Category Archives: Philosophy

Empathy, Ethics, Philosophy, Spirituality

A Seeker’s Guide to Teaching: A Great Resource

August 30, 2018 Steven J. Lawrence

In 2009 I discovered a website called “The Guru’s Handbook”. For a good four years this site provided a nourishing influence for my teaching life, and I would drop in on the site from time to time to take in some of the insights on the deeper interpersonal (and perhaps transpersonal) dimensions of teaching practices.

After taking a sabbatical in 2012 to pursue creative writing and music projects, I fell out of touch with the website. When I returned to teaching full-time in 2015, I noticed with great disappointment that the original site was gone.

Though I searched for the author, Asher Bey, I could not find anything beyond 2013, even on the site’s Facebook page. I even searched for the URLs on the Internet Archive Wayback Machine but only came up with the defunct URLs for the individual blog posts -which appeared to be no longer available as actual posts.

By chance, I decided to follow a hunch and to comment with a question on the Guru Handbook Facebook page, expecting no answer, as the page had been inactive for a long time.

And I received an answer -presumably from Asher Bey. It turns out that the site had moved to a WordPress.com format, and, after spending some time with it, I can see that all of the original writings from the other site are included.

Over the years, I’ve come to see that it doesn’t matter how many people are reached. It only matters who. With this in mind, I am delighted to share the site with whomever comes across this blog post.

If even one person absorbs even the vague after-scent of the wisdom offered in these writings, so much the better for the students who come into contact with them.

And so much better for the world.

https://gurushandbook.wordpress.com

Empathy, Ethics, Philosophy, Spirituality

The Non-Sectarian Principle

April 8, 2018 Steven J. Lawrence

When I was 17, I got my first taste of the sectarian mindset when I read this book called “Why I am a Nazarene and Not a….”. The title of this book and its contents went on to bullet point why a Nazarene should not be a… Mormon, Roman Catholic, Jehova’s Witness, Seventh Day Adventist, Christian Scientist, and so on.

This was the beginning of a decades-long interest in studying different systems of belief and thought and a never-ending fascination with the question of how human beings could ever seriously consider that their own ideological framework -with its special language, concepts, practices, beliefs and unique package of enemies to fight against- could be the ONE true secular or spiritual path in history to offer liberation and harmony.

Curiously enough, many movements, including highly structured political movements and their powerful religious cousins, seem to always have a place for condemning heretics, dissidents or simply those who have found a different path or see a different perspective, which suggests a lack of real faith in the system that is being defended.

It is often said in wisdom traditions across the world that transformative change and its outward expression is intimately bound up with our own individual liberation from all forms -including the forms of personal narratives, political systems, socio-political identities, ideological beliefs and even justice work (whatever we take that to be) that we have attached ourselves to and have formed our identities around.

I make no claims here to be a liberated person (anyone who has experienced my hypomanic, passionate outbursts, knows I’m not). And I surely do get caught up in my own paradigms, beliefs, ideas, group loyalties, and unresolved personal narratives.

But, I can’t shake the idea that if we confine ourselves to working for the liberation (or simply for the interests) of only our own individual selves, our own tribes, or our own communities or even nations, we wind up trapping ourselves in a never-ending cycle of self-justification, hatred of an enemy, and the constant pressure of having to check back in with the values that have been handed to us, to make sure for ourselves and prove to others that we are on the right path.

I don’t think we can avoid living in the world without frameworks, communities, principles, beliefs, commitments and individual and collective actions against injustices.

But, I suspect that stepping out from these frameworks and looking at the raw data of our inner and outer experience might lead to a more invitational approach to the world, less hatred against one-dimensional enemies, and the discovery of a natural sense of kinship and harmony.

Empathy, Ethics, Philosophy, Positive Politics

Bettering in Our Own Time

August 3, 2017 Steven J. Lawrence

*NOTE: My friend gave me permission to re-post something he wrote onto my own social media page. At the time of this posting, I have not yet gotten his permission to post it here. But, I love this and it speaks for me, so I want to share it.

Our country was founded on the radical proposition that everyone is born equal, and should receive equal treatment under the law. Even from the very beginning we did not live up to that ideal in practice and actual governance, but our history has been one of slow, stepwise, painful movement toward it.

Too slow, and too many moments of backsliding, for far too many people who deserve better. But we cannot give up, unless we want to give up on what being America really means.

Certainly the founders had many notions of the limits of equality and citizenship that no longer apply, nor should they. They lived, as we all do, in a particular moment in time, and could no more escape history than a fish can escape the ocean. And the effects of those mental and political blinders were very, very real for the people left out of their limited concept of what equality should mean.

But there was, I think, an entelechy to the ideas worked out in the Constitution and other founding documents, that goes beyond that moment in time and its limitations. It was an idea too radical for a bunch of white, male, very well-to-do property owners, whose only model of governance was the divine rule of kings, and whose implicit idea of society was deeply hierarchical in nature, to bring to full fruition. But they wrote something down, and whatever it meant to them, it continued to resonate down through the generations and inspire not only the powerful but also the rest of us to do better.

(Equality is still a radical idea: each time we expand the circle of equality and fairness, we realize there is another circle beyond that. Our grandchildren will probably have difficulty understanding our own mental and societal limits on true equality.)

So, I understand [people’s] objection [to having pride in American heritage], and I think it’s well worth raising. I won’t try to convince [them that they’re] wrong and I’m right. I’ll just say that I believe it’s possible to be both critical of the history of our nation and at the same time see it as something worthy of inheriting and bettering in our own time.

Empathy, Ethics, Philosophy

The Postmodern Fallacy of Dominance

July 13, 2017 Steven J. Lawrence

I wrote this on a social media thread, and chose to use ALL CAPS as a metaphor for the theme of domination and power that I was exploring. I have been influenced to use ALL CAPS in a non-angry way by another writer whose writing on philosophy and spirituality is superb. Somehow his capitalized expressions do not come across as yelling but as emphasizing (as if italicized).

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So, this philosopher Derrida is very popular with the young activist crowd (and some old ones, too). He’s the guy who made an IDEA extremely popular… the idea that all systems, relationships and momentary exchanges are hierarchical in nature and are rooted entirely in POWER dynamics and the drive to DOMINATE.

Derrida went on to exhort us all to FLIP the hierarchy at every possible turn. In other words, we are called to reverse the power dynamics at all times… moment by moment… individuals and systems.

With this premise, it’s perfectly understandable why entire frameworks are created with a straight-out-of-the-gate adversarial stance against “the other” and the feverish drive to “dismantle” all things created and to win back the power that was stolen.

But, a question arises.

What if the original premise is incorrect? What if some -or perhaps many- people simply interacted with us out of the desire to connect? What if some -or perhaps many- people recognized differences in wealth, fortune and status between them and us and desired to share at least part of what they have with us? What if some -or perhaps many- people are simply not AWARE of these differences or how they fail to SEE us or our suffering and oppression?

What if the central premise of POWER and domination being at the root of all systems and relationships is not entirely accurate? What if this premise is just an INVENTED position based from painful personal experience and not a DISCOVERED pattern based on objective observations over time?

I ask this, because I have seen so many other premises (or operating PRINCIPLES) driving the behaviors and creations of individuals, communities and even entire systems…. lust, desire, longing, existential despair, desire for comfort, winning, striving for excellence, creating beauty, new discoveries, the seeking of justice, intentional ignorance of unpleasant realities, fear of death…. turning away from abuses…. and so forth.

Then there is the wondrous delight of building, innovating and creating….. and the ancient, universal and natural patterns of loving, belonging and nurturing…. so, so, so, so, SO much more to all of this than the Game of Thrones.

At least that has been my experience.

In recent years, I’ve seen relatives killed with bullets by law enforcement, dear friends lost forever to addiction, abuse and cruelty, students stabbed to death and shot outside their homes, liars getting away with lies, and the emergence of a culture of ridicule that demands that we diminish the all too real suffering of those whom we stand against.

And, yet I still cannot get behind the idea that life is all about domination, oppression and control. I believe in the goodness of people, even now.

What if re-designing and re-purposing lazily and selfishly designed systems for the betterment of all involved at least some degree of kinship with “them”… if only in the secret chambers of our minds?

What if a person who writes out ideas and questions like these doesn’t have any answers or solutions at all?

What if the answers we find in writers and thinkers lead us further away from ourselves and from one another?

What if this is all just an addiction to “the fight” to escape ourselves?

Empathy, Leadership, Philosophy

Criticism of Servant Leadership

October 30, 2014 Steven J. Lawrence

Servant Leadership can also be called socially responsible leadership, caring leadership, or even steward leadership. Boiled down to its essence, this is a leadership philosophy that makes caring about people the most important thing.

It would be difficult to argue that leaders should not care about people. But, while most critics would agree that caring leaders are needed in the world, some have argued that this leadership style subtly and deceptively contains gender bias, a patriarchal stance, and a strong representation of the myths and moralities in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Some have even referred to it not as a leadership philosophy but a leadership theology pointing out what they consider a strong religiosity and the occasional reference to the word “spiritual” in some of the literature.

Although Servant Leadership in recent years has steadily gained recognition as a viable model for positive, ethical and efficient leadership among leadership experts and social scientists such as Margaret Wheatley and Peter Senge from the MIT Sloane School of Management, it is by no means a universally-accepted paradigm.

The main criticism is that this model of leadership is paradoxically both ambiguous and and over-prescriptive, as this framework a) doesn’t catalogue empirically observable behaviors and b) doesn’t take into account the diverse perspectives and insights that arise within a community, instead relying on a predetermined ideology. This, according to critics, is counterintuitive to the post-modern age of facilitative approaches to decision-making in which all stakeholders participate and retain their own autonomy culturally and ideologically.

I can appreciate some of these criticisms, and the fact that Robert Greenleaf was a white, male Christian easily opens this model up to being discredited. At some point, I hope to write a response to an essay criticizing Servant Leadership from a feminist perspective. In that piece, I will respond to the micro-analysis and socio-cultural deconstruction of the assumptions, aims, language and contradictions inherent in this leadership philosophy.

For now, I just want to make one point.

Stewardship is an attitude of wanting to take care of our world. A person who has an attitude of wanting to help (be of service), will identify problems and work to find ways to solve those problems. If that person winds up in a position of formal authority, he is likely to want to develop people on his team or in his organization. This means he will be able to notice frustration in those who feel they lack a voice. He will most likely want to remove that frustration or help to neutralize it by adopting a participative approach in which that person will have a voice. And the organization will be all the better for it, because the information gleaned from the participative process will most likely lead to more informed decisions. This will help the enterprise and help sustain long-term relationships within the community, team or organization.

So, the assumption that Servant Leadership necessarily precludes an egalitarian approach to decisions is just that. An assumption. And, an unexamined one, at that.

The key is empathy. When a person of formal authority genuinely cares about people and has a compassionate attitude, he will use whatever leadership models and strategies available to him that can get the best results and maximize the benefits for the largest amount of people. Sometimes, this will be participative, and sometimes it might be transformational. Leaders who serve (or servants who lead) are the ultimate situational leaders because they are aware and emotionally intelligent enough to understand the full potential of these models and strategies.

We can go around in circles, critically analyzing and making sure never to allow any one theory, individual, group or position to dominate (a major preoccupation that postmodernists/deconstructionists have), or we can be honest about the fact that leaders will always be around and that we need to promote at the very least the fundamental value of having a heart.

Heart matters in a world of need.

Ground Experience