An Excerpt from the "Grand Acknowledgement" Chapter (with revisions)
And a short note of thanks for reader feedback
Greetings, readers.
I am writing to offer my thanks to readers who provided feedback about the last chapter I put out last week, “Carrying a Message Further • Part 7: Sacred Victims and the Grand Acknowledgement”.
In response to the feedback, I made some changes to the beginning and added some more clarifying content to help orient the reader in what this chapter covers.
As of now, this is the longest piece I’ve put out on the Ground Experience Substack page, and I will likely make more revisions to this and other chapters as more feedback comes in. It’s been very interesting to work on a larger work in real time, allowing readers to read it as it’s developing. Overall, it has been a positive experience for me personally because writing of this nature can be very lonely and isolating. It also helps tremendously to have reality checks along the way, lest I get lost in a world of abstraction and endless rabbit holes.
I have been thinking about posting short excerpts from the “All We Are” series in a separate series as well as brief video clips in which I read excerpts aloud.
Stay tuned!
In the meantime, below is the revised beginning of the “Grand Acknowledgement” chapter.
Life is Tough
This essay is a companion piece to the previous chapter called “Sacred Victims and the Land Acknowledgement”. The Sacred Victim narrative that Erec Smith lays out in Critique of Antiracism in Rhetoric and Composition ignited a months-long inquiry for me, during which I delved deeper into the many dimensions of victimization and the stories we tell about the individual and collective lived experiences of the Sacred Victim.
In this chapter, I want to explore in more detail the many elements of pain and suffering that are inherent to all life forms, including human beings at the very top of society, using the basic worldview of Eastern spirituality, which, overall, emphasizes the universality of lived experience for people from all walks of life. I will first examine contemplative texts from Tibet and Vietnam that relate to the suffering of living things, and then explore some Western references to suffering, including the lived experiences of suffering of the internationally renowned 19th century poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
At the end of this exploration, I will propose a broader and deeper approach to the Land Acknowledgement ritual, which I hope might invite more unity and empathy into the progressive spaces in which this ritual is carried out.
Why Have I Chosen one Specific Framework for Exploring Suffering?
I’ve intentionally chosen to frame this chapter around the specific insights around human and animal suffering that are foundational to the basic philosophy of Buddhism. I’ve chosen Buddhism for three reasons:
First, it is the only philosophical system that I know of that centralizes pain and suffering as the main components of life that should serve as inspiration to walk a path of wisdom. Like all systems of thought—both spiritual and secular—Buddhism begins with a premise (all life is suffering) and builds upon that premise in subsequent additions to the original philosophy as laid out in additional non-canonical commentaries, practices, and texts by those who have taken up the carrying of the torch for the lineage sometimes over thousands of years. Because of this, Buddhism in its many different sects and lineages has developed a supremely sophisticated and detailed exploration of the many dimensions of pain and suffering experienced by living things.
Second, many communities that are influenced by critical theories of social justice (i.e. Critical Social Justice theory, or CSJ) have taken a liking to Buddhist epistemology (theory of knowledge/ways of knowing), believing that there are significant overlaps between the postmodern theories of how we know what we know and the insights into human consciousness that Buddhist teachings brings to the table. It’s useful to note that the word “woke” was originally used by Black Americans to indicate a “waking up” to the realities of systemic oppression and that the ancient Indian language of Sanskrit has a similar word for waking up to the realities of pain and suffering for all “sentient beings”. That word is “Buddha”, which means “awake” in Sanskrit and is the honorific title that was given to the founder of Buddhism, Siddhartha of the Shakya clan, 2,500 years ago.
Third, I want to demonstrate through the contemplation of one specific framework (Buddhism) a truism that I feel has become lost to our society in recent years: no single individual and no single ideology has cornered the market on empathy, caring, fairness, analysis, knowledge, wisdom, or justice work. The presumptuous and totalizing claim to absolute, exclusive authority in all things related to humanity is the Great Achilles Heel of postmodern social justice frameworks (i.e. Critical Social Justice, intersectionality, critical theories of race, gender and other categories of sociocultural identities, etc.). I believe this unacknowledged shadow has led to a profound split and even active hostility between many people from different demographic groups and world views, and that this unacknowledged shadow has contributed greatly to the rapid unraveling of societal cohesion.
I also believe that this escalating situation can be turned around if those who advocate identitarian forms of anti-oppression justice work (what Erec Smith calls the primacy of identity) could adopt a more universalist perspective that honors both the unique identity and shared history of the demographic groups being advocated for as well as their place in the larger identity and shared history of the human family and even all other living things. The detailed contemplation of suffering in Buddhist philosophy is but one example that demonstrates that critical theories of social justice are not the only path to a just world nor the only lens through which we can study problems and find solutions.
Pain may be a part of all life (Buddhist), but during all of our lives we are not in pain and for most of our time here we enjoy much pleasure. In addition we satisfy our curiosity in many ways which are not painful nor particularly pleasurable, but are necessary for us to make good progress in what we attempt to achieve. However, the lack of social justice is a painful matter which we do have to bear.