Back to the World edit

Back to the World

This piece comes from Chapter V of Parker Palmer’s book, Let Your Life Speak. As such you’ll notice some references to earlier chapters in the book.



depths of depression/
the world of action.

Go far enough on the inner journey/
you end up not lost in narcissism but returning to the world, bearing more gracefully the responsibilities that come with being human.

we are made for community, then leadership is everyone’s vocation, and it can be an evasion to insist that it is not. When we live in the close-knit ecosystem called community, everyone follows and everyone leads.

for better or for worse, I lead by word and deed simply because I am here doing what I do. If you are also here, doing what you do, then you also exercise leadership of some sort.

 cynicism about our most visible leaders

lacking in ethics, compassion, and vision. 

where people who have known great darkness have emerged to lead others toward the light.

Vaclav Havel1990

addressed a joint session of the U.S. Congress:
Re:
communist type of totalitarian system

a legacy of countless dead, an infinite spectrum of human suffering, profound economic decline, and, above all, enormous human humiliation.

something positive

capacity to look... 
somewhat further than someone who has not undergone this bitter experience.

 A person who cannot move and lead a somewhat normal life because he is pinned under a boulder has more time to think about his hopes than someone who is not trapped that way.

how to educate our offspring,
 how to elect our representatives,
how to organize our economic life so that it will lead to prosperity and not to poverty.

our experience/knowledge

consciousness precedes being

salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart,

the human power to reflect, in human meekness and in human responsibility. 

Without a global revolution in the sphere of human consciousness, nothing will change for the better

the catastrophe toward which this world is headed—be it ecological, social, demographic or a general breakdown of civilization—will be unavoidable.

power for authentic leadership

in every setting—from families to nation-states—aim at liberating the heart, their own and others, so that its powers can liberate the world.

Material reality
is not the fundamental factor in the movement of human history. 

Consciousness is. 
Awareness is. 
Thought is.
 Spirit is.

inner Archimedean points from which oppressed people have gained the leverage to lift immense boulders and release transformative change.

legacy of believing in the power of external realities much more deeply than we believe in the power of the inner life.

How many times have you heard, or said, “Those are inspiring notions, but the hard reality is…?” How many times have you worked in systems based on the belief that the only changes that matter are the ones you can measure or count? How many times have you watched people kill off creativity by treating traditional policies and practices as absolute constraints on what we can do?

a human problem. 

we—especially those of us who enjoy political freedom and relative affluence

—are not victims of that society:

 we are its co-creators

through a complex interaction of spirit and matter,

if we who are privileged find ourselves confined, it is only because we have conspired in our own imprisonment.

spiritual traditions do not deny the reality of the outer world.

 They simply claim that we help make that world by projecting our spirit on it, 

If our institutions are rigid, it is because our hearts fear change

if they set us in mindless competition with each other, it is because we value victory over all else

; if they are heedless of human well-being, it is because something in us is heartless as well.

Consciousness precedes being: consciousness, yours and mine, can form, deform, or reform our world. 

complicity in world-making

responsibility

a source of profound hope for change.

Shadows and Spirituality

leader(s) 
project either shadow or light upon some part of the world, and upon the lives of the

shapes the ethos in which others must live, an ethos as light-filled as heaven or as shadowy as hell. 

has high awareness of the interplay of inner shadow and light,

We have a long tradition of approaching leadership via “the power of positive thinking.”

But by failing to look at our shadows, we feed a dangerous delusion that leaders too often indulge: that our efforts are always well-intended, our power always benign, and the problem is always in those difficult people whom we are trying to lead!

tend toward extroversion, which often means ignoring what is happening inside ourselves.

If we have any sort of inner life, we “compartmentalize” it, walling it off from our public work. 
This, of course, allows the shadow to grow unchecked, 

Leaders need not only the technical skills to manage the external world—they need the spiritual skills to journey inward toward the source of both shadow and light.

In the deeps are the violence and terror of which psychology has warned us. But if you ride these monsters down, if you drop with them farther over the world’s rim, you find what our sciences can not locate or name, the substrate, the ocean or matrix or ether which buoys the rest, which gives goodness its power for good, and evil its power for evil, the unified field: our complex and inexplicable caring for each other, and for our life together here. This is given. It is not learned.~
Annie Dillard

critical features of any spiritual journe:

 it will take us inward and downward, toward the hardest realities of our lives, rather than outward and upward toward abstraction, idealization, and exhortation. The spiritual journey runs counter to the power of positive thinking.

Why must we go in and down? Because as we do so, we will meet the darkness that we carry within ourselves—the ultimate source of the shadows that we project onto other people. If we do not understand that the enemy is within, we will find a thousand ways of making someone “out there” into the enemy, becoming leaders who oppress rather than liberate others.

if we ride those monsters all the way down, we break through to something precious—to “the unified field, our complex and inexplicable caring for each other,”

to the community we share beneath the broken surface of our lives.

Good leadership comes from people who have penetrated their own inner darkness and arrived at the place where we are at one with one another

people who can lead the rest of us to a place of “hidden wholeness” because they have been there and know the way.

downward is where you go when you spend years “pinned under a boulder.” That image suggests not only the political oppression under which all Czechs were forced to live, but also the psychological depression Havel fell into as he struggled to survive under the communist regime.

“Velvet Revolution” of 1989—

 “autotherapy,” 
an alternative to suicide, his expression of the decision to live divided no more.
“[Havel] felt that he could remain silent only at the risk of ‘living a lie,’ and destroying himself from within.”

That is the choice before us when we are “pinned under a boulder” of any sort,

go all the way down, travel through their inner darkness—and emerge with the capacity to lead the rest of us toward community, toward “our complex and inexplicable caring for each other.”

why would anybody want to take a journey of that sort, with its multiple difficulties and dangers? 
Everything in us cries out against it—which is why we externalize everything.

“If you can’t get out of it, get into it!”
“the word become flesh”

Out of the Shadow, Into the Light

need to ride certain monsters all the way down,
 understand the shadows they create,
 and experience the transformation that can come as we “get into” our own spiritual lives.


shadow-casting monster is insecurity about identity and worth.
extroversion sometimes develops as a way to cope with self-doubt: we plunge into external activity to prove that we are worthy—or simply to evade the question. 

our identity becomes so dependent on performing some external role that we become depressed, and even die, when that role is taken away.

When we are insecure about our own identities, we create settings that deprive other people of their identities as a way of buttressing our own. 

 in families, where parents who do not like themselves give their children low self-esteem.

dynamics

institutions that deprive the many of their identity so the few can enhance their own, 

an insecure teacher is forcing students to be passive stenographers of the teacher’s store of knowledge, leaving the teacher with more sense of selfhood and the vulnerable students with less. 

a hospital where the doctors turn patients into objects—”the kidney in Room 410″—as a way of claiming superiority at the very time when vulnerable patients desperately need a sense of self.

your sense of self is enhanced by leaders who know who they are.

leaders (who) possess a gift available to all who take an inner journey: 

identity does not depend on the role we play or the power it gives us over others. 

It depends only on the simple fact that we are children of God, valued in and for ourselves.

When a leader is grounded in that knowledge, what happens in the family, the office, the classroom, the hospital can be life-giving for all concerned.

A second shadow inside many of us is the belief that the universe is a battleground, hostile to human interests. 

images of warfare

We talk about tactics and strategies, allies and enemies, wins and losses, “do or die.” If we fail to be fiercely competitive, the imagery suggests, we will surely lose, because the world we live in is essentially a vast combat zone.

self-fulfilling prophecies.

our fear of losing a fight, is that it helps create conditions where people feel compelled to live as if they were at war.

the world is competitive, but largely because we make it so.

The gift we receive on the inner journey is the insight that the universe is working together for good. 

The structure of reality is not the structure of a battle.

Reality is not out to get anybody. Yes, there is death, but it is part of the cycle of life, and when we learn to move gracefully with that cycle a great harmony comes into our lives. 

harmony is more fundamental than warfare in the nature of reality itself could transform this leadership shadow—and transform our institutions as well.

 “functional atheism,”

the belief that ultimate responsibility for everything rests with us. This is the unconscious, unexamined conviction that if anything decent is going to happen here, we are the ones who must make it happen—a conviction held even by people who talk a good game about God.

This shadow causes pathology on every level of our lives. It leads us to impose our will on others, stressing our relationships, sometimes to the point of breaking.

It often eventuates in burnout, depression, and despair, as we learn that the world will not bend to our will and we become embittered about that fact.

Functional atheism is the shadow that drives collective frenzy as well.

The gift we receive on the inner journey is the knowledge that ours is not the only act in town. 

some of them are even better than ours,

we need not carry the whole load but can share it with others, liberating us and empowering them. 

sometimes we are free to lay the load down altogether. 

The great community asks us to do only what we are able, and trust the rest to other hands.

fear
of the natural chaos of life. 

We want to organize and orchestrate things so thoroughly that messiness will never bubble up around us and threaten to overwhelm us (for “messiness” read dissent, innovation, challenge, and change). 

In families and churches and corporations, this shadow is projected as rigidity of rules and procedures, creating an ethos that is imprisoning rather than empowering

the mess we must deal with is the prisoners trying to break out!

The insight we receive on the inner journey is that chaos is the precondition to creativity

that which has been created needs to be returned to chaos from time to time so it can be regenerated in more vital form.

When a leader fears chaos so deeply that he or she tries to eliminate it, the shadow of death will fall across everything that leader approaches—for the ultimate answer to all of life’s messiness is death.

the denial of death itself. 

we also live in denial of the fact that all things must die in due course.

Leaders who participate in this denial often demand that the people around them keep resuscitating things that are no longer alive.

Projects and programs that should have been unplugged long ago are kept on life-support to accommodate the insecurities of a leader who does not want anything to die on his or her watch.

Within our denial of death lurks fear of another sort: the fear of failure.

even if that failure, that “little death,” was suffered in the service of high purpose. 

 “failure” clarifies the steps that need to be taken toward truth, sometimes more than a hypothesis that succeeds. 

The best leaders in every setting reward people for taking worthwhile risks even if they are likely to fail. 

These leaders know that the death of an initiative—if it was tested for good reasons—is always a source of new learning.

The gift we receive on the inner journey is the knowledge that death finally comes to everything—and yet death does not have the final word.

By allowing something to die when its time is due, we create the conditions under which new life can emerge.

Inner Work in Community

Can we help each other deal with the inner issues inherent in leadership? 

We can, and I believe we must.

we are in trouble
Since we can’t get out of it, we must get into it—by helping each other explore our inner lives. What might that help look like?

lift(ing) up the value of “inner work.” 

helping us to understand that inner work is as real as outer work and involves skills one can develop, 

skills like journaling, 
reflective reading, 
spiritual friendship,
 meditation, 
and prayer.

if people skimp on their inner work, their outer work will suffer as well.

spread the word that inner work, though it is a deeply personal matter, is not necessarily a private matter: inner work can be helped along in community. Indeed, doing inner work together is a vital counterpoint to doing it alone. 

Left to our own devices, we may delude ourselves in ways that others can help us correct.

But how a community offers such help is a critical question. We are surrounded by communities based on the practice of “setting each other straight”-
an ultimately totalitarian practice bound to drive the shy soul into hiding.

other models of corporate discernment and support.

the Quaker “clearness committee”
In this process, you take a personal issue to a small group of people who are prohibited from giving you “fixes” or advice, but who, for three hours, pose honest, open questions to help you discover your inner truth

Communal processes of this sort are supportive but not invasive. 
They help us probe questions and possibilities but forbid us from rendering judgment, allowing us to serve as midwives to a birth of consciousness that can only come from within.

The key to this form of community involves holding a paradox—the paradox of having relationships in which we protect each other’s aloneness. 

We must come together in ways
 that respect the solitude of the soul,

 that avoid the unconscious violence we 
do when we try to save each other, 

that evoke our capacity to hold another
 life in ways that honor its mystery, 

never trying to coerce the other into
 meeting our own needs.

It is possible for people to be together that way, though it may be hard to see evidence of that fact in everyday life.

from the healing I experienced as a few people found ways to be present me without violating my soul’s integrity.

Because they were not driven by their own fears, the fears that lead us either to “fix” or abandon each other, they provided me with a lifeline to the human race.

That lifeline constituted the most profound form of leadership I can imagine—leading a suffering person back to life from a living death

we can remind each other of the 
dominant role that fear plays in our lives,
 of all the ways that fear forecloses
 the potentials 

all of 
the world’s wisdom traditions address themselves to 
the fact of fear,

for all of them originated in 
the human struggle to overcome this ancient enemy.

despite their great diversity, unite in one exhortation to those who walk in their ways: “Be not afraid.”

“Be not afraid” does not mean we cannot have fear. Everyone has fear,

the words say we do not need to 

be

 the fear we have.

We do not have to lead from a place of fear
engendering a world in which fear is multiplied.

We have places of fear inside of us, but we have other places as well—places with names like trust, and hope, and faith. 

We can choose to lead from one of those places, to stand on ground that is not riddled with the fault lines of fear, to move toward others from a place of promise instead of anxiety.

As we stand in one of those places, fear may remain close at hand and our spirits may still tremble. But now we stand on ground that will support us, ground from which we can lead others toward a more trustworthy, more hopeful, more faithful way of being in the world.

Back to the World
of action