Written on 19 May 2018

Today I want to talk about how this practice of mindfulness can be used in dealing with conflicts.  I have been thinking about how to be able to talk about this topic ever since I came to Jerusalem in October last year.

The photo shows my view as I thought about what to say today.  I was in the West Bank town of Beit Jala, in an organic farm/meditation spot [that’s how the owners describe the place on their Facebook page].   

It was Shabbat [Saturday] afternoon and Jerusalem was preparing for an important Jewish holiday which started that night and ends at sundown today.  It is called Shavuot, marking the day on which God gave the Torah to “his chosen people” on Mt Sinai 40 days after their exodus from Egypt.  And for most of the Arab world, the holy month of Ramadan started just a couple of days ago.

This place where I am is a mere 10-minute drive from my home in Jerusalem, beyond the wall.  You can see the wall in the photo.  It’s so close yet life here in the West Bank is so much different from life in Jerusalem.  For one, most of the people here cannot even go to that side of the wall.  In the same way, Israelis are not allowed to come to this side.  And I, who have the freedom to go back and forth as I please, feel that I have the opportunity and the duty to contribute, in my own little way, towards building a bridge between the two sides.

Jerusalem has a history that goes back more than 6000 years.  Just to put it into perspective, New York City was founded as a Dutch colony some 400 years ago (although Native Americans were there much longer before that).

During its long history, Jerusalem has been attacked 52 times, captured and recaptured 44 times, besieged 23 times, and destroyed twice.  It is a city intimately familiar with violence and conflict, a place where people are very much aware of their differences.

It is the one place in the world, and I have been to many, where people would randomly stop me and call me Morpheus, the Laurence Fishburne character in The Matrix.  I enjoy it whenever that happens.   But it also highlights for me the fact that I look so different from them, that I am the Other.

“The Other.”   john a. powell [for some reason his entire name is always written in lower case], the world renowned civil rights expert who teaches law at Berkeley and heads the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society, defines “othering” as “a set of processes, structures, and dynamics that engender marginality and persistent inequality across any of the full range of human differences.”

This Othering happens, for the most part, unintentionally, as a result of how our brains function – with its many triggers and biases.  Some of the culprits are: 

Fear and anxiety

Categorizing

Stereotyping

Implicit bias

Racial anxiety

Confirmation bias

In-group preference

Let’s talk about fear and anxiety.   Has anyone heard of the term “amygdala hijack”?  So amygdala is a part of our brain, in the older part before our species became rationale thinking animals.  It is the brain’s sentinel.  Its motto is better safe than sorry.  It’s a hair trigger: as soon as it perceives danger to its host, it sets of the alarm and puts the body in a fight-flight-or-freeze mode.  This is what scientists call an amygdala hijack.  And it made sense for our ancestors whose life was in the wilderness.   If there was a sabre toothed tiger lurking in the bushes, our ancestors needed that hair trigger alarm for survival. 

But now, in the modern world, there’s not a lot of existential threats like sabre toothed tigers lurking behind the bushes.  But our amygdala is still a hair trigger and it sets off the alarm at the perception of the slightest threat.  Like the Other.  When our amygdala is hijacked, our rationale/thinking brain is cut off, and we are not capable of expanding/broadening our sense of what’s happening, of the world.  We are caught up in narrow-minded thinking.   The heart is closed.  And there is a neurological explanation to this – in an amygdala hijack, the brain sends all the resources to those parts of the body to enable it to respond immediately – either to fight or to flee. 

I remember when I first went to the United States in the late 1990s.  I was going to Columbia, just south of Harlem.  I remember having to get my social security number in Harlem [they still gave foreigners social security numbers then, before they stopped after 9/11].  I was feeling quite scared, and this was in broad daylight, as I walked along West 125th street, because it was in a “black” neighborhood.  I was experiencing amygdala hijack.  All I knew about these people, the African-Americans, was from the movies and TV shows, which except, perhaps for The Cosby Show, was all about gangs, and crime and drive-by shooting, and rap and hip-hop.  As it turns out, Bill Cosby is the worst of them and most everyone else was just like me.  The fear came from stereotyping and implicit bias, from categorization and racial anxiety.  But as I made friends with black Americans and lived alongside them, that fear started to subside and now I can say that I am absolutely comfortable saying hi on the street to a black dude I don’t know and feel safe walking anywhere in Harlem even at night.

According to neuroscientists, the human brain processes 11 million bytes of information per second.  We are consciously aware of 40 of these, at best. Othering occurs in our unconscious network: this can lead to racial, ethnic, or religious bias.

The subconscious mind uses three processes to make sense of the millions of bytes of data we perceive:

(1)   we categorize them;

(2)   we make associations between things; and

(3)   we fill in gaps when we do not have all the information.

One cognitive bias that is true for all of us is what is called “confirmation bias”: the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms one’s preexisting beliefs or hypotheses.  Which is why it is hard to convince the guy in the opposing side that one’s views are correct.  That guy on the other side has his own set of information that confirms his preexisting views.  And so do you.

We categorize people, what we call stereotypes and we all do it.  Just another type of unconscious bias – it can be positive – Asians are smart and hardworking, or negative, Blacks and Latinos could be smarter and do more. 

I remember a time in New York that I went to Brooklyn with a visiting friend.  And I started disparaging hipsters, I had a negative view about them when I really did not even know them.  My friend, always very gracious, remarked that he had been spending a lot of time with these so-called hipsters and that they were actually not that bad.  They hoarded experiences, not possessions.  They were about expressing their truest selves, not acquiring riches. They bought second-hand clothes in rebellion against consumerism. They shopped at local farmers’ markets, not to be trendy, but to support the local economy. They rejected cars and rode bikes because they cared for the planet.  I reflected as I listened to him, and I realized how totally wrong my image of these hipsters was, and how they in fact seemed to live and breathe the values I held dear.

Along with or instead of negative associations toward an out-group, most people tend to hold favorable attitudes toward in-groups.  “In group” preference explains how people can legitimately feel “non racist”.

Derek Black was raised in one of the most prominent white nationalist families in America. His father founded Stormfront, which people described as the first internet hate site and David Duke, the former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, was his godfather. Black spent the first two decades of his life as an enthusiastic aid to his family’s activism, running a political campaign, a radio network, and organizing conferences on white nationalism. Black has since conceded that the ideology he had fought so hard to promote was harmful, and he renounced the white supremacist movement in 2013, and I will tell you later the interesting story of how that came to be.   Derek says that he never felt he was being racist – because he was focused on his in-group.  His words: We don’t “hate,” and we don’t “dislike”; we’re just interested in “preserving our own.”   That is in-group bias or favoritism or in-group preference.

Now, let’s all be clear about one thing.  Having biases and stereotypes do not make us racist, it makes us human.  This is the human condition.   It’s not an easy thing to admit.  But we all have biases and prejudices.   This is what I think the Buddha was referring to when he said one of the three poisons that cause human suffering is ignorance/delusion.

So how do we defeat them?   I humbly offer to you three things to consider.

(1)  Mindfulness

The practice that I have been introduced to by my teachers Sharon Salzberg, Jack Kornfield, Tara Brach and Alexis Santos, is called vipassana.  The most helpful translation I have heard of the word is “clear seeing.”  With continued practice of vipassana, one becomes more intimate about one’s sensations, emotions, thoughts and mind states.  With this practice, we become more aware of the cognitive biases I just described and all other mental habits and patterns of thought.  Also, with the practice, we are able to cultivate beginners mind, a sense of wonder about everything, even those that we used to feel familiar with, even an expert on, including our set ways of thinking, and learn to investigate them and respond more skillfully, instead of going on autopilot and reacting blindly.

There is a way to respond differently than being on autopilot. A beautiful way of expressing this possibility appears in the work of Viktor Frankl, a holocaust survivor and psychologist, who wrote the book Man’s Search for Meaning. Frankl’s teachings has been summarized as follows: “Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space lies our freedom and our power to choose. In our response lies our growth and our happiness.”

Mindfulness creates that space.  We see clearly that our thoughts are not us.  They come and go, like clouds on a breezy day.  They come out of nowhere and disappear like soap bubbles bursting.  When we internalize this truth: “My thoughts are not me.”, then you do not have to react immediately to those thoughts.  That space, that gap is created and you can then choose a more skillful, a kinder response.   When you are triggered by seeing a Palestinian, you are able to notice the emotions triggered in yourself, the sensations in your body that are associated with such emotions.  And you are able to see clearly whether or not your cognitive biases are at work.  Then you are able to create the gap and find a better response.

There’s a great mindfulness practice called RAIN, which I first heard from my teacher, Tara Brach.  RAIN stands for: Recognize, Allow, Investigate, and Non-Identification.

Recognize. The first step of the RAIN process involves pausing to recognize the sensations in the body, feelings, and thoughts that are present in your inner experience. It can be tempting to ignore unpleasant thoughts or feelings or to form judgments about those thoughts and feelings, but our aim in this step of the process is to observe without an internal or external reaction. One useful piece of advice for this step is to be friendly with yourself as you recognize what is happening within your mind and body.

Sometimes, asking ourselves a question can help initiate a clearer recognition of our present moment experience. Questions like, “What am I feeling right now?” or “What do I really think/feel about this situation?” or even “What is happening inside me right now?” help us to focus our energy towards a clear recognition of our inner experience.

Once we recognize our sensations, emotions, or thoughts, it is helpful to name them – “anger,” “sadness,” “tightness in the throat,” “worry about mother,” “loneliness,” etc. Naming what is happening within you allows for a clearer connection to the experience.

Allow. According to Tara, the next step is to “allow life to be just as it is.” This entails letting the difficult experience exist without trying to change it. Often, our response to difficult thoughts and emotions is one of three forms of aversion – we ignore the unpleasantness, we resist the unpleasantness, or we grasp for something that will distract us from the unpleasantness. When practicing RAIN, we avoid these temptations and allow the experience to be.

A useful skill when practicing this step is to use a word or phrase to support your intention to allow the experience to be as it is. Tara notes that mentally saying “yes, this too” to the experience is a way to express your consent to the sensations, feelings, or thoughts that have arisen within your awareness. This expression both reminds you of your intention in practicing this process and also plants a seed that you are not the experience – a  theme addressed in a later step.

Investigate. The third step in the RAIN process may not always be necessary. You may have regained a sense of mental balance through simply recognizing a difficult experience and allowing it to be. Other times, the first two steps are not enough. This is especially true for recurring difficulties like marital problems or entrenched issues with your colleagues. In these cases, investigating your experience in greater depth is useful. You can ask yourself questions like:

• What is the feeling tone of this experience (positive, negative, or neutral)?

• What event triggered this difficult experience?

• Why was that event triggering to me?

• Have similar events triggered me before?

• What story am I telling myself about these feelings?

• What story are these feelings telling me?

• What alternative stories exist for these difficult feelings?

• How realistic is the story I am telling myself?

• What bodily sensations are connected to this experience?

Non-identification. The final step is not so much an actionable step as it is a result of the process. Non-identification means that through recognizing, allowing, and possibly investigating your experience, you became aware that you were not the sensation, emotion, or thought that was causing you difficulty. It means that you have ceased to identify yourself with your difficulty and instead are able to see the difficulty as a small, ephemeral part of the large mosaic of our present time experience. With non-identification, we have successfully shifted our perspective towards seeing the streaming, constantly changing (however subtly) nature of our experience.

(2)   Cultivating Warm-Heartedness

My second offering for dealing Othering in ourselves is to cultivate what the Dalai Lama refers to as warm-heartedness [which by the way I learned from the Book of Joy, which Ash introduced to this group way back].  It is about cultivating a wise compassionate heart.

My teacher, Jack Kornfield:  I remember sitting with the Dalai Lama and some Tibetan nuns who had survived years of imprisonment and torture by the Chinese. We were part of a meeting that I was running of ex-prisoners from all across the United States who’d been using meditation, contemplative practices, mindfulness, compassion, and so forth to change their lives.

With us were guys who had just been released after 25 years in Texas state prison or 18 years in Ohio in a maximum security prison. And they were sitting with the Dali Lama and these little nuns who were imprisoned during their teenagers years for saying their prayers out loud.

The nuns were asked, “Were you ever afraid?” And they answered, “Yes, we were terribly afraid. And what we were afraid of was that we would end up hating our guards—that we would lose our compassion. That is the thing we most feared.”

And they sat there, these sweet young nuns, and I remember this one guy who had been in prison for 18 years in Ohio saying, “I’ve seen some brave folks in my day, and I ain’t seen anything like you young ladies.”

How did these Tibetan nuns get to that level of wisdom and compassion?

A behavioral study from Switzerland in 2010 had soccer fans as participants. They were told that the person in the other room, an actor, was either a fan of the same team or a rival team.  They were then told that the person was to be given electric shocks and they could help him by taking some of the shock themselves. The experiment showed that the participants were much more likely to help when the person was introduced as a fan of the same team. Even more interesting was that the action of the participants could be predicted by their brain scans.

Another science study found that watching a video of one’s own body being touched can temporarily increase one’s sensitivity to touch. A study out of Italy explored whether and how this visual remapping of touch works if the face you see being touched belongs to someone else. The participant was shown faces of people from different ethnic groups, and the visual remapping worked measurably better if the video showed a person from the same ethnic group. The same is true when the person shown on the video held the same political belief.

How do we develop empathy for The Other?

The above scientific studies points to the first solution: seeing similarities. When we see others as similar to us, it naturally inclines us to better understand them. Importantly, this does not mean glossing over differences in life experiences–we can appreciate the differences in others, while seeing the same fundamental humanity underneath.

The second foundational practice is kindness. Kindness is the engine of empathy; it motivates you to care, and it makes you more receptive to others, and them to you, even in the midst of perceived difference or conflict. The more kindness you offer to people, the better you can empathize with them.

My teachers gave me the following practices – Jack and Tara, in particular, calls them heart practices. 

We call it the “Just like me” and the loving-kindness or metta practices.

1. Set-up

·       Sit in front of a person, facing each other. Take a moment now to introduce yourselves. During the meditation, I will ask you to actually look at each other a couple of times, but don’t worry, it won’t be for very long. The important thing is just to know that this person in front of you exists.

·       Start with 2 minutes to rest the mind on the breath.

2. Script

[Note to teacher: make sure you create a pause before each “just like me”, to let the experience sink.]

·       Become aware that there is a person in front of me. A fellow human being… Just like me.

·       Take a moment now to look at your partner. [5 to 10 sec] Now feel free to look down or close your eyes.

·       Let us consider a few things.

·       This person in front of me has a body and a mind… Just like me.

·       This person in front of me has feelings, emotions and thoughts… Just like me.

·       This person in front of me has at some point in their life, been sad, disappointed, angry, hurt or confused… Just like me.

·       This person in front of me has in their life, experienced physical and emotional pain and suffering… Just like me.

·       This person in front of me wishes to be free from pain and suffering… Just like me.

·       This person in front of has experienced many joys and times of happiness… Just like me.

·       This person in front of me wishes to be healthy, loved, and have fulfilling relationships… Just like me.

·       This person in front of me wishes to be happy… Just like me.

(pause)

·       Now, let’s allow some wishes to arise.

·       I wish for this person in front of me to have the strength and the resources to navigate the difficulties in life.

·       I wish for this person in front of me to be free from pain and suffering.

·       I wish for this person in front of me to be happy.

·       Because this person is a fellow human being… Just like me.

·       Now take a moment to look at your partner again. [After 5 to 10 sec or so] You may now look down or close your eyes.

(pause)

·       Now if you’d like, I invite you to try extending these wishes further.

·       May everyone here in this room be happy; may they be free from suffering, may they be at peace.

·       Then, think of those you love – family, closest friends, perhaps co-workers…. may they be happy, may they be free from suffering, may they be at peace…

·       If you’d like, I invite you to try extending these wishes further, to co-workers and other friends; may they be happy, may they be free from suffering, may they be at peace.

·       Then, if you are feeling really bold, see what it would be like to extend these wishes to everyone. May all beings be happy, may they be happy, may they be free from suffering, may they be at peace.

·       Finally, to yourself. Don’t forget yourself… may I be happy, may I be free from suffering, may I be at peace.

3. End with a 1 minute resting of the mind.
(3)  Authentic conversations; generous listening

The practices I described – mindfulness and cultivating warm-heartedness will help in this third offering. To be able to have authentic, open conversations, a compassionate heart, a preference for kindness, presence and curiosity have to be strong enough to withstand animosity and narrow-mindedness – after all, this is a perceived enemy, “the Other”, that you are talking to, and you can get triggered easily which will end the conversation before it even gets started.   Creating that mental space and cultivating warm-heartedness will help you navigate these treacherous waters.

john a. powell, the Berkeley law professor, rockstar civil rights expert, talks about direct interactions between members of the two sides as a way of working towards a solution to the Othering.  He also says that indirect interactions — when people observe positive interactions between members of their own group and another group (vicarious contact), they report lower bias and anxiety, and more positive inter-group attitudes.

I have this favorite quote, attributed to Abraham Lincoln: “I don’t like that man. I must get to know him better.”

When we feel we are doing Othering, close in.  Find someone from the other side and have an authentic conversation.

I have heard of this program of the Council of Europe called intercultural dialogue.  It says that the “enabling factors” that characterize a true, meaningful intercultural dialogue are the following:

–       Equal dignity of all participants;

–       Voluntary engagement in dialogue;

–       A mindset (on both sides) characterized by openness, curiosity and commitment, and the absence of a desire to “win” the dialogue;

–       A readiness to look at both cultural similarities and differences;

–       A minimum degree of knowledge about the distinguishing features of one’s own and the “other” culture;

–       The ability to find a common language for understanding and respecting cultural differences.

Does it really work?  I was in the home of this Palestinian some months ago, I together with our sangha of Israelis were visiting him and his wife was terminally ill then.  He became a paraplegic after an Israeli soldier shot him in the back in the second intifada in the early 2000s.  He was then introduced to Thich Naht Hanh and became part of his community together with his family.  He and our Israeli friends started talking about this initiative of bringing the two sides together – just to talk, not about the conflict, but of topics that friends usually talk about, their families, their lives, their hopes and dreams.  And Issa [our host] and Juditta [one of the Israelis with us] both were not convinced that such an initiative is worth the effort.  It’s all talk they said.  How does that help bring peace.

My answer is a resounding yes, yes, and in fact, that might be the only way to solve this seemingly intractable conflict.  By the slow work of getting people to have authentic conversations.

I told you about the story of Derek Black and how he turned his back from the hateful idealogy of white supremacists.  Do you know how that happened?  When he went to college, in New College Florida, he was outed as the heir apparent of the white supremacy movement.  After this outing, an Orthodox Jewish student, Matthew Stevenson, who lived in the same dorm, invited him to Friday Shabbat dinners.  Matthew said they invited Derek because they thought he probably didn’t know any people from the backgrounds that his ideology despised.  They never talked about Derek’s white supremacy ideas and activism all those Shabbat dinners that they had which went on for a few years.

It’s a similar story for Megan Phelps-Roper, the prized daughter of the Westboro Baptist Church, an American church known for its use of inflammatory hate speech, especially against LGBT+ people, Catholics, Muslims, Jews, and U.S. soldiers.  The church also has made statements such as, “thank God for dead soldiers,” “God Hates Fags” and “Jews killed Jesus.”  Authentic conversations with “enemies” online proved instrumental in her deradicalization, and she left the church and her entire way of life in 2012. 

What is key in these conversations is generous listening. Krista Tippett, of On Being, and the Civil Conversations Project describes generous listening as follows: “Generous listening is powered by curiosity, a virtue we can invite and nurture in ourselves to render it instinctive. It involves a kind of vulnerability—a willingness to be surprised, to let go of assumptions [echoes of beginners mind, wonder], and take in ambiguity. The listener wants to understand the humanity behind the words of the other, and patiently summons one’s own best self and one’s own best words and questions.”

Name-calling is never helpful. Instead, explain your point of view clearly and acknowledge the viewpoints of others.

NYU social scientist Jonathan Haidt says sharing food helps too.

Takeaways:  

(1)   mindfulness practice – to be aware of our cognitive biases and respond skillfully

(2)   heart/compassion practices of just like me and loving-kindness – to cultivate warm-heartedness

(3)   Authentic conversations, powered by generous listening, and food.

To close, I want to quote from Krista Tippett: “The crack in the middle where people on both sides absolutely refuse to see the other as evil—this is where I want to live and what I want to widen.”