Walking the Wall

I read a fabulous article in the July issue of Shambhala Sun by Jack Kornfield entitled “Discovering Our Nobility: A Psychology of Original Goodness” which is actually the first chapter of his book The Wise Heart: A Guide to the Universal Teachings of Buddhist Psychology. This idea of original goodness is a powerful issue for me, contrasting as it does to the ideology of original sin and innate sinfulness of humanity in my religious upbringing. I have to say that for me, for my personality type, this aspect of religion had the most devastating effects–the deep seated belief of being “desperately wicked” buried deep into the way I viewed myself. “The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked, who can know it?” is a verse that played in the back of my head all the time and still pops into mind at odd times. Kornfield asserts that the first principle of Buddhist psychology is to “see the inner nobility and beauty of all human beings.” He writes about a Jungian analyst, Robert Johnson, who says that people tend to resist acknowledging their noble aspects harder than they hide their dark sides, “It is more disrupting to find that you have a profound nobility of character than to find out you are a bum” (42). Why? Because if “we fully acknowledged our dignity…it could ask something huge of us”. This made me think of the poem Shine that I have written about before, specifically the beginning lines:

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate,
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light - not our darkness - that most frightens us.

Kornfield is not only a Buddhist meditation teacher who was trained as a Buddhist monk in Thailand, Burma, and India–he also has a Ph.D. in clinical psychology and was raised in very abusive circumstances. He doesn’t ignore that sorrow of people or suggest people be naive about the capacity for instability and violence in people–he says we are forced on a daily basis to recognize and acknowledge the suffering in human life (43). What he is saying is simply that if we start from a basic understanding of the innate nobility of a person–it is a better place to start than with their evilness. He quotes Nelson Mandela as saying, “It never hurts to think too highly of a person; often they become ennobled and act better because of it.”

Somehow we need to find our own way to see innate nobility (or inner illumination) in other people. He suggests three ways, one is to imagine the person as a small child, still innocent; or to visualize the person on their deathbed, vulnerable with no place left to hide; or see him/her no as a “fellow wayfarer struggling with his burdens, wanting happiness and dignity. Beneath the fears and needs, the aggression and pain, whoever we encounter is a being who, like us, has the tremendous potential for understanding and compassion, whose goodness is there to be touched” (14). I personally tend towards the first and think of that person as a child–it brings out my motherly instincts and I wonder what it was that took that innocence of a child and twisted it to the pain that is manifesting today. He points to the spirit of children and how “they remind us that we are born with this shining spirit”.

He also points to a psychologist named Viktor Frankl who was the only member of his family to survive Nazi camps and yet, despite this horrific suffering, he found healing. Frankl wrote:

We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms–to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way. (44)

I just feel like retyping the whole article, it was so good. A good friend of mine gave me a gift card to the bookstore for my graduation so on the way to work tonight, I picked up the whole book and am looking forward to reading it all.