Contemplative activism? My journey.
By Carmen Zurl
“ thinking in other way, thinking otherwise “
Some years ago now I met a group of people disillusioned with the effectiveness of activism as a vehicle for bringing about global change in the field of social and environmental justice. Most of us had attended the October 19 London XR revolution to a varying degree and roles from drop-ins organizers, philosophers and arrestables alike. We gathered in the months to follow for some R&R at a retreat center in Norfolk to swap notes and question what more or else could be done to bring about noticeable change to the social and environmental crisis. Given the state of the environment (we recited the earth science statistics) and the state of the community among humans (we cited economic and social limits) we are bound to deal with the anguish of our own adaptation to living with the realization that ‘no matter what we do now greater human suffering cannot be averted’ which is directly connected to rapid loss of biodiversity leading to significant climate change effects and hence further degradation of already stressed social and economic systems. Many of us had come from a variety of Buddhist training bringing gifts from far away lands such as Japan, India, Thailand, Vietnam..
We decided to meet in the early 2020 at another retreat in Manchester but the pandemic locked us into our homes where we began to sit together every Sunday from 7-9 carrying on the conversation that over time began to formalize into a ‘practice’. We were a pretty global north-west bunch, mainly from the UK, EU and the US. Occasionally, a new person popped by to see us sit together. It was the time where people began to speak of the great change all around us greatly fuelled by the virus and the US elections. But the overall outlook around the planet became to collaborate remotely on a variety of innovative apps and sit put for months on no end. We held onto our wounded activist selves together during the entire year in peaceful protest against the world and all of our expectations. Nobody said what was going to happen next, why we were doing what we were doing every Sunday nor how and when these gatherings would come to an end. And so began this small river of practice, a wholly new experience of a wisdom council circle we called Contemplative Activism. Why? Ask Liam. I hate this name.
Contemplative(s)
I’m still quite unsure as to what we do or anyone else for that matter exactly that warrants the term ‘contemplative’. I would say we have started a weird discursive practice of sitting together with a question we use as a string to unpack big suitcases of stuff we brought to the meetup. I would like to call this practice real thinking with the whole body, feeling, listening, processing, breathing, watching the presence of ourselves and each other in the room. Each gathering, always held on Sunday afternoon, would start by a 40 min silent sitting of enthusiasts before opening up to the wider group which (started off being around 12-16 people then) dwindled down to a solid core of 7 Contemplative Activists. (Ha. What the hell is this nomenclature? This titling, labeling, being called something or someone as in a doctor, lawyer or an Indian chief. I’m allergic to this grammatical formation: contemplative activists - And yet I stay by.) Watching people wondering through the fog of their assumptions. Feeling uncomfortable. Watching humans being human. Being lost. Getting lost. Not coping with repetitions of things said and heard elsewhere, longing for radical disturbance of my habitual ways of thinking and processing the world to take over. I was mostly using these Sundays as an opportunity to feel my disillusionment with our ‘civilisation’, our conditioning, appreciating the rattling cages of the English language that bind us and the way in which people around me lose control over what they actually want to say. Just like me.
After the third gong, we take a spacious ‘sharing’ space that for the 7 of us lasts about an hour. Here anything can happen - events of the week past get mangled with provocative invitations to articulate a probing question most of us resonate with. Somewhere a theme emerges and we climb it like a raft in the sea of our entangled impressions of the shared field of enquiry allowing it to float us through to a question to contemplate. I have no idea how this practice actually came about or what it means to contemplate the question our way but I never managed to think any of our questions through with any degree of rigor that befits questions such as life, death, love, community, enlightenment, language, meaning, words. The experience of ‘contemplation’(whatever that may mean to others) is for me a curious well of magic connection through word stringing into a necklace of triggers, thoughts, feelings that come from all directions in our sessions. I love the experience of quietness in which I hear for the first time someone, sometimes even myself, speak, say something
We begin slowly to talk, to dissect, to examine with curiosity what notions carry with them that may be useful to carry on with employing for the good of the world, future, love, togetherness, death, life, change etc. After a while we began referring to these dialogues to be ‘contemplative’. To date I’m quite unsure what this means to others, but for me it is a form of thinking that involves the whole body.
We step back together, use words with care, lightly, with curiosity meeting their utterance with openness no matter which direction they come from. Between us a generous, kind, loving, support colors the evening. People smoke, drink, sit, lye about turning up in all sorts of states sometimes high, sometimes sad, ecstatic and we tell it all as is there and then and from the heart of things. We are definitely a badass Buddhist Sangha. We could be labeled very Zen. Very 21st century rebel lot slightly ragged, super free and very, very welcoming. Hardly sweet or agreeable. I remember cut throat arguments on the importance of semiology, deconstruction, teleological reasoning, paradigm shifting, communism, crypto and technology that impassioned us with great disturbance that lingered over the entire week. I remember waking up in the night and sitting with stuff people had said, emailing them in the morning and holding this disturbance with immense interest and attachment to its brilliance. I remember being touched, being torn, being folded over by the wisdom and the lives of our tiny bad sangha.
I sit in this contemplative space – I truly hate the word contemplative because it conjures up practices of a variety of religious behaviors but have no better. Google gives a possible meaning as ‘expressing or involving prolonged thought’ so I persevere with it. Whatever ‘prolonged thought’ might actually look like! In Croatian I make a difference between raz-misliti i misliti. There are clear forms of of types of thinking in everyday language: one that beholds the subject without outcome as in the making of judgment or opinion (could be thought of as ‘prolonged’); and the other raz-misliti takes place in the middle of an action, project or endeavor as in one needs to razmisliti how to make a chair (unprolongued problem solving thinking) whereas ‘misliti’ involves deciding whether to go to the beach, razmisliti creates a business proposition or a legal decision. Very simple.
I hope that in this group we use ‘contemplative’ not to evoke a deeply uncomfortable tradition of spiritual workers exploiting the illiterate masses with their sweet tongued persuasive, often fearful tinkerings about metaphysics and the ways of bettering the world. However I wouldn’t know. I personally wish we could disentangle from this deeply uncomfortable past and tradition without rewriting the meaning of the verb ‘to think’ from Anglo-Saxon to an Indo-European meaning but somehow I do not see this to be possible in the context of our gathering. What I do on Sunday nights with my, now dear friends, has no spiritual meaning whatsoever for me. I come and engage in this awkward enquiring practice because it offers me a peek into the human soul of my fellow travelers. I love the experience of being given the permission of thinking in other ways, thinking otherwise, and not struggling with the time continuum for a couple of hours each week at the present moment, not needing what is to be otherwise. It helps me sit. It opens my eyes to the infinite opportunities of catching the glimpses of our oneness, similarity and difference. I feel the practice of these ill-named gatherings has given me insight to begin loving more humans over and over again, afresh with an open mind and one huge listening ear. And this is truly exhilarating.
Crédit photo : Mycelium