How to learn from every person

Primordial purity in everyday life

Ben Zoma said:
Who is wise? He who learns from every person.

Pirkei Avot 4:1

We find that we feel hurt about something or sad, or that irritation and judgment arise. We see these feelings arising out of our conditioned history and our current circumstances. But because their insubstantial nature is clear, we have a choice about how to relate: Do we act in this way or that way? Do we investigate our deeper vulnerability? Do we just watch our reactivity come and go? We’ve pretty much dissolved the fantasy of being a problematic person and therefore needing a problematic relationship. It doesn’t mean that our relationship is always passionate and fun and without difficulties, of course. We still have our human lives to live. We still have bills to pay; we might have health problems. Our partner might still trigger disturbing feelings. It’s just that none of this is a problem anymore—it’s simply what it is.

At this point, we might look back and feel very appreciative of our codependency, our struggles with personal responsibility, and our difficulty in being kind. We see that all of that was exactly what we needed to work on to free ourselves of our fascination with chronic self-absorption and identity drama. So we don’t have the sense that we’ve wasted any time. My partner has helped me force out into the open exactly what I have had to work on. I haven’t always enjoyed it, maybe, but it’s been incredibly generous of her to help me. I probably wouldn’t have brought these issues out into the open all on my own. We start to see that there’s a certain sense of path in relationship and that there’s a reason to do certain practices to help us move in a direction we might want to move in.

Bruce Tift, MA. Already Free: Buddhism Meets Psychotherapy on the Path of Liberation (p. 291).

In the Indian Buddhist philosopher Dharmakirti’s description of the four stages of progress in Mahamudra, the fourth stage is called “non-meditation” - where explicit effort, or the sense of any kind of doing falls away, both in formal seating practice and off the cushion. It is characterized by a purification process where every activity of the mind expresses itself as wisdom. While this might seem both unlikely and lofty, in practice it can be as simple as the quote from Pirkei Avot. But, how exactly can we learn from being challenged? I want to illustrate a few examples.

Let’s start with some examples regarding challenges to our worldviews. Coincidentally, as I’ve been working on this post, Amod Lele wrote a piece that reiterated the related idea that “the philosophical ideas we learn the most from will seem repugnant to us at first, and we really learn by persevering.”

I know I’ve written many critical things about Effective Altruists, but their moral pleas on behalf of faraway suffering moves my heart, and I’m grateful for them. I’m also glad that they are trying to evaluate interventions with some rigor, even if that supposed rigor leads to an excess of confidence.

Although I’ve written about the limitations of rules-based perspectives on morality, the sutric (and Abrahamic) view of ethical conduct can still serve as a meaningful yardstick to see whether my emergent activity is indicative of a broader View or egoic grasping. Moreover, the tantric view, if leaning toward an excess of spiritual confidence (i.e. “eternalism”), can lead to a justification of all kinds of bad behavior. The sutric perspective reminds us of this.

Those of us who practice in a spiritual tradition can learn from atheists. Atheists, in my experience, have a keen sense of the hypocrisies of religious communities. Although it can feel uncomfortable, they are holding our feet to the fire! We need skeptics outside our traditions to help us see whether we are really living up to our own ideals. Of course atheists can sometimes benefit from examples of how to connect with the sacred world, something that believers can offer.

The discomfort we might feel for some philosophical view is small potatoes compared to the magnitude of what we might feel in difficult relationships, however. The key idea in relationships is that tough situations bring out your conditioning; regardless of anything else, being able to observe your own reactions to a given situation is extremely valuable information. As Bruce Tift says, it points out the very areas that are left to work on. However, a question remains of how best to engage with that disturbing mental content skilfully. Did your boundaries get pushed? Great, now you know where your boundary is. Did a childhood coping mechanism get triggered by a recurring pattern of interaction? Working with that now becomes your practice. Did you fuck up and deal with a person unskillfully? Not only can you use that for your own practice, but you can also use that to arouse compassion for others who are even more trapped by these recurrences.

Sometimes it can be helpful to work with a recurring pattern in relative terms - treating the pattern as real and trying to ameliorate it in various ways. Other times, the best approach is to relate to the content as energy, dropping the story, and learning to accept and get used to a formless emotional discomfort. Knowing when to use which framework can be incredibly challenging, and I don't think there's any formula or rule we can write down. Sometimes you just have to experiment with different approaches and see what leads to greater freedom and well-being.