Social Commentary | Hari-kirtana das

What happened to civility?

One could of course argue that the world has always been a very uncivil place – particularly for people outside the dominant power structure – but I think most of us would agree that rampant public incivility has become the new normal. Perhaps it’s because this behavior is socially contagious; if not confronted by corrective feedback or consequences, incivility tends to be repeated and spread to others. It’s a constant upping of the ante on who can be first or get the last word.

So what’s driving this mess? While I don’t always see eye to eye with New York Times columnist David Brooks, I do appreciate a comment he made about this topic:

Civility is the natural state for people who know how limited their own individual powers are.

Is David Brooks a yogi? Perhaps… because that’s pretty much what yoga philosophy says as well.

Coming back down to Earth

Civility is the natural state for one who is humble, and humility is the natural state of a person who sees things as they are.

When we see that the universe is very big and we are very small, that the universe does not revolve around our desires, and that our lifespans are insignificant relative to the lifespan of the universe, our egos come back down to earth from whatever part of the stratosphere they may have drifted off to.

While our lifespans occupy an insignificant stretch of time, our lives themselves remain significant. And when we see things as they are we see that every living being is spiritually significant no matter how insignificant that being may appear to be.

Humility means being in touch with reality as opposed to being stupefied by delusions of grandeur. The essential indicator of humility is an inclination to offer respect to others while maintaining a healthy disinterest in being admired by others.

So, we can assess the quality of our yoga practice by asking ourselves a simple question: ‘is my yoga practice helping me to develop and attitude of humility?’

How to cultivate empowered humility

Yoga philosophy tells us that one of the best ways to develop authentic humility is to cultivate an attitude of service and seek out opportunities to serve others without any expectation of recognition for our efforts. Service to something or someone greater than our selves is the key to cultivating a mood of service and, with it, real humility.

Real humility empowers us to act boldly and confidently. A humble yogi can rise to any occasion and perform any task fearlessly when the situation calls for it because they have confidence in the greatness of the cause that they’re serving.

Cultivating a mood of humility through acts of selfless service for the sake of a cause that’s greater than our selves also attracts the mind of the Supreme Being. In the Bhagavad-gita, Krishna tells Arjuna:

One who is free from envy, who is a kind friend to all living beings, who is not controlled by illusory conceptions of ‘I’ and ‘mine’, who is equipoised in both happiness and distress, who is quick to forgive and remains always satisfied, who offers service to me with determination and devotion, whose mind and intelligence are fully invested in me – such a devotee is very dear to me.” – Bg 12.13-14

As we advance on the path of yoga it becomes progressively easier to remain undisturbed by the arguments and actions of those with whom we disagree. Even when firmly standing in opposition to an adversary’s position, an advanced yogi does not become their enemy’s enemy. On the contrary, one who pursues the path of devotional yoga is always kind to everyone, even to his or her enemies.

As this verse from the Gita indicates, such equanimity and unconditional kindness attracts the favor of the Supreme Person, who thus becomes pre-disposed to reveal himself to us. As our awareness of the omnipresence of the Supreme Person rises, we start to see Krishna everywhere, even in the hearts of our enemies.

Thus, devotion is the key element for achieving this high standard of equanimity in yoga. And equanimity, born of humility, is the key to being able to maintain a commitment to civil discourse even in the face of unabashed hostility.

There is no defense against humility

Of course, we’d like the Paramatma – the Lord who resides within the hearts of all beings – to convince our opponents to see things our way. Because, obviously, we are right and they are wrong and God knows the world would be a much better place if everyone would do things the way we think they ought to be done.

However, the Lord within all does not interfere with the free will of even the most foolish among us. It may be that our misfortune in the face of foolishness is just be a matter of karma that we’ll have to tolerate for some time. Fortunately, all karma is temporary.

In the meantime we can encourage civility in social discourse by maintaining our own civility irrespective of provocations to the contrary. And we can anchor our determination to be kind and respectful to our enemies with a humility born of broad vision that’s grounded by proximity to reality.

How we engage in discourse is as important, if not more so, than the substance of what we have to say. I hope you’ll try to engage with your adversaries with respect and humility, however much they may infuriate you. By doing so you may come to find that humility itself is a potent conversational weapon against which there is no defense.

Feel free to offer an opinion

How do you feel about the tone of social discourse? How do you maintain your equanimity when engaging in an adversarial debate? Do you avoid such conversations, tip-toe through them, or take them head on? Please contribute to the conversation by leaving a comment or suggestion about how our yoga practice can help us overcome the acrimony that’s become so prevalent amidst our social divisions.

At times it seems as if the world has gone off its rocker. Maybe it has. When the going gets tough it’s tempting to retreat from the world. And a respite may be just what we need from time to time, if for no other reason than to get our bearings before we try to navigate our way through another roller coaster news cycle.

Our spiritual practices may offer shelter from the storm but there’s also the risk that we’ll be seduced into using them to make a full-scale withdrawal, a disengagement from a world justified by the notion that seeking our own enlightenment is the best contribution we can make to the world.

This presupposes that we can find our enlightenment in isolation, that engagement with the world is not essential to our spiritual progress, and that we can be the change we want to see in the world without participating in the world we want to change.

Does the pursuit of our own enlightenment necessitate a withdrawal from the world? Does embracing a deeper spirituality take us up, out, and away from the experience of being present in our communities?

It depends on your conception of enlightenment and what you think ‘spirituality’ really means.

Do human beings invent spiritual practices?

We tend to think about spirituality as something invisible or abstract, as something hidden within or residing beyond the physical forms of the material world. And we tend to think of spiritual practice as something that will take us to that invisible realm beyond the material world.

A common aspect of spiritual practice is to make the invisible visible, to bring the spiritual realm into the material world by rendering a conception of spirituality in a physical medium like stone or metal. The result can be a kind of materialized spirituality wherein the spiritual is reduced to the representational: objects that symbolize something intangible.

When we step outside of the abstract concepts, representational artifacts, and ritualistic practices of spirituality we might be tempted to think that conceptions of a transcendental truth and the practices designed to facilitate their realization are merely human inventions.

Curiously, the spiritual traditions that humans have presumably invented do not present themselves as human inventions. They present themselves as having transcendental rather than mundane origins. One may ask, ‘is it reasonable to assume that rational people who achieved an authentic insight into the human condition would lie to themselves and their followers about their own invention?’

The notion that transcendental knowledge and spiritual practices are human inventions is a very modern development. And because we’re modern, educated people who accept being consigned to the narrow parameters of a purely physical reality we rarely, if ever, consider the possibility that a better way to make the spiritual visible is by changing our eyes, by developing spiritual vision.

I don’t mean this in an abstract or intellectualized way: I mean it literally. Our physical eyeballs are designed to see matter. If we want to see spirit we need spiritual eyeballs.

Think of it like technology: a material operating system, namely, a human body, is designed to hear, see, feel, taste, and smell matter. If the direct experience of spirituality is beyond the capabilities of a material operating system and we want to gain access to spiritual experiences then we need to upgrade to a spiritual operating system.

Does upgrading to a spiritual operating system negate social engagement or personal relationships?

You may think that the ability to develop spiritual senses sounds like a far-fetched idea. In that case, you may want to consider that we already have access to metaphysical experiences. In fact, we value metaphysical things — like equality, justice, and love — far more than we value physical objects. If the metaphysical is higher than the physical then we can follow the breadcrumbs up the ladder to the spiritual.

Which brings us to the next objection: the assumption that the purpose of vertical transcendence, of a spirituality that takes us up a ladder, is to take us away from our lives in the material world. For those who care about the state of the world, an inward-turning spiritual practice that leaves the world behind in favor of solitary meditation seems unacceptably irresponsible, even callously selfish.

Does an inward-turning practice designed to upgrade our senses to a spiritual operating system negate social engagement or personal relationships? I don’t see any reason why it should. In fact, I see every reason to think just the opposite: that the spiritualization of experience would result in deepening both our commitment to social action and our engagement in personal relationships.

Why? Because when we see the spiritual nature of the material world we’ll treat the world as a sacred being rather than an exploitable object. And when we see people as spiritual beings we’ll feel a natural kinship with one another that transcends physical differences.

The difference between spiritual and material is the difference between love and lust.

Our equality as human beings is not physical; it’s metaphysical or, to be more specific, it’s spiritual. It’s our common spirituality rather than our isolated physicality that makes deeper intimacy possible. Thus, a deeper spirituality is both vertical and horizontal, leading us simultaneously to a transcendent truth and a deeper personal connection to the world.

By contrast, a deeper materialism that dismisses the idea of spiritual experience as an illusory human invention leaves us with nothing but desolate matter. And that leaves our hearts empty. If being materialistic means loving the material then materialism is a sure-fire formula for unrequited love because matter can’t love you back. People can love you back. And people are not made of matter.

The difference between spiritual and material is the difference between love and lust. Being materialistic means being excessively concerned with possessing pleasure-inducing material objects. It means thinking that matter is all there is and that matter is therefore the ultimate cause of every aspect of our experience, including the experience of love. Hence the metaphysical experience of love is reduced to an epiphenomenal by-product of automatonic processes: the love of robots.

What we hunger for is a higher love. If the best we can hope for is a deeper and more intimate connection to our fleeting and flawed material existence then the higher love we hunger for will remain hidden in an invisible realm beyond our reach. What we need is a deeper spirituality that will move us toward that higher love and toward one another.