Buddhism, the Self and Identity Politics

 

 

To believe identity is a sufficiently solid and energized thing, and not an atomized and sub-atomized flow of imputed imprints is to follow in the footsteps of the likes of Hitler and the occultist and bogus science of the Nazis. They viewed the body, mind, and spirit as indistinguishable aspects of the races and the races as bordered formations enmeshed with culture and inherent psychic and social manifestations. Even if we allow that identity is simply a social construct, if we initially see people like this, especially in reactivity to trauma, we fall into the trap of energizing a delusion. In so doing we do not honor human beings, and from a Buddhist point of view we do violence to them on first contact no matter the relativist narrative.

Here is a glancing look at the preeminent philosopher Nietzsche’s view of identity.

“Nietzsche takes a strikingly skeptical view of identity. We are all too familiar, he thinks, with metaphysical and logical theories that carelessly affirm identity everywhere. To avoid what he thinks are the deleterious consequences of such metaphysical and logical theories, Nietzsche strenuously denies that there is any identity anywhere. Nietzsche is not the only thinker to challenge the logical supremacy of identity. His denials of identity as equality and identity as endurance link him closely to modern ontologies involving tropes (rather than universals) and events (rather than substances).

-Nietzsche On IdentityEric Steinhart. This article has been published as(2005) Nietzsche on identity. Revista di Estetica 28 (1), 241–256.

This view of Nietzche’s mirrors in current neuroscience, neuropsychology, evolutionary biology and contemporary physics (consciousness and the quantum), aspects of ancient yogic findings, and most contemplative spiritual work through the ages.

If we are to truly address the terrestrial plane, the political world it contains, and be effective in activating compassion and wisdom therein, how do we co-sign the dominant narratives of identity and the politics that flow from it all over the political spectrum?

It feels like we are being asked to set aside or warp the spiritual view, which is often a set of realizations found through “self-investigation“ and instead, integrating our moral and metaphysical frame into the toiling power struggle between mental projections of groups signified by some ephemeral and limiting quality in an individual. The challenge for the contemplative has always been such.

Groups generated by perceptions, no matter how much laced in history those perceptions carry, are still self-categorizing or categorized externally on flexible symbols and language. But! The middle path suggests many routes to ultimate truth, so we can not dismiss those projections or the suffering they animate, out of hand.

For example, how can we not identify black suffering as uniquely black? No amount of spiritual bi-pass gaming can erase black individuals’ lived experience in the United States through the centuries and today. No amount of universality can de-tangle us from specifics; in the same way that fruit is not sand, every sense based expression of activity has perceived parameters and place holder symbols, manufactured by the conceptual mind. How we respond to these parameters matters for our navigating our evolution and seeing beyond concept, and so it is with the karmic challenges of the human realm. Perhaps we can activate our sense of self and identity through touching the nature of self and perception more completely.

Without ignoring the mundane world’s true and specific faces of struggle can we liberate our concepts and perception through insight, and thus begin a process of freedom for all, by example?

When presented with a unique concert of suffering or an equation of moral struggle, we cannot resort to bi-pass and look at conceptual emptiness alone. Cosmic or universalizing empathetic positions can be a way not to focus on our actual current state. By bearing down on a specific scenario presented with whatever boundaries seem to arrive, we can use our wisdom to see where the perceptual poisons erupt. By recognizing them, we can energize our practice. On the other hand, we cannot believe they are ultimately true and add fuel to them by entering the fray with the same convictions, pain or aggression that builds those constructs.

Our bodies are a great example of responding to our arising experience and using it for transmuting the mundane into liberation. We do not usually experience pain across the entire body at once. Instead, we feel and locate the specific circumstance of the pain to diagnose and respond. Reactivity is the impulsive or defiled mind activating, but responding with discernment is the mind in repose to samsaric expression and using that expression to self liberate by seeing ignorance.

Like this, we observe larger scales and systems of pain as occasions to activate our motivation to liberate ourselves from ignorance. And so we can engage with the idea of individual identity and group identity as an unavoidable aspect of the worldly life of this realm, but we do not use the same language that has manifested such constructs to engage with them. Accepting the power of identity and its contradictions is a way to bring compassion and understand the human condition even as we aspire to be Buddhas. And yet! There is a way to hold the other side of the coin so that we go further and get off of the limited train of thought.

Both Buddhism/Dharma and philosophy seem to require all manor of interventions based on the times they describe. Like this, our current bardos of thought about self, the political and the metaphysical or spiritual, requires intervention.

In many ways, we see the samseric dilemma, the desire realm as this world is called, recast once again as we struggle for justice, equality, reform, healing, and the revolutions of thought that demand an overhaul of language and institution when also trying to experience emptiness and practice Bodhicitta - or ultimate compassion to liberate all sentient beings.

How do we practice equanimity and the “correct view” when required to make tremendous declarations of truth in opposition to this view? Being asked to view individual identity and the constructs of race, group, and self as fixed and essential structures linked with oppression and liberation, power, and summarized or totaling qualities is a recipe for tension axiomatically set up. On the one hand, the overhaul of our presumptions and culpability in subjugating maligned or oppressed groups, possibly including our own, is a crucial part of advancing out of ignorance and this way reducing or purifying our “bad Karma” by doing the right thing.

While on the other hand, we funnel into a collective mesmerization of all too familiar ideas. We are always being dragged into deeper waters of samsaric calcifying, where we impute power into scales of division. These divisions keep the human condition locked in a state of relativistic fracture and disharmony. Can we fight for justice along needed lines, reconcile the dimensions of injustice and inequality as we simultaneously look at individuals as more than labels, indeed as more than people? What would that fight start to look like?

Can we look at individuals as future buddhas and not limit them or ourselves to some lower cast of thought as we also reconcile with the political domain of confusion?

Simply put, can we say that we are practicing the middle path, dharma, or being spiritual at all when we forgo observing all phenomena as transient and ultimately empty, people as karmic formations and our mundane minds activating out of confusion? Can we castigate, blame, see people as identified political projections, and claim to be practicing dharma?

Are we modifying our minds (at least publicly) based on these arbitrary but powerful and constant re-calibrations of societal fluctuations? Do we have a choice not to? There must be a way to bridge intellectual honesty, moral clarity and maintain a footing in true dharma as householders. There must be a way to fight for social justice while noticing the narrative’s current dimensions to be flawed in the deepest sense. Can we manage all of this? Yes.

The past practitioners would believe that a delicate touch can allow for a measured, thoughtful, and compassionate response no matter the situation. But what happens when the political is at a critical mass of mediated confusion, polarized central beliefs rallied around competing ontology, and siloed group-think? If we pretend there is no better way to engage, doesn’t this make us complicit in another crime. The crime of dogmatic non-thinking and the corruption of energizing concepts of the self that act counter to the liberating message of dharma? Are we not lying each time we do so if we know better?

I have struggled personally with how to square group identity with an understanding of individuality, notions of “free will” (however faulty), and how a morally singular body forms within a group. The degrading principle of over-identification with the group is tribalism. While culture produces things like Tibetan Buddhism, art, food, music, and the textures of the world we enjoy and come alive through, we are also susceptible to worshiping such symbols and interdependent imputations as an indispensable, solid and equal part of the true “I”. That is what keeps us cycling through samsara, no matter how convinced we are of the importance of such an imputation or situation. Its a hard pill to swallow in the degraded age we are in, so convinced of righteous moral standpoints as equivalent to spiritual realizations that we spin into samsara again and again.

The dharma expresses in language, art, and all manner of the cultural signifiers. Still, it is not housed there, and in the same way, the core of the psyche and, more deeply and broadly, the human mind, is not finally tethered to any worldly construct such as race or creed sex or gender — “It” is merely energized in delusion by these.

It is the defiling of mind and body through karma production and inherent ignorance that places the idea of self in a projected and limited world such as the one we are discussing this in, and that is achieved through labeling imputation and the inability to observe mind.

To believe identity is enough of a concrete thing to be energized, and not an atomized and sub-atomized flow of imprints is to follow in the footsteps of the likes of Hitler and the mystical bogus science of the Nazis. They viewed the body, mind, and spirit as indistinguishable aspects of the races and the races as bordered formations enmeshed with culture and inherent psychic manifestations. Even if we allow that identity is simply a social construct, if we initially see people like this, even in reactivity to trauma, we fall into the trap of energizing a delusion on contact. We do not honor human beings and from a Buddhist point of view we do violence to them on first contact.

We have come to know race as a construct, entirely changing, and falsely segmented. Culture is similarly porous, and so is language. Gender is a construct. While sex is undeniably part of a biological phenomenon, it too dove-tails into the same fluid space as the core racial groupings defining migration and gene expression across the millennia seeing that biological activity is fluid and ever changing. These are all evolving and not simplistic aspects of physical nature, shuttled into human conceptual frames of . While mind and body are interlinked, a single mind’s malleability and uniqueness are not defactos unshakably tethered to the body.

No social pressure can make this so. Perhaps we see something fixed and under the pressures of power narratives and abuse, and that thing is culture, and that thing is also interdependent and imputed, messy and unstable. It has no border. We can respond to how others perceive culture and identity through their self recognizing and signifying members, but do we wish to play the same game?

Just as the body and form realm itself mutate due to the interdependence of factors, the mind is subject to the influence of intention, which stems from the spirit and accumulated karma — the total energy of the mental effluent or Asava. This supersedes any particular body or vessel in the narrow sense of life. We can motivate our true view of identity, beyond simple conceptual idealization to change. We are only responsible for our view, and our view can inspire others.

As a teen, I was once lamenting to a friend the struggle to rationalize my Jewishness in light of antisemitism. Despite not being religious at all and knowing that even the cultural trappings only slightly reflected who I truly was and how I had grown up. In an attempt at solidarity, the friend reprimanded me and said, “why don’t you just..not be Jewish”. This was a pivotal moment for me. And while it is indeed far more comfortable and possible for a Jew to pretend not to be a Jew than a black person to forgo blackness, the question is, why, besides some internalized self-loathing, would we wish to? The reason someone would be a racial apostate or defector would be to feel less othered, less hated, less seen for what we are not, rather than what we are!

And yet, that would be to try and be something we also are not — the majority and value setting caste. Or whatever we perceive the majority to wish us to be. Neither option offers a stable identity that reflects our nature. And more to the initial point, neither option pins itself to the reality beyond societal whims and the currents of ignorance.

This conversation with my friend was a haunting lesson for me. I was damned if I did and damned if I didn’t embrace my Jewishness, or so I thought at the time. That space of tension, though, is where I began to struggle and examine identity, the idea of group allegiance, and the presumptions of character that a group was supposed to afford me.

At the far end of associating with Jewishness are messianic Zionism and a kind of ethnonationalism. At the other edge of the spectrum is a kind of rejection of something that finds expression in my ego-personality without a doubt. But! It has taken the dharma and the spiritual experience of empathetic exchange of self for others and of seeing through the mind of separation and labeling to see how ridiculously limited my ethnic-cultural creed is at the forefront or most energized identity to view life through.

It is the most tedious aspect of me, primarily because the spiritual belief at the center of that identity does not reflect a free mind- no religion does, no pride in history does. Collectivism and tribalism always divert the spiritual path of liberation for the individual and are difficult to hold as relative constructs of any value. The only implicit value of group identity for a Buddhist would be the Sangha or the beings that are supporting each other towards liberation for all out of delusion and suffering and into enlightenment That is the value set we can strive for, and in so doing, alter our perception of all relativist formulations that keep us stuck!

So, while I acknowledge the gifts and curses that a heritage allows in this (or any) society, I do not stop there when observing my self, nor believe it can come anywhere close to being a liberating factor for investigation of self. Not even observing myself as a collection of webbed projections made alive by the perception of history and nurtured belief is closing in on the self’s nature, in fact it is just another trap. I believe we can each attempt this exsersizing of identity if we understand emptiness, karma, rebirth and the deeper nature of self beyond the ego and transient form realm persona. These are notions tied to practices in the territory of Buddhism.

I absolutely MUST look deeper to escape these two choices I offered above. When I do so, I can see people are much more than people. I can see the political struggle for freedom through reifying tribal allegiances as reductive and a sure path away from waking up. Whether we practice meditation and insight or simply wish to understand our selves more deeply and get off of this wheel of suffering, we can see beyond the conditions of this flimsy and always mutating social realm and underhand our natures in liberating terms that extend to others, even the others we see as enemy.

But, what to do about navigating real suffering brought on by racism, here and now? Well, perhaps there a path and practice that says:

“I see how you see me, but I do not see myself that way. I see how you see you, but I do not see you that way.”

And,

“If we see each other in these ways, we will forever be led astray and toward a world that has room for neither of us.”

I would offer that. And I would practice that even if others do not. That is the Bodhisattvas way.

And in that way, I would try and address the systemic inequities and blind spots endemic to a public raised on atrocious cultural reinforcements, historic trauma inculcated and baked into the institutions by playing a new game, a game that gets us out of the game entirely.

If we think there has to be a better way, that is because there is. And it’s time we started suggesting it instead of playing the game we know is rigged and keeping us more deeply mired in samsara and near a cliff that is all in our minds.

Josh Reichmann

2021