Krista Tippett: And there’s something in what you just described and the way you described it that points at your voice in this moment we now inhabit culturally. I’m very taken with this book that you wrote, actually in 2016, Radical Dharma, which I think was a prescient book. It’s very much about what we’re living through, but you wrote it in the middle of that election year, before that was all done, looking at, as you said then — and I don’t — I think there’s a clarity about this now that there wasn’t then, about this increasing collective anxiety about transitioning from the first Black U.S. president. So focusing on that human anxiety that was there and was going to be there, whoever had won the election, you make this statement that I find so compelling and stark. And this — I just want to delve into this with you. You say: “We cannot have a healed society, we cannot have change, we cannot have justice, if we do not reclaim and repair the human spirit” — if we don’t do inner work, as you say in another place, that has been underemphasized. We have not trained ourselves to do the work that is upon us now.

Rev. williams: No, we haven’t. We haven’t. And we haven’t for good reason, from a particular perspective. To do our work, to come into deep knowing of who we are is — that’s the stuff that bringing down systems of oppression is made of. And so capitalism in its current form couldn’t survive, patriarchy couldn’t survive, white supremacy couldn’t survive, if enough of us set about the work of reclaiming the human spirit, which includes reclaiming the sense of humanity of the people that are the current vehicles for those very forms of oppression.

Tippett: Right. That’s such a huge statement.

Rev. williams: It’s hard. [laughs] People always look at me in this slightly hopeful and furtive way.

Tippett: [laughs] Right. So let’s talk about that for an hour. [laughs]

Also, you have lived inside this dynamic — obviously, you are also a product of this culture, and you speak very openly about having your “angry activist” phase — which was more than a phase, and a very important, formative part of your life, which is also a formative part of our cultural life and of our cultural impulse to feel discomfort and leap to change and want to leap over that inner work where anger and healing and these things actually reside.

Rev. williams: It’s funny, I was just speaking about that to a friend as I was on the way to have this conversation — that there is this place of vulnerability from which truly transformative action must come from, is what I have discovered and wrapped my whole language and view around, is that we can take action, and we can take very skillful action. You know, don’t get me wrong in any way — there’s an enormous amount of advocacy being done, very hard choices that people are making to put themselves on the front lines. But without this particular place and location of a willingness to be flexible, open, soft-bellied enough to be moved by the truth of the other, in whatever given situation, then it is not transformative. It’s change, maybe. It can be moved backwards again, as we can see — the stroke of a pen.

But for us to transform as a society, we have to allow ourselves to be transformed as individuals. And for us to be transformed as individuals, we have to allow for the incompleteness of any of our truths and a real forgiveness for the complexity of human beings and what we’re trapped inside of so that we’re both able to respond to the oppression, the aggression that we’re confronted with, but we’re able to do that with a deep and abiding sense of “and there are people, human beings, that are at the other end of that baton, that stick, that policy, that are also trapped in something. They’re also trapped in a suffering.” And for sure, we can witness that there are ways in which they’re benefiting from it. But there’s also ways, if one trusts the human heart, that they must be suffering. And holding that at the core of who you are when responding to things I think is the way — the only way we really have forward to not just replicate systems of oppression for the sake of our own cause.

Tippett: That kind of discernment is also about knowing ourselves — uncomfortably knowing ourselves.

Rev. williams: Well, I think it’s actually uncomfortably un-knowing ourselves. [laughs] It is this willingness to keep being willing to come undone — to do what we can to understand the world around us and how we operate and what is impacting who we are and how we are, and to allow that to keep coming undone.

That’s what I think is really the paradox in what is possible, from a liberatory standpoint, is to recognize, oh, we’re not trying to become something, we’re trying to un-become. We’re trying to undo ourselves. And that is really what is most challenging for us, because we want to be known to ourselves. We want to be known to others. But the moment we try to do that, we’re actually fixating in a way that traps us, so we feel both safe, but it’s also confining.

Tippett: One of the words you used, when you were writing in 2016 about what this moment requires of us, is that it calls for “pause.” And you come from a tradition, a spiritual tradition, which has sitting at its core — “So we sit, and we feel.”

I want you to unfold that a little bit, because this thing we’re talking about, it’s so countercultural. It can so easily sound like this is about not being relevant and not attending to what is urgent. But sitting, as you — and what happens in sitting and in pausing is not about not acting. [laughs] It’s a different move, so just take us inside that.

Rev. williams: I love that — “It’s a different move.” There is so much momentum to every aspect of what drives us, what moves us, what has us hurtling through space, including all of our thoughts and even our own sense of our emotions — how we interpret any given feeling, any experience of discomfort; where that discomfort sits in our bodies. It’s not just that we have a feeling of pain or awkwardness. It’s that we then interpret that.

And those interpretations — much to our chagrin, we come to understand through a process of observing them — are not clean or not free of all of the things that are impacting us outside. And so even our sense of what pains us and what makes us feel shame, feel guilt, feel awkwardness, feel put-upon by people, feel disempowered, has to do with the external information and cues that we have received. And they’re moving at an incredible rate of speed. And for the most part, we almost never get the opportunity to observe them and sort through them — kind of like that drawer that collects everything in your house.

Tippett: [laughs] I have a few of those.

Rev. williams: Yeah, where you say, “Oh, but wait a minute, someone lived in this house before me,” in essence, “and some of that stuff is not mine. Actually, this is not mine. That’s my mom’s.” “This is not mine. That’s the inheritance of white supremacy,” or, “That’s the inheritance of generations of oppression and marginalization that subjects me to habitually feeling less-than, even if the current situation has no intent to make me feel that way.” And we have no real way of being able to discern what is mine, what is yours, what are we holding collectively, what have I inherited, what have I taken on as a measure of protection, of a way to cope, at some point in my life or past lives, that I no longer need?

And sitting lets us begin to do that. It doesn’t do it right away, because what we first are confronted with is just the assault of the amount of thoughts and the mixed messages [laughs] that just inhabit our body and our mind and our experience on an ongoing basis that, when we sit, the first thing we’re met with is not quiet or calm or peace. The first thing we’re met with is, “Oh, my God. Who is in here, and why won’t they shut up? How do I get them to stop?” And not only is something and someone and everyone speaking to me, it’s mixed messages. Things don’t agree with each other. I don’t agree with my own truth. I’m having arguments in here that are not my arguments. They are someone else’s arguments. They’re my parents’ arguments. Sitting lets us just, first of all, recognize that we are this massive collection of thoughts and experiences and sensations that are moving at the speed of light and that we never get a chance to just be still and pause and look at them just for what they are, and then, slowly, to sort out our own voice from the rest of the thoughts, emotions, the interpretations, the habits, the momentums that are just trying to overwhelm us at any given moment.
And when I say “trying to overwhelm us,” that’s really a key thing to understand, because that means that there’s an “us.” There’s a core and deep and abiding “us” that is being overwhelmed by something that’s actually not us. And when we become aware of it, we’re like: “Oh, I actually have some choice here.”

[music: “Tiny Water Glass” by Blue Dot Sessions]

Tippett: I’m Krista Tippett, and this is On Being, today with Zen priest and social visionary angel Kyodo williams.

[music: “Tiny Water Glass” by Blue Dot Sessions]

I want to also talk to you about love. You first got thinking about love, with bell hooks. And I have to say, I think we forget, but we may be remembering that the great not just spiritual geniuses, but social reformers, have used this “L” word, “love.” And it was absolutely central to the Civil Rights Movement. And I hear this word surfacing everywhere, and also an attention to how we have to — how we have to revive it, how we have to fill it with connotations that take in the complexity of us and the hardness of what’s before us. You’ve been thinking about this, the role of love in movements, I think for a couple of decades. And I wonder how your thought on that — also, what you see in the world — is evolving right now.

Rev. williams: I think you were pointing towards it. bell, and reading bell, and getting an opportunity to meet bell, also, gave me a lens into the possibility of love being something that I could — not only “could,” I want to say — that I had to bring into the language of my perception of the world, and that love was not to be limited to my bedroom or my family and just people that I thought that I liked; that what I was doing in the past and what we often do and what our culture calls us to do is to use love to be a quantifier of “do I have a preference for you?” [laughs]

Tippett: That’s really well put.

Rev. williams: “Am I aligned and in agreement and affinity? Are you reflecting back at me what I want to be reflected back at me? And if you are, and if you are enhancing my idea of myself, [laughs] then I love you.” And bell opened up the idea that that was a very limited way of understanding — and she still does — that that’s a limited way of understanding love.

The way that I think of love most often, these days, is that love is space.

Tippett: Say some more about that. What do you mean?

Rev. williams: It is developing our own capacity for spaciousness within ourselves, to allow others to be as they are — that that is love. And that doesn’t mean that we don’t have hopes or wishes that things are changed or shifted, but that to come from a place of love is to be in acceptance of what is, even in the face of moving it towards something that is more whole, more just, more spacious for all of us. It’s bigness. It’s allowance. It’s flexibility. It’s saying the thing that we talked about earlier, of “oh, those police officers are trapped inside of a system, as well. They are subject to an enormous amount of suffering, as well.”

I think that those things are missed when we shortcut talking about King or we shortcut talking about Gandhi. We leave out the aspects of their underlying motivation for moving things, and we make it about policies and advocacy when, really, it is about expanding our capacity for love as a species.

Tippett: That’s so interesting, to just focus on that word, “movement” — because again, if we just take a reality base, you don’t move people by hating them or criticizing them. And you don’t always move people by loving them, but you don’t have a chance of doing it [laughs] with the other tools.

But I’m also thinking so hard at the moment — you’re right, we haven’t even seen this aspect of that history, even the history that’s not so long ago. I sometimes have this feeling that we are only now growing into, for many reasons, the aspect of consciousness here, what you’re talking about — the real human work, without which those political changes are fragile.

How are you — I feel that what you are describing and participating in feels like some kind of evolution. I don’t know. I mean, this is kind of like taking a very wide lens and going to a big, telescopic level, as Maria Popova likes to say — a telescopic lens on the present. But just say a little bit more about that, because I think that also is calming, in its way, for us.

Rev. williams: We’re at this unique time. I’m surprised, actually, that more people aren’t talking about it. I think I may have glimpsed an article that I disciplined myself to not read. But we are at a time, so incredibly unique in human history, where there is a meaningful number of us that are not driven by mere survival, and we are not defined by the work that we do or the place from which we come. We are able to be transient. We can move around places. We can create meaning out of things and ways of being and work that we choose to do. And we can recreate it over and over again. We’re not defined by where we are or what we do. We can make meaning out of it, but we are not defined by it in a way that former cultures and societies that were limited in transportation and had a necessity to be able to put food on the table and so we farmed and so we did a whole bunch of things that were about fundamental necessities.

Tippett: You just inherited identities from — all kinds of identities from your kin.

Rev. williams: And they’re inherited. That’s exactly right, which is part of our great conflict in this country right now. We are running into the conflict between people that inhabit an inherited identity with the place that they are — coal-mining country and the work that they do as a result of the place that they are — up against people that have values and ways of perceiving the world that have shifted because they are not identified by their place and the work that they do in the same way that location and a fixed place tells you who you are and how you be in the world.

And that conflict, and the values that come from those two disparate locations, is the conflict that we are up against right now — in this country, in particular, but also in other places in the world.

Tippett: All over, yeah. It’s global.

Rev. williams: We are in this amazing moment of evolving, where the values of some of us are evolving at rates that are faster than can be taken in and integrated for peoples that are oriented by place and the work that they’ve inherited as a result of where they are.

Tippett: Yeah, and who are in survival mode.

Rev. williams: And who are in survival mode, as a result of that. And so our values and what’s acceptable to us — enough of us — is shifting at a pace that is just outside of some of our ability to even take in. And the problem is — I mean, that’s always been true, but the problem is now we have a meaningful number, a substantive number of people that have those rapidly evolving values, in confrontation with people that are understandably still working with the location-, survival-based orientation. This means a lot of things for us. This means that, in terms of values, we can be more spacious. There are many of us that can afford, literally, to be OK with people that are really, really different. In fact, we can be curious about it, because our sense of threat is diminished because our identity is not prescribed by sameness and being afforded belonging because of sameness.
Our own identities have evolved in such a way that, because we’re not merely trying to survive — I’m not saying we’re not trying to pay our rent and everything, but because we’re not identified with merely trying to survive, our sense of survival, our sense of thriving is embedded in a sense of movement and spaciousness and increasing allowance for more and more difference that is in direct conflict with people that are in a space-time continuum that is still place-based, survival-based, get-food-on-the-table-based. “If I don’t cut off the top of this mountain, where will I go? If those people are not beneath me, how will I know my own value?” Et cetera, et cetera.

Tippett: You sometimes do an exercise — you did this in your TEDx talk, where you have — you’ve got a roomful of people, and you have them stand up and — it’s about placing your — a hand on the side of someone’s shoulder and creating pressure and, I think, feeling embodied, but also feeling the space around you and feeling the other people in the room. I’m kind of longing — and we don’t have time to do that, but I’m kind of longing to end with you just offering some ways for people to begin — there’s this wonderful notion that runs all the way through your recent writing, that the world, you said, for people who are not monastics, the world is our field of practice.

Rev. williams: That’s right. Our teachers — as much as we love our embodied teachers that come in flesh and bone and sit on cushions — are really the people, the situations that we confront, moment to moment, day to day, month to month, year to year, that incite a sense of discomfort, dis-ease, awkwardness in us. And rather than seeing those moments as threats to who we are — if we could reorient, if we could center in our relationship to ourselves as evolving, fluid, ever-expansive creatures, whose role is to be in observation of: what is that? What has that inspired? What has that called forth in me, that discomfort that is speaking to something that feels solid and fixed and is now challenged in its location? — if we could do that, if we could live our lives in a way in which we understand that our deepest learning, our deepest capacity for growth comes not from walling ourselves off from the things that make us feel a sense of threat or discomfort, or out of alignment or out of sorts, but rather figuring out what is speaking to us when we feel those things, and what do we have to learn from that teacher that is embodied in that situation, that moment — not so that we become something different than who we are, but that we’re evolving into a greater and greater sense of what it means to be fully human — to be radically, completely in the truth of the human experience and all of its complexities.

I think that if we can move our work, whatever work we’re up to, whatever kind of desire that we have for our own development in life, to be willing to face discomfort and receive it as opportunity for growth and expansion and a commentary about what is now more available to us rather than what it is that is limiting us and taking something away from us, that we will — in no time at all, we will be a society that enhances the lives of all our species. We will be in a society that thrives and knows that the planet must thrive with us. We will be in a society that knows that no one that is suffering serves the greater community, and that no one that is suffering is not an indicator of the ways in which the society itself is suffering.

Tippett: I like that faith of “in no time at all.”

Rev. williams: In no time at all.

Tippett: I’m impressed with that. [laughs]

Rev. williams: In no time at all. [laughs]

Tippett: You mean that?

Rev. williams: I really do. I think we have — we are evolving at such a pace. Even what we’re experiencing now, in our society, we’re just cycling through it. We’re digesting the material of the misalignment. We’re digesting the material of how intolerable it is to be so intolerant. We’re digesting the material of 400, 500 years of historical context that we have decided to leave behind our heads, and we are choosing to turn over our shoulders and say, “I must face this, because it is intolerable to live in any other way than a way that allows me to be in contact with my full, loving, human self.”

Tippett: I think it was Lion’s Roar, you said, “I don’t have a lot of words, but I have a lot of faith. I know the road feels low and winding, and we seem to need the pain to cut to the core to emerge from the sleepwalk of despair and feel through the numbness of disconnect and indifference. But if we let ourselves feel this, we will be better for it.”

Rev. williams: It is part of it. It is part of it, to go through the fits and the denial. There’s a death happening. There is something dying in our society and our culture, and there’s something dying in us, individually. And what is dying, I think, is the willingness to be in denial. And that is extraordinary. The willingness to be in denial is dying in a meaningful number of us, the tipping point. It’s always been happening, and when it happens in enough of us, in a short enough period of time at the same time, then you have a tipping point, and the culture begins to shift. And then what I feel like people are at now is like, “No, no, bring it on. I have to face it; we have to face it.”

[music: “Simple Vale” by Blue Dot Sessions]