I was probably the stemlordiest person at this retreat. Certainly the only person who identified as being in a subculture loosely oriented around objective truth. I liked everyone else – there was a philosophy camp vibe I miss from college. Fairly quick camaraderie and happiness.
Conversation
At one point, in the Q&A section after a lecture on Zen Buddhism, people were asking the organizer questions. There was something odd about most of these questions – they were too easy. Nothing that really got at the strangeness and inconsistency of what was being explained.
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(And of course it was strange stuff – it's Zen!)
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And I asked a followup question about something he’d said. (It’s not as interesting without the context, but it was something like:
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“Why do you say it's bad to stop meditating because you decided during meditation to stop, but good to stop meditating because it's the end time set by the you who put the event in your GCal? Is there a principled distinction between these two ego instances?”)
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His answer didn't satisfy me. And the interesting thing: I backed off. Not in a “hmph, I’ll drop it” way, but with an apologetic smile, as if I were the fool for having pressed him. The feeling that drove that expression was anxiety that I was not allowing him to save face.
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I had not realized, until I asked that question and backed off from it, that I WANTED him to save face. In that moment I realized I was invested in the social construction of this retreat as an event where a wise guy taught us stuff, we respected him, and went away satisfied.
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I wanted us all to have a good time, and this was more important than coming to a resolution on what consistent philosophy about the ego could underpin the meditation practice. It seemed, perhaps, that this was why everyone else was asking him softball questions.
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It’s hard to summarize what I learned from this. One of them is simply that “pretending to be satisfied to strengthen a social dynamic that feels good to everyone” is something I’m even capable of. I don’t think I’ve done it so distinctly before.
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Another is that this is probably going on all the time, in ways I can’t see right now. In extreme cases, this must be present in cults.
I think this conformity is something I’m more inclined to as I grow older and learn to fit myself to other people.
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