Jonah, Matsyendra, Jivana Heyman, and Northrop Frye: Keynote Address to the Accessible Yoga Conference, Toronto, 2018
July 6, 2018
A Disorganized Attachment Legacy at Shambhala: Brief Notes on Two Letters and a 1993 Interview with Pema Chödrön
July 11, 2018“But the Shambhala TEACHINGS are precious. They changed our lives. We CAN’T let them go. We HAVE to separate them from the organization and its leadership.”
This is the active-ingredient argument you may be hearing from some of your fellow community members. It’s based on the premise that beneath all of the human imperfections and “conventional realities” of Shambhala International, there was something essentially good and true communicated by Trungpa and his followers, and that that essence was what changed lives.
A further premise is that that essence can and should be isolated and mobilized.
Those who talk about the “essence” of the teachings are those who are still in one way or another within the learning community or high-demand group. They might believe that the essential teachings were universally clear; they could test this belief by asking those who left the group what they believed the teachings were.
They would be also be the ones who would be least likely to consider the placebo effect of the teaching content.
If the active-ingredient argument were true, there wouldn’t be a wide range of responses to Trungpa’s writings and the “Shambhala teachings”. I appreciated parts of Spiritual Materialism, for instance, but none of the rest of it sounded right to me. And I had full-on nausea response when I walked into Karme Choling in Vermont in about 1994 or so. I can’t explain why I didn’t have the same response to the high-demand groups I did actually join, except that when I crossed those thresholds, I was particularly vulnerable.
It’s useful to investigate the possibility of false attribution. If the Shambhala teachings seemed to work for you, fine. But ask yourself: what else was involved? Did you meet new people and form new bonds over shared aspirations? Did you change self-regulation patterns, diet, sleep?
In the Ashtanga world, people grappling with Jois’ abuse will sometimes say “but the practices are medicine”, even though they know they’ve been injured or accumulated repetitive stress through the postures.
What I believe they’re really saying is “I love this place and these people with whom I do this refined activity that gives me relief from the conventional world and relationships.”
Further, they may be saying: “I really love the things that weren’t bad.”
Can you really say that there were core Shambhala ideas or visions that were separable from the relationships that communicated them? Was there a single part of Shambhala ideology that came to you as it seemed to come to Trungpa — spontaneously, from no one else, as if in a dream? Did you believe that because it occurred spontaneously to him, it had its own reality from beyond him, and Shambhala should exist for you in the same way?
The irony of false attribution combined with essentialism is that when mobilized in an attempt to preserve neo-Buddhist teachings in the midst of an abuse crisis, basic Buddhist philosophical principles are ignored. As far as I understand the Middle-Way metaphysics that most Tibetan sources try to teach, there is no such thing as an essential object, message or teaching. There’s just a series of changing relationships within which, with great difficulty, you (who also have no findable unchanging essence) can try to orient yourself ethically and with empathy.
I believe what people are really saying when they say “But the Shambhala TEACHINGS are precious” is:
“The experiences I had with those people at that time were so compelling, so charged, so complex — they inspire me, through my imperfect memory, to this day. I really don’t want to let them go.”
There’s absolutely no shame in that.