http://https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrfsyxJvkj4


Willpower

My children, when they were younger, loved the Frog and Toad series. They still do. One of the funny themes, as I recall it now, was on willpower. Would one of them, either Frog or Toad, who were best friends, have the willpower to do what they needed to that day or that moment? Or, would they, rather, succumb to their individual desires and not be able to control their will? It was about delicious cookies that one of them had just baked and how to stop eating them all quickly as their desires told them they wanted to.

William James, one of the founders of the field of religious studies, and in particular, psychology of religion, writes eloquently about the notion of our individual will. I would extend his understanding and apply it to our collective “will”. He says: “We measure ourselves by many standards…Our strength and our intelligence, our wealth, and even our good luck, are things which warm our heart and make us feel ourselves a match for life. But deeper than all such things, and able to suffice unto itself without them, is the sense of the amount of effort which we can put forth…He who can make none is but a shadow; [she] who can make much is a hero.” (Richardson 2006: 306)

In his language, I have switched gender to sometimes “she” and sometimes a “they”, to make his language more contemporary. We can no longer afford to leave out a majority of the world out of the declarative statements of elder white males. We, perhaps, need to reimagine and to re-inscribe, in order to recover their multiple meanings, in a more gender full way, for this contemporary time.

It is the most difficult, James admits, when things do not go the way we wish them to. Obstacles after obstacles have risen tall and feel insurmountable in our path, again and again. This year certainly has been this way. At the end of 2019, this past winter, many of us were profoundly affected psychologically by the climate catastrophe emerging year after year during the past years, wondering what was in store for us the coming year and wondering how we were all going to navigate our paths through this time, given the lack of political leadership at the national level.

James reminds us, according to one of James biographers, Robert D. Richardson, in his brilliant William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism: A Biography (Houghton Mifflin Company: Boston, 2006), “to consider just how hard and how dark the challenge often is. Effort, for James, is linked to acceptance now, not to resistance or denial, but acceptance even of calamity and disaster” (306). James struggled with severe depression on and off throughout his life, so he knew what he was talking about, when he tried to understand the relationship of will to energy and effort. Richardson lifts up James words for us to see more clearly:

When a dreadful object is presented or when life as a whole turns up its dark abysses to our view,” this is when effort becomes so difficult and so necessary. Even for the heroic mind, James says, “the objects are sinister and dreadful,
unwelcome, incompatible with wished-for-things.” But the heroic mind, he insists, “can stand this universe…[They] can still find a zest in it, not by ‘ostrich-like-forgetfulness,’ but by a pure inward willingness to take the world with those
deterrent objects there.” (306)

Richardson then goes on to illustrate how James “connects attention to will, will to effort, and effort to our basic, irreducible consent or non-consent to the world we confront.” (307)

Throughout this pandemic, I have been going slowly through this biography and it never fails to satisfy. With his wide-ranging mind, James knit together with his own will the disparate folds of knowledge like a beautiful origami design, just as modernism was blowing knowledge fields apart into their separate and distinctive kingdoms and fiefdoms, from the late 1880s onwards.


Karma

The Frog and Toad stories and Williams James’ preoccupation with how we shape our will reminds me of how karma theory works in Hinduism, and sometimes in Buddhism and Jainism as well. I have been thinking about how the theory of karma may shed light on our present recurrent tragedy of climate chaos. The accrual of karma, familiarly, is what “goes around comes around”. Human actions, whether intentional or unintentional, result in both positive and negative reactions, both good and ill effects, though these may not be visible in this life; the building up of the effects of good and bad actions result, according to Hindu and Buddhist religious texts for at least 2500 years, in rebirth and suffering.

It seems to me, at least at first glance, that we are at a simple level facing the results of our collective actions and individual actions, our karma, our ritual actions building one on top of each other, resulting in the earth speaking back to us in the new inventive language of firestorms, orange skies, gigantic racing walls of fire, and thick cloudy skies where to breathe becomes an inhalation of poison, ash, smoky materiality. As the Brhad.Upan., (3.12-13) says: “A man turns into something good by good action and into something bad by bad action.” It expands this idea in the following way:

“As a person acts, so he becomes in life. Those who do good become good; those who do harm become bad….You are what your deep, driving desire is. As your desire is, so is your will. As you will is, so is your deed. As your deed is, so is your destiny.” (114)

All of us humans living on this beautiful planet are facing simultaneously climate chaos, a global pandemic, a rise to call for black lives matter, economic collapse, and the particular daily experiences of the fires, waters, and airs of the particular places where we are living. Have I left anything out? We must face all this as squarely as we can. Grieve, yes, for the loss of RGB, a shocker if there was one; one after the other, sometimes it feels: how can we take another blow?

Yet the Frog and Toad stories, William James and the ancient Upanishads all remind us gently to stay focused on our intense desires, translate those desires to will, and move that will to action or deed, and make those action/deed lead us to our collective destiny.

Let’s keep getting up and go, shall we?
Let’s get up and push and pull; let’s get up and push and pull for expansion of the vote to all who are capable of voting; let’s get up and push and pull for all those close Senate races; let’s get up and push and pull and watch closely how data is being manipulated and send out SOS’s about them.
Whatever it is that you can do, from wherever you are sitting or standing, just do it. It could make all the difference in the eventual outcome and our collective destiny, for many, many generations to come.