In the summer of 2019, MAPLE Head Teacher, Soryu Forall, went to teach at the branch in the San Francisco Bay Area called OAK. At that time, I was living and working in the area as a software engineer, and just getting to know this community.
In Forall’s farewell evening talk, he brought up the phenomenon of self-loathing, self-flagellation or shame in our culture—”I’m no good. I could never be good. I’m inherently flawed.”—a phenomenon which doesn’t exist in all cultures. “Why do we have that? There are lots of reasons, but the number one reason is that we all know we're complicit in the destruction of life on Earth.”
This really hit some audience members. One young man started breathing quite hard. Forall did not back down. “We know we are complicit in the destruction of life on Earth. We're going to feel mad at ourselves, and wish we weren't doing that. So of course we feel bad about ourselves. But just feeling bad isn’t the solution. Break free of it! Do you really want to live the rest of your life like that? You don't have to. This is an empowering moment. I'm not saying it's easy—it’s very hard—but good news: millions of people throughout history have done this. You can do this. It’ll be good for you and the whole world, right away. Yes, it’s hard, but if you do it, you would never want to go back. You would rather live one day without shame than a hundred years with it.”
An audience member asked, “When I’m feeling this, how do I decide what action to take that will lead to less suffering? It feels like it’d be easier to just do small things.”
“Yes, it’s true,” Forall replied. “You’re free to do that, but… This is my final talk, so I’m just going to be blunt with you—I care about you, not doing this to be mean—I don’t believe you, that you don’t know what to do. You may not know with your head. You may not have a clear, mapped-out plan of action, but you don’t need that. You have a fire burning in your belly. It's not going out, and it’s destroying your life. Put it out. Do whatever it takes. If you know that, you know all you need to know. You don’t need to know all the details. You need to know the next step, and take it.
“You must just realize, ‘This is unacceptable. It has to change, so that's the end. What is it that's going to bring my life out of this place of legitimate shame? I'm willing to do it. Let's go. Today. Not tomorrow, today.’ And then your life changes from this melancholy prison into a terrifying adventure. And the terrifying adventure is much more fun than the melancholy prison.”
The young man who had been breathing hard raised his hand. Forall acknowledged him with “Yes, friend.” He asked in a quivering voice as if he was on the verge of tears, “I've felt the wish to bring more joy and to cause less suffering and prevent more suffering before. I feel like for some reason it hasn't taken, and my life is not a great and terrifying adventure yet. How do I keep going on the path of goodness and saving people?”
“Yes exactly, it doesn’t take,” Forall said kindly. “We continually underestimate the power of the collective intelligence that holds us captive. If we keep doing that, it will continually win. I wish I could say ‘good news: there's a pill you can take’, but the only way I know of—I wouldn't be giving my entire life to this way if I had any other way because it's really hard to do this—but the only way that actually works is, you join a community with a virtuous collective intelligence so that you don't have to fight against the world you live in. That’s how these patterns finally take. I personally gave up on the sense ‘I'm gonna pull this off’ when I was a teenager, and realized the real issue here isn't me against the world. It’s this collective intelligence that's convinced us to have an individualistic collective intelligence so that it's constantly me against this… evil god.”
The questioner chimed in, his voice a bit steadier, “Or Moloch?” He explained to those who might not know that this is the name given to the concept of evil in the Rationalist community. “The solution is then to try to cut yourself out of all of the Moloch nature of society, and make sure that the majority of your interactions, if not all of them, are in a context that is optimized around promoting goodness, saving people, and all that.”
“Exactly, and there's a word for what you just described. It's called a monastery. That's what a monastery is. You may not like that word, so feel free to use another one, but there's a known concept that refers to what you just described. When a group of people gather and agree to compromise everything for the sake of freedom from delusion and living from compassion, a new kind of collective intelligence is formed. That is already hard, but if you can do that, there's a further challenge—how, from that perspective, can you spread that to take over the world, not by merely inviting Moloch back in?”
The questioner followed up, “Right, because humans are still all around the world, and Moloch is still out there. We're going to have to meet it at some point. Hopefully we meet it on equally enough footing that we stand a fighting chance.”
“Exactly,” Forall said, with a tone of audacity. ”When you leave the monastery, you want to eat Moloch for lunch.”
People had a good laugh. He went on to tell a beautiful fun story about how his teacher, Shōdō Harada Roshi of the Rinzai Zen temple Sōgen-ji in Japan, was able to do just that at an airport.
It struck me that while “eating Moloch for lunch” seemed impossible to me, Forall was doing it right there in that room with us. Six months later, I started training at MAPLE, and have been here ever since.