Excerpted from The Engaged Spiritual Life: A Buddhist Approach to Transforming Ourselves and the World, by Donald Rothberg. Available October 15, 2006.
Reprinted with permission of Beacon Press.
In contemporary Western societies, and particularly American society, there is clearly a very strong social and cultural predisposition to be attached to outcomes. Social theorists from Max Weber to Jür-gen Habermas have identified the ways in which in modern secular societies we often become fixated on getting things done, on being pragmatic, often without paying much attention to the deeper value or meaning of what is getting done.
These theorists speak of this tendency as resulting from an overdevelopment of our instrumental rationality, of a means-end rationality in which we focus on finding the best means to achieve a given end or outcome. Much of our everyday work in society is almost exclusively instrumental, focused on figuring out how to achieve a given outcome: attempting to make more money, helping our corporation increase its sales, researching better ways to kill pests, or developing a plan to invade another country. In itself, this thinking about outcomes is a necessary part of our intelligence, helping us to plan, to study cause-and-effect relationships, and to attempt to achieve intended results. However, when this form of rationality becomes predominant, a number of problems arise.
For instance, we may continually focus on short-term outcomes, attempting to meet our desires of the moment but finding eventually that continually following such desires, although sometimes quite useful for the growth of the economy, does not lead to a life of wisdom. Or we may spend our entire lives preparing for what comes next and how to get there, preoccupied with planning for immediate outcomes but never arriving anywhere because we are always planning, always concerned with the next plan, the next outcome, always in the future. Most of our lives become an attempt to complete our to-do lists, expecting that some day we will somehow succeed and then relax and do what we really want to do. Our lives may consist of continual, ongoing preparation and, as Yeats once noted, planning for something that never happens. We get good grades so we can get into good schools, so that we can get good jobs, so we can have enough money to raise our children and send them to good preparatory schools, so that they can get into good colleges, so that they can find good jobs, so that they can have enough money to raise their children and have a comfortable retirement . . . and die, just like us, having been successful in achieving all the desired outcomes—except, of course, for death.
Or we may, in our work, meetings, and actions, become preoccupied with attaining outcomes at the expense of attention to the process—to how we treat others and to our own and others’ actual experiences at any given moment.
Or we may sometimes be so preoccupied by the means and the immediate outcomes that we never reflect on the ends and whether they are the right ones.
Bearing in mind how these social and cultural forces strongly condition our attachments to outcomes, we can go on to identify the concrete ways in which such attachments manifest themselves in our experience, whether more individually or in our relational and collective lives.
What are some of the particular types of attachment to outcomes? Here, I identify three basic forms: (1) being attached to specific outcomes, (2) trying to control outcomes, and (3) owning an outcome as “mine.”
BECOMING ATTACHED TO SPECIFIC OUTCOMES
When we act, we typically want and expect particular outcomes. I want to arrive at my meeting this evening, rather than have my car or the bus break down. I want my protest to have an effect on other citizens and even on those in power, rather than have them ignore us. I intend my work to help bring about a new environmental law that will succeed, rather than fail.
Of course, our lives are full of experiences in which we see that our intended outcomes, small and large, don’t happen, or they don’t happen the way we want them to happen, or unwanted outcomes do happen. In our training in committed action with non-attachment to outcome, we begin by noticing our reactions in relation to these kinds of situations.
The teaching of the Eight Worldly Winds suggests how we get attached to outcomes. As we saw in chapter six, attachment for the Buddha is a compulsive and often unconscious state in which we grasp on to (or push away) a person, an object, an experience, or a view, somehow believing that doing so will bring us long-term happiness. How do we practice with the Eight Winds? First, we need to be as mindful of their presence as possible, particularly when they appear with some force. Second, when one of the winds appears, we can explore its nature, textures, and where it leads. What is the experience of loss like? What occurs when I am praised or when others hold me in disrepute? Third, we can examine those situations in which we experience suffering because of the winds or find ourselves acting somewhat unethically to ensure an outcome. How do I sulk for hours, disappointed in not having accomplished a particular task?
How do I become attached to the meeting’s ending with this or that result or that successful vote? How do I become depressed when my local legislature doesn’t act the way I wanted them to, despite my having lobbied them for a year?
TRYING TO CONTROL OUTCOMES
Our attachment to a particular outcome typically leads us to attempt to control situations, other people, and ourselves. We may find ourselves becoming manipulative and insensitive to others, maneuvering to obtain what we want. We may, when we look carefully, see that we have imagined ourselves, in our work as activists or helpers, as all-powerful controllers.
Justine Dawson speaks of how, in her work at a home for women and children in transition, she has had to examine, through mindfulness and reflection, such a self-centered tendency to find security in control, especially in difficult situations:
Ironically, direct service work can sometimes become very egocentric; it can center on me as the responsible one, the one who responds. I can believe, “I’ve always got to do everything. I’ve always got to do this or that. I, I, I!” I’ve learned to ask myself a lot of questions.
Sometimes, it’s helpful to ask, “What is happening right now?” I’ll walk into a room to find a total circus—the kids are going crazy. I’ll say to myself, “Oh, here’s the circus.” Then I try to be aware of my own tendencies, like “I have this great need to change and control the situation.” I often go through a kind of internal debate: “Well, on the one hand, I’m legally responsible for these kids. And there is a standard in the household that we want to maintain. On the other hand, it’s just a circus.”
I ask myself: “What is triggering me in this situation? What is it bringing up personally? How do I need to work with the ‘internal’ material that is coming up in order to respond more appropriately to the ‘external’ situation?”
“OWNING” PARTICULAR OUTCOMES
The Eight Winds, particularly those of praise and blame and fame and disrepute, remind us of a further complication: identifying a particular outcome, consciously or unconsciously, with our self-images and identities. Of course, such a link goes back to very early conditioning in the family context, in which a child’s given behavior is typically defined as good or bad and often made the basis of the child’s very “goodness” or “badness.” Over time, such conditioning connects deep aspects of our identities with praise and blame (and more broadly fame and disrepute), and we come to internalize the standards of praise, so that external praise and blame may scarcely be needed.
Hence, to examine closely attachment to outcome is for most of us also to carry out a deep and penetrating investigation into the very contours of our constructed selves and self-images, including the areas where we are confused and wounded. Such practice over time has the potential to deconstruct such identities and images, freeing our action from the pressures, constraints, and distortions that arise when they implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) carry the objective of confirming and sustaining our identities and images.
We can notice such ownership of actions in various ways. We may notice thoughts in which we congratulate ourselves, or how we subtly shift the conversation so as to receive praise or confirmation. We may exaggerate or inflate our relationship to a given outcome, much as the beaver does in telling the muskrat by the Hoover Dam: “It’s not that I built it. They just picked up one of my ideas.”
When we do this in the context of transformational work, whether that of individual spiritual practice or social change, the contradictions can be particularly poignant. One of the most difficult issues in any community or organization is how credit and ownership of actions, particularly successes, are given, both from inside and outside. In our current historical setting, with its strong tendencies to identify charismatic leaders and stars, in which, we might say, the prevailing ideology is that ownership of outcomes is desirable, some individuals often receive public credit in ways that can be in significant tension with attempts to expand leadership, question prevailing models of power, and empower communities and individuals.
SHYING AWAY FROM COMMITTED ACTION
Attachments to outcomes often register in a very obvious way in our psyches, notably as suffering when our preferred outcomes don’t occur! The complementary imbalance, of a lack of committed action expressing our deeper intentions, is often harder to discern and more subtle in its manifestations. Yet we also need to bring to light the various ways in which this imbalance appears in our lives.
LOSING SIGHT OF OUR DEEPER INTENTIONS
In a society so structured by attachment to immediate outcomes, it is easy, as we saw, to forget more fundamental intentions and aspirations, especially as we move into the adult world of jobs, family, and planning for retirement. In other words, we may be quite active and busy while not expressing our deeper commitments. We may even speak of this process as a movement to “maturity,” understood as the outgrowing of one’s youthful and surely naive idealism.
When I was teaching at Kenyon College in the late 1980s, I would often ask soon-to-graduate seniors whether they would accept a very modest, basic middle-class salary if they could do the kind of work that they most wanted to do. Most, but not all, said that they would happily choose such an option (a minority were more interested in making a lot of money). Then I asked, “How many of you actually have that option?” Almost no one raised a hand; they all felt as if their options were severely constrained, and that they could not do work that matched their deeper intentions. No doubt within a few years, many or most forgot those original intentions, which moved beneath the surface of consciousness, often only to appear, if at all, in a midlife crisis (or during other types of crisis) or even later in life, perhaps at the time of retirement.
Even when we are more consciously attuned to our deeper intentions, it still remains a great challenge to keep them alive in the midst of the details, deadlines, pressures, busyness, and sometimes tedium of daily life. This is why it is so crucial to find activities—such as a daily spiritual practice, periods of reflection, community gatherings and rituals, travel, and periodic retreats—that cut through the dulling of consciousness that can occur amid the repetitions of daily life, to reinspire us, to renew our visions and intentions.
EXERCISES
IDENTIFYING AND WORKING WITH YOUR ATTACHMENTS TO OUTCOMES
What are the main ways in which you get attached to outcomes? Reflect in particular on how you are influenced by the Eight Worldly Winds. In what parts of your life (for example, your personal life, your spiritual practice, your relationships, your work, or your social change work) are the attachments to outcomes easiest to notice?
Reflect especially on moments of suffering in these domains, for usually such suffering can be traced to attachments to outcomes.
Reflect also on how you attempt to control outcomes, or how you take credit for outcomes. Devote a week to examining attachment to outcomes in a specific part of your life. Take notes and produce an inventory of your various attachments. Explore what
it might mean to “let go” in some of these areas.
COMMITTED ACTION: WHAT MAKES IT DIFFICULT? WHAT MAKES IT POSSIBLE?
Reflect on the ways in which you have difficulty acting fully, in a committed way. What makes such committed action difficult for you? To what extent are you acting out of your deeper intentions? To what extent are you doing too many things? What qualities of mind and heart (perhaps despair, confusion, self-judgment, or distraction) undermine your ability to act fully?
Think of when you have acted most fully, with the most commitment.
What was such action like? What were some of the inner and outer conditions that made such action possible?