What Is Humanity Becoming in Your Presence?

As It Is

"What is humanity becoming in your presence?"

Judy asked that question a couple of years ago, and I remember thinking how curious that sounded. I have always loved linguistic patterns that create trance like contexts, questions that have a distinctly Miltonian quality about them. At the time, I thought she was speaking about influence or perhaps about the responsibilities we carry within the various roles we participate in as teachers, therapists, facilitators, etc. It took me years to look at another description of the same question, what if her question was probing something entirely different like, ‘What happens to our presence while humanity becomes what it is becoming? Who are we on that continuum? What do we defend, what do we hold on to, and what do we slowly give up? And so on’ 

Every year, during the Spakoina silent retreat in the mountains, I somehow find myself speaking about this, as every passing year has left me with small, rare and ordinary epiphanies, and a deeper appreciation for the question itself. Some teachings are like that na .. ? like a nazm or a couplet, they leave us awestruck in a single sitting; and then also continue to be with us for decades.

Things are difficult in the world right now. Perhaps they always have been. There are periods in history when the intensity of such events rises and falls, but today it often feels as though everything is happening all at once everywhere and that too with increasing frequency. Open a newspaper and you are met with wars, children dying, political tyranny, seedless fruits, rising prices, families splitting apart, communities being torn apart from their land, and so many lives uprooted by disasters. Somewhere in between all of this are ordinary people trying to make breakfast, go to work, raise children, and show up every day. There are days when I genuinely wonder whether we have learnt anything from history at all. Wars have changed in scale and sophistication, political systems have risen and fallen, empires have disappeared, and generations have carried the memory of unbearable loss. We have inherited enough stories, records, and testimony to know what violence costs. And still, we continue to find reasons to repeat it. Perhaps that is what I struggle to understand. Human beings have shown extraordinary ingenuity. We have transformed medicine, expanded scientific knowledge, developed technologies that connect people across continents, explored space, written literature that has endured for centuries, and created works of art that continue to shape how we understand ourselves. These achievements reveal an immense capacity for imagination, collaboration, and discovery. I often wonder why this same participation has not extended more fully into the way we live with one another. Why do we continue to organise ourselves around politics, religion, nationality, ethnicity, and ideology in ways that make conflict seem inevitable? Why does our capacity to create so often exist alongside our willingness to divide?

What happens to us while the world becomes what it is becoming? What happens to our state of being, our relationships, our ambitions, our ability to love, our willingness to trust, and the way we begin looking at another human being? These questions have gradually become new ways of perceiving the world for me. Sometimes I find myself wondering how my teachers and models would have looked at these times. How would Dick have understood today's world? How would Judy be making sense of all this? How would those monks participate through these times? These are people who have spent decades practising, meditating, praying, sitting, observing, failing, beginning again, and repeating the same practices thousands, perhaps millions, of times. Their lives have been shaped by those practices. I find myself deeply curious about the quality of the world such a human being inhabits. How do they regulate themselves and continue participating in a world that brings chaos and uncertainty? What allows them to remain fully open to the world without shutting down or disappearing into the rabbit hole?

The year before last, in one of her discourses, Ani Pema said, "You cannot always change the world, but if you are open to the world... as it is..." and then she paused. There was something in the way she said the words "as it is," followed by the silence. Looking back, I sometimes wonder whether it was the silence that created the impact for me, the way her voice softened around those words, or simply her presence. For months, I thought she was speaking about acceptance. Later, I wondered whether she meant surrender. Today, I am still not certain... hahaha... or even whether either word is enough. Increasingly, I find myself revisiting those three words. I remember sharing this with Aarti, and she said, "Perhaps 'as it is' means being before becoming, or presence without competition, comparison, conclusions, expectations or the need to avoid, perfect or fix before participating in life." There is something profoundly courageous about living this way. It is the willingness to stay present when life happens as grief, illness, uncertainty, disappointment or loss, without immediately turning away from the experience. As human beings, we naturally hope that those we love do not suffer. It is a beautiful intention. Perhaps we forget that our presence alone can bring a sense of ease, safety, belonging, and meaning. I often wonder what happens when someone we love is in pain. Almost instinctively, we reach for reassurance, we encourage, explain, search for words that might make life a little kinder. And somewhere, almost without noticing, our attention shifts. We are no longer simply with their experience. We begin to respond to what their pain stirs within us. We lose sight of the discomfort their experience has awakened within us. Instead of remaining with it, we begin trying to make their path easier, hoping that, if their suffering softens, something within us will soften too. Perhaps this is why the invitation to be with life ‘as it is’ feels so difficult. We cannot change the wind, only learn to adjust the sail of our own boat. Sometimes the deepest act of love is not to rescue, it is to remain present without interrupting a journey that only they can live. Perhaps the greatest act of love is listening, love is listening! We cannot calm another person's sea; we can only learn to meet it without losing our own.

As I continued through conversations with my supervisors, my own self-work, counselling, Gestalt, meditation, training, and countless encounters with people, those three words slowly began changing for me. I realised that acceptance had very little to do with saying, "I accept you," or "I accept the world." It became something much simpler and much closer. It was my willingness to notice and stay with what another person's story awakened within me. There was an ease in that. I no longer felt the need to defend a position, manage an impression, or respond from familiar patterns. I could simply be present. From there, allowance also began to change. It became the willingness to let another person explore their own life, their choices, and the fullness of their experience without needing them to become different for my comfort. Somewhere in the midst of this, non-interference also began making sense, as a quality of presence from which everything else seemed to emerge. Even today, I am not sure where acceptance ends, allowance begins, or where non-interference stands apart. Perhaps I never will. I only know that the more I experience them, the less interested I become in defining them, and the more they begin to feel like different expressions of the same human presence.

Judy was sharing a short discourse by Thich Nhat Hanh when she said, "The next Buddha will be a community." It reminded me of the African philosophy of Ubuntu; "A person is a person through other persons." Human beings have perhaps always become human in the presence of other human beings. Long before we belonged to nations, institutions or political identities, we belonged to a commune. We belonged to a village, a tribe, a sangha, a circle around a fire, a family that knew our stories. That was our first field. I find myself appreciating how essential that field is. When we step away from our communities, we slowly hand over our attention, our fears and our belonging to the algorithm. Perhaps that is why Sangha continues to matter so deeply to me. The world will continue to surprise us with uncertainty and impermanence. Every tradition, in its own language, has spoken about times like these. Some called it Kaliyuga, others spoke of the end of an age, the dark night, or seasons of great testing. Ani Pema’s words continue to navigate my world. "You cannot always change the world, but if you are open to the world... ‘as it is’..." she continued, "That is where the best human qualities emerge." Viktor Frankl met with it in a concentration camp. Immaculée Ilibagiza in her hiding during the Rwandan genocide. Nelson Mandela during his long long prison years. Etty Hillesum wrote about it from the midst of the Holocaust. Venerable Master Hsing Yun continued teaching through illness and adversity. Abdul Sattar Edhi built a lifetime of service in the middle of poverty and human suffering. Their stories are remarkably different, yet so aligned with the philosophy of ‘being open to the world... as it is…”. 

You cannot always change the world, but if you are open to the world... ‘as it is’...

That is where the best human qualities emerge.

- Ani Pema