The scene: a drive-through line. The cars are bumper-to-bumper. An SUV pulls up to the billboard menu, and the driver rolls down his window, but he can’t quite get his mouth close enough to the microphone to order. Frustrated, he leans on his horn to get the car in front of him to move forward. But the car in front is bumper-to-bumper with the one in front of him and can’t move.
Now angry, the SUV driver leans out his window and yells an insult. At that, the driver in front of the SUV—who happens to be a martial arts instructor—gets angry too. His temper flares, his mind races with fantasies of revenge on the world’s rude people, testosterone and adrenaline flood his body, and the world shrinks to a small orbit of rage. He has the impulse to leap from his car, reach into the SUV, and send that rude driver to the dentist.
Then this martial arts teacher glances in his rearview mirror and sees the SUV driver’s face contorted with rage. He looks at his own face: the same mask of anger. He has second thoughts and his mind goes to his t’ai chi training on maintaining equilibrium in all situations.
At that moment the car in front of him drives off, opening the way for the instructor to get to the pick-up window. As the cashier hands him his coffee, he says, “I’d like to pay for the guy behind me, the one in the SUV.”
The guy in the SUV has ordered breakfast for five. The instructor pays for them all and feels pretty good as he drives away.
Then the SUV driver passes on the favor. He pays for the order of the car behind him. And for hours afterward, through a long chain of drive-up orders, driver after driver passes the favor back to the car behind. Not one person takes selfish advantage, accepting the gift but not paying for the next person. That act of kindness ripples through the day.
Consider what triggered that continuous wave of good heartedness: an intentional mode shift. In an act of inner martial art, that t’ai chi instructor absorbed the anger and intentionally transmuted it into kindness. The instructor, Arthur Rosenfeld, later called that alchemy an “act of consciousness.” Maintaining balance in life is all-important—the point of meditation, breath work, and t’ai chi training. These mental disciplines can be immediate ways to join up and connect with the secure mode.
The moment we start to lose our tempers, we are faced with three doors. Number One: meet force with force and start a fight—Rosenfeld’s immediate impulse. Number Two: give in to the other guy’s anger and ask for forgiveness. Rosenfeld chose Number Three: a middle way, which differs in each situation, but restores everyone to a better state. As he says, “The trick is to figure out what that better way is.”
In a cool, calm, and collected mode we are more ready to respond to life’s honking horns; our better modes are a gift to everyone around us. Because modes, like moods, are contagious, our inner state can sway that of the people we are with.
The sum total of this interpersonal exchange can determine the overall mode of a group. As with the t’ai chi instructor, someone who can keep inner equilibrium even while others are losing it can make all the difference in restoring an off-kilter group to a more balanced mode of being.
The perceptual biases of the toxic modes at an individual level can be shared by a group. We can see these invisible forces at work not just within ourselves and our relationships, but also in our families and communities, our relationship to the earth, and globally, in how nations interact. The principles that heal at the relationship level are also helpful, along with other dedicated efforts, at the collective level.
A Universal Language
When I was in Kyoto taking some lessons at a Japanese tea ceremony school, one Saturday morning I went to explore a local outdoor market where artisans display their wares. An elderly Japanese man had put out a blanket on which there were some tea bowls.
A beautiful antique tea bowl caught my eye. I held the bowl gently, appreciating its character: wabi, as the Japanese say—seasoned with age.
The bowl used in a tea ceremony is supposed to have a story behind it. I wanted to ask this fellow about his bowl, but he clearly spoke no English, and except for a few tea phrases I knew no Japanese. I tried to motion to him what I wanted, drawing a bit on my training in kathak, the Indian storytelling dance form, making imaginative movements that I hoped would communicate my curiosity about the bowl’s background. He didn’t have a clue what I was trying to ask, but he seemed amused by my antics.
Then I realized that this was the story. I would tell about this moment when I served someone Japanese macha tea in that bowl. Just as there’s a story behind every tea bowl, if you listen closely everyone has a unique story to tell.
New York City has always embraced a wide variety of cultures, and growing up in Manhattan I got used to meeting people from all over the world. I had best friends who were Greek, Korean, Chinese, Spanish, Norwegian, Jamaican, and French. I’ve always loved to travel to different countries when I could and to learn traditional arts from many cultures, such as Japanese tea ceremony, Indian classical dance, and international folk dances, as well as the meditative practices and philosophies I’ve studied from Burma, Thailand, Tibet, and India.
In my sunroom at home I have a basket of small dolls from around the world. I playfully tell people that they all get along even though they live in the same basket. Visitors of all ages have played with those dolls, putting costumes from one part of the world on a doll from another: the Indian Barbie lends her sari to the Danish girl; the Chinese dancer tries on the Tibetan chuba; the Ecuadorean family takes care of an Eskimo baby. It’s all in the spirit of play—but, if you think about it, there’s a larger meaning. Kindness is a universal language. Leaving behind our habitual cultural assumptions is a connective force that can help melt barriers.
When someone asks me where I’m from, I often feel like I have a little bit of all these cultures infused in my being. That’s partly why I feel so perplexed when nationalities are filled with so much hatred toward one another that their conflict leads them to go to war.
Perhaps it’s naïve to assume that there should be a way to overcome such differences, but we can at least try to heal divides. I feel that so much conflict is due to a lack of empathy and communication. Plus, we all perceive and interpret things so differently. Perhaps we can consider finding a skillful compassion, a wise approach to mutual understanding even in the face of disagreements.
There was a poignant moment at the airport in London. At a currency exchange booth there was a man who had just arrived from an Eastern European country, one that had had Nazi concentration camps during World War II. He told the exchange clerk, “Please visit my country. It’s so different than it was at that time. The younger generation doesn’t have any of those feelings that the people did who lived during that time.”
What is it that solidifies the past and carries resentments from long ago into the present? It’s helpful to remember that things change. People who live with the burden of previous negative actions that their countries had engaged in can be quite different. That’s worth reflecting on in any relationship.
From Them to Us
An ominous message reached Dr. A. T. Ariyaratne, founder of the Sarvodaya Movement, a grassroots community-development organization in Sri Lanka. His movement was becoming too popular. It was now threatening powerful parties in the small nation’s elite.
Word came to Dr. Ari (as he’s popularly known) that there was a plot to assassinate him. An underworld boss named Choppe Aiyah had been paid to kill him at a lecture Ari was scheduled to give at a Buddhist center.1 Tipped off, Ari went to the home of Choppe—nicknamed “the king of killers”—and presented himself to the crime boss.
“Choppe Aiyah,” Ari calmly announced as he gazed into the eyes of the surprised thug, “I am Ariyaratne, whom you are planning to kill. Please do not desecrate that sacred Buddhist seat of learning with the blood of a beggar like me. Kill me here instantly.”
Shocked, Choppe replied, “I cannot kill you.” From that time on, I’ve heard, Choppe supported Sarvodaya and became one of Ari’s admirers, calling him a respectful “Our Sir.”
That courageous tactic of direct, nonviolent confrontation epitomizes the strategy Dr. Ari has taken from his model, Mahatma Gandhi. The very name of Dr. Ari’s movement, Sarvodaya, says it well: in Sanskrit, the root sarvo means “all” or “embracing everything,” and udaya means “awakening.” The movement awakens its members to that open embrace in many ways.
Even during the ferocious Sri Lankan civil war, which pitted Buddhist Sinhalese against Hindu Tamils, people lived in peace with one another in Sarvodaya villages—not just Hindus and Buddhists, but also Christians and Muslims, coexisting in friendship and as neighbors working together for common goals.
“We have to give the power back to the people,” Dr. Ari says, in the spirit of movements from the Arab Spring to the Occupy movement. Sarvodaya brings everyone together to provide health care, to put in water pumps, and to build roads and housing for villages that otherwise would lack these necessities. “Power should be placed at the village level,” he says. “People should be able to govern their own affairs.”
From a mode perspective, this work means establishing a shared secure base, both individually and collectively: a safe space where people who otherwise might be enemies can join up as “we” rather than as “us” and ”them.” “When selfishness dissolves,” he says, “‘us’ and ‘them’ evaporate.”
When I met with Dr. Ari at the home of my friend Jacalyn Bennett, a longtime student of his and supporter of Sarvodaya, he emphasized the link between individual and collective transformation. “The root causes of suffering are greed, ill will, and ignorance. Organized greed widens the income gap between rich and poor, multiplies pollution, and a host of other troubles. Organized anger becomes hatred and violence, ending in war.
“But we cannot address only one problem independently. Everything is interrelated. We need dialogue rather than force, and internal disarmament to create outer disarmament. Peace is more than not fighting.”
Listening to Dr. Ari, I thought of how often the mind solidifies around “us” versus “them.” Toxic modes can be shared.
The Sarvodaya Movement blends Gandhi’s social principles with Buddhist philosophy, focusing on rural development and self-sufficiency. But the crucial factor is cultivation of what Dr. Ari calls “self-reliant minds.”
Meditation is one dimension of the movement. I heard Dr. Ari tell a group of American social activists, “Gandhi was trying to transform himself, transform his mind. If one individual is awakened, then the family, the village, the nation, the whole world can awaken.
“Heal society through nonviolent direct action,” says Ari. “Transform politics and economics. Heal the environment. For this, we first need to heal the mind, to transform our thinking. Each moment is an opportunity to be mindful of thought, of speech, of action—with less greed, less hatred, less delusion.”
In the series of conversations I had with Dr. Ari I was struck by the magnitude of the transformational power of his work. At the heart of his method is freeing the mind from the modes of greed, hatred, and delusion, the root causes of suffering (as we saw in chapter 3), while encouraging the secure mode through meditation, along with encouraging the causes of happiness, wisdom, and compassion—and of course social action. As he says, “This is how to heal our world.”
Collective Mode Work
There are hope-inspiring activists around the world who are, essentially, creating a collective secure base. These shared safe zones of the mind allow the crucial shift from the adversarial mode of “us and them” to the collaborative mode of “we.”
That dynamic underlies the work of social psychologist Ervin Staub. As a child in Budapest, Staub was saved from the Nazis by the kind intervention of the Swedish ambassador to Hungary, Raoul Wallenberg. Wallenberg granted Swedish passports to tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews and sheltered them in buildings declared Swedish territory. This Swedish umbrella prevented the Nazis from arresting them—and so rescued them from the death camps.
Staub has dedicated his career as a social psychologist to understanding the roots of evil and how to overcome it.2 The seeds of an us-and-them mode, Staub finds, begin with a group’s pride feeling wounded; behind the anger is an underlying feeling of vulnerability.
That fits with Aaron Beck’s analysis: a sense of being wronged triggers hurt and shame, which quickly turns to anger and hostility, and then to retaliation at the “enemy.” The us-and-them mode, he says, reflects “primal thinking,” cognitive residue from our ancient past when predators, like marauding humans, were a threat to our lives. While it once may have paid to have a friend-or-foe, predator-or-prey instant reflex, today that either–or thinking gets us in trouble. This cognitive bias can lead a group to perceive misunderstandings or mild challenges as serious offenses, which then leads to needless friction.
Just as in dealing with the predator-like mode within individuals, at the collective level there’s also an opportunity to intervene by altering the way people perceive themselves, their group, or their core beliefs. We need to become more aware of the rigid thinking that gains control of our minds when we feel threatened and resist the tendency to judge people in absolute categories, particularly as “the enemy.”
Predator-like entitlement means people lack empathy for those they are trying to control; personalizing the other group by recognizing their common humanity, even having compassionate concern, might pierce the idea of “them” and reach the awakened part of “us.”
Such an approach is being used today in Rwanda, a decade after the ferocious tribal bloodshed between the Hutus and the Tutsis, which took a million lives. Ervin Staub is working together with people from both tribes on a hugely popular radio soap opera, which spreads the message of intertribal cooperation and urges people to speak up to oppose hate speech.
When I met with Staub, he explained that he was using the soap opera to create what he calls “active bystanders”: witnesses to someone being harmed who, instead of being passive (and therefore seeming to approve), do something to oppose the harm—like Wallenberg. Whether opposing a schoolyard bully or an act of bias, active bystanders have the potential power to put a stop to it.
It might be asking other bystanders, “Isn’t there something wrong going on here? Shouldn’t we do something?” and then finding an action appropriate to the situation. Otherwise the collective norm of just letting the harm be done strengthens.
An active bystander influences other bystanders to act too, even if just to voice their concerns and explore alternatives, which can change the social equation. What had appeared outwardly to be okay with everyone (though privately it was not) no longer is condoned. But if there is the potential for violence, bystanders need to act in a way that does not put them at risk. Which led me to ask Staub, “How can active bystanders protect themselves?”
“Good question,” he said. “That’s why I encourage early prevention.” The longer the harm has been going on and the more intense it becomes, the harder it is to reverse direction, he’s found. So his research has focused on detecting early signs, like unjustly blaming a group for problems, and “finding effective ways to intervene at the early stages.”
That, I think, seems exactly parallel to mode work: being aware of the mode in its early stages and finding ways to intervene. That’s one way the mode perspective might help in the social dimension: recognizing these patterns in people’s minds before they lead to actions.
Seeing the parallel to predator-like, narcissistic attitudes in modes, I said to Staub, “Sounds just like when people who are entitled have no empathy and blame others for their problems—they rarely see their own faults. They don’t follow the rules or take responsibility for their actions—and there’s often an underlying sense of worthlessness behind that.”
“It’s the same in groups,” he said.
Dr. Paula Green founded a graduate program in conflict transformation, based on her years of work in peace-building. Peace-building focuses on compassion and helps each side find common ground so that they can see each other as human beings just like themselves, building a secure base they can share.
Her group, the Karuna Center for Peacebuilding, held conflict-resolution sessions in Rwanda as well as with different factions in the long-simmering civil war in the Balkans. In the dialogue circles with Bosnian and Serbian women, at first no one would even look in each other’s eyes.
U Vivekananda, a German-born Theravadan monk living in Nepal (in Lumbini, Buddha’s birthplace), has combined Buddhist principles with conflict resolution to settle disputes that were dividing that community. He attended a workshop that Paula Green was giving in Nepal. Afterward he reported applying those methods successfully with owners of brick factories whose emissions were eroding a World Heritage Site. He found dialogue through the differences and a remedy that worked for all parties.
U Vivekananda was telling me how Buddhist principles for transforming the mind have been very helpful in this environmental activism. Effort, patience, insight, concentration, and equanimity, to name a few, are needed to accomplish change at the societal level. Then we explored some outside-the-box insights, such as instead of just relying on official agencies to make the needed change, to look into buying from factories that make green bricks by drying them in the sun instead of using furnaces that pollute.
“If everyone did something to help the environment,” as César Chávez once said, “we could really turn things around.”
In psychotherapy, identifying patterns releases some of the conflict: we can recognize a pattern—rather than a person—as the cause. Realizing that there are two of us creating a pattern helps us see each other’s humanity.
Inner work parallels intergroup work; joining up at the collective level might add a helpful dimension to peacemaking. As I’ve spoken with such peacemakers, I’ve seen how the mode perspective can provide a clarifying conceptual framework that can help inform their work.
From our secure mode we increasingly have the confidence and inner connection that lets us be more attentive to the needs of others. We have an inner platform for working toward changes that benefit everyone. A collective secure base can be a helpful support from which to act together.
There’s a step beyond: we can target the root causes of a conflict in order to be able to find apt solutions. This means recognizing that adversaries are so often caught in the same history, within a similar web of bitter antagonism, expressing similar fears and acting on the same “ill will, acquisitiveness, and essential blindness,” as one Buddhist activist put it.3
If we aren’t aware of the underlying modes, we may resolve the issue at hand, but these symptoms are likely to come back over and over again.
Melting Us and Them
Randy’s family hails from Eastern Europe, though he lives in a Hispanic neighborhood in Brooklyn these days. Blond and blue-eyed, he spent the first ten years of his life on the streets of Buenos Aires then moved to an inner-city neighborhood in Baltimore. So he speaks Spanish like a native and English like one too. Randy’s accidental mix of heritages—European, American inner-city, and Hispanic—lets him belie easy stereotypes.
He likes to join pick-up soccer games in Brooklyn’s city parks. One day he was playing with some Hispanic guys he’d never met before. As was natural for him, whenever he spoke to one of them during the game, he’d casually speak in Spanish. But they always replied to him in English. Somehow it didn’t compute that this tall, blue-eyed blond was Hispanic.
At one point after Randy had once again said something in Spanish, one of the guys stopped suddenly and said in a tone of disbelief, “You speak Spanish?”
Randy replied, in Spanish, “I’ve been speaking to you in Spanish for the last half hour.”
Then the other guy said to him in Spanish, “I thought you were a gringo,” and melted into a wide smile.
That melt signified a shift from a subtle us-and-them attitude to a collective “we.” As Randy put it, “The reason I like to do that is to break through their stereotypes and assumptions. They realize, He looks like a gringo but he feels like one of us.”
“When we extend our own ego to the whole group,” Aaron Beck observes, “and we start to think our group is right while the other group is wrong—and we’re better than them—it leads to seeing us as all good or right and them as all bad or wrong. Pretty soon we start to dehumanize them—they’re not real people anymore.”
As we lose empathy, the “others” aren’t seen as having human feelings or human rights. In this toxic collective mode, people in a group stop taking in information about the others in an open way and instead filter perceptions through the distortions of their shared skewed lens.
The need to break through our stereotypes seems even more imperative when it comes to the many intergroup conflicts around the world. Arabs and Israelis, Hutus and Tutsis, Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants, Serbs and Croats—when all such distinctions between people are amplified by a collective mode of fear and hatred, the results are explosive.
The gap that occurs between two opposing groups—the breakdown of trust, the hardening of attitudes, the obstacles to mutual empathy, the solidifying of “us” and “them,” the bitterness and negativity toward the other group—all these point to the root causes of conflict. It’s as though each group, aimed at the other, falls into a grand-scale version of the punitive extreme of the aversive mode.
Collaboration
Yet the sort of communication and mutual understanding that might heal such fierce divides is more likely when people come together with the intention of working toward a shared secure mode. The mode principles for individuals and relationships can also be applied to the collective sphere, from communities to nations, and particularly to intergroup relationships.
Phillip Shaver’s research with Mario Mikulincer, an Israeli psychologist, has found that when we prime our secure base, our biases evaporate and we become more tolerant. This makes a shared secure base the optimal space for working together across an us-and-them divide.4
So a first step in resolving any intergroup conflict might be to recognize modes that separate us and turn toward those that connect. “We are willing to extend our hand,” as Barack Obama once said, “if you are willing to unclench your fist.”5
Aaron Wolf, a hydrologist at Oregon State University, has used his expertise in the ecology of water systems to bring together people who are otherwise antagonistic toward each other. He’s worked in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Yugoslavia. Because these sometime adversaries share common concerns about something vital to their lives—the management of a water table or a river system—they are willing to talk, he finds.
But before he gets into the details of water management with them, he first asks everyone to express the symbolic, higher meaning of water in their culture and religion. He takes them all to a shared plane of understanding so they don’t start with their disagreements but with a common bond. That discussion very likely primes the positive modes of everyone in the room. He finds that the rest of the negotiations are more likely to go well after that.
Also, he often shows two maps—one of the countries involved and their political borders, the other of the same territory defined only by water and land. The second map opens eyes—and hearts. Instead of focusing on what divides them, they realize what unites them.
“We go through life with our own needs and expectations,” which form our boundaries, Wolf observes.6 If we can draw a new map of our world we can include the needs and wants of the entire community.
This shared secure mode fosters collaboration, as opposed to the usual geopolitical conflict mode, common worldwide, in which a government dams the headwaters of a river or diverts it with canals, depriving everyone downstream of desperately needed water. In some instances this could mean choking off life-supporting water—a striking example of the ways predatory control can sometimes be so destructive.
A counselor from Kuwait, who uses some of my principles and practices in her work, came to a workshop. We talked about the wars in her part of the world. “It’s governments that are in conflict,” she said, “not the people.”
When I have the opportunity to give workshops in different countries it’s always refreshing to meet in that authentic, secure base connection with others who on the surface might seem different from myself. People all around the world share the same emotions, bear the same hardships, and essentially want similar things. I’m always pleasantly surprised at how happy people are to put down the burden of their group identity. The more people understand each other’s perspective—even if they don’t agree—the less they are likely to fight.
From afar it’s all too easy to fall into simple stereotypes, but if our understanding stops there, we miss the more subtle truths that an attunement to local politics and social realities might bring. We miss the opportunity for open understanding, which fosters true empathy—where the other feels felt and understood—and the chance to build a shared secure base with mutual cooperation.
Us
A robin and her mate nested in the tree that shades our deck, which is one of my favorite places to spend time at home. Their nest was perched on a forked branch near a sliding door that gives me access to the deck. That tree was perfect for a cozy robin’s nest; the canopy of leaves protected it from being seen from above.
Soon the nest was filled with eggs, and the robin spent hours sitting on them. When noises disturbed her peace, she would fly up and away from the nest, perhaps to distract predators. I adapted to sharing the space with this new flock, and I tried to use a more distant door or go through the patio to the deck more often so as not to frighten them.
It seemed as if the robin flock accommodated us as well; even with her newly hatched chicks she went busily about, flying off for food to bring back to her babies’ perpetually uplifted beaks.
One day a friend walked out on the deck unaware of the presence of the hatchlings in their nest. The robin shrieked, a sound I had never heard from her. When I mentioned this to my friend, who was knowledgeable about animals in the natural world, she said, “Oh, it’s because she doesn’t know me. That explains why she shrieked.”
Finally one morning I saw the most robust chick hopping around the branches of the tree, seemingly testing its wings for flight. A few days later I noticed that all the babies had vacated the nest. Then the next morning I saw the lone mother robin sitting on the railing of the deck for a long time. She would sometimes look up at her empty nest, and then gaze off in the distance. I, too, felt their absence. Even though now I could come and go freely and spend more time sitting under that tree on the deck, I missed their presence and watching their activities—and even accommodating their needs.
For that short, sweet time while the nest was full, the robins and I had formed a collective secure base, a group of beings who felt serene and safe together and who (at least speaking for myself) enjoyed each other’s company. We had learned to accommodate one another, accept our mutual presence, and sense what was needed.
A secure mode–based social system would be life-enriching, much like bees and flowers in a symbiotic relationship: as bees get nectar from the flowers, they pollinate them. Meeting everyone’s needs—physical, emotional, and spiritual—is what motivates people in such a system.
What does a “we” look like? It’s as though we were a herd or tribe, a group that cares for its members. Our relationships are interdependent, not competitive, and not predator–prey, where privileged members impose their will.
My stepson Gov and daughter-in-law Erica, who live in a New England village, once got a chilling message on their town’s emergency alert system, a reverse 911 phone call. An automated voice said, “A child is missing. This is not a test …” and went on to say where the child had last been seen, what he’d been wearing, and what to do.
Cameron, just seven years old, had wandered away from where he and his father had been building a playhouse in the woods behind their house. It was ten minutes before his father had noticed Cameron had disappeared: just as night was falling, he called out for his son and he searched the wooded ridges, but the boy was nowhere to be found. It was the night before Thanksgiving and temperatures were going to dip into the twenties.
The father’s call to 911 had brought out the local police, the state troopers, and the volunteer fire department. Soon just about everyone in this small town was mobilized. The local grammar school became search headquarters. My daughter-in-law went by there at about midnight to drop off spaghetti and brownies for the searchers. Several volunteers kept the food and coffee flowing through the night. As more villagers got word, more food kept arriving. Even the county jail donated 200 sandwiches.
My stepson went over to join a search party. Hundreds of volunteers had gathered to scour the treacherous forest terrain, with its craggy ledges and sheer drop-offs. The search continued throughout the night, with helicopters, all-terrain vehicles, and search dogs.
Just after the break of dawn on Thanksgiving morning, two locals who knew the woods well discovered Cameron, who had weathered seventeen hours in twenty-degree weather. Cameron spent a day in the hospital, but then was sent home, safe and healthy.
One volunteer who had been out searching all night said that he was probably going to sleep through his family’s Thanksgiving gathering, adding, “My Thanksgiving was finding this child. That’s enough of a Thanksgiving for me.”
“This was a total village effort,” as the town’s police chief put it. “That’s the beauty of a community.”