Transcending Blame and Shame: Awakening the Basic Goodness of Society

Acharya Fleet Maull will address the predominance of blaming and shame in our culture and the challenge that creates on a personal and societal level. The creation of enlightened society relies on the transformation and/or transcendence of shame-based culture through awakening the unconditional basic or innate goodness and dignity in all human beings and in society itself.

What is Integral Transformative Justice?

“When things happen, when crimes happen, when harmful behaviors happen, this is, in some ways on a systemic level, the world speaking to us saying, “Hey, there is something to pay attention to here, the system is breaking down, the community is breaking down.” These things don’t just happen out of nowhere and the world is saying, “Wake up, pay more attention here.”

What is Integral Tranformative Justice? How is it different then the current Retributive Justice model that dominates criminal justice in our country, and the world for that matter?

Integral Transformative Justice is a model Kate Crisp and I have been working to develop over the past 20 years at Prison Dharma Network. We’ve been working on evolving this over time as an alternative to the current model.

Many of you have probably heard of Restorative Justice, which is another wonderful model. This model is focused on healing rather than punishing. It’s really about healing the tear in the community fabric whenever there has been a crime or a tragedy or some kind of harm done. They way Restorative Justice often works is as alternative to the usual court system, especially in smaller level crimes or social problems. Sometimes it can be part of the regular court system or involve a victim-offender reconciliation program.

The core of Restorative Justice is usually composed of community volunteers who form Restorative Justice circles, or panels, and   stand in for the needs of the community – the needs of those who have been harmed – and invite the person, or people, who have caused harm into a dialog. They are often asking for recognition from those who caused the harm, as a movement towards accountability and are certainly trying to encourage and call forth empathy for the people who have been victimized. This process often has them enter into a contract which gives the community some sense that the person has recognized the harm, recognized the impact of their behaviors, and that they are willing to provide restitution, where that is appropriate, and that they are willing to enter into some kind of behavioral treatment or training, and ultimately, that they move into a healthier lifestyle and won’t continue to cause harm in this way.

Our model, called Integral Transformative Justice, which includes the Restorative Justice model, also includes the Transformative Justice model. The Transformative Justice model, which is better known in Australia and New Zealand, is the Restorative Justice model, but it takes it a step further. It repairs the relationship, inviting the so-called “offenders” or “wrong-doers”  into accountability with so-called “victims” or those who have been harmed.

This is great, and obviously a much better alternative to the punishment model (which really doesn’t meet the needs of those who have been harmed, and doesn’t really do anything but make so-called ‘offenders’ worse through punishing them and demonizing them). Our normal Retributive Justice system, in my opinion, and the opinion of many people, actually causes all kind of collateral damage in our society… it makes people worse. It really doesn’t meet anyone’s needs. Ultimately, it could argued how much public safety it actually creates.

In our view, the Restorative Justice model is a wonderful alternative to this, as it creates more room for healing. At the same time, it is simply dealing with the current wave of harmful behavior or wrongdoing or crime. It is not really looking into roots of crime. Transformative Justice takes this a step further. Transformative Justice not only sees a crime or wrong doing as an opportunity for healing, or a need for healing, it actually sees this as an opportunity for transformation; transformation for everyone in involved,  the victims, their family, their community and also transformation for the wrong-doer and their family, their community and transformation for society as a whole.

When crimes or harmful behaviors happen, I tend to think of it in some ways on a systemic level. It is as if the world is speaking to us saying, “Hey, there is something to pay attention to here, the system is breaking down, the community is breaking down.” These things don’t just happen out of nowhere and the world is saying, “Wake up, pay more attention here.”

Transformative Justice wants to look deeper into the behavior and ask “How did it arise?” Transformative Justice asks the questions: “Whats happening in their background?” or “What kind of pain and suffering are they acting out of?”
People don’t do harm out of a place of their own joy and life fulfillment. People do harm out of their own place of suffering, pain and confusion. When we’re trying to invite people who have caused harm into an empathic place with those who have been impacted by their behavior, they may not have capability to express empathy because no one’s ever listened to their pain, no one’s ever heard about their suffering, they’ve never received the empathy, so they might not have the capacity to give empathy.

If we really want to reduce crime and reduce harmful behavior, we have to first be willing to look at how crime arises in the individual themselves. We have to ask ourselves, “Are we willing to bring healing to this individual so that they have a greater capacity for empathy and a lower capacity for doing harmful behavior?” When we do harm it means we are disconnected from those we’re harming. It means we have depersonalized them or we’re completely unaware of them and somehow we’ve turned them into objects, we’re not in an empathic space. When we have empathy, we can’t do harm doing.

What’s different about Transformative Justice is bringing healing to the so-called “offender” and then looking systemically at what’s going on socially. What’s going on in their communities? What’s going on in their socioeconomic strata that they live in, and operate in? What’s happening systemically? If we’re not willing to address the systemic causes and conditions, we can’t really expect things to change. And yes, absolutely, the need for healing of the victim and the community are paramount, no question. At the same time, if we really want to reduce crime – if we really want a safer world, a healthier world, healthier communities – then we have to be willing to look at the causes and conditions out of which the crime and harmful behavior arose in the first place, both at the individual level and at the social systemic level.

This doesn’t mean that if we look at systemic causes and conditions we’re going to let this person ‘off the hook’, or that we’re going to say, “Well, it’s your horrible up bringing and..” no, absolutely not. Any individual who is going to change has to step into accountability and recognize the impact their behaviors are having on others. They have to own the consequences they receive; it is the only way they are going to change. And at the same time, we have to recognize that so many people in our world, who are doing harmful behavior come out backgrounds and upbringings that are just absolutely horrendous situations. And unless we’re willing to do something about that, we can’t really expect things to change very much.

So, in our model, Integral Transformative Justice integrates this needs for personal accountability into the need to bring healing to everyone involved. It ask us to look deeply into causes and conditions at the individual and the systemic level and by doing so it allows us to bring transformation for everyone involved.

To hear more on this, topic, please listen to Part Two of Fleet Maull speaking on Transformative Justice:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfCWcOyQcoQ&list=PLB6BB8199D4565F75&index=2&feature=plpp_video

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February 28th 2013

Why do we often begin talks and/or interviews with a bow?

It’s a very simple human gesture to take a good posture and offer a bow to each other.  As we take the posture, in the same way we are working with the meditation, we are taking our seat with good head and shoulders. We are gathering our mind, gathering our energy in one place, connecting heart, body and mind together, and then we offer that to each other.  In that way, we are acknowledging the sacredness that’s already present, and in doing so, collectively creating sacred space with and for each other.

“See if you can get that door to responsibility to crack open”

The following is excerpted from a talk on accountability by teacher and activist Fleet Maull. Fleet will be visiting Washington DC March 8-10 to teach a program on Radical Responsibility, presented by the Shambhala Meditation Center of Washington DC and sponsored by BuddhaFest. For program details and registration information, visit http://dc.shambhala.org/program-details/?id=121193

Certified Public Accountants (CPAs) are all about accountability. In the Radical Responsibility model, I use CPA as something different. In this model, the C stands for Caused it (or created it). Looking into ourselves, and looking deeper into our story, we are able to see if there is someway we caused it, created it or at least contributed to our story occurring.

Sometimes when we have been victimized, either in reality or in our perception, we tell the story again and again. In this way, it becomes our story. And what does that do? Law of attraction; we start attracting that kind of situation to us. We all know that we can find ourselves getting victimized in the same way again and again. Often times, we can see how other people get into the same situations again and again. Take, for example, how we can keep getting in the same kind of dysfunctional relationship over and over again. We are unconsciously driven to keep playing out the same scripts, again and again!

However, if we look into our victim story, we can ask ourselves, is there some way we’re setting ourselves up for this? This is where the “P” in CPA comes in. Now, we can ask ourselves, ‘is there some way we’re promoting this?’

The “A” in this equation stands for Allowed it. At the very least, are we willing to say “I let it happen” or “I didn’t have good boundaries” or “I could have seen it coming” or “I could have been less naïve,” or “more mindful,” or “more prepared,” or “I didn’t know how to stand up for myself,” or…or…or?

There are many ways we can own our situation, take radical responsibility, and get ourselves back above the line.

Go ahead, dig deep into your own personal victim story now. See if there’s any way you can find that you may have caused it, promoted it, or at the very least, allowed it. Keep going, even when the defenses come up. See if you can get that door to responsibility to crack open, even if just a tiny bit. Try to find that little opening of a place where you caused it, promoted it or allowed something to happen. Start with that little opening and go from there.

You can see this talk, and others, on Fleet Maull’s  YouTube channel

I wanted to let you know that Purna Steinitz and I will be leading The Event in a few weeks, October 18 – 21 in Providence, Rhode Island - this is the only Event in the U.S. this year.  We still have a few space open in this limited enrollment training. My friend Purna, the founder of The Event, is the most amazing and powerful trainer I know; so it’s a real privilege for me to lead The Event with him each year. You can find out all about The Event at this link below:

http://peacemakerinstitute.org/the-event

From the website:

™The Event is a transformative, three-day breakthrough training.  In The Event, we engage in challenging personal work and a deep community process that can move us beyond our past conditioning.  The Event is a unique opportunity to clear and transform family of origin conditioning, shift positions of victimization and reclaim your authentic voice, personal power and wisdom.The Event is about you and the specifics of your life. It empowers you to take charge of your life and live from possibility rather than limitation. The unique setting and methodology of the training is a powerful catalyst for:

• completing unfinished business.
• transforming negative or self-limiting core beliefs
• reducing dysfunctional habitual patterns
• building the capacity to effectively manage our emotional triggers
• discovering our authentic voice
• building healthy relationships
• clarifying and standing behind our highest commitments
• identifying and taking critical new steps—personally and professionally
• clearing away obstacles to personal and professional success

Trailer of “When the Iron Bird Flies”

In the harsh environment of a Rhode Island men’s prison, a group of fifty inmates are transforming their lives through the practice of meditation. Path of Freedom follows former inmate Fleet Maull as he visits prison to share his strategies
for surviving on the inside. The film offers a rare glimpse into the inner lives of men reaching for forgiveness, inner peace and freedom behind bars.

To learn more about Fleet and the work of the Prison Mindfulness Institute, visit: prisonmindfulness.org.

Many in my generation have been working for progressive social and political change for 40 years or more, and for some portion of that time we have tried to inform those efforts with a spiritual or contemplative context. We have tried to move beyond the divisive, angry, and polarized “us versus them” social action and politics of our youth. Successive generations have taken up their own causes and continue the search for a spiritually informed, contemplative approach to social action. However, many of us—young and old alike—have given up on the mainstream political scene, seeing it as hopelessly corrupt, ineffective, and bordering on irrelevant, except for the mostly negative impact it has on our lives. Our anger can motivate us to get involved, but it won’t sustain us.

As an itinerant meditation teacher and social activist, I enjoy meeting young meditation practitioners in their twenties and thirties all across the U.S. on a regular basis. I find these young people to be almost universally interested in and even passionate about the intersection between the spiritual life and social activism. They are hungry for teachings on socially engaged Buddhism, socially engaged spirituality, and contemplative approaches to social and political engagement.

While there are many wonderful examples of contemplative approaches to social engagement, most such spiritually informed efforts still begin from a perspective of there being something fundamentally wrong with the current situation or the way things are. Many Buddhist traditions emphasize in various forms the innate goodness and awakened nature of all beings. Many traditions also share the aspiration to lead all sentient beings to the realization of this innate goodness. But how does this translate into social action? What about society itself, which appears so deeply challenged by materialism, injustice and conflict? Could we entertain the notion of the basic goodness or innate awakened nature of society itself? Could we imagine such a radical vision for social and political engagement as one grounded in seeing and experiencing society itself as essentially and innately good. What about governments, corporations, and other social institutions—can we recognize their basic goodness?

In his presentation of the Shambhala teachings, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche not only exhorted us to embrace our shared responsibility to create enlightened society, he also proclaimed the radical view that the path to creating enlightened society begins not just with the realization of the basic goodness of all beings but also with the realization of the basic goodness of society itself. “Society does contain profundity and sacredness,” Trungpa wrote in Work, Sex, and Money, “The sacredness of society is potent and powerful.”

Trungpa’s notion of the basic goodness of society is not a simplistic expression of good versus bad. It is a calling to see the sacredness in the totality of society, where there are “flashes of positive energy, flashes of destruction, flashes of hatred and love.” He talks about a big perspective, a mandala perspective that recognizes the essential goodness or sacredness and thus the potential for awakening in the wholeness and totality of our societal situation as it is.

In the “Social Awakening” retreat, we will explore how our individual spiritual path and our aspirations to work for positive social change intersect. We’ll look at the traditional bodhisattva vow to save all sentient beings, first from the traditional “motivation perspective,” where the liberation of all beings becomes our motivation for attaining liberation, and then from the more radical perspective of collective awakening or social enlightenment. What does it mean to awaken together, to practice social enlightenment together? How do we progress from anger at injustice to doing something positive to bring about change?

Conventional contemplative wisdom states clearly that the path begins with ourselves, that we have to do our own work of cultivating mindfulness and awareness. We are told that we need to make friends with ourselves and develop lovingkindness and compassion before venturing very far into the sphere of bodhisattva activity or engaged spirituality. But what if this is an unnecessarily limited or even mistaken view? What if the path actually begins with us, the collective us, with interbeing, as Vietnamese peace activist and Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh teaches? What if the paths to both genuine liberation and collective awakening are inseparable and best informed by a social view of spiritual development from the very beginning?

At a recent meditation retreat, Sakong Mipham Rinpoche, the current Shambhala lineage holder, spoke about the necessity of seeing the basic goodness in society and asked his students to “take a seat at the table of society and gently interject, Can we please consider an alternative possibility, which is that people and society are basically good.”

In the “Social Awakening” retreat, we explore through both traditional and innovative, awareness-based community practices how entertaining the possibility of innate awakened nature and basic goodness not just of all beings but of society itself changes our practice, and how developing confidence in this view can transform our path and society.

Acharya Fleet Maull is the founder of Prison Dharma Network, Peacemaker Institute, and National Prison Hospice Association and the author of Dharma In Hell: The Prison Writings of Fleet Maull and the forthcoming bookRadical Responsibility: A Path to Freedom.

Here’s an exchange from today’s conversation:

Question: Thanks for leading this new retreat. You talk brought up many things to consider carefully. I just wanted to focus on one particular phrase that I have always had problems with: realizing “the basic goodness of society”. It is used a lot, but almost always is qualified by “it is not about good or bad, but realizing our true good nature”. So I am a little confused about what the phrase might mean. Does it mean that under all the suffering, pain, hate, dishonesty and deception there is an “all-rightness” about things? In that case why would one be motivated to change anything? What exactly does “coming to terms” with things as they are really mean (presumably other than a quietist acceptance of the status quo)? I hope these questions are not too far off the mark. If so please feel free to point toward the direction you are headed. Thanks again for this retreat, Glenn

Response: We know from extensive research that human beings who have received enough love, empathy and support as children to have a relatively stable sense of self and a moderate level of self-acceptance or sense of okay-ness, naturally manifest prosocial qualities like empathy, caring and compassion when fear is not in play. We know that our brains produce experiences of pleasure and well being when we perform prosocial or altruistic acts, and that the same occurs even when we witness such an act by someone else. When we are not afraid, when we are not doubting ourselves and fearing others, we are naturally caring and compassionate beings. We are innately social beings living within an interdependent web of mutuality. We need each other. At a recent conference presenting neuroscience research about mindfulness and compassion training, one of the presenters showed a video of a unique experiment. Six-month old infants were shown a series of simple animations depicting prosocial, helping behaviors on the one hand and anti-social blocking behaviors on the other. The data showed a very significant preference among these infants for the prosocial, helping behaviors. Evidently, six-month old infants are predisposed to respond positively to witnessing prosocial behaviors.

On the other hand, we know that when we are fearful, we tend to fall back on fear-based survival (physical and emotional) strategies we developed as children when our basic needs were not being met, when we did not feel loved and supported, when it wasn’t safe to be who were were, or in some cases to be at all. Most of us received some kind of mixed bag of unconditional love and support and the lack thereof as children. Most of us live with a moderate level of insecurity or not-okayness. We overcome this for the most part by developing varying levels of expertise in living, having relationships and working and from that we build a kind of conditional confidence which keeps our worst insecurities at bay. As we all know this is a fairly fragile artifice of confidence, often a kind of whistling in the dark, in the face of our insecurities and fears, our fear of failure or loss, and ultimately our fear of death, or more precisely our fear of nonexistence.

Of course, human beings are very diverse and spread out along a wide spectrum when it comes to levels of insecurity and confidence, but the vast majority of us bunch up in the middle of the bell curve, the normal neurotic human condition. So collectively that’s the situation, and as a society we are then very prone toward allowing doubt about ourselves and fears of all kinds to get in the way of our intrinsically prosocial and caring nature. Of course it is not blocked completely and most of us lead relatively prosocial lives. It seems though that when we form institutions and systems, the fear gets ramped up and we tend to structure things around the lowest common denominator of fear-based, survival behaviors. Many or our institutions and systems appear to structured around the idea that we cannot trust each other, that human beings are somehow innately prone to bad behavior. If we hold such a belief about humanity, how can we really aspire to genuinely positive social transformation. Such a negative view of humanity would unavoidable lead to subtle or not so subtle coercive strategies for social transformation, transformation through aggression. We have seen the results of these approaches, mixed at best.

At the most basic level meditation is about learning to relax and accept ourselves as we are. At the most profound level meditation is about learning to relax and accept ourselves as we are. The question is how deep does our relaxation and acceptance go. Through meditation we can tap into the direct experience of the ground nature of our being, something deeper than the conditioned self or the conditional confidence we have worked so hard to attain. We can tap into, relax into, the most fundamental level our being and based on that develop or awaken unconditional confidence, confidence in our basic or unconditional goodness, in the basic goodness of our beingness and our humanity. Just by synchronizing body and mind through the practice of mindfulness-awareness meditation, we experience a basic wholesomeness or feeling of well being and wholeness that just feels basically good. At the most profound level, we are really talking about the basic goodness of nonself, the innate goodness of who we really are, the beingness beyond our conditioned and limited sense of self or “me.” In the gap between to “me” referenced thoughts, there is still the experience of being. Interestingly enough, when we forget to focus on “me” or check to see if “me” is still existing, the lights don’t go out. We are still very much alive, awake and experiencing the magic of life … all the more so. As we relax more and more into that gap between thought of “me” and natural confidence is awakened. This unconditional confidence is the antidote to doubt and fear. The more confidence we have in basic goodness, the less subject we are to doubt and fear and the less prone we are toward fear-based reactions of all kinds.

There is the saying, “he or she who hesitates is lost.” Obviously, there are times when the most appropriate or wise thing is to stop, rest or wait. But in this case, hesitation refers to doubt and fear arising. We know that in martial arts, sports, the performing arts and so forth, when doubt and hesitation arise, we lose our seat and lose our body-mind synchronization. Our doubting, fearful mind gets in the way of the natural flow of body-mind synchronized action. For warriors in battle it likely means defeat. This is something we have all experienced. If doubt and fear take over while we are cycling or skiing, we are likely to fall or crash. All golfers have experienced the disastrous results of fear and doubt arising in mid golf swing. The obstacles of fear and doubt are the barrier to the natural expression of our innate qualities of caring and compassion. Accepting things as they are, starting with our experience of ourselves and our life right now, just as it is, is the first step in relaxing into our innate goodness and confidence. I think we can see now that this naturally leads to more caring and more compassionate action, not quietism or detachment which I imagine would be essentially fear-based strategies of some kind. When the artificial barriers between ourselves and others begin to dissolve through the meditative experience of egolessness or non-separateness, we naturally respond to others in the same caring and responsible way we relate to our own needs. If we cut our own hand, we just take care of it, cleaning and bandaging it properly, and we don’t expect a medal for doing so. With the experience of non-separateness, we respond to the needs of others as our own needs. We take care of ourselves and each other. It is all quite natural and ordinary when we are not possessed by the obstacles of doubt and fear.

So for me the question is not, how can we all get to this unconditional confidence in basic goodness one at a time, but how can we do this together? How can we collectively awaken this innate confidence and trust in our own goodness, the goodness of others, the goodness of human society, the goodness of life altogether. And how can we then begin to develop communities, institutions, and even systems that reflect that confidence and trust in basic goodness … So much so that these institutions and other structures support and reinforce our individual and collective awakening to unconditional goodness?