How To Get Out of Your Own Way
If you can get out of your own way, you won’t be in anyone else’s.
— Aldous Huxley from Island
This article has 3 titles:
- The first is Unintended Consequences
- The second is How To Get Out of Your Own Way
- & The third is What’s Between You and Beloved Community
As this mélange of titles suggests, the thing that is between you and the Beloved Community of which you dream and to which you aspire, is you. Either you are in your own way, or you are already there. This is yet another paradox of enlightenment.
Now, of course, you aren’t in your own way on purpose. You are in your own way, quite by accident as it seems to you, quite at the mercy of the great many things far beyond your control. The realization of Beloved Community, you might hasten to add, isn’t about my internal state! It’s about the relations of the larger world of which I am but a small, nearly insignificant part!
To which I respond, yes, and no, and you’re bigger than you think, more interconnected than you think, and your significance is yet another paradox. The gap you perceive, the distance, between you and living in Beloved Community is a chasm you can’t squeeze shut with your waking mind, a gap you can’t bridge with your science and your logic, a space whose depth and darkness thwart your hopefulness… and yet, and yet…
It is also an ephemeral illusion that is the unintended consequence of how one lives.
…an ephemeral illusion that is the unintended consequence of how we live, how we all live, how you all live, how you live…
First, so that we’re all on the same page, let’s remember together what the dream of Beloved Community looks like, sounds like, and smells like… from the King Center by way of Jackson Advocate News:
“The Beloved Community” is a term that was first coined in the early days of the 20th Century by the philosopher-theologian Josiah Royce, who founded the Fellowship of Reconciliation. However, it was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., also a member of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, who popularized the term and invested it with a deeper meaning which has captured the imagination of people of goodwill all over the world.
For Dr. King, The Beloved Community was not a lofty utopian goal to be confused with the rapturous image of the Peaceable Kingdom, in which lions and lambs coexist in idyllic harmony. Rather, The Beloved Community was for him a realistic, achievable goal that could be attained by a critical mass of people committed to and trained in the philosophy and methods of nonviolence.
Dr. King’s Beloved Community is a global vision, in which all people can share in the wealth of the earth. In The Beloved Community, poverty, hunger, and homelessness will not be tolerated because international standards of human decency will not allow it. Racism and all forms of discrimination, bigotry, and prejudice will be replaced by an all-inclusive spirit of sisterhood and brotherhood. In The Beloved Community, international disputes will be resolved by peaceful conflict-resolution and reconciliation of adversaries, instead of military power. Love and trust will triumph over fear and hatred. Peace with justice will prevail over war and military conflict.
Dr. King’s Beloved Community was not devoid of interpersonal, group, or international conflict. Instead he recognized that conflict was an inevitable part of human experience. But he believed that conflicts could be resolved peacefully and adversaries could be reconciled through a mutual, determined commitment to nonviolence. No conflict, he believed, need erupt in violence. And all conflicts in The Beloved Community should end with reconciliation of adversaries cooperating together in a spirit of friendship and goodwill.”
Now, I don’t know about you, but that sounds pretty utopian to me… Cory Doctorow wrote a book that mixes utopian and dystopian themes called Walkaway. In it a character from the nonviolent walkaway culture is having a conversation with one of the power brokers from the hyper-capitalist and militarist culture that expresses this idea:
We aren’t getting rid of greed or of greedy people. We are simply changing the default to being not greedy. Greed will still exist and greedy people will still exist, but instead of being lionized and lauded for their greed, they will be pitied and tolerated. No one is going to stop you from being an a-hole, but we are going to stop rewarding you for it. (paraphrased)
Similarly, there is Aldous Huxley’s utopian vision in Island — a work he considered his most important. Like Walkaway it is a utopia juxtaposed against a dystopia — a dystopia that looks eerily familiar to the modern world in which he was writing. And, spoiler alert, the utopia does not prevail. It is crushed, although the latent potential for its rebirth is hinted at.
For my part, I think utopia, as a concept, has gotten a bad rap, a name and reputation that even the King Center wishes to distance itself from. And we’ll get to that — my proposition to you is that Beloved Community IS utopian, not in the visionary-pie-in-the-sky way that is central to all the intellectual and cultural dismissals of the term, but in a way suggest by my favorite quote from Morpheus in The Matrix: “You’re going to learn, just as I did, there’s a difference between knowing the path and walking the path.” Utopia isn’t a path you KNOW, it is a path you WALK.
So, let’s talk about how you can get out of your own way, avoid unintended consequences, and walk the path of Beloved Community.
There are two big illusions that frequently keep us in our own ways:
First, the idea that we are separate and discrete entities &
Second, that we are what we think.
For the first one, the idea that we are separate and discrete entities, I could repeat things you’ve probably heard: for example the 7th UU Principle: Respect for the Interdependent Web of All Existence of Which We Are a Part… Or I could tell you about how there are more non-human microbial cells in your body than there are cells that contain the DNA that you like to think of as yours. But I’m going to take a different tack this morning, let’s go back to Josiah Royce, who coined the phrase Beloved Community in the first place. Did you know that what he is philosophically famous for, at least in his early career, is the concept of Universal Mind — of Mind with a capital M. Of an overarching consciousness in which we all participate and of which we are all a part? Maybe, like me, you had a moment as a child when the reality of being a thing made up of other living things just hit you, and you wondered — What would it feel like to be a cell that is a small part of a much larger thing. The answer is both clear and obvious: it would feel like this, like however you’re feeling right now. Unity consciousness, Buddha nature, whatever you want to call it, whatever spiritual or philosophical lineage’s understanding best resonates with you — it’s all the same thing and the same truth… you are a cell, an appendage… your life is your own, and is not your own, is in belonging to something larger… when we live in denial of that belonging we are tortured, when we accept it and embrace it and find the joy in it… then we find our feet on the path we call Beloved Community.
Okay, second — and this is a tough one, partly thanks to Descartes and our continued addiction to dualism. Let’s try on this approach for size: dualism exists because of our persistent insistence that we can master the world with our intellect and therefore resolve the paradox of our own consciousness through logical forms. The dualism is the intellectualized manifestation of paradox. We see both sides of the paradox, so we imagine that we ourselves are split — a mind and a body. We are not split, we are mind-body experiencing paradox, which is a layer of comprehension beyond logic. The practical implication of this, the ‘why does it even matter’ part, is this: the brain part of your mind is a tool for learning, a tool for noticing, a tool for discriminating (by which I mean telling things apart, not the more insidious definition), a tool for thinking. It is a tool that is at the service of your awareness — which is who you are, you are that awareness that can be aware both of your thoughts and of that Mind with a capital M. So, when your brain thinks a racist thought or a xenophobic thought or a sexist, ableist, or homophobic thought… that thought is not who you are. The fact of your awareness of the nature of that thought is not JUST another thought, if you pay attention you can tell that your awareness precedes the judgmental thoughts that you have about yourself right after you have an unkind thought. Those kinds of thoughts are like plants in the garden of mind you are cultivating, the water, sunlight, and nutrients in that garden are your attention. You will mistakenly and violently think that you need to pull those thoughts up by the root — and in doing so you will, as an unintended consequence, strengthen them. As Eckhart Tolle says, “That which you resist, persists.” All you really need to do when you recognize a thought that is not worthy of Beloved Community, is to deny that thought the energy of attention — neither argument nor self-flagellation. Simply recognize that it was an old thought, a product of culture and conditioned mind patterns — not who you are, not something you wish to feed. …another step on the path we call Beloved Community.
Let me share with you a passage from Huxley’s Island:
“Faith is something very different from belief. Belief is the systematic taking of unanalyzed words much too seriously. Paul’s words, Mohammed’s words, Marx’s words, Hitler’s words — people take them too seriously, and what happens? What happens is the senseless ambivalence of history — sadism versus duty, or (incomparably worse) sadism as duty; devotion counterbalanced by organized paranoia; sisters of charity selflessly tending the victims of their own church’s inquisitors and crusaders. Faith, on the contrary, can never be taken too seriously. For Faith is the empirically justified confidence in our capacity to know who in fact we are, to forget the belief-intoxicated Manichee in Good Being. Give us this day our daily Faith, but deliver us, dear God, from Belief.”
What is the belief-intoxicated Manichee? It is the ego, to use Eckhart Tolle’s definition. It is the confusion of what you think with who you are. It is Descartes’ dualism. It is the addiction to thought. The hypervigilance that promises safety but never delivers it. The endless stream of one thought after another that crowds out your awareness… That makes you feel insignificant in a way that implies powerlessness instead of interdependency.
What is Good Being? It is living aligned with Beloved Community. In the words of Jesus the Kingdom of Heaven. In Buddhist terms, enlightened. In each and every wisdom tradition, you can find words that point to this truth. Stop looking for what makes the words different from each other, begin to look past the words at the truths to which they point. After all, words can point at the truth, but they can’t ever BE the truth. …deliver us, dear God, from Belief.
I am loath to argue with the King Center, but Dr. King was prophetic and it is okay that his disciples still struggle to understand the depth of his message. Perhaps Dr. King himself only glimpsed the deeper truth at which he was pointing, let me put it to you like this:
We have believed that Beloved Community requires critical mass and this belief has made it so. It has made it impossible for US to BE Beloved Community, because we have convinced ourselves that we are waiting on some unspecified number of others to do it with us or for us… some ‘critical mass’… If you’re feeling like we’re on the cusp of another paradox, you’re right.
Beloved Community is a path that we choose to walk, it is a path of non-violence, it is a path of radical self-love and interdependency, it is a path of loving-kindness, it is a path that can be walked alone or with company. There is a moment, only visible in hindsight, where a critical mass of people are on the new path, where thesis and antithesis crash and a new synthesis is born, a new default. But, in the words of Gandalf the White, “That is not for you to decide, all that you get to decide is what to do with the time you are given.” And you can decide, right here, right now, to walk this path… and you will not be alone.
— Article adapted from a sermon delivered at San Gabriel UU Fellowship in Georgetown, Texas on Sunday October 22, 2023. Video Version.
