When we train the mind in meditation, we set down for a few minutes the many compelling stories that fill our lives with drama, violence, romance, and the dream of a victory that will make things better. This setting down is tremendously difficult. The dramas define us—individually and collectively—and it’s hard to even see that we’re carrying them with enough agency that we can set them down for a few moments. Usually we don’t even want to. They’re too important!
In most of the wars that trouble our world right now, large and small, you probably know which side you’re on. Even if we barely know the main actors in the drama a few charged keywords tell us who to root for: “terrorists,” “civilians,” “extremists,” “colonizers,” “democratic,” “autocratic,” corrupt…” You almost certainly hold close to your heart, mostly unconscious, a worldview shaped by the many conditions, traumas, and privileges of your life, and this worldview determines whose cause you support. Everyone thinks their view is right, mature, just, and moral, and with real compassion and care for those who are suffering—everyone, but especially the people on their side—longs for an end to the violence and suffering of war. But when you have a side in the fight, the sweet peace you long for will be tangled up in the bitter peace called “victory.”
The Buddha found a different path to peace that calls on the awkward, incomprehensible discipline of disenchantment. We are instructed to wake up from an enchantment that has turned us into partisan warriors, passionate romantic heroes, defenders of justice. It’s not that there is no such thing as good and evil in the world. There clearly are these ancient forces that warp human hearts against each other and forge metal into blade and gun. But there is no such thing as victory.
When any side in a conflict is victorious, the best result is some years of comfort and safety for the victors, and a long shadow of grief, displacement, and trauma for those who lost. Victory is never complete. The displaced and dispossessed wander the utopia of the victors for centuries, pleading, organizing, fighting for recognition and reparation. All of us who are comfortable enough at this moment to practice the Dharma and reflect on history and liberation are the descendants of those who were victorious in some war or other. Undoubtedly, we each also have ancestors who lost, and wander the world displaced, wounded in ways we would not wish on any being. Many of us understand that the victories that lay behind our present comfort cast a shadow. And that the traumas that fuel our rage and partisan grief cannot be healed by the next victory. But bringing this wisdom into engagement with the very real partisan moment is no easy piece. The spell that enchants the world is ancient magic indeed, and breaking the spell begins—or ends—with breaking a mighty support pillar in your own heart.