New vision

It’s usually a bad idea to look for hidden motives behind Forall’s actions. When I investigate Forall’s actions, what I find is that he did them for the reasons he said he was doing them, which follow plainly from the motivations that he has always said that he holds.

Recently, Forall returned from his summer travels, briefly, for about a week and a half, before continuing with further travels. During that time he brought all the leaders of the organization together under a new vision. This vision is a refinement of a long-standing vision, of course, and yet it is described and demarcated in fresh terminology, broken down into fresh goals, and comes with new roles and responsibilities for several of the leaders in the organization.

One of the things that Forall did in order to bring this about is as follows. He organized, over the course of a day, meetings with each of the leaders in the organization. He asked them, individually, what we should do as an organization going forward. He asked about timescales of months or weeks or days. He insisted that everyone make their expositions real. He listened, and then responded with his own description of the organization’s vision, freshly informed by and tailored to the individual’s response to the prior question. The next day he met with all of us together in a single meeting and laid out a synthesized vision, goals, roles, and responsibilities.

Now, this is just the part that I was personally privy to. Much happened beforehand. In the weeks prior, he spent whole days with the current teacher and incoming executive director discussing what we should do together, and how. Prior to that he spent years formulating a worldview that could motivate such a vision. Prior to that he spent decades building up a community capable of sustaining such a worldview. And prior to that he spent a whole lifetime cultivating a practice capable of giving rise to such a community. It’s not that this all happened overnight.

Nevertheless, this was not the first time that he led us in formulating a vision, broken down into goals, supported by roles and responsibilities. It was not even the first time that he led us in roughly this way. We have done it many times.

I said once to Forall: “it’s important to plan, and it’s important to hold to our plans”. He agreed only with the first part of that sentence. This is very significant, I believe. The most important aspect of planning is to practice while you’re doing it. We should engage in planning just as we would engage in any other kind of activity: that is, from a place of practice.

Forall demonstrates again and again what that looks like in practice. Again and again he takes us through the process of clarifying our mission, clarifying our goals, clarifying our individual roles and responsibilities. I don’t want to sound too infatuated, but frankly he does this with a grace that is shocking. I don’t know how else to describe it. It’s not that it’s easy. He pours all his time and energy into doing this kind of thing, and he exhausts himself. It’s that it’s not easy, and yet he does it with grace.

He exhorted us this time to be realistic about what we can achieve. He said we are already aiming very high, there’s no sense in taking on more than we can possibly accomplish.

He said we have had the same mission right from the beginning of the organization, and yet we have so far always failed to bring the power of emerging technologies to bear on that mission. He said this time we must succeed.

He said that what we already do at a world-class level is three things: teaching the Dharma, building community, and sustaining a real practice. We fund those things through a few large donors.

He said that what we are doing matters, that whether we succeed or not is real, that nobody else is doing this, that we have an opportunity to change world history, that we already have something unique in the whole world, that we can offer this unique thing to everyone and that therefore we must. There is no kind of commentary that can be placed on top of all this, that wraps it up into a nice bundle of views to be held over there, gestured at but not let loose. It is not a psychological stratagem. It is not an epiphenomenon of atoms. It is not an artifact of the mind. It is not a trick of any kind. I have tried in so many ways to fit spirituality into my life. It will not fit. My life is ruptured by the attempt. Soon, I will die.