We Have a Choice
This post is the second of this month’s series on Relational Multiplier Effect.
Relational Dhamma is encompassing: together, we apply the Buddha’s teachings to understand relationships and our relational nature. We discern the dynamics depicted in the original texts, such as spiritual friendship; sangha or community; human morality and decency; and a realization of the entire path of practice, including meditation that fosters calm and insight.
This is the Dhamma as it naturally is: saturated with human relatedness.
Relational Dhamma is a corrective to the overly individualized, perhaps even self-encapsulated, view of modern society. Especially in the West, we tend to see both suffering and liberation as individual projects. This overly interior view omits a vital truth: we exist within webs of relationship.
Relational Dhamma offers a corrective. Through interpersonal and social practices and Insight Dialogue in particular, we directly explore our intrinsic relatedness. We ask:
What’s really going on here?
Why do relational practices feel so powerful?
We come to see that we need a balanced Dhamma, wise about our individual interior experience, wise about how to live in this complex world, and wise about our relational nature.
Whether as a corrective or simply to deepen our understanding, it is helpful to develop a clearer sense of our relatedness and its role in our path. The root of it is this: we are sensitive beings and have a particular sensitivity to other humans. In human contact, our sensitivity creates a foundational dynamic: the relational multiplier effect.
When another person enters our field of awareness, our mutual sensitivity is awakened. In real time, whether face-to-face or through technology, social contact sets off complex and potentially reactive conditions.
Our bodies, emotions, and thoughts activate.
Feedback loops form between two or more people.
These loops accelerate, amplify, and sustain whatever is present, whether wholesome or unwholesome.
Relational contact can amplify suffering or meditative qualities, yielding delusion or insight. Aversion can grow into war. Hate can turn into abuse. Delusion can harden into injustice. Or...interpersonal contact can grow into peace. Love can turn into care. Understanding can soften into justice.
The Buddha put it succinctly: “I teach suffering and the end of suffering.”
If we recall the problem of humanity—that we suffer needlessly and we amplify, accelerate, sustain that suffering—we come to recognize that it doesn’t have to be this way. In a collective “Wow!” we see: there will always be aging, illness, and death. There will always be loneliness and loss. As we come to understand the relational multiplier, we realize our paths don’t have to go the way of needless suffering.
We have a choice.
More on the relational multiplier next week.
This post draws from an unpublished Dharma talk on the Relational Multiplier that Gregory Kramer offered on January 22, 2024.
I'm glad something landed, Tina. And we continue...
thank you, Greg!