believe now and why? Such conversations often sprouted into heartfelt sharing about our deepest thoughts and fostered a sense of camaraderie in which no one was pressured to do anything but share. It also revealed areas in which our values and beliefs intersected even if the surface forms–Christian, Buddhist, Muslim, atheist–were different.
To have such conversations and an atmosphere of open inquiry, it requires the capacity to work constructively with judgments we hold. Given that as humans, our brains are hard-wired to make judgments, this can seem like a daunting task. The nature of the reptilian parts of our brain–the emotional centers of the amygdala and hippocampus, often called the “fight-flight” centers–means that our initial reaction to a difference between ourselves and another can trigger the desire to attack or flee. How do we get beyond this very basic, natural reaction so we can get to a higher level of functioning that enables us to connect even when we are encountering differences that may feel threatening to our own belief systems?
Because of my parents’ desire to explore different spiritual beliefs and their interest in other cultures, I developed growing up an openness and curiosity about the spectrum of human spiritual self-expression. I myself was taken by my parents to the Episcopal Church as a child until the age of 10. After that, we changed to the Unitarian Universalist Church. Later, as a teenager and young adult, I migrated away from organized religion. However, due to my mother having been interested in Asian religions and philosophies, I had been exposed to both Hindu and Buddhist beliefs. Our bookcases were filled with books such as the famous Hindu title, Autobiography of a Yogi and the New Age classic, Seth Speaks. I grew up feeling a very strong sense of spiritual connection to both humans and a divine presence. However, after my parents divorced, I no longer went to an organized church, having come to feel that they were focused on exclusivity, and not on true love of others that I felt was at the core of Christ’s message.
Eventually, in my late twenties and early thirties, I felt the need to prioritize my spiritual life in some more formal way and I began to study Buddhism in earnest. At the same time, I was writing my Ph.D. dissertation on a church founded in 1919 in the southern coalfields of West Virginia by immigrants from Carpatho-Russia (now located in easternmost Slovakia). The church of their homeland was the Carpatho-Russian Greek Catholic Orthodox Church, a blending of theology and practice between the Roman Catholic and Greek Catholic churches that occurred at the time of the Great Schism between Constantinople and Rome in 1054 AD. The deep faith of the members of the still-standing, gold-domed church in Elkhorn, WV inspired me to also explore my Christian roots more deeply so I started attending an Epsicopal church. Eventually, my study of Buddhism led me to studying with a Tsalagi (Cherokee) teacher named the Ven. Dhyani Ywahoo, who also holds and teaches in the Drikung-kagyu and Nyingma-pa streams of Tibetan Buddhism. Thus my spiritual path eventually became an amalgamation of these three streams: Christian, Buddhist, and Native American. I still consider them equally influential.
Like many people in this time, however, I do not participate in any organized religion, but rather find connections with like-minded people with whom I share meditation, theological dialogue, and spiritual self-reflection. This is a situation that took me many years to be comfortable with due to a subtle message in mainstream society that we “should” participate in a group or church to be accepted. It also took me many years to do so because my eclectic blend of beliefs is still unusual and is often judged as “flaky” or wrong-minded by others in both mainstream and non-mainstream spiritual communities.
Eventually, I came to compare myself to the mystics of many religions, such as Hildegaard de Bingen and Thomas Merton, who taught that when we keep our hearts open, we find that God or the Divine is in everything and everywhere. So like the early Christians, who felt worship could as easily take place inside as outside in nature because God is in all things, I came to feel that it was not necessary to worship within a particular form or context. My unique spiritual life is now in fact not lonely nor have I ever been truly alone. Through contact with many people of different backgrounds and beliefs, my own spiritual life is enriched and hence my sense of connection to others and the divine within them is expanded.
It nonetheless remains challenging to balance my own beliefs and attitudes with respect for the vast differences in those around me, as is true for all of us. My own family members, for instance, do not share the same beliefs or faiths as I. My father continues to wrestle with whether there is a life after death or whether God exists. Because my own sense of the immanent presence of the Divine, or of God, around me is so strong, I am sometimes puzzled by what appears to be his lack of the same. In my 15-year marriage, differences in spiritual beliefs and worldview were a central source of tension between my now ex-husband and me. I have to admit that I often find myself feeling frustrated, judgmental, and even angry at those who don’t see things as I do. When I am caught up in the egotism of judgment, I think others should be, think and do as I do. Yet I also know that it is folly to wish as much, as the great diversity of human expression shows that we will never be all the same. We are all doing exactly what is right for us. We are as unique as the myriad snowflakes that fall to earth. The challenge, therefore, is how to work with judgment and other states of mind which could lead us to at best dismissing those with differing beliefs or, at worst, to kill them.
Several sources of knowledge and experience inform my thoughts and actions. Due to the privileges of class and education given to me by my family, I have been exposed to many different ideas, cultures, and religions both through school and travel. When we travel out of our own country or comfort zone, it becomes clear that cultural, religious and spiritual heterogeneity is more the norm than the exception. In order to learn the language and culture of a place we are visiting, it is essential that we temporarily suspend our own judgments to see the world through the eyes of our hosts. As an anthropologist and folklorist with a specialization in Russia and Eastern Europe, I also had to develop the intellectual tools of observing the “other” with as as much “objectivity” as possible. I had to assume that differences existed and yet suspend any tendency to make value judgments in the interest of scientific accuracy. Yet, it has been the practices of Buddhism that perhaps help me the most when I find myself, like any human being, pulled into an inner narrative that “my way” is the “best” or “only way.”
Unlike many religions, the precepts and practices of Buddhism are not centered around belief in a deity or deities. Indeed, the Buddha only mentioned the word “God” a few times. Generally, he simply avoided the issue altogether and rather, admonished his followers that the true path to knowledge and spiritual freedom was through working with the self. Through a close observation of the mind and through practices aimed at taming emotions and bodily sensations, he said peace could be found–or samadi, a place where we experience absolute bliss and oneness which some might call God. So it is that as Buddhism has migrated all over the world, it has usually easily been mingled with the local religion. Tibetan Buddhism, for instance, arose out of the merging of the animistic, indigenous Bon religion with the form of Buddhism that came from India, which itself had been influenced by contact with Hinduism.
But more importantly than whether Buddhism talks about God or not, is that the contemplative practices of compassion and mindfulness require us to notice when judgment, anger, hatred, and other “afflicted” emotions arise in the mind. When they do, our task is to simply observe them with kindness and to let go as best we can. Rather than latching onto the thought and getting onto the train of internal chatter–”Well, what is wrong with this person? He is so wierd, so wrong!” or instead of getting caught in the sensations and emotions of constriction, anger, etc.–we stay off the train and redirect the mind back to a single point of focus–often the breath or a mantra, a single chanted word. This is a kind of mind training in which we develop the power of concentration as one tool to help us disengage from jumping on the bandwagon of the constantly chattering and judging mind so we can then access a far greater sense of ease and, ultimately, compassion for ourselves and others.
If we are engaging in a practice of compassion, then we may also silently send ourselves or the other person kindness, or metta when we notice judgment about difference. The goal is not to attempt to stamp out or eradicate in the moment such feelings and thoughts, but to recognize them as simply a feeling or thought–nothing more, nothing less. To have judgment, to have hatred and anger, are simple human emotions and experiences. It is when we consciously or unconsciously act on our every random through or feeling that we risk causing harm. It is when we attach a belief in our own righteousness or our anger at an unjust world to judgment that the potential for a jihad, holy war grips us, either literally in an act of violence or in words of blame and anger.
Therefore, the basic practices of mindfulness and metta are based on the knowledge that when we bring the simple light of awareness to pain of all kinds–and judgment of another is certainly a kind of pain–then eventually, little by little, it dissolves. We begin to find ourselves being less judgmental, less apt to leap into the inner stream of criticism and anger. I think of it as being very much like when we enter a dark, strange room. We don’t know what is there and may limit our movement for fear of running into something. Or we may flail around like a bull in a china shop, knocking over and breaking things. But if we take the time to light candles, eventually, as as each one is illumined, the whole room is revealed and its unknown contours become apparent. We can then move freely about without worrying about knocking something over or injuring ourselves or another.
As awareness grows and we are able to unhook from getting on the train of our mind’s judgment, seeing the pattern, it eventually becomes easier to stay in a place of caring and openness. We recognize negative labeling or judgments and we breathe through and beyond them.
Buddhism thus gives us practices of simple observation and non-action. Once we have mastered non-action, we can then begin to see that a judgment is only a kind of pattern of thought. Once we begin to dismantle the pattern, we can then begin to see all the many influences underneath it that drive our tendency to want the rest of the world to be just like us despite ample evidence that it never will be. In the larger picture, it could also be that in stepping beyond our initial judgments, we discover that we need to test our inner judgment against the fact of another’s difference of belief to strengthen our own without denigrating the other. Or that we need to dismantle the influence of a parent who was so rigid and demanding that we ourselves have developed a similar quality, either subtle or overt. Judgment of another is never one thing; it is always a constellation of many things.
Of course, there are times when we want judgment to be well and strong. Buddhism calls this form of judgment “discriminating wisdom”. This is the capacity that we have to determine what is the right action or reaction to a situation. What will cause the least harm to and do the most good for ourselves or another? Therefore, the art of dismantling judgment of another whose beliefs or practices are different than ours is different than making the choice to know what we believe and to hold to it and to determine if it is appropriate or not to introduce that belief to another. For instance, if someone is telling us that in order to be a “true believer” or to be “saved by God”, we must cause harm to another, it is helpful to have the ability to judge the rightness or wrongness of such an action. Therefore, we don’t want to be without judgment; we only want to temper it. With the practices of mindfulness and compassion, we can hone judgment to discriminating wisdom and be like a wise elder who holds us with a smile and a big heart.
Lastly, it is important to hold ourselves with kindness when we do find ourselves getting on that train and succumbing to our wish to be right about what we believe. Or when we find ourselves proselytizing or being overtly intolerant or prejudiced. To hold ourselves up to an impossible standard is to reject the diversity of experience within ourselves.
As human beings living in bodies, we will always have feelings and judgments. We will have to navigate small and large differences between ourselves and others. Sometimes we will do better than others; at other times, it is too large a stretch. We may do better one day and worst the next. We may find in an interaction with another person that we have made unconscious assumptions and judgments based on the color of their skin, the yamaka on their head, or some other external signifier.
Since we currently live in a world that has for centuries been torn apart by a sense of separation and even hostility of one group against another in many cases enacted through violence and brutality, it is not realistic to expect that we would be a clean slate, untainted by the many influences upon us from birth to death. To that end, the practice of exploring spiritual diversity with respect is also about dismantling a culture of violence that permeates our world and our worldview on levels that go far deeper than meets the eye.
The practice of exploring spiritual diversity with respect, then, if done mindfully on a daily basis, becomes all about dismantling the violence within ourselves whose roots go deeper than we can even imagine. This is not to discourage us from taking on this challenge, but to temper the practice with compassion for our shared human plight and to be as kind as we can to everyone, including and perhaps especially ourselves.