Practical Spirituality: On Having an Opponent or Enemy
I like to think of myself as a nice guy, but then again I’m not in much of a position to judge. One thing for certain is that I don’t court conflict for the shear joy of it, and I have more or less avoided creating any avowed enemies.
Until recently, that is. As always, the specifics aren’t important, but an organization I represent found itself under attack a while ago. Legal battles and all the rest of it. Surprisingly, I found myself with an enemy.
Why I don’t want any enemies boils down to one basic reason: it takes up too much energy and too much time. You have to strategize, plan, and sometimes even worry when you have enemies. You never know what they might do. Dealing with an enemy thus takes up a lot of time that might better be spent doing creative projects, meditating, and simply enjoying life.
Ah, but our human incarnation is not solely about doing what we enjoy, even when our ambitions are lofty (which they aren’t always). The appearance of an opponent or enemy is one of the things we occasionally have to deal with in this go-round. You’re not obligated to respond in any one particular way to the appearance of an opponent, but you have to decide how you will respond, and you have to deal with the implied consequences.
Many conflict-avoiders will simply give in and let the opponent have their way. There is nearly endless support for this if you travel in spiritual circles, where the emphasis is on not getting embroiled in worldly contests. If you are indeed completely immersed in spiritual pursuits, then this may well be the path for you. However, for many of us, it’s entirely possible that you’d really just be finding a convenient reason to avoid the unpleasantness of conflict. “This is happening to me because it’s my karma,” may be true, but that doesn’t mean that sitting still with a target on your back is the necessarily best way to remedy the karmic situation.
When you fail to respond to an attack (and I’m assuming here that you’re not the attacker) you could wind up losing something of value to you, whether that something is personal, financial, or in any other domain. And in losing that something, you may wind up consciously or unconsciously feeling bad about yourself. Others can help you to feel bad when they chime in their opinions, too. Additionally, it may not be just you that suffers: it could be your family, neighborhood, business (and all the people that depend on it), and so on.
Okay, let’s say you decide to respond to a challenge. It’s going to embroil you in a conflict that will take up time and perhaps other resources. At the end of the day you might still lose. Plus, despite the limits you might try to place on your response, it’s likely that your defense will inflict a certain amount of harm on your attacker, and there’s also the possibility of collateral damage: will that generate some kind of bad karma for you?
Like most human dilemmas, there is no obvious answer, and no entirely pain-free and guiltless solution. So far, I have used two strategies to deal with the situation.
The first has been to respond as strongly as possible to the attacks. I represented the organization as best as I could in the initial arbitration, and hired lawyers for subsequent court cases. In a prior article, I expressed my doubts about the moral advice Krishna gives Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita, but I felt that it was the better move to participate and try to win (we’ve been very successful, by the way).
The second strategy has been to practice loving-kindness towards my enemy. This may sound a little counterintuitive, or it may sound like New Age bullshit, but believe me, it’s a very effective process.
Now, it’s a little hard to start generating loving-kindness or compassion towards someone who means you harm. Fortunately, I have a technique that I learned in a class with Buddhist teacher Robert Thurman many years ago. I start by generating loving-kindness towards those people who are close to me, then go on to neutral people, and, after a while, I start to tackle the various tough cases. Sometimes, it’s easier to start with a collective baddie, and then move on to folks with whom I have a personal gripe.
I invoke what I call the compassion-logic. It goes like this: Imagine you want to be perfectly happy. Perfectly. It stands to reason that you’re going to need to make others happy, too. Sure, you can be very happy if there’s misery somewhere (we do it all the time), but you couldn’t be perfectly happy. So, you have to wish for all your loved ones to be happy. But if you want to be perfectly happy, you also have to wish for all the folks you are neutral about to be happy. Finally, you couldn’t be perfectly happy if some asshole is stinking up the Cosmos with his unhappiness, and so you have to wish for him to be happy, too. Otherwise, his unhappiness would be like a pebble in your shoe. In this ideal situation, any unhappiness anywhere would detract from the perfectness you are seeking.
Does it work? That depends on how you measure.
I can assure you that with practice and patience, it is indeed possible to generate loving-kindness towards your enemy. One might have to send out rainbow light rays of compassion for a pretty long time, but eventually they get there. Sending good vibes to people close to me and neutral folks helps to soften me up and makes it a great deal easier — I’m in a pretty good mood by the time I get to the difficult people and outright enemies. So, yes, it works situationally.
Does it have a lasting effect? Well, not at full power. I can still get plenty upset at the situation and the opposing party. But either time has somewhat inured me to the matter or the meditation has raised the threshold of irritation, so I tend to be less upset even long after the loving-kindness meditation.
Now, there’s another question that might be lurking in some minds, and that is whether it helps to bring about a better outcome. For example, does my enemy seem less antagonistic? That’s kind of a back-door way of fighting, sending light rays of love to in effect disarm your opponent. It hasn’t happened for the Dalai Lama with China, and thus far it hasn’t had that effect for me, either.
But I was neither intending or expecting it to change my opponent’s disposition towards me (although I would have been happy if it had). I’ve been doing the loving-kindness meditation on this situation periodically for about a year, and it’s had a positive effect on me. That’s what I wanted.
My opponent? Well, fuck him! ;)