A sketch on the nature of power

The best position in any negotiation is to deeply and genuinely want the thing, but to also have the ability to immediately get up and walk away.

As I go deeper into Vajrayana Buddhism, specifically Dzogchen, I’ve found myself reflecting on the role of power. Evolving Ground’s Opening Awareness practice has profoundly impacted me. Finding more perceptions in my awareness has helped me notice a number of self-deceptive patterns, mostly around my desire for control and my aversion to responsibility. In the last few weeks, I’ve noticed how they intertwine with a discomfort in being powerful and having power, especially over other people.

Let’s make a distinction between being powerful and having power. A distinction inspired by To Have or To Be by Erich Fromm. “Power” is a fairly broad term that means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. Within this context, it means the ability to find possibilities within one’s field of awareness, and have the energy to act on them. The more viable actions that one finds in a given moment, the more power that they have in that moment. To be powerful is to participate in the world over an arc of time such that they are consistently able to have power. We can judge whether we have power within the context of a moment. But it’s impossible to judge if our being is powerful without looking across an arc of time.

What’s the relationship between having power and being powerful? Like many Having/Being relationships, it’s best captured by cyclic causation. It’s tempting to believe that naively and intentionally chasing the having of more power leads to being more powerful. That might work in the short term. But what’s likely happening “under the hood” is that the person is making themselves increasingly susceptible to bullshit. Attempting to intentionally maximize power habituates the increased relevance of power-seeking options that aren’t readily available to those participating in consensus perceptions. So in the short term, the person seems to become more powerful and it “feels” adaptive. However, the same attachment to having power gradually closes that person’s awareness to second, third and nth order effects. That is, it closes that person’s awareness to the broader consequences of past actions. These cyclic patterns potentially create their own self-organizing social dynamics. As alluded to in my other post, the self-organizing social dynamics that one participates in can shape one’s literal perceptions. Living long enough through this myopic power-seeking can increasingly distort subjective reality and take a toll on the individual.

Often, we’re best served by being powerful over a span of time, rather than having power at any given moment in time. However, the two reciprocally inform each other. So it’s easy to get confused about what often serves us.

It seems that the “sustainable” path to power is to give it away, but in proper proportion. Successfully creating a curriculum to give away all “excess” power loosens one’s attachment to options that insecurely seek to having more power. That is, it takes less energy in the moment to liberate one’s awareness from a narrative oriented towards maladaptively having more power. This in turn unveils a greater degree of adaptive viable actions, which in turn makes it easier to give away any moment’s excess power, and so on evolving in a reciprocal process of cyclic causation. Giving away too much power beyond one’s ability to bear can engender its own unhelpful dynamics. For example, apathy, repression and the avoidance of responsibility.

This framing provides a partial account of why society’s halls of power seem to be full of seemingly antisocial people. Their antisocial bias affords them the ability to see more viable actions than those participating in shared norms or consensus perceptions. Participating outside of consensus perceptions doesn’t come without a cost. If one’s subjective reality is too malleable and lacks appropriate error correction, it may maladaptively fall outside consensus perception.

Similarly, this framing provides a partial account for why so many spiritual traditions emphasize a student/teacher model. And why so many of these relationships go off the rails. A teacher can help a student grow by expanding their range of what they thought possible. That is, by acting outside the student’s consensus perceptions. To be effective, the teacher must have power over the student within the relevant domain. A “bad” teacher’s maladaptive power-seeking strategy might often involve providing some power to the student. From the student’s perspective, the teacher is “good” because their advice affords them the ability to be more powerful. This is why it’s so hard for a student to separate “good” teachers from “bad” ones. In contrast to learning something narrow like weightlifting, mathematics or cooking, “spirituality” as a domain seems to encompass all of life. This makes the risks and opportunities of delegating power to a teacher even greater.

Relatedly, perhaps this points to one of the marks of a “good” teacher. To what extent are they orienting themselves to become helpfully “irrelevant” to the student, as rapidly as possible? That is, to make it viable for the student to view the teacher as a peer. And to encourage the student to seek the next teacher for their development?

The best position in any negotiation is to deeply and genuinely want the thing, but to be uninvolved enough to walk away without hesitation when it’s clearly become maladaptive. This seems to also be true for the perceptions in our field of awareness. I’m reminded of a Tibetan Buddhist metaphor for attachment. Being “too involved” with one’s perceptions is like eating delicious honey off a razor blade. The optimal strategy is to savor every single lick. But to not get so lost in it that one’s tongue gets cut. Many forms of spiritual practice use material renunciation to engender such an attitude towards life. More worldly practices (e.g. householder Vajrayana) seem to provide more abstract conceptualizations of renunciation involving participation with the world.