Re: Authors - Who's cultish, who is not?

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Chödrön’s “I don’t know” carries a further charge. Arguably, a large part of her popularity comes from her ability to poetically mobilize the language that values personal vulnerability (recently made more popular by Brené Brown and others) to reinforce a doctrinal belief not just in the unknowability of “relative” answers, but in their irrelevance.

For those who try to engage it — I speak from some personal experience — the impact of M?dhyamika contemplation can be startling to the point of ecstasy. The feeling of “groundlessness” to which the Shambhala literature continually refers reflects the sudden epiphanies of deconstructive logic. I was used to this austere pleasure from my university studies, where it was applied to pull apart the mechanisms of social and linguistic power. To think that this could also be used internally, soulfully even, to pull apart internalized power structures was thrilling. It’s a hook, for sure.

But groundlessness and “spaciousness” as responses to not just life in general, but particular instances of harm in organizations like Shambhala, should now be looked at in a different light. Trauma studies have made the reasons for dissociative responses in relation to abuse part of popular discourse. We know that abuse victims can enact disembodiment reflexes in order to avoid further abuse or pain, or to recover from past abuse. Those to whom dissociation occurs describe sensations of floating above, or vacating the body, or shrinking down to imperceptible size, or inflating to an ungraspable immensity. (These are all, in fact key features of Vajrayana visualizations.)

The free-falling qualities of groundlessness and spaciousness are coded as states of freedom and courage by Chödrön, who honours her training well. We have to now ask, clearly, whether, how, and when that training spiritualizes a trauma response. We have to ask whether when students are told that they “can’t come up with a ground”, but are to occupy no position at all, they are being given tools to:

Sublimate their own experiences of abuse, and/or
Ignore the victims of power abuse, and/or
Protect themselves from the pain and moral injury of having their critical thinking and agency stripped away by an Iron-Age thought experiment, weaponized by a high-demand group.