Karmic Enmeshment with Unknown Others

Awakening is a process, not a state

There may be a useful way of thinking about waking up and being woke as two ways of expressing the same deep connection we have with others and the world around us.

Recently, on a short day hike at Filoli, a garden and historic estate nearby, we encountered a sign explaining Filoli’s Land Acknowledgement:

Filoli sits on the unceded ancestral homeland of the Lamchin, an independent tribe of the Ramaytush Ohlone peoples, the original inhabitants and stewards of the San Francisco Peninsula. Lamchin families from the village of Supichom had an intimate relationship with this land.

The impacts of colonization are ongoing and adversely affect the Indigenous peoples of the Bay Area. As we use the land to gather, live, learn, and work, we are beneficiaries of those past injustices. Filoli is a sanctuary for healing for all people; honoring this truth is a vital first step to transcend barriers of heritage and difference.

Land is central in defining Filoli. The land provides a sense of place and represents a longstanding history, chronicling past, present, and future. We commit to partnering with the Ramaytush peoples to share Indigenous stories and collaborate on land stewardship. 

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I’ve read many such land acknowledgement statements, but what struck me in particular in this case was the phrase “we are beneficiaries of those past injustices.” We are karmically connected with people and events—and injustices—of which we are often, all too often, not aware. Living our ordinary, daily lives does not make us aware of them. Or, they are so distant in time and place, that they have drifted off into the insubstantial, misty past.  

Sometimes, Buddhist rhetoric (such as my own) emphasizes emptiness, inconstancy, the absence of anything that is permanent, eternal, absolute, or unchanging. From this perspective, the idea that something, anything, is permanent, eternal, absolute, or unchanging are all simply ideas, socially constructed concepts that, growing up in a particular culture, we learn to apply in certain socially accepted ways. It is easy to allow ourselves to drift along holding onto these ideas, as ideas that make sense of the world for us, they offer reassurance and security.

The ideas of emptiness or inconstancy, that there is nothing that is permanent, eternal, absolute, or unchanging, can also be comforting, offering reassurance and security of a different kind. They are also simply ideas, socially constructed concepts that, maturing in a different cultural context, we learn to apply in socially accepted ways within that social location.

“Woke” has, of course, become a favorite scapegoat of some authoritarian politicians in the US today. And, if not as a code word in itself, then a more generalized aversion to claims that diversity, equity, and inclusion are positive values by which to guide social, institutional, and cultural life.

A while back, the corresponding concept of contention was pluralism—that the pluralist character of society is a positive value, something to be embraced and encouraged. Those opposed to pluralism seemed to believe that our educational institutions should provide (impose) a view of the world that only countenanced uniformity—that god-fearing White men were inherently of upstanding character, that they “opened the frontier,” made all scientific discoveries, wrote all the literature worth reading and that that literature was worth reading because it provided an image of life and society reflecting this uniformity. The current glorification of “Western culture” reflects this attempt to eradicate plurality, to write a history that transfers the leading role from the Jews of the Hebrew Bible to Christians, to Protestants, to Britain of its Imperial glory, to the United States, and now in the eyes of some to Russia as the protector of this embattled “Western culture.”

The depth of this self-image is reflected in a conversation I had some months ago with a friend whom I’d not seen in a few years. Our conversation turned to the current woes of India under the repressive Hindu nationalist government. He said, yes, while the British empire had its flaws, it had in sum been a benefit to India—it had unified the country with its railroads, its laws, and its language. Having just read Elkins’ Legacy of Violence, I found myself attempting to point out that India, as we think of it today, was the creation of the British Empire—there was no “nation” that pre-existed the imposition of the uniformity imposed by railroads, laws, and language. The societal “needs” for unifying railroads, laws, and language were those of the British Empire, not of some newly created category of “Indians.” The uniformity of history here is not only the uniformity created by railroads, laws, and language, but the uniformity of the idea that the driving force of history was those White men of the British Empire who brought these “benefits” to the world.

Acknowledging that we are the beneficiaries of past injustices moves beyond acknowledging the reality of pluralism, to recognizing our karmic situation. The connections between my walking through the gardens of Filoli, and the displacement of Native Americans from the land I now inhabit actually exist. For something to actually exist does not mean that it is permanent, eternal, absolute, or unchanging—not “real” in that strong Platonic sense—but also not something to deny. The complexities of karmic connections, including past injustices, is the face of interconnection that focusing only on emptiness and inconstancy looks away from.