Won Buddhism of Manhattan

By Won Jung Shim-Kimball Jones

The theme of maintaining balance and equilibrium in one's life is central to the teachings of Won Buddhism. This is a theme that has intrigued me all of my life -- and I must say that it was moving to me when I was given the Dharma name Won Jung Shim -- because what that means is "One equilibrium, or balance, mine." I'm not quite sure why I am so drawn to this theme -- but I can't escape it, and perhaps that is part of my personal kharma.

As a psychotherapist, I have always been drawn to the writings and thoughts of C.G. Jung, because for Jung the search for balance and equilibrium is the one dynamic that most drives both the individual psyche and what he called the collective psyche or Collective Unconscious.

Jung was convinced that the one thing that could get us into the most trouble, both in terms of neurotic patterns of thought and behavior that cripple us psychologically and in terms of out-ward behavior that can make us behave destructively and irresponsibly toward others is to be blindly one-sided, too narrowly focused in our thoughts and actions.

When I put too much energy into trying to project myself in a particular narrowly defined way, there will be rumblings within my unconscious psyche trying to make me aware of all the other ways of being that I am blocking from my consciousness. For example, if the most important thing to me is to appear happy all the time and to be wellliked for my jovial persona, there is going to be within me, what Jung called the shadow side of the psyche, strong feelings of unhappiness and discontent representing the opposite of what I am trying so hard consciously to be. And these shadow qualities are likely to catch up with me at moments when I am vulnerable for example when I'm tired, sick, under stress, or whatever. What we sweep under the rug has a way of coming back through the window or jumping out of the cupboard at moments when we least expect it. When this happens we feel that it is a bad thing -- because we obviously don't welcome it -- not realizing that our own internal psyche is simply trying to make us more whole, more human, more real -- which Jung would suggest is the ultimate goal of human life and the healthiest state that can be achieved.

This is a difficult and troubling concept, because we can't help wanting to be happy, well-liked, responsible and caring people. These are normal and healthy objectives. There's nothing wrong, or certainly unhealthy, about striving for worthy goals in our lives. It becomes a problem only at the point when we fall under the illusion that we are those things we are striving for and that anything contrary to that vision is not part of who we are.

When that happens we then project the shadow parts of our being, those things we don't want to think we could be, onto other people – and that's when we get into trouble. We are usually not aware of an insidious and universal process by which we constantly search for scapegoats onto whom we can project all the unseemly qualities that we do not accept within ourselves. Jung felt, and I agree, that this is the single greatest source of conflict in the world -- and the cause of most of the greatest man-made tragedies. No society is free of this dynamic.

In recent history, Nazi Germany probably manifested the strongest example of this dynamic with the holocaust, which was a result of Aryan Germans projecting their collective shadow onto the Jews whom the Nazis labeled as the enemy, the ones whose annihilation would free the world of evil. What a crazy thought! The greater evil of course lay in the Nazis and not in the Jews. We'd like to think that WE could never engage in any such atrocious evil. You and I. Our country. Yet if we look honestly at history, we see that we've played out our own versions of this. First it was the Native Americans who we wanted to annihilate, then it was the black slaves who dared to want equal citizenship. No country, no race, no individual is totally free of this dynamic. It is a universal process in which we all participate.

To the extent that we fail to acknowledge our own weaknesses we will always be looking for an enemy whom we can scapegoat. In the cold war period we saw this in the polarization between East and West. To us the Communists were the devil incarnate, and to them the greedy Western Capitalists were. Once the Berlin wall came down, it was as if new enemies had to emerge, new polarities in which this awful drama of shadow projection could get played out: so it became Arab terrorists vs. Western Imperialists – each seeing the other as the source of evil.

On a more local level we see this same dynamic played out in all kinds of ways: Shiites vs Sunnis, Zionists vs Palestinians, Hutus vs Tootsies, Catholics vs Protestants in Northern Ireland, red states vs. blue states, pro-life advocates vs pro choice advocates, creationists vs Darwinians.... I could go on and on, but I think you get the point. This becomes very complicated because not every act, not every cause, not every movement is of equal ethical value. We do have to take stands both individually and collectively to oppose violence, evil and destruction where we see them occurring. We cannot be passive and morally neutral.

But this is a very tricky matter. It may be clear to us, for example, that terrorism is a bad thing -- something we need to work to eradicate. I don't think any of us would disagree with that. But how should we go about doing that? That's where it gets tricky. It's too easy to say "Arabs are terrorists, and if we could just rid the world of Arabs, things would be fine!" That's pretty much the position that the Crusaders took against the whole Muslim world 500 years ago -- and we all know how that ended.

A less drastic, but equally shadow-driven position would be "Let's not get rid of all Arabs, let's just get rid of all the terrorists. If we could kill all of them, then the world would be safe for Democracy."

There are many dangers in this kind of thinking as well. It is based on the assumption that if you rid the world of any particular group you will rid the world of evil. And that simply isn't true. The potential for evil exists within all of us. Killing our enemies will not rid the world of evil. If anything, it will increase the repressed evil or shadow that exists within us, in our own souls. And for all the killing we will become dehumanized.

When you look at the largest possible picture, I agree with Jung that the greatest source of evil in the world does not lie in any one group, or any one ideology, it lies in polarization itself. The beginning of healing between opposing groups is the moment when you or I can say, "I too could be a Nazi, I could be a Communist, I could even be a Terrorist -- there lies within me the potential to be whatever I see as being the greatest source of evil and conflict in the world."

This is not an easy or pleasant thing to admit. But once one can grasp that reality and come to terms with it, one is then likely to say, "Maybe I can actually sit down and talk to some of these people whom I see as being so radically evil. Maybe we can begin to understand each other through dialogue and through studying the social, economic, religious and historical underpinnings of our differing ideologies. Maybe I don't need to destroy these people. Maybe we are more alike than I had thought."

Here is where I think the Buddhist message is so very important. I have to start with me. I need to look into my own soul and learn to balance the light and darkness within myself before I can begin to have perspective on where the good or bad, the dark or light, lies outside myself.

That's perhaps the most difficult journey of all. I do not want to think there is anything other than light and love within me. But I know better. I know how angry I can get when the wrong buttons are pushed. I also know how easy it is to feel self-righteous vis-àvis those who are driven by polarity -- for example, in my own case, when I find myself feeling angry toward the fundamentalist Christian right in this country. Too often I find myself thinking, "If we could just silence all those radical Christians maybe we could get this country back on the right track."

Or "It's all those people who polarize things, who don't understand the importance of balance, who are the problem. If we could just get Sacha Baron Cohen to go interview them and humiliate them..." But wait a minute, what am I saying? You see how insidious this is!

Again, this is tricky, because there are more and less enlightened ideologies in this world, more and less destructive or constructive social and political movements. But every time we put any one group into one narrowly defined category or another, we are falling into great danger, because that often causes us to fall into the trap of one upmanship: "I've got the right perspective, you've got the wrong one, and if I could just convince you that I'm right and you're wrong, then things would be better..." That very moment, that very thought, is the beginning of the loss of enlightenment.

We see so much polarization in the world today, so much in our own country. We need to find balance. We need to find the common ground and common humanity that binds all of us together. I think this is perhaps the greatest and most significant challenge that we face today.

In our own meditations, our own individual spiritual journeys, we need to find the wisdom, the good will andthe endurance to look into the depths of ourselves and our motivations with the greatest ofself-honesty, seeking the very core of our own human nature in all of its complexity so that we can find and embracethat which binds us together with all of humanity - Arabs, Jews, Democrats, Republicans, -- everyone. As Harry Stack Sullivan, a great psychoanalyst once said so simply and yet so profoundly: "We are all more human than otherwise." It is my hope and prayer that we can commit ourselves to find and affirm the essence of that humanity.

August, 2006