Chapter 1

Spirituality and Resistance: A Beginning
by Roger S. Gottlieb
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"Who is truly rich?" asks the Talmud, and answers: "The person who is satisfied with what they have."

"The world is full of wonders and miracles," said the Baal Shem Tov, an eighteenth century Rabbi, "but we take our little hands and cover our eyes and see nothing."

"We are what we think," counseled the Buddha twenty-five hundred years ago. "Speak or act with an impure mind, and trouble will follow you, as the wheel follows the ox that draws the cart. Speak or act with a pure mind, and happiness will follow you as your shadow, unshakable."

"Gratitude," teaches the contemporary Catholic monk David Steindl-Rast, "is the heart of prayer, and the essential source of happiness in life."

We begin with a basic principle of spiritual teachings: the conviction that a deep happiness, a joyous wonder and an unshakable satisfaction in life are truly possible. Yet to realize these possibilities, spiritual teachers tell us, we need to make some fundamental changes in our lives. We have to live in gratitude, take our hands from in front of our eyes so that we can see the daily miracles spread out before us, and act with "pure mind."

Unlike more strictly religious teachings, these spiritual truths seem both universal and psychological. They can be expressed in the vocabularies of many different traditional faiths -- or be part of an agnostic stance which has no particular belief in God. In this everyday sense of the spiritual, we are not called by an external authority, but by an increased attention to our own inner truth. As that truth is ours alone, it cannot be imposed on another, nor will we be critical of a person who finds his relation to truth differently. In this sense of the word, "spirituality" is a way to be fully at home in our lives and on this earth.

This kind of spiritual perspective focuses on our daily pains, frustrations, disappointments, griefs and longings and confidently assures us that these distressing states of mind are not essential to who we are. We can leave them behind, as easily as taking our hands from in front of our eyes, if only we will. In a spiritual life we will no longer make ourselves miserable, no longer create our own depression or succumb to pointless anxiety, no longer turn our back on the preciousness of each moment that has been given to us.

The psychological truth of these teaching is, for many of us, immediately appealing (even if actually following the advice of these teachers proves not so easy!). Consider the notion of gratitude, or of being satisfied with what one has, alluded to by both the Talmud and Steindl-Rast. We find, for instance, that in traditional Judaism the first thing one does, before even stepping out of bed, is to say a simple prayer of thanks for living through the night ("Thank you God...for returning my soul to my body.") In other words, even if your back hurts, or you have to face the dentist or the I.R.S. right after breakfast, or you had a terrible fight with your husband last night or you are in prison or a hospital, at least you are alive.

Isn't it the sad truth that we rarely wake up with words of gratitude on our lips? Yet isn't it obvious that if we did so we'd be much happier? So much of the time there is, it seems, so much that we can find to be ungrateful for: the unwashed dishes from last night's dinner, the mess in the kid's room, fears for our aging parents, the arrogant boss at the office, the asthmatic cough echoing from my daughter's bedroom. With no effort at all, we can focus on how unsatisfactory all these are. But where will all this displeasure lead? If it is our habit of mind to focus on what we want but don't have, how long will satisfaction last when we actually get something we want? The very real relief that comes when my daughter's temperature, after four days of fever, finally gets down to 98.8, lasts until the next round of coughing. The pleasure of graduating from law school, after three years of drudgery in the library, gives way to anxiety over getting hired or making partner. The enjoyable prospect of a long weekend in the country will be swallowed up by the subsequent resentment at the boring workweek ahead.

Wouldn't we be happier if we simply felt grateful for what we had? if we took the same powers of concentration which rivet us on the disappointing and switched the focus to all the goodness that we do possess: that we are alive, that our bodies (to some extent at least!) work, that there are people and animals and trees in the world, that this new day may hold a surprise, a wondrous mystery that will illuminate the meaning of our lives.

In the message of gratitude we see something of the essence of spiritual teachings. Its simple and profound message is that by acts of mind and will we can deeply alter our lives. We are, the teachings go on, mistaken to think that the quality of those lives depends nearly so much on what happens to us, or on what we own, possess, achieve or drive; on our bank account, marriage status, kids' grades, or the size of our waist lines. What is really important is the attitude we take to all these things. If we want, as we so often say we do, to be happy, to experience a little peace, to feel at one with ourselves, then we must undertake an inner journey: towards gratitude and acceptance; towards opening our eyes to miracles instead of closing them to everything but our own desires, attachments, and resentments; towards compassion for others instead of jealousy, contempt, competition or fear.

Of course this message will mean little to people who are fundamentally satisfied with their lives the way they are. If our basic approach to existence is spontaneous pleasure, simple enjoyment and (semi) constant delight, we need make no changes. Alternatively, if we believe that today's temporary displeasure (which, we must admit, does seem to keep recurring) will be assuaged by the next love affair, raise, book contract, vacation, or new dress, then the spiritual message is not for us.

We are called by spiritual teachings only if we have begun to feel that in fact there is something basically wrong with how we have been thinking about our lives, about what makes for contentment and about where we have been looking for happiness. In response to a spiritual call, we may reflect on our experience and determine that the times we felt most authentically, vibrantly, alive had little to do with narrow forms of control, clinging attachments to personal relationships or buying stuff. Images of spirituality seem to offer a kind of freedom from needless pain, a spacious vista in which we need not be constrained by the bars of a psychic cage we ourselves have made.

Once we respond to those teachings, we start to see our lives -- at least in part -- as unfolding along a spiritual path. This path, it turns out, is complex and often confusing. Movement along it is neither simple nor direct. Its pattern is often two steps forward and one back -- or one forward and two back.

For instance, we find that a certain meditation practice focuses our energies and calms our mind. We are able to relax after a day's work, feel less pressure during exam week, take a break from the screaming kids or even find a bit of calm during a family illness. We buy the proper meditation cushion, set up a special place in the house to practice, or join a local group. We wonder how we ever could have survived without it. Yet then gradually, bit by bit, it starts to slip away. One night we go to a late movie, another we have friends over and drink a bit too much wine, the third we are "just too upset" to meditate. Before long we notice, to our surprise, that while things piled up at the office and at home we haven't meditated for weeks. "We ought to meditate more," I've often said to my wife, wondering how I'd let the impulse melt away.

Perhaps we begin to take the practices of a particular religion seriously. We go to religious services, find a priest or rabbi we admire, pore through holy texts. For a time these feel vital and significant. But then, sadly, they begin to empty of content. We keep on with them, but notice that our pattern of being impatient with the kids or harsh with subordinates at work still exists. Religion isn't making us very different in our ordinary lives. We continue to go to Church or synagogue, but what we are doing doesn't seem to open our hearts. The initial sense of excitement has worn off. Our religious observance becomes regular, familiar, ordinary... insignificant.

We may have some deeply mystical experience: of God's love, or bliss, or understanding our own perfect place in the cosmos. Afterwards we promise ourselves that will never again succumb to petty jealously or foolish irritation. At last we see. We understand. We realize. And this time, we will remember. (The philosopher Pascal, it is said, sewed the image of a star into his clothes to remind himself of such an experience.) And then we find that gradually, almost imperceptibly, we return to our ordinary mind, with its familiar cares, preoccupations, and periods of selfishness or self-indulgence.

So the round continues. Spiritual teachers emphasize that this is a task for our whole lives, not one that will be over in a day or a year. While a few rare souls may become 'enlightened,' and never again fall prey to the habits of mind that obscure the wonders of the world, most of us go in circles. And even if those circles take the form of ever-higher spirals, we may still oscillate closer to and further away from what we seek. We still gain and lose our hold on gratitude, peacefulness, acceptance and a loving heart. Yet as long as we remain on a spiritual journey, we hold on to its basic insight. We have come to believe, at least part of the time, that building our lives around material possessions, social status, physical appearance, or sensual gratification will bring (at best) only fleeting, often quasi-addictive, pleasure; at worst, they create disappointment and loss. Anything like lasting contentment cannot be found in them. Even personal relationships, unless we approach them with a sense of genuine serenity, will eventually lead to deep frustration; for we will end up fruitlessly seeking from others what must come from ourselves. It is in our spiritual identity that we seek to develop that which must be rooted within ourselves: a basic acceptance of who we are and an essential appreciation and embrace of the world. This embrace may center on God or Goddess, on a particularly exalted teacher or simply on the earth itself. In any case, it leads us back to gratitude and wonder for the daily miracles of creation.

***

Thus far, a spirituality of resistance can travel with other, more familiar, approaches. But then their paths diverge.

For in response to our ignorance and self-imposed discomfort, spiritual perspectives may err by directing us exclusively or mainly towards a purely interior self-examination, an inner transformation, a personal peace. We may be asked to accept the world as it is, without wondering how it can be made better; counseled to make our peace with things that in fact should not be lived with, but resisted and overturned. We may be asked to worship God, but not to wonder how God might respond to questions about suffering and injustice. Instead of helping us open to the world, such attitudes shut us off to whatever is unpleasant or threatening.
A spirituality of resistance, while recognizing the importance of working on ourselves, also directs us towards outer examination, outer transformation, and the pursuit of justice in the world. For a spirituality of resistance, the costs of living a purely 'inner,' purely 'personal,' spiritual life are too high: too much denial and avoidance of social realities, too much blindness to our own roles in those realities. These costs cripple any attempt to make spiritual progress. To find a peaceful heart, I will suggest, we need to live on this earth: fully conscious of what is happening on it, actively resisting that which we know to be evil or destructively ignorant.

If there is a central problem to the essentially private form of spiritual life, it might be summed up by a term used by the Christian Existentialist philosopher Soren Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard is perhaps best-known for introducing the phrase 'leap of faith', but his use of the term 'aesthetic' to define a host of serious problems that can arise in spiritual life is particularly illuminating here. For Kierkegaard experiences, values, or ways of living are 'aesthetic' when we believe that what is most important about them is the way they make us feel. An aesthetic experience is one evaluated purely in terms of how pleasurable or painful, interesting or boring it is. An aesthetic person is one who focuses on pleasing experiences as the goal of life, and seeks above all to avoid displeasing ones. When adolescents say they hate school because it bores them, or middle aged men dread the tedium of opera because the music leaves them cold, they are concerned with the aesthetic.

Now of course it makes sense to be aesthetically concerned with a concert: if the music doesn't move us, why bother? But it is another matter, warned Kierkegaard, when religion is thought of or pursued in aesthetic terms. For the life of the spirit is essentially a passionate, personal transformation; a commitment to a certain kind of truth about what we believe is most important in life. It is not, essentially, about how we feel. 1 In other words, since spirituality speaks to our pain, loneliness, and frustration, the danger is that we will come to see the goal of spirituality as simply making us feel better. Our spiritual lives then become focused on the pursuit of the pleasant, a pursuit that will never be lastingly successful.

Examples of aesthetic spirituality are not hard to come by. The loveliness of religious music, for instance, can transport us to an ethereal reverie. As we listen, our communion with God is sweet, and we are soothed by thoughts of divine love. Of course there is nothing wrong with feeling good for a few minutes, but a difficulty arises when such feelings are equated with spirituality. What then happens when reality does not feel so good, when some task or dilemma raises its ugly head and confronts us? Will we retreat to that dreamy melody that brought us to God? When things are no longer agreeable will we feel that God is absent? To keep in touch with God, will we learn to avoid what is unpleasant?

A meditation class is held outside on a warm spring day. Our breathing slows and evens out. The soft chirping of birds, the gentle breeze rustling newly budded trees, perhaps even the distant sound of a brook tumbling over small stones -- all these support our efforts to quiet and focus the mind. And in this setting the mind does become more serene. The aesthetic move -- the aesthetic mistake -- is to think that these feelings of peacefulness are the heart of meditation; and that if we can only find the time, and similar calm, unpolluted places, then our journey towards meditative peace and spiritual development will be well underway. So meditation centers are built in beautiful settings, far from traffic, poverty, toxic wastes or anything else that will break the spell of the 'pleasant.' We learn a mantra or to focus on our breath, but rarely are instructed to concentrate on an image of people who are starving, or on children drinking polluted water. Few think to build meditation centers -- as Joanna Macy suggests -- at radioactive waste sites. 2 As a consequence, it is not openness to life that we learn, but another version of the pursuit of pleasure. Meditation becomes a relaxation technique, and not a source of real spiritual development. Unfortunately, while of course all of us need some time to retreat from a painful world, no meditation practice can be ultimately 'successful' if it screens out the unpleasant things of life.

We read spiritual literature. The stories entrance us. They show us how, with the proper attitudes of detachment and acceptance, things work out for the best, Consider, for instance, the following, told by a widely-read and respected contemporary Buddhist teacher:
I read somewhere about a family who had only one son. They were very poor. This son was extremely precious to them, and the only thing that mattered to his family was that he bring them some financial support and prestige. Then he was thrown from a horse and crippled. It seemed like the end of their lives. Two weeks after that, the army came into the village and took away all the healthy, strong men to fight in the war, and this young man was allowed to stay behind and take care of his family.

Life is like that. We don't know anything. We call something bad; we call it good. But really we just don't know.3

There is much truth here. Things often do have a different meaning than we suppose. But is this particular outcome supposed to be thought of as "good"? Is the dominant meaning of the tale that one family had a good experience? Or is it the sadness of men conscripted to fight in wars? The problem is not that this teacher is trying to get us to learn to acknowledge our ultimate ignorance of the meaning of what happens to us. The problem is that the social reality of armies and violent conflict is taken as a background, a setting, for the unfolding of a spiritual message about our personal spiritual path. The essence of this story seems to be its focus on being happy with what you have or at least suspending judgment on the vicissitudes of life -- when it is perhaps some kind of judgment about armies and wars that is called for. We know full well that there is something wrong with armies made up of conscripted peasants being sent off to fight the emperor's wars of conquest. We do not have to suspend judgment on that. (Would the author, reassuring us that we 'really don't know' what is bad or good, want to apply that lesson to the Holocaust?) The tale is ultimately aesthetic because it isolates our lives and the judgments we make from the wider reality in which they unfold; because it makes our individual happiness or disappointment the center of things.
***

The paradox is this: our initial attraction to spirituality may be motivated by our experience of pain in ordinary life, and by the growing belief that we cannot find fulfillment or satisfaction without some kind of spiritual transformation. Yet if what we are after is the avoidance of personal pain, and the achievement of a kind of 'spiritual' pleasure -- one not subject to normal disappointments and let-downs -- then (sadly) failure is guaranteed.

For a start, aesthetic life, including and especially the spiritual kind we are looking at here, inevitably leads to boredom. If pleasing experiences are really what we are after (no matter what we call them), then after a while we will find that any meditation practice, beautiful Gregorian chant or soothing prayer will wear a little thin. They were pleasant, they have become tedious. We will be forced to move on, searching for new and perhaps ever more exotic spiritual experiences. If we got it from Buddhism last year, perhaps next year we will try Shamanism or the Black Goddess.

I am no stranger to the aesthetic mode of spiritual life. (I doubt that many of us are. It is a permanent temptation, especially in a country as wealthy as ours.) There were times when my ordinary mind -- consumed with the drive to succeed at my profession, baffled with difficulties in my love life, deeply hurt by parents who didn't seem to love me - was so downright miserable that I used the trappings of spirituality as a kind of non-pharmaceutical tranquilizer. Visualization tapes helped soothe my constant anxiety over the struggle to find a decent job and my despair over all the rejection letters I got from publishers. Quiet music and sweet incense helped me be a little more accepting of frustrations in my personal life. Mantra meditation before a lovely altar graced by candles and crystals worked better than having four drinks every night.

Worked better, yes. But the problem was that the goal was really the same thing: to distract, soothe, tranquilize. I was not confronting the deepest personal sources of my pain -- which stemmed from a childhood in which I was given the message that I would not be loved for my soul, but only for what I accomplished and achieved. Nor was I able to see that the even deeper problem was that much of this spiritual activity was really about making myself feel better; and that the way I was using the trappings of spiritual life was not all that different than covering over my insecurity with career success or sedating myself with alcohol.

As long as I was after feeling good, I was doomed to disappointment. For real happiness, as Aristotle long ago pointed out, is not itself a substantial condition, but a quality of other activities: an adverb, not a noun. Happiness arises when we are at one with what we doing: when our chosen path in life seems worthy of respect, the way to it both possible and interesting, and we ourselves seem deserving of satisfaction. The more our sole goal is our own pleasure, peace of mind and equanimity, the more they escape us. It is only when we turn our attention elsewhere that they appear. Because pleasant feelings are fleeting, addictive, and tend towards boredom, they never satisfy us for very long. Not surprisingly, then, after a while I got fed up with the soppy New Age music, neglected the soothing visualization tapes, and fell again (for a time) into the familiar compulsive search for a 'success' that would validate the emptiness I felt inside.

Strangely, the aesthetic form of spiritual life can also take an opposite form: a desperate clinging to a particular set of religious beliefs, doctrines or rituals. In this kind of aesthetic fundamentalism, the purpose of our spiritual life is, once again, to make us feel better. Only this time we do it by knowing that we (unlike anyone different from us and our friends) have found the one 'right' way to do things. Our single-minded attachment to our beliefs makes us increasingly narrow-minded, arrogant and (actually) insecure. As the New Age music soothes one kind of aesthetic urge, so a rigid attachment to a parochial truth soothes another. In both cases, the ultimate goal -- acknowledged or not -- is to satisfy and comfort our conventional ego.

Another problem with aesthetic spirituality is that it involves, it requires, denial and avoidance. These pitfalls will be discussed in detail later on, so I will only say a few words about them here.

At first glance, certain spiritual teachings seem very much opposed to denial and avoidance. Buddhist authors in particular stress the importance of an unrestricted and unguarded openness to whatever exists, and the need to face the full reality of life. The problem, however, is that "full reality of life" is often described in very limited ways.4 The examples chosen repeatedly concentrate on essentially personal disappointments, comparatively mild irritations and frustrations. They tend to leave out the more perplexing and threatening issues of collective social evil, shared pain, or global threats to nonhuman and human alike.

For instance, when contemporary Buddhist teacher Sharon Salzberg wants to explain the proper Buddhist understanding of anger, she chooses as an example her irritation at a recalcitrant computer and her further vexations when she discovers that the resident computer expert could not be reached for help. We do not get what we want, the example tells us, and then we get angry. Instead, we need to 'be' with whatever turns up, accept the essentially uncontrollable nature of life, become familiar with our tendency to think we can regulate that which is beyond our powers, and learn to surrender to the naturally frustrating qualities of normal life.5 This is good advice. Who among us hasn't lost it over the common frustrations of existence? traffic jams, erased computer files, the whole range of split milk over which crying -- or raging -- does so little good?

But while these essentially personal, in-the-long-run unimportant frustrations are (unfortunately) an essential part of our lives, surely they do not tell the whole story. What about, for instance, the anger of the woman who was forced to have oral sex with her father from age 7 to age 12, while being assured that if she told her mother her father would kill them both? What kind of anger might arise from cancer patients among South Pacific islanders, who were returned to their homes by the government after atomic tests despite the fact that the level of radiation was far higher than officials would have found acceptable for mainland, white Americans?6 Few books on how spirituality is conducive to a peaceful heart mention these kinds of situations. Fewer still examine them at any length. For a spirituality of resistance, however, such situations are the core of spiritual life. In short, I believe that certain versions of spirituality succumb to the danger of making spiritual life appear too easy. The siren song of the aesthetic lulls us all (including myself at times) into a dreamy state in which the bitter realities of existence dare not intrude. This ease, I suspect, is both appealing and dangerous.
Kierkegaard had an analogous concern, which he recounts in this memory of the advice he gave himself while trying to figure out what to do with his life.
"...wherever you look about you, in literature and life, you see the celebrated names and figures, the precious and much heralded men who are coming into prominence and are much talked about, the many benefactors of the age who know how to benefit mankind by making life easier and easier, some by railways, others by omnibuses and steamboats, others by the telegraph, others by easily apprehended compendiums and short recitals of everything worth knowing, and finally the true benefactors of the age who make spiritual existence in virtue of thought easier and easier....You must do something, but inasmuch as with your limited capacities it will be impossible to make anything easier than it has become, you must, with the same humanitarian enthusiasm as the others, undertake to make something harder"....Out of love for mankind...and moved by a genuine interest in those who make everything easy, I conceived it as my task to create difficulties everywhere.7

It is hard enough to be peaceful when we must struggle to overcome our natural attachment to simply getting what we want. Just working on our own tendencies to be dissatisfied when we might be grateful is a life-long effort. Things become even harder if we are going to be spiritually serene while we are aware of and responding to unjust suffering, social evil, and the environmental crisis. Yet if spiritual life does not include that challenge, it becomes easier than it has to be.
***

For most of us, death is one of the great barriers to a peaceful mind. The question of the spiritual approach to death is therefore a good place to reveal some of the limitations of the aesthetic approach to spiritual life. The specter of the end of consciousness and the termination of our personal identity provokes a kind of dread that can darken everything. The philosopher Camus argued that one of the reasons life is absurd is while we are constantly 'looking forward' (to our next vacation, to when we will have more money, to when we will fall in love), all such movements forward lead us closer to death. Other thinkers, from Ernest Becker to Ken Wilber, have stressed how much of our civilization is built on the denial of death. Collective aggression, the control of nature, the creation of personal fortunes, political empires and great art can all be traced, they claim, back to our desire to bring into being some lasting aspect of ourselves that will escape the finitude of our mortal bodies.

By contrast, spiritual perspectives have always counseled us not to fear death. Whether in the traditional Jewish or Christian claim that our soul outlives our body, or in the Buddhist notion that we have no enduring self to lose in any case, we have been taught that the proper response to mortality is to look it in the face and accept it.

Some contemporary spiritual voices have been particularly important in this regard. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross introduced the simple but (sadly) at the time unheard of practice of counseling terminal cancer patients in hospitals by talking directly to them about the fact that they were facing death. Remembering Tolstoy's character Ivan Ilych, who reflected that the most painful part of his ever worsening illness was how the people around him kept pretending that he was not dying, we can appreciate the enormous Kubler-Ross's contribution was. Her gift was to encourage people to face the imminent end of their lives, to directly experience the fear and rage that end was provoking, to finish whatever they could in the time remaining, and, thus, to be able to achieve some kind of clarity and peace as the end approached.8

Stephen Levine adapted Kubler-Ross's work to a Buddhist framework. He counseled counseling the dying and those around them seek openness to whatever the present moment contains, including the realities of pain and imminent loss, and to allow the bounds of separate identity and ego involvement to fade in the process.
...you relate to one who is ill the same way you relate to any being. With openness. With an honoring of the truth we all share. Work to dissolve the separateness that keeps one lost in duality. Become one with the other. ...See the conditioned illusion of separateness. ...Allow both of you to die. ....Not trying to change things. Not trying to make something or someone other than it is.9
The lessons offered by Kubler-Ross and Levine are very important. I can still remember my own grief and fear when, eight years old, I fully realized that someday I would die. My mother's attempt to soothe me -- "Don't worry, that won't happen for a long time" -- communicated her caring but missed the point. Now, well past the mathematical middle of my life, having been present at the deaths of both my son and my father, the prospect of that final change is no longer so overwhelming. However, at times I can still feel the shiver of fear that comes with the thought of how temporary everything is.

But while I agree that the prospect of death can be an opportunity for individual spiritual growth, I believe that this approach neglects something of critical significance. In this light we may recall one of Elie Wiesel's early essays, in which he describes how hard it was for him to honor his father's memory. It was some years after the war and the anniversary -- in Hebrew the 'Yartzeit' or memory time -- of the day his father had died in Buchenwald concentration camp: "stretched out on a plank of wood amid a multitude of blood-covered corpses, fear frozen in his eyes, a mask of suffering on the bearded stricken mask that was his face." To commemorate a Yartzeit, Jews are enjoined to go to a synagogue and take part in a special reading of the Kaddish prayer, one reserved for mourners of the newly dead and those observing the Yartzeit of long-deceased family members. But Wiesel feels that he cannot say Kaddish for his father, a prayer which, by the way, makes no explicit mention of death but only extols the greatness of God and asks for peace. It would have been easy to say Kaddish, Wiesel tells us, if his father had died of old age, or sickness, or despair
But such is not the case. His death did not even belong to him. I do not know to what cause to attribute it, in what book to inscribe it. No link between it and the life he had led. His death, lost among al the rest, had nothing to do with the person he had been. It could just as easily have brushed him in passing and spared him. It took him inadvertently, absent-mindedly, by mistake. Without knowing that it was he; he was robbed of his death.10

In other words, death is not always the same. There is the natural fact of our limited presence on earth: our mortality, the growth, flourishing and eventual withering of our flesh. And then there is the unnatural, the wrong way in which some of us die. To be killed by the Nazis was not, Wiesel tells us, his father's 'own' death, because it came from a destiny unchosen by him and unacceptable for anyone. We should not praise God for his death, accept it, or meet it -- as in the closing words of the Kaddish -- with peace.

This idea can be transferred with little effort to precisely the people whose illnesses and deaths are chronicled by Levine. We may wonder if the cancer patients with whom he deals are in fact enduring 'their own' deaths or, like Wiesel's father, are having something unfit and misplaced imposed on them. It is a poorly kept secret, after all, that somewhere in the range of 60-80% of cancer stems from environmental causes. The chromosomal changes which lead to tumors and metastases come in the main from incremental stresses on our bodies.11 Bit by bit, we are transformed. These stressors are often substances people have put into the air, water, ground and food. Our bodies are assaulted by tens of thousands of artificial chemicals, many of which are known carcinogens; and only about 2% of which have ever been studied. It is people who produce, and transport, and buy and perhaps make a lot of money out of the substances that lead to an ever-rising cancer rate.

Levine counsels us, over and over, to be open to death, not to resist the pain, to accept the reality of our inevitable loss and the inevitability that some of us will fall to illness, that "there is no fault in this, and "no blame."". Yet he seems to simply ignore the dimension of death of which Wiesel speaks. For instance, Levine thinks of what he would like to say to Alonzo, sixty-one years old and dying of stomach cancer : "...it's O.K. to die. It's fine. It's the appropriate thing at the appropriate moment...Let go of the pain of not being able to protect everyone from everything...It's all O.K."12 These thoughts are comforting. They soothe. And God knows people dying can use some comfort.
But what of the unasked questions, the ones that are not so soothing? Could Alonzo have gotten stomach cancer because his body is a little more susceptible to the nitrosomines that are used to preserve meats? Or could it be that Alonzo worked in dry cleaning, and was affected by the carcinogenic Benzene used in the process? Could it have been the formaldehyde used in particleboard -- present in virtually all houses built since W.W.II? Is it really "O.K." that these things are in our environment and that we are dying from them? What could "O.K." mean in this case?

Stephen Levine is a wise and good man. For years he selflessly offered himself as a counselor to cancer victims; and his own wife suffered from it. When he writes that "Resistance to the pain about us causes the heart to wither. Allowing that pain to enter into us tears our heart open and leaves us exposed to the truth" he is offering us a great lesson.

But.

The truth is also that some of our deaths are, in Wiesel's sense, not our own. They may have been caused by the senseless dumping of poisons into the environment, from which a particular group of people made a good deal of money, and which others defended and lied about and kept on with even when they knew about the consequences of their acts. How can we make spiritual sense of what these people have done? How do we make our personal peace with them? What is the 'proper' spiritual reaction not simply to death, but to a kind of impersonal murder? And how are we to face our own possible complicity when as consumers, producers or passive bystanders, most of us play some part in the unfolding disaster? Is our role in all this 'o.k.'? Can we be open to the truth, as writers like Levine constantly counsel us, without making some kind of judgment about what we see?

In a similar vein, it is important to see how one-sided is Levine's constantly repeated assertion - one he shares with many other spiritual voices -- that "we are one." He tells us:
Work to dissolve the separateness that keeps one lost in duality. Become one with the other....For, in truth, there is no "other." There is just being, experienced from different focal points. When you are fully present, you see there is no such thing as "another person." There are just two perceptions of the one existence.13

From the spiritual standpoint embodied in this book, I respond: what might it mean for Wiesel's father to see the Nazis as people to 'become one with'? How about the woman whose daughter died from leukemia brought on by drinking polluted water- should she 'dissolve' the separateness between herself, her daughter, and the factory owner who surreptitiously dumped the chemicals that killed her daughter? How could she do this? Who are we to say she should? What does talk of the illusion of separateness mean when some people's actions are instrumental in spreading the substances that cause cancer in others? Does dissolving the 'illusion of separation' mean that we suffer the same fate as the victims? If we 'dissolve the separateness' between ourselves and the tribes made homeless by rainforest destruction, does that mean we join them, penniless and starving on the edge of the new settlements that have destroyed their village? Or that we invite them into our homes?

This book is an attempt to make sense of questions like these. They are questions that must be faced when our attempt to find a peaceful heart unfolds in this dark time, and I believe that they have answers. I do think that we can achieve spiritual peace even in the face of the kinds of social evils that afflicted Wiesel and amidst today's socially caused cancers and environmental illnesses. I don't think that these afflictions make spiritual peace impossible or that we need to be in unrelieved anguish over the world's sorrow. Perhaps it is even possible to achieve some psychic empathy with those who are committing the crimes. But these dilemmas have been examined too infrequently, and ignored too often in contemporary spiritual thought. Unless we confront them with the same energy and attention that we give to dealing with personal disappointments and individual fears or greed, our wisdom will be thin indeed.
Answers to these dilemmas may come from surprising sources - from the energy and passion of resistance to evil as much or more than from more familiar forms of spiritual acceptance and feelings of oneness. Consider Rachel Carson. Her Silent Spring, a study of the dangers of industrial chemicals and pesticides, helped create the modern environmental movement. She brought to her work not only scientific training and literary skill, but also an intensely spiritual view of the natural world. In her very last book, a simple evocation of the value of nature for children, she celebrated the infinite healing powers of the "beauties and mysteries of life," a power derived from the "recognition of something beyond the boundaries of human existence." In an earlier book, she offered an inspiringly non-theistic model of our place in the cosmos:
Every living thing of the ocean, plant and animal alike, returns to the water at the end of its own life span the materials which had been temporarily assembled to form its body. Thus, individual elements are lost to view, only to reappear again and again in different incarnation in a kind of material immortality.14

Carson's emotional identification with nature included a deep sense of moral responsibility to it. While writing Silent Spring she endured a host of acute illnesses, including a persistent and eventually fatal breast cancer. Part of her motivation to finish the book, she said, came from a feeling that if she had not done all she could in defense of both nature and human beings, she "could never again listen happily to a thrush song." In other words, she could find spiritual peace, which for her meant connecting deeply to the natural world, only if she simultaneously did her best to defend it. Her celebration could be authentic only if it existed alongside resistance.

***

In some respects, the idea of a spirituality of resistance is very old, and this book is part of a religious conversation that has been going on for thousands of years. One side of this conversation has typically stressed the need to develop the kind of spiritual virtues I described at the beginning of the chapter: listening to inner voices, renouncing attachments, being grateful for all we have, surrendering to the will of God. On the other side have been the rousing calls to serve God by feeding the poor, removing the arrogant from the seat of power -- or at least extending a helping hand to your neighbor. There are those who center their energies on the search for personal peace -- and those who see resistance to evil as essential to the spiritual path. There has been the 'horizontal' dimension of concern for social justice and collective well being. And there has been the 'vertical' dimension of a personal relationship to God or spiritual development. The crucial, and often quite difficult, task is to join both dimensions. And, for our time, to do so in the face of global environmental catastrophe.

During the third century B.C.E., Buddhism split into the Mahayana and the Therevada schools precisely on this question of how the individual spiritual seeker relates to other people's suffering.15 The original system (Therevada or 'wisdom of the elders) was criticized by the newer voices of the Mahayana (who called themselves the 'greater vehicle') for focusing too much on an essentially personal enlightenment. While the Mahayana agreed that attachments to self or objects of desire brought pain, they thought the initial teachings contained a somewhat distorted view of how to end that pain. Charging the Therevada with a hidden but persistent selfishness, the Mahayana sages asked: If you pursue your own escape from pain, what will become of those left behind? Of what possible service is your enlightenment to others? Are you are still driven by fear of pain? Is your own sense of self, which needs to wither to attain enlightenment, still very strong? You need, they counseled, to develop a disinterested concern in the liberation of every being, and not just a passion to save yourself.

The Therevadan response was that in fact the individual Buddhist sage could be of immense service to those around him: just by demonstrating that escape from earthly pain was possible. To the Therevada, people are trapped by ignorance of how attachments cause unhappiness. In our ordinary lives we are like people stranded on a riverbank, desperately wanting to cross over a river but not knowing the way. The spiritual sage, then, is a person who fashions a canoe with his own hands and paddles to the opposite shore. His help for others consists in showing that ending attachment and a consequent spiritual liberation are indeed possible. Witnessing his success at overcoming attachments and desires, the rest of us will see that we can do the same.

The Mahayana teachers found this view sorely lacking. They changed the orientation of Buddhist teaching: away from a focus on ending personal pain, and towards an impersonal, universal compassion extending far beyond the boundaries of one's own individual situation.16 To them a true religious hero had to do more than simply provide an example. They told a different story of what makes a person spiritually developed. It is as if, an early Mahayana dialogue explains, a young prince is accompanying his large, extended family on a long and dangerous journey through the forest. There are wild beasts and robbers, and the way is long and difficult. Soon the family is lost, left with little food and no sense of the way home. The babies cry, the aged grandfather bows his head in resignation, the two pregnant nieces are struck dumb with fear. Does the prince -- a powerful and healthy youth, a warrior, a forest explorer -- go off to save himself? No, he stays with his family. He will not leave the forest without them.

In other words, any fear for one's own condition gets submerged in concern for others. The Mahayana taught that this concern, properly tempered by patience, sensitive intelligence, and awareness of human frailty, is the heart of the very liberation from pain that animated Buddhism to begin with. The paradox is that only if we can stop being so concerned with just our own pain can we ever free ourselves from that pain. Spiritual development for ourselves cannot be achieved directly, but only in the roundabout way of forgetting who we are, and why we consider ourselves so important.

In a very different setting, some of Judaism's greatest prophets made comparable claims against the religious establishment of their day. Time after time they rejected the notion that empty rituals would satisfy God's demands. Time after time they "spoke truth to power"-- and sometimes ended up getting hunted by the King's soldiers for their pains! The point is that for these prophets a spiritual form of life had to include responsiveness to the hunger or anguish of those around us, as well as seeing and resisting the authority of the arrogant and privileged who controlled the kingdom. As in the Mahayana perspective on enlightenment, (though in a very different religious idiom) the prophets made it clear that acts of religious devotion had no merit if they were motivated by self-interest; or -- most important here -- if they depended on ignoring the desperate plight of other people, especially those towards the bottom of a hierarchical social structure.

It is interesting that on Yom Kippur, a day occupied by extended prayer, complicated rituals, and fasting, one of the major readings from the Bible is a prophetic passage castigating the ancient Jews for self-serving and hypocritical observance -- in precisely their celebration of Yom Kippur! Speaking for God, Isaiah warns the people:
They ask: Why do you not see when we fast; we afflict our souls and you do not notice? For on your fast day you seek business and oppress your laborers. You fast for strife and contention; to smite with a fist of wickedness. You do not fast this day to make your voices heard on high. Can this then be the fast that I have chosen -- a day when man afflicts his soul, to bow down his head like a reed, to sit in sackcloth and ashes? Is this what you call a fast, an acceptable day to Adonoi? Behold this is the fast that I have chosen-- loosening the bonds of wickedness, undoing the straps of the yoke, sending the oppressed free and breaking every yoke of tyranny. Break your bread with the hungry, and bring the impoverished into your home; clothe the naked when you see them....If you remove from your midst the yokes, the stretching out of a finger and wrongful speech. If you reach out to the hungry and satisfy the afflicted soul, then your light shall shine forth in the darkness (Isaiah: 57, 58)

This wonderful passage carries a simple but powerful message: doing the will of God necessarily includes a response to what is going on around us. That we comply with religious rules is not enough. The general idea is often expressed by the notion that God asks us to engage in 'Tikkun Olam,' the 'repair of the world.' The cosmos, on this view, is unfinished and imperfect. God left its defects for us to remedy. If we fail to do so, our spiritual destinies are incomplete.17

In this century liberation theology, religious civil disobedience as taught by Martin Luther King and Gandhi, and representatives of feminism and the environmental movement have modeled a spirituality of resistance. They have all affirmed that spiritual virtues involve much more than overcoming nagging anxieties or frustrations in our personal lives. As King put it, we are bound up in an "inescapable network of mutuality"; and thus our personal spiritual development leads us necessarily towards concern for others. If none of us can be truly free while others are enslaved, so none of us can be truly enlightened or at peace if the fate of others is absent from our awareness. Responding to the environmental crisis, many thinkers have passionately extended that sense of mutuality and moral concern to our relations with the natural world. They have helped bring the depth of our pain for the environmental devastation to consciousness; and told us that helping to heal that devastation is an essential part of our spiritual work.

All these perspectives advise us that if spiritual contentment is what we are after, we cannot achieve it by ignoring the injustice to which we, or others, are subject. From Elie Wiesel to Gandhi, from Joanna Macy to Abraham Joshua Heschel, from Dorothy Day to Cesar Chavez, the message has been clear. This book continues their efforts.
***

The particular historical background that animates my version of spirituality of resistance is that of unprecedented crimes by -- and threats against -- humanity. It is the uniquely threatening and frightening specters of genocide and ecocide -- the prospect of mass death for entire communities, species and ecosystems. I will concentrate first and foremost on how environmental concerns challenge spiritual life. To illuminate that challenge, and tap the lessons of an event which exemplifies nearly limitless evil, I will make constant reference to the Holocaust. I know that this comparison will be shocking to some and obscure to others; and therefore subsequent chapters will explain why I think the Holocaust carries a weight of warning far beyond the boundaries of the communities actually involved. I will develop two main ideas. First, I believe that what Nazis did to their victims can serve as a kind of warning about the potential consequences of our own ecological madness. Second, Jewish resistance to the Nazis can serve as a model and inspiration for the courage we need to confront the environmental crisis.

If spiritual life is not to sink into the merely "pleasant," mass murder and unprecedented threats to the future of life on our planet must be a spiritual seeker's daily bread. A spirituality of resistance exists in the shadows of Auschwitz and leaking toxic waste dumps. In striking new ways these matters test the conventional spiritual virtues of open-minded awareness, acceptance of life, compassionate forgiveness and concern for others. They ask us to think about things we would much rather not think about, to learn lessons we'd rather not know, and to engage in a difficult and detailed examination of our own place in the social realm.

Further, in my particular vision spirituality is meant to guide us to a life of peace on this earth. Unlike certain conventional forms of Judaism, Christianity, or Hinduism, or indeed some of the comforting types of New Age thought, I am unable to place my trust in some other reality, some Force from Afar guaranteeing that things will all come out right in the end. My terms of reference are the earth and all that dwell therein -- and nothing else. That is why I believe that if a spirituality of resistance is to succeed, it must not lead us away from what we face here and now, but ever deeper into it. Indeed, I do not believe there is anywhere else to go.

***

What then is new about our situation, so novel that earlier attempts to connect spiritual values to social life are not fully adequate to it?

To begin with, the magnitude of the environmental crisis is more threatening than anything we have ever seen in the past.* That is why the danger of denial is part of this spiritual setting in a way that is not typical of other forms of social suffering. Victims of rape or colonialism, for instance, do not usually need to be reminded of what they are enduring. The difficulty in facing the reality at hand is not usually part of the spiritual response to war or racism. But the prospect of the 'end of nature,' in Bill McKibben's chilling phrase about the consequences of humanity's alteration of the earth's atmosphere and climate, is so vast and yet so diffuse that it is extremely hard to hold it in our minds. Taking in the truth of what we are doing is very difficult. There is some analogy here to the way many of Europe's Jews simply could not believe the full scope of the Nazi plan for them, and rejected the truth when they heard it. Similarly, most of us, most of the time, cannot begin to fathom what we have done to the Earth -- or ourselves.

Further, the very extremity of our situation means that once we get beyond denial, it is very hard not to lose heart entirely. As Joanna Macy observes
...we are barraged by data that render questionable the survival of our culture, our species, and even our planet as a viable home for conscious life. Despair, in this context...is the loss of the assumption that the species will inevitably pull through.18
Hope for the future, confidence in the moral standing of our civilization, a sense that there is a place where we really can belong with grace or harmony, such things become increasingly difficult to come by. How are we to find a peaceful heart while facing the full -- and bitter -- truth? In a sense, that is the single question this book attempts to answer.

Finally, it is not just the extreme consequences of what is taking place that is so antithetical to the openness and peace which spirituality promises, but just how much of global society would have to change for things to be different. The extent of the environmental crisis, and its deep roots in virtually all facets of contemporary civilization, make the present task of resistance uniquely daunting. To resist the environmental crisis is to seek an essential change in how we produce, distribute, and consume. A real solution will require that we alter our most basic ideas about what is important and what we want for our children. I do not believe any kindred spiritual orientations faced a task of such magnitude. The teachings of Gandhi and King, for instance, as immensely valuable as they are, concern national independence or the extension of civil rights to a racial minority. These goals, while formidable, are not comparable to what must be done to respond to global warming or the world-wide proliferation of toxic materials into all life forms. A contemporary spirituality of resistance thus proceeds not so much from national outrage or group struggle, but from a kind of global despair.
***

Besides the environmental crisis and the severity of our emotional responses to it, my contemporary version of a spirituality of resistance has a very specific cultural background. Worldwide, there has been a vibrant and surprising growth in religious concern; and in the West. a very singular form of spirituality has emerged.

These developments have arisen partly possible because of a fundamental weakening of the social authority of science. We have seen technological competence used to build gas chambers and, inadvertently, damage the ozone layer. There is widespread distrust in unceasing technological innovation, detached professionals, unlimited scientific research and stiff, unfeeling doctors who practice medicine as if patients were collections of body parts. These 'accomplishments' cast a very long shadow over the supposed bright light of a purely scientific and technological understanding of society, knowledge, and selfhood. A good many people now doubt that in and of itself the endless growth of science will create a happier and more just world.

Similarly, a life based on secular values of consumption no longer commands the kind of automatic respect it did forty years ago. Sophisticated production and mass consumption of gadgets can coexist, we have come to realize, with drug abuse, casual violence and deep veins of unhappiness. Many of us have so many 'things' -- yet are, much of the time, so harried, frustrated or depressed. Instead of calm enjoyment and appreciation, we are gripped by ever-increasing desires that are only temporarily satiated by new acquisitions. The Christmas-time orgies of consumption leave a lingering sense of emptiness. Obsessions with career success and wealth never seem to be placated. As we get older, we begin to wonder if all these possessions and accomplishments can really bring us anything but the most fleeting of pleasures.

Challenges to science and consumerism have helped prompt a resurgence of interest in spiritual values and religious worldviews. "Spirituality is the new religion" proclaims Mother Jones Magazine, polls report that an awful lot of people believe in angels; and Self Magazine asks why it's so hip to be a Buddhist. However, in the developed world many versions of that interest have taken a particularly -- and unfortunately -- self-indulgent and narcissistic turn. Aesthetic values command much of what passes for spiritual teaching. That is why there is a distinct importance in stressing the role of resistance in spiritual life now, when it is all too easy to turn spirituality into an extension of feel-good psychotherapy; or when spiritual 'experiences' -- in the most trivial and self-interested sense of the word -- are too often presented as the heart of spiritual life.

At the same time, contemporary spirituality contains a historically unprecedented eclecticism. Many people are willing to take heart wherever they can find it, believing that the crux of spirituality is similar in all the major traditions. The perspective developed here is both compatible with and an extension of this new capacity to celebrates insights from widely different sources. The movements led by King and Gandhi, by contrast, emerged from and were couched in the idioms of Christianity and Vedantic Hinduism respectively. Further, a spirituality of resistance is able to express the spiritual aspirations of people who have no traditional religious beliefs whatsoever. It can flourish for unbelievers as well as believers; and requires no relation to Jesus, Buddha, Krishna or any particular holy book or institution.

Despite the work of King, Gandhi and countless religious feminist and peace activists, the historic antagonism between spirituality and politics, between those who want to "get their heads together" and those who want to change the world, still continues. I would like to soften that antagonism. I reject the all-too-common belief that a religious temperament and a political one must be at odds. And, while most of my energy here19 is directed to bringing awareness of the importance of political resistance to spiritual life, I will describe some of the distinct ways in which spirituality can and should inform political activism.

Finally, the view I am presenting here contains, I believe, an original understanding of the spiritual role of resistance to social evil. In my view the liberating practice of resistance is itself the moment of spiritual fulfillment. For it is only in the act of resistance, when we embrace that which is most disturbing not by accepting but by seeking to overcome it, that we can know ourselves as fully one with all of reality. It is only in resistance that acceptance is actual, and not a mask for denial. And thus it is in resistance that we encounter the face of God, awaken to the call of the Goddess, and realize our deepest connections to the mysteries of human life. The precious moments in which we face the truth and resist evil are the culmination of our spiritual journey.

That journey begins with the problem of denial.

* I include here as part of that crisis the threat of nuclear war, which itself would be the ultimate environmental disaster.

Notes to Chapter 1

1 about how we feel. These ideas are developed throughout Kierkegaard's writings. See especially Either/Or, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963); and Concluding Unscientific Postscript, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966).

2 at radioactive waste sites. There are wonderful exceptions in some of the recent writings of 'engaged' Buddhism. See Arnold Kotler, ed., The Engaged Buddhist Reader (Berkeley: Parallax Press, 1996).

3 really, we just don't know. Pema Chodron, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times (Boston: Shambala, 1997), p. 9, my emphasis.

4 described in very limited ways. See Kotler for different approaches.

5 frustrating qualities of daily life. Sharon Salzberg, A Heart as Wide as the World: Living with Mindfulness, Wisdom, and Compassion (Boston: Shambala, 1997).

6 for mainland, white Americans. International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, Radioactive Heaven and Earth: The Health and environmental effects of nuclear weapons tests in, on, and above the earth (NY: Apex Press, 1991), pp. 81-4.

7 to create difficulties everywhere. Soren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, pp. 165-6.

8 peace as the end approached. Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Illich; Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, On Death and Dying (NY: MacMillain, 1969).

9 someone other than it is. Steven Levine, Who Dies? (New York Doubleday, 1982), p. 157.

11 stems from environmental causes. Sandra Steingraber, Living Downstream: An Ecologist Looks at Cancer and the Environment, (Reading, MA: Addison Wesley, 1997).

12 it's all o.k. Levine, pp. 169, 162.

13 perceptions of the one existence. Levine, p. 171.

14 kind of material immortality. See Linda Lear, Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature (NY: Holt, 1997), pp. 86; Rachel Carson, The Sense of Wonder (NY: arHarperHarper, 1965).

15relates to other people's suffering. The account of Buddhist history is based on many sources, including E. Conze, ed., Buddhist Texts Through the Ages (NY: Philosophical Library, 1954) and E.A. Burtt, ed., The Teachings of the Compassionate Buddha (NY: New American Library, 1955).

16one's own individual situation. Other issues were at stake, but for the present discussion, only this one is crucial.

17 spiritual destinies are incomplete. For a rich contemporary account of this dimension of Judaism see Michael Lerner's Jewish Renewal (NY: Harper, 1994).

18 will inevitably pull through. Joanna Macy, World as Lover, World as Self (Berkeley: Parallax Press, 1991), pp. 16-17.

19 most of my energy here. I have worked at the other direction in a number of places: for instance, the last chapter of Marxism 1844-1990 (NY: Routledge, 1992); " Heaven on Earth: A Dialogue Between a Political Radical and a Spiritual Seeker," in Roger S. Gottlieb, ed. A New Creation America's Contemporary Spiritual Voices (NY: Crossroad, 1990); "Spiritual Deep Ecology and the Left," in Roger S. Gottlieb, ed. This Sacred Earth: Religion, Nature, Environment (NY Routledge, 1996).

End of chapter 1

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