Inmates Running the Asylum (second of three on power – see below)

That’s how it can seem if the horizontal gets carried away.

Rather than traditional power with its hierarchical, vertical orientation, the second form of power, modern power, is community-based and horizontal – but that’s good, right?

Well, it is certainly a hard-won development and movement from the feudal form of authoritarianism, but modern power comes with a couple major negatives when applied to Zen that can eat away at the teacher-student relationship and the organization as well.

First, group decision making is usually not very creative. Instead, the tendency is to settle with the safest route that everybody can agree on. Or the power of the crowd takes over and we’re all very stupid … history is full of those examples. If I recall my Psych 101 at the University of Minnesota in 1975, studies on group effectiveness support what I’m saying here.

So if you’re looking for creativity and wisdom in a teacher-student relationship, when a community hijacks the organization, just move on. If you stay, I fear that you will waste your life.

When modern power is the way people predominantly relate, the sangha, instead of the teacher, “controls” the Zen group. Want to change the type of candle on the altar, bring it to committee. Want to be a more welcoming group, bring it to committee. Want to buy a building, bring it to committee.

A few years ago I read the long-range planning document from one large Zen group. They had 60 residents and 65 active committees. The average resident served on more than three committees (or something like that).

Obviously it can be a big pain in the butt, a misdirection of energy from zazen, work, and study (the three traditional activities of a Soto priest). This use of time pisses away the focus of the burning Way Seeking Mind. Too much talk dissipates energy. The atmosphere just gets “icky” and the teacher-student relationship cannot thrive.

“Oh, its all practice,” you might say. Well, yeah that’s what the crowd wants you to believe, but if you simply lower the sacred to the level of the mundane, you might as well stay home and watch “The Office” and call that zazen. The mundane has to be raised to the level of the sacred or it isn’t practice-enlightenment and without some real zafu-breaking zazen, the current “everything is beautiful talk” is just talk.

Note: The higher/lower thing is whacked in this metaphor but I’ll leave it for now. There’s a chapter in Keep Me in Your Heart Awhile that deals with this too….

Another Note: If you think I’m advocating for a return to feudalism, read the previous post.

The second point is harder to make in any way that I think you’ll want to read. But here goes….

Modern power uses quite a pernicious tool to establish social control, “a system of normalizing judgments exercised by people in the evaluation of their own and each others’ lives.” Modern power instills in people “the aspiration to achieve a grant of normative worth” from group belonging through conformity with social judgments. Once “inside” the inner circle, the group member gets to be more active in articulating and policing conformity. People with special knowledge about normative judgment systems (psychologists, for example) are given special power in the group.

Group pressure is applied for the “deviant” person (sometimes the most brilliant, innovative, etc.) to agree with the meaning of their experience ascribed by the group-think theory. People actively participate within the fashioning of their own and each others’ lives according to the constructed norms of contemporary liberal, psychologically-correct culture. The community recruits people into the surveillance and the policing – it is called “gossip” or “precept practice” or “third-party talk” (you know, the really interesting stuff) and can reinforce “group think.”

The late 19^th and 20^th Centuries ushered in the age of over-arching and sophisticated theories that explain human behavior and provide a norm and a criterion for pathology from Marx, Freud, Jung, etc., through Stephen Covey and lots of other best-selling authors. The list is long and we seem very hungry for some over-arching theory to explain groundlessness away so … we can get back to “The Office” …?

Modern power uses these over-arching theories to explain and diagnose others and in so doing squeezes out individually created meaning, the only authentic, fully alive version available on this little blue-dumpling planet, in my opinion.

This is one of the huge weaknesses of Japanese-style Zen – realizing non-self (freedom) is too often confused with conformity to group ego. I’ve seen this close up and impersonal during my hard travellin’. To imitate it here is regression.

On the other hand, the group practice can be real rough on our cowboy egos, so it also has great virtues. However if you yourself aren’t really good at holding a poisonous snake, you better have a teacher who is. And then watch your back and learn real quick how to hold the snake or you might get bitten in the process anyway (anti-hyperbole note: most do recover).

The point is that although modern power has virtues, it also has debilitating weaknesses.

When the true dharma is up for majority vote or group consensus, run for the door, friend.

Summary of the first two posts on this theme: both feudal power and modern power have such serious limitations, you’ve got to wonder if it is really a very good idea to teach in a group bigger than what can meet in my basement (might be my problem in days to come) or to get involved with a teacher and a community (maybe your problem now).

What’s a person to do?

I’ll try to respond to that in my next post ….