How to Be Good When the World Isn't

Finding the Audacity to Experience Original Humanity

It is a feature of the Dao that the natural world moves with effortless effort towards homeostasis. Early Daoist tradition calls this “reverting to the Dao” and sees the process as a feature of the power (de) as essential as the Dao itself---hence the work is the classic (ching) of the Dao and its Power (de): Dao De Ching (or for you oldschoolers Tao Te Ching). What the Dao is is the power of what it does, without imperative or even impulse; and at our core, we are nothing other than that Dao. If we presume to say Lao Tzu has a thesis, well then this is it.

As Dao De Ching further puts it, the effortlessness of the Dao’s “action” is in fact non-action (wu-wei): unaffected, ingenuous, unstudied, guileless. The Dao is just what it does without external agency, need or motivation, absent of purpose or goal and instead by mere recursion of its nature: the power (de) to do as much is autochthonal. We are that power to be who we are. (Do take note here: I urge you never to miss the opportunity to use the word “autochthonal”, and just imagine the look on your fellow Scrabble players as you turn out that -chth double consonant. When we experience our power bemused the sinister feels trivial in comparison.)

A consequence of such an understanding of “how things work” is that it provides an invitation for us to see ourselves the same way. We need not “act” but instead “not-act” in order for our being to (re-)find its equilibrium. The caveat is of course that effortlessness is never not happening. To wit, we are ever finding our way to whatever alignment of “normalcy” that will provide the next coefficient of viability.

The genius of the Dao is that there is no “ought” or “should,” no normative, because the normal “reverts to the Dao.” We adapt, adjust, make do, and when we are at our very best, we hardly notice, don’t need to notice because things have been set to rights. This experience is, at least in part, conveyed comparably in Sanskrit traditions referring to the force of nature (guna) called sattva. I have in mind particularly the exposition of the Bhagavadgita.

Literally, sattva means “being-ness.” When matters are understood to be in their most optimal state of affairs, we acknowledge this “sensitivity” (sattva) in ways that contrast with volatility (rajas) and stolidity (tamas). Three guna-theory---sattva, rajas, tamas---is an invitation to be ourselves in every way we are and to notice how difference can make a difference. We are not less aware when threaded in sattva, rather we are cognizant, receptive, mindful, and unlabored in attention. It is our state (*again, sattva=beingness) as much as it is a declaration of our situational whereabouts with respect to body (somatic), mind (thought), and heart (feeling). Thus, sattva is our sensitivity to our being; it is how we are experiencing ourselves because it is who we are.

We don’t arrive at sattva, much less enact the Dao’s effortless action (wu-wei) without some concomitant experience of the armature on which the whole rests, at least at that very moment, in its own greater equipoise or processing reversion. Our experiences are not formed as isolates but in relationships, in structures and coordinating systems whether we recognize them or not. We are beings in the context of being and with other beings, like it or not. And that too will bring reckoning, for the Dao cannot be undone by even best worst efforts. Ease is not so much an effort as it is the being who is our sattva self: your realest you is you not trying at all.

When we feel ease our skillfulness, in Sanskrit called upaya (special thanks here to our Buddhist friends) is our formative state (another meaning of upaya), which means we feel fluency and facility. The vibes will extend, they may even be contagious or exemplary, and next thing you know there is a rapport and correspondence that gives us a chance to feel at home with ourselves and to offer an unrestrained hand, a self no longer defending boundaries but rather expanding and moving with them.

Just how can we do this?

Or, to put it in the terms of the Dao and the Gita’s teachings on sattva-guna:

What does it take to return to this “original” self?

Foremost it is not to desensitize to the world’s tumult and convulsions. Our task is not to inoculate ourselves from the world so much as it is to organize experiences to acclimatize, compose, and coordinate with the self that naturally seeks a more irenic and joyful being. There’s nothing here of mere accommodation or conformity, especially when the world is offering us horror and malignancy. We’re not giving in, giving up, abdicating or abstaining.

Instead, we’re asking about engagement---let’s call that yoga---and rather than ceding our powers of thinking and feeling we’re demanding (without making the demand) for what is ours, the unalienable rights of our shared human endowment. We’ll need both the serenity that is our self’s best offering, our sattvic being, and a streaming awareness to accept all that is on offer, even more so when the world’s offering is vexing and hurtful. To realize the state of affairs is not to resign but to reclaim the truth we experience as incontestable. When we understand how great a blessing it is to be human, we can revel in our privilege to be good. When we pay forward that privilege, we are most human selves.

We saw this in full form on the streets of Minneapolis as people responded to violence, thuggery, and injustice with respect for human life and the dignity of honest conviction, with aplomb and increasing skill (*more upaya here) in how they went about choosing their response.

It is not easy to be courageous, but what we notice is how courageous people make it look so very natural, neither ordinary nor common, but instead innate, so real that it’s not about trying, it’s what happens when we are being ourselves. It’s important not to diminish in any way these acts of courage---because it is extraordinary when we witness people being our best selves. What we see in them is what we know about ourselves: we humans can be our truest selves, and we will do it for ourselves when we see it in each other.

We must not normalize our reaction to the outrageous, despicable actions we are witnessing but instead see the option before us: to do what is right. As the Dao De Ching suggests, this is not an exception but our truest “normalcy.” It is, as the Gita puts it, our sattva, our being-ness the being who does not succumb to unproductive volatility or benumbed indifference. We don’t need to try to be good. We need to be the goodness we feel when we share in shared humanity, when we identify as the experience that converges upon the body, mind, and heart all at once.

To manifest such graceful presence, we won’t require divine commandments or supernatural interventions. We need not moralize or proclaim ethical superiority. Rather, we need only the courage to be ourselves, recognizing that as our greatest asset, who we really are when it feels effortless, skillful, sensitized. (There’s that sattva again.)

We will be no less vulnerable to evil and should be vigilant to the ways others are failing their humanity with heartless unresponse (this week’s prize goes to A.G. Bondi’s performance at the Congressional hearings) and their assaults on decency (the all of them). We can be instead the person whose first-instinct is a mindful-awareness that knowing the difference between right and wrong is, as the sage Meng Ko-tzu put it, one of the shared “human beginnings.”

We may need to recognize, to acknowledge, even to cultivate that “human beginning,” but it is ours to experience and when we do nothing feels more natural, more at home in ourselves. Let us respond from that place inside ourselves, like Alex, Renee, and countless others who have offered courage and goodness in their examples. This is no mere theory about being human: it is the feeling of being human when we dare to be just that.

Ironically, none of this seems easy. But neither is it alien nor do we need to impose upon ourselves to command goodness from us. We’re not sinful beings in need of redemption. We need no motivation by threats of punishment nor promises of reward. Instead, we can reach inside to offer as grace a humanity that comes, as we learn from these sources and from those powerful examples of humanity in Minneapolis and elsewhere, in the gift of a human birth.

Revert to being ourselves. Water flows down, says Dao De Ching. Be water.

Sensitize into the most authentic form of your being. Who you can be is right here, inside you.

Become skillful in the ways we have been made and in how we make ourselves.

Perhaps these old lessons will again prove their value in world that too often wants us to be anything but human. But that is for us to choose.