These are the times that try men's souls (and women's, and children's, and pets', and plants', and those of just about every other sentient form of life on the planet), and we would do well, in the face of global rage and tyranny ascendant, to examine how to cope with whatever the hell it is that's going on.
Let's start with a simple premise, one with which you may or may not agree. It is a spiritual axiom that there are but two true emotions: love and--no, not hate, but rather, fear.
There are only love and fear.
Fear engenders so-called "negative" characteristics: intolerance, impatience, cruelty, unfair judgment, criticism, and so on. It also generates troubling emotions: rage, despair, disgust, hatred. From love, on the other hand, arise such life-affirming characteristics as kindness, comity, cooperation, compassion, and empathy, and such uplifting emotions as joy, a sense of well-being, and so on.
For most of us, fear arises quickly, but love--practicing love, engaging in loving action--requires cultivation.
Fear, of course, is a built-in human (and animal) survival mechanism. If we hadn't had a natural fear of tigers in the days when we lived in caves, we'd all have been eaten, and the human race would have died out. In the same way, if I'm crossing the street and see a truck bearing down on me, fear will cause me to flee. If I get out of the way in time, I'll go on living. Indeed, it is not just a fearful act, but also a loving one, to jump out of the way of the truck: if I go on living, the people who love and depend on me will still have me in their lives, and the truck driver won't live with a human life on his/her conscience, never mind suffering the consequences of human laws that might put him/her behind bars, away from loved ones, for years.
It is said that fear contracts, while love expands. Fear results in tribalism, a desire to see ourselves and our beliefs mirrored in those around us, and a suspicion of those who are unlike us. Love, on the other hand, inspires in us the capacity to see beyond the tribal perimeter, to become curious even about those things which challenge our valued perceptions and cherished beliefs. To cultivate genuine curiosity is a loving act: feeling interest in things and people beyond our personal world is the beginning point of human sophistication, of humanism itself. Seeing past the tribe, coming to see the entire human race as one's broad-based family--that's seeing with the eyes of love.
There is a powerful rage arising across the globe at the moment. It is manifesting in populist and nativist political movements: Donald Trump's rise to power in America (and with it, the rise of the nationalist right), the Brexit vote in England, right-wing National Front party president Marine LePen's presence in France, the May election of right-wing Phillipine President Rodrigo Duterte, and the ongoing attempts of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to systematically silence his country's remaining free press. Behind rage there is always fear; the fears driving this Zeitgeist shift have to do with elements both pragmatic (economic) and existential (refugee crises, the looming effects of climate change). We as a race are aware, even if we don't consciously admit it, that, just as democracy in America is fragile and subject to decay, so our days on the planet may be numbered, the very existence of the human race itself in doubt.
This is a hell of a thing to contemplate. The greatest fear most of us experience is that of our own mortality. The fact of one day perishing is more than most of us can bear. As biological organisms, we are hard-wired to live, so to think about one day not living goes against our deepest instincts. It is arguable that most of the human race's greatest achievements arise from a life-affirming reaction against mortality: first food and shelter, then clothing for warmth, then the safety of the tribe, then better food and prettier shelter and nicer clothes, and pretty soon you have, for example, Trump Tower, alas.
The second greatest fear, for many of us, is of physical pain; the third, the death and/or pain of those we love and/or depend on. All three of these fears are so powerful, especially if left unexamined in our lives, that they can unconsciously drive everything we do, from flipping off the guy trying to edge into our lane to smashing the laptop which boots up wrong.
The first step to overcoming fear, then, is to look at the deepest ones we harbor--death, pain, losing loved ones or seeing them in agony--and accept that they are likely one day to occur. That's a fact of life. We will die. We will hurt. Those we love will hurt and die.
But acceptance doesn't mean approval or acquiescence; it just means seeing things as they are, without mental rationalizations, and accepting the truth of them. Then we can begin to shift ourselves and/or our circumstances to better fit life's unfolding reality, rather than hiding from it or trying to hammer it into some image we have of how it should be.
The next step is to have compassion for ourselves and our foibles--including our fears. Practicing compassion doesn't mean condoning aberrant acts; it means practicing love in the face of those acts. If we can love ourselves even when we do something wrong, we're on the road to loving others when they cross lines. Enlightened spiritual masters feel the same compassion for a murderer or a rapist that they do for someone who uses a handicapped-parking placard when they're not really handicapped. All aberrant acts arise from fear, and the enlightened soul feels deep compassion for anyone living in fear's dark cave.
After that, we begin to cultivate love for ourselves, which presently becomes love for others--including those beyond our immediate "tribe" (family, friendship circle, social media "friends" and followers, etc.). I would suggest that love is a constant, like air; like and dislike, on the other hand, are inconstant, like weather. It is in confusing love with like/dislike that we are perhaps most deluded. We'll say, "Oh, I love Frank; he's really funny," and then turn around and say, "I hate Mike; what an asshole." That second statement is a delusion; we don't "hate" Mike, but, rather, we fear him. Remember? There's only love and fear; fear generates hate, not vice versa. Anyway, if we don't fear Mike, but rather feel disturbed by him, it means we dislike him, not that we hate him.
To begin to distinguish between love and like/dislike, it's useful to examine the ways in which we think. The mind is a wonderful tool, but it is prone to delusion. We think we know more than we do, or we think that something we know is incontrovertibly true when it turns out, later, to be proved entirely false. One useful way to examine our thinking is in the practice of meditation. In sitting (or walking) quietly, and attending to the chatter of the mind, we begin to see the pattern of our thoughts. We do this not as actors compelled by thoughts, but as observers of them. If there is an "I" who can observe "my" thoughts, then "I" must not be my thoughts. Once that distinction becomes clear, we begin to practice pausing when heightened thoughts cross our minds, really examining whether the thoughts are true, and then proceeding accordingly.
Like and dislike are narratives of the mind, whereas love is a constant of what, for want of better term, we can call the heart. The mind confuses like and dislike for love; the heart, on the other hand, knows. Think of some being, human or animal, that you really love. You notice the feeling in your body, the smile on your face? Now, let me ask you: do you always like that being? We love our pets, but we may not like them when they scratch the furniture or poop in the salad. We love our parents, but we may not always like how they act or what they say. Same with our kids, partners, friends, colleagues. Trouble arises when, in a moment of dislike, we confuse it for hate. We discover a new way of relating to others when we cultivate the idea that we always love them, but occasionally may not like something they say or do.
This same paradigm can be applied to the idea of hope. What if, rather than indulging in the idea of hopelessness, we instead accept hope, like love, as the constant, and make optimism and pessimism the variables? When things look darkest, in our own lives and/or across the land, we tend to feel "hopeless." But what if, instead, we tried to cultivate hope as ever-present, and acknowledged instead that we felt momentarily pessimistic? What if, in other times--when we get a promotion, a good night's sleep, a filling meal, a kind word from a friend--we agreed that we feel optimistic? Optimism and pessimism are two sides of the same coin, and the coin is marked "delusion"; they are tricks of the mind. The constant is hope, and any constant, as we've seen, has to be cultivated--which means made conscious, and then practiced.
In the same way, a sort of grounded realism, resistant to whipsawing mental narratives or emotional states, can be cultivated as a psychologically healthy approach to life. Cynicism and idealism come and go; similar to like/dislike and optimism/pessimism, they are tricks of the mind, weather states that arise and pass away. It is easy to be cynical, to give up hope in humanity and in life; but a cynic is just a disappointed idealist, and idealism, although a fine motivating factor, is a delusion if it denies reality. Better, in the end, to develop a taste for grounded realism, based on factual evidence and reasonable deduction.
The next time you feel cynical about the state of the nation, remember love. The next time you fear the outcome of an election, remember love. The next time you don't like someone, remember love. The next time you feel pessimistic about the human race, remember love. Love is as hard-wired into us as fear is, but it takes some work to feel and to find and to believe in and to practice it. But better to believe in love, and to search for it, than give in to despair, don't you think?
Just ask the guy lurking high up in Trump Tower, the guy whose campaign for the highest office in the land spread fear like wildfire. It got him what he seemed to want; he won. But did he really win?
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