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A suggestive notion that comes up from time to time in Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chogyam Trungpa’s writing and talks, which may seem contradictory, or at least unfamiliar, is “non-mastery.” Mostly we’re conditioned to consider mastery desirable, particularly in craft, and in most work-related endeavors, as we’re accustomed to hearing about (and respecting) master builders, masterful musicians, martial arts masters, yoga masters, spiritual masters. The last, especially, Trungpa would consider particularly susceptible to spiritual materialism—the use of spiritualist techniques to strengthen and solidify ego, to feel better about oneself, to gain a sense of importance through spiritual attainment, to develop special powers that enable you to seduce or manipulate others—and ultimately delude yourself even beyond what a mundane, non-spiritual materialist would be capable of.

So, non-mastery: being fully at ease with things as they are; not irritably chasing after resolution of contradictions (or after “closure”); basic comfort with oneself in spite of imperfections (though not neglectful of efforts to meet challenges skillfully).

The subtlety here is that skillful response to challenges is still important, the ability to solve problems with wisdom, insight, compassion, is a crucial capacity (and here I’m elaborating on Trungpa’s direct statements, but it’s all true). But don’t get stuck on how great you are because of what you can do. Non-mastery.

Toward repairing the world: it’s up to us to maintain it, continually correcting our course—not for the sake of personal gain (although through the making of things there’s an exchange that’s sustaining[1]) but because of loving the world fiercely and wanting to make something that is a gift for its benefit, an offering, which operates by awakening delight in beings who encounter it and inhabit it.

Mastery is not finality but refinement. Acknowledgment and recognition for doing something well are helpful but too easily mistaken for an end-state or goal (useful but not sufficient). 

Restraint provides a necessary resistance to being overwhelmed by the vastness of the task. Allowing the action to arise without becoming an actor may be tricky, but ultimately there's no other way to do something as a full offering. By getting out of your own way you can become receptive to something that helps move toward fuller awareness. Is this completion? So far no, only further development.

Mastery is only relevant if it develops with this attitude of moving forward, not getting stuck. Getting stuck is inevitable at certain points and getting unstuck is part of the process of developing mastery, but isn’t itself mastery. Mastery does imply a certain facility with disentangling.

The term mastery also implies a power relationship—think of slavery. Domination is essentially a non-ecological attitude.[2] But considering the origin of this term, we can see some ambiguity: the word “dome” (which, as well as referring to a hemispherical roof, is also the French and German term for cathedral), comes from Latin domus and Greek dōma, meaning house, and shares the same root as dominion, domain, dominate and domestic (and also danger and despot). So somewhere along the way, we might find a positive (or at least neutral) connotation—something like “householding.” Of course, in the cultures that produced this idea, a householder was thought of as the authority—the master of his domain—and the most developed moral codes of the day required ethical treatment of one's slaves but did not question the existence of slavery. [3]

The phrase from Genesis that’s often been cited as a philosophical basis for exploiting the earth, “You shall have dominion over all the living beings” seems to be a mistaken translation. The Hebrew prefix a (b’) attached to a word means “with”—not “over.” So that statement more reasonably reads, “You shall rule in relation with all the living beings”—a much more ecological statement.

The Environmental Justice Foundation estimates that by 2050, 150 million people will have lost their homes as a direct result of climate change, from drought, flooding, desertification, rising sea levels and extreme weather events. How many millions more will become political or economic refugees because of indirect effects—social instability and unsustainable agriculture, military incursions, ethnic and tribal conflicts that arise in conditions of stress and scarcity, among other factors—is difficult to assess. (Not to mention any of the other mundane, ongoing causes of forced migration.[1]) How will the rest of the planet absorb these people?

Since the beginning of industrial development, rural villagers have crowded into cities—sometimes voluntarily, but often as a result of combined environmental, economic and political pressures (in some cases abetted by dubious advertising, sleazy promoters suggesting wonderful opportunities). Not that rural poverty is the best possible life, but concentrating 70 percent of the world’s population in increasingly uninhabitable cities is clearly not the best alternative.

At Tule Lake

“The Modocs’ grief was for a whole relationship to the natural world and to a specific place, for their culture and community, while the grief of those who produced and profited from their loss was purely personal.”[2] In this statement, Rebecca Solnit describes both parties to an indigenous displacement in terms of grief—the military conquerors who forced the Modocs from their ancestral homeland (in 1873) suffered both private losses and their own ancient inheritance of exile, a separation from place and connection to land that in some ways enabled—or at least coincided with—European technological advances and colonizing impulses. The trauma of their early, mostly forgotten, displacements survived as the willing suspension of empathy that fueled the engine of conquest.

The Modocs were driven from the land of their birth, the center of the world where they had always lived, the place that had nourished and supported them from the beginnings of time. The place was the heart of their culture and the basis of meaning in their universe. To be pushed even a few miles away was irreconcilable. A complete rupture. Recovering that land someday could, perhaps, repair some of the damage, but so much specific knowledge is lost when this sort of intimacy with a place is destroyed that it seems unlikely ever to be fully restored.

The deepest loss is of that intimacy, which is the core of indigenous experience in a place, of a place. Even if old stories are remembered, even if the language survives (or is revived), without the deep everyday experience of the specific subject of the stories, there’s a degree of understanding that is simply unavailable. Who knows how many dozens or hundreds of generations it takes to develop?

And yet, change is inevitable, and developing strategies of engagement, of honestly learning to meet a place, seems preferable to simply lamenting its demise.

When the so-called swine flu threatened Egypt (land of the Pharaohs), the government decreed that all pigs would be destroyed. Of course there was no epidemiological basis for this. It was really just a convenient ploy for further marginalizing an already degraded group of tribal Coptic Christians living in the mountains above Cairo.

It turns out these pig-herders, known as zabaleen (“garbage collectors”), are the recyclers of Cairo—perhaps the noisiest city on earth, now also one of the most putrid. Many of the zabaleen are descendents of poor farmers, displaced from their land for a combination of environmental and political factors, who came to Cairo in the 1950s. They turned to garbage collection because Muslims consider it unclean. By hand-sorting, the zabaleen have successfully recycled up to 85 percent of the garbage they collect.[1] Until recently, the organic waste was fed to their pigs.

But without their pigs to feed, the zabaleen don’t have much incentive to remove food waste from the ubiquitous street-corner piles of it. Without a functioning alternative strategy, the food waste rots in the streets.[2] There seems to be a lot of it.

Everybody loses: the pigs are dead, the zabaleen deprived of a crucial part of their livelihood, the streets of Cairo stink. Of course there’s no impact on the spread of H1N1 or any other infectious disease, except perhaps to worsen conditions that increase their impact and spread them further—so perhaps there is a winner after all, if you consider the pathogens. With respect to the delicate and severely stressed ecology of a human settlement such as Cairo, it seems all of this demands a more rational sort of attention.