Seeing Past the Enemy’s Mask
In the same way that we can open our heart’s in our personal relationships, we can be part of the awakening of hearts in our wider society. Let’s explore with Tara how we can learn to see past the mask of those we don’t know, those we might consider as ‘bad’ other.
When anger and blame become habituated creates suffering because we lock into the identity of a victim and the unreal others become our persecutors. There is no healing from this. Tara give an example from the ku in Matobo, Africa, depicted in a film entitled, The Interpreter
“Everyone who loses somebody wants revenge on someone, on God if they can’t find anyone else. But in Africa, in Matobo, the Ku believe that the only way to end grief is to save a life. If someone is murdered, a year of mourning ends with a ritual that we call the Drowning Man Trial. There’s an all-night party beside a river. At dawn, the killer is put in a boat. He’s taken out on the water and he’s dropped. He’s bound so that he can’t swim. The family of the dead then has to make a choice. They can let him drown or they can swim out and save him. The Ku believe that if the family lets the killer drown, they’ll have justice but spend the rest of their lives in mourning. But if they save him, if they admit that life isn’t always just… that very act can take away their sorrow.”
https://cognitiveitching.wordpress.com/2014/02/02/philosophical-itch-the-drowning-man-trial-what-would-you-do/
Tara asks at the end of this session:
When I try to awaken compassion for a person who has caused harm in our world…
I still feel anger and aversion
I feel warmth if they’re vulnerable
I can see past the mask
Realise I’m not averse to the person.
Life isn’t always just and if we learn to accept the reality of the loss then we can heal our sorrow. The Ku put it this way: Vengeance is a lazy form of grief
The process of healing requires us to take full responsibility for our feelings and actions. Seeking retribution and blaming others is vengeance but what we need to do is bring compassion and awareness to the wounds inside ourselves. Only then have we the capacity to feel compassion for another’s pain and suffering and forgive them.
Thich Nhat Hahn says:
People are not the enemy, through meditation and self-reflection you look deeply inside and understand that the other is the victim of violence, injustice, and hate. When you begin to understand compassion is born in your heart and the anger is no longer there. Now it is possible to forgive and not before.
We are aware that violence begets violence and that what we need is reconciliation. What we need is restorative justice. What we need is to listen to one’s another experiences and hear each other’s story of suffering to bring a peaceful end to our lives and stories or the story of our lives.
Blame is an old evolutionary strategy for survival. It’s part of the limbic brain’s way of thinking and being in an unsafe and threatening world. We need with our more responsible, reasonable brain attend and befriend this enemy within so we can respond in all situations with the two wings of awareness, mindfulness and compassion another being in our hearts.
We’re challenging with a curious and in a non-violent communicative way our belief systems that create our sense of identity, which also fuels or separation from others whom we erroneously believe to be different.
Tara shares a story of a Palestinian and Israeli girls participating in a program called Building Bridges for Peace, coming together to share and then have the other retell the other’s story in the first person to feel what the other felt and so the other can listen and hear how our enemy has heard what it feels from the other’s perspective. One of the participants put it succinctly:
“If I don’t know you, it’s easy to hate you. If I look into your eyes I can’t.”
What if we can’t engage with our so-called enemy? We can still try to sense what is it like for them? What’s their fear and pain, their suffering?
To imagine and then feel what it’s like to be them and come to see ourselves in another being and all being in ourselves.
“Want of imagination makes things unreal enough to be destroyed. By imagination I mean knowledge and love. I mean compassion. People of power kill children, the old send the young to die, because they have no imagination. They have power. Can you have power and imagination at the same time? Can you kill people you don’t know and have compassion for them at the same time? ”
Evolution has given up the capacity with our mirror neurones to imagine what it’s like being another human being, our other self. But it takes patience and lots of practice for this to become a habit.
We can imagine that person, not as they seem to us now but as they and we were before the experiences of pain and sorrow entered our lives and hardened our hearts and froze our capacity to forgive and forget.
Hurt people, hurt people and I imagine to heal our hurts and heal we have to feel for ourselves first where does is hurt.
If our habitual reaction to hurt is to blame others for how we feel we are being responsible for how we feel. We need to pause in those moments and dig deeper to get to our coeur or core, our hearts.
This is easier said than done for me. As I reflect, my thoughts distract or deflect my attempts to get to the heart of myself. I can remember and imagine the difficult situations and find myself stopping short before entering that unknown space or blindly bursting through the space that separates us because I’m angry or afraid and also willing to face whatever is there.
I think of a time when my partner and I were sleeping in a tent in the backyard and we heard something outside. We were both a little scared but I unzipped the tent and jumped out only to find it was the cat hunting. Exposing my head first if it really was some creature as fearful as us it might have decided to attack first rather than flee. It was a relief that it was only the cat but there have been other situations where I was afraid for a long time to face what might be waiting and what might happen if I were to run head first into that so-called enemy, with an uncertain outcome once again.
