Listen to learn it,
 Learn it to tell it, 
Tell it with love…

Garnet ribbons of apple peel slid from my grandmother’s knobbed knuckles, forming a sweet, soft pillow in the kitchen sink. Beside them, the juicy trimmings from my own efforts plopped audibly. Alerted by the sound, my grandmother plucked up my refuse, knife in hand, and pushed it toward my eyes. The brown spots and blue veins of her nearly translucent hands amplified my sense of her concern. You’re cutting too much apple, she said worriedly, tossing my rejected work back into the sink. Here, she recomposed her patience, Watch. She proceeded to slice off the paper-thin peel of an entire apple in a single slow but steady stroke. Raised in a frugal Mennonite community in rural Ohio, her gesture revealed a precision one might mindlessly call “mechanical,” but that in such a word we would lose the recognition of the firm but pliant intuition of the bones of her hands, the archetypal training of her muscles, and the dexterous clarity of her mind. 

Memory merges this moment messily with a resonant evening peeling potatoes with my other grandmother, from Ecuador. In both instances the skill of their knifework humbled me. Certain that one vital factor must have been the relative sharpness of our tools, both times I checked – only to find their knives quite duller than mine. 

As I got older, my memories were fascinated less with their skill and more by the sense of satisfaction with that skill that each of them held and, ultimately, with the seriousness of the home economy which they defended each time they applied pressure to the blade. While they took pride in their work, these skills were no project of vanity. The process was satisfying, but everything was always at stake. 

The of Haida Gwaii have an old saying, “life is as sharp as a knife.” My grandmothers knew that the whole world was balanced on the tip of that blade and so acted with appropriate severity and grace.

Wind makes corporal the air 
What once was not, now is there 
Deeds wrought with spite or birthed in care 
Who at last will be their heir?

When I heard the news one day that a nephew would be born, I pruned a limb from an apple tree in my mother’s yard and from it carved a twisted caramel spoon. 

After roughing out the shape with an axe, I soaked the wood in water to keep it from cracking. Even after a hundred years sitting in the dust, a piece of wood will draw and release moisture through its tense fibers, the inner mechanism of circulation and life not yet released, perhaps, from its inclination toward hope, or duty of self-production. When the spoon was close to finished, I dried it out over a period of a few days – in an out of plastic bags – while finalizing the details of the curves. Once bone-dry, I sanded it down and replaced the water with walnut oil: massaging it in and using the wood’s natural longing to cure it of its life-spasms. No longer drawing water in, nor pushing it out, the oil will instead hold back, for a time, the cracks, fissures, and pressures of decay.

It is a process I learned from a teacher, who had learned it from his, who had given him a spoon made from a Maine pear tree, grown from a cutting of a tree at Ghandi’s Sabarmati ashram in India. It was a lineage of labor and dignity that he freely passed onto me.

My spoon was certainly not stamped from a machine. There is evidence of me throughout it—cuts, contours, decisions made coherently, hesitantly, absent-mindedly, too early, too late. Beautiful and imperfect. Is there a me-ness held within it? Does it contain me as kerosine contains the sun? As a dollar contains the labor power of a million aggregated moments of human effort? I’m not really sure. Not without another mind to mend that meaning, I don’t think. Where would the me in it live? Is it directly perceivable? Is it smoothed away by sandpaper or by use? It seems to me that there is no essence within it. Just as there is no essence within me to share if I had wanted.  If it could be shared, would it truly be an essence? And yet, there is something about it that is different – perhaps a hard to pintpoint element of human labor.

Any time I finish a spoon, I hold it before me, examining. I feel proud, accomplished, but also braced for disappointment. Will it be appreciated? Loved? Will it be used? If so, will it be cared for? In what drawer or on what shelf will it gather dust? Sometimes I think of these objects as artifacts from a culture that does not yet exist and which will crumble long before it does. The oil is not yet hardened and the shadow of distance between myself and this creation is already stretching long. I think of Marx, fascinated by the foreignness of the products of our labor, how they stand outside of us, distant: opposed to us. 

The alienation of the worker in his product means not only that his labor becomes an object, an external existence, but that it exists outside him, independently, as something alien to him, and that it becomes a power of his own confronting him; it means that the life which he has conferred on the object confronts him as something hostile and alien.

~ Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (p58 MER)

This spoon in my hand doesn’t feel particularly hostile – but that would be hard for any spoon. (Though the Mayan Popul Vuh tells of a time during the last epoch where the kitchen utensils rose up violently against their human owners - for lack of proper care). Whatever tensions I may feel with my spoon are largely muted by the feeling of control I have over it. It is a sense of my future plan to conjure good feeling for myself and for another by gifting this spoon to my nephew. I expect some gladness in another’s enjoyment of it. Perhaps even a return of gratitude, of praise. This is all rooted in the sense that I own it and so can exert some influence over its future ability to nourish me back – whether materially or mentally.

The sense of ownership is one thing. But the experience of ownership is not necessarily about the relationship between people and things. It is about the relationship between people in regard to things. 

Did my grandmother’s apple pie feel like it was hers? With us, she certainly exerted authority over who was to partake in its sweetness. But that was an authority and expectation granted by the fabric of our social world. She learned to make pies as a young woman, employed as a domestic worker for a family who required she bake a pie every day. In that case, it was the sweet-toothed family – probably the father – who we would say owned the daily pie, since he paid for her labor to produce it. 

What responsibility to, what authority over do we have with an object or idea, a slice of pie, a wooden spoon, a piece of land, a water wheel, a speech, a song? Can we understand and reimagine these things without reimagining ourselves - without bringing our own sense of me and mine-ness under consideration? 

Watch this and weave it 
Weave it and wear it 
Wear it and wonder…

Somewhere in the decaying colonial grandeur of Old San Juan, Puerto Rico, there may still be a mediocre but self-important restaurant where I once worked as a waiter. On a street named for a saint, beside a convent-turned-hotel, I rehearsed the role of fleeting retainer to momentary masters who would arrive and depart with the cruiseships. One night I was granted the responsibility of serving the hotel owner and his sparkling entourage. 

As someone thirsty for recognition but also invisibility - and knowing what it meant for the security of my position - I did my best. When the long night eventually ground into a lower gear, the big table having now been split up and deserted by several other patrons, my manager approached me and warmly placed his hand on my shoulder. Smiling generously, he shook my hand. “Well done,” he affirmed, as if blessing me with the most reassuring compliment someone of my station could bear, “The owner told me you have a natural talent for serving.”

The flip side of my servile temperament is a rageful dignity that takes very little to spark aflame. In the presence of my boss, I suppressed the conflagration as best I could, resulting in psychic distortions that seemed to bend the universe around me. But afterwards, when given room to breathe, it consumed me for days. Yes, there was something about bringing people what they wanted, feeding them, attending to their wishes that felt pure, even beautiful. Yet the often careless and carefree disrespect of me by customers, and my own permissiveness of this for the sake of tips – was degrading. I had worked in kitchens before, as a low wage cook, where the exploitation was still obvious but somehow didn’t dig into and twist the cracks of my identity. 

In the kitchen I was merely a worker that could swear and curse my station with ease. As a waiter, the adoption of performance of worthlessness was an aspect I could not long bear. Within a few weeks I quit my job and held myself firmly to finding a way forward in this life that allowed what goodness I could generate to be offered without restraint, but without participating in my own diminishment.

It turns out to be not such an easy task to avoid being integrated into these dynamics of human subjugation - and perhaps not even a heroic one. Marx long held the belief that resisting this process of proletarianization is regressive, and a sign of the untrustworthiness of the so-called petty-bourgeoisie. For him, it is only through mass proletarianization that workers come to realize their power against capital. The heroic – but much harder – choice is not to avoid our alienation, but to organize around it, confront it, and overthrow the entire system.

But me, like any petty-bourgeois radical, for the past 25-or-so years since quitting that job in Puerto Rico I have tried my best to produce nothing of monetary value – for myself or anyone else. I have created quite a bit of value, I think, outside of that specific monetary form. I have done work, largely for non-profits, and much of it has been valued, but less and less of it has been - or could be - bought or sold.  

Compose and then profit, deposit, and save
Repose in your coffin, decomposite in grave
In throws we can’t stop at the crest of a wave
Suppose that we drop it and rest in a cave

Respiring amid the stone-rimmed fields of central Massachusetts, the unacknowledged estate of a Buddhist retreat center hides amid the marshes and pastures. The surrounding forests have been largely restored from colonial era over-grazing, protected by extensive and expensive conservation efforts. Behind the thickets of mountain laurel and honeysuckle, mosquitos and ticks flourish in the bogs and bramble, and the morose stiffness of the puritanical past is yet to be fully allayed. 

These days, I am a Buddhist teacher and was for some years a welcome voice at this place. The Buddha was explicit that his teachings were to be given freely, not treated as commodities, so I offer my expression of them without cost and am supported only by any donations, or dana, that is offered to me. In my tradition, dana along with sila (ethical conduct), are considered the essential foundations of our bhavana – mind cultivation, sometimes translated as “mental culture.” 

Because the sacred glow of this commitment to dana is so bright, it can obfuscate another angle of our working reality: that the entire programming of centers like this one are provided by people they don’t have to pay. In fact, these places have no responsibility to the teachers at all in terms of health care, retirement, long-term contracts, or housing - even though without our freely-offered labor they would have no program to offer and no reason to exist. 

Monks and nuns in Southeast Asian meditation centers or monasteries are not paid either – but they are cared for, fed, clothed, and generally supported by their affiliated institutions. Many of us have no other means of livelihood and have very little leverage in terms of defining the conditions of our work beyond the presumed goodwill of our retainers. In our community, we are often honored as the scared holders of these ancient teachings and practices. But in our employment, we are gig workers - profoundly revered Uber drivers for the mind. It can feel like a rather distorted way of honoring the letter of the tradition while abandoning the spirit of it. 

When the first westerners attempted to bring these practices and teachings back home, the dual action of their cultural and economic maneuvering was profound: on one hand, they quickly shed the monastic skin of our tradition, but rather than introduce a dynamic modern innovative structure, the organizational culture of many of these places remains essentially medieval: replete with a king and a queen, a royal court, and a peasant class of low-wage staff – with itinerant teachers operating in a poorly-defined proto-merchant middle area of these three. While unconscious and problematic, this feudal system still seems better than many of for-profit corporations who have ejected the foundational elements of the tradition entirely – including the Buddha himself - and have packaged and sold mindfulness as a pure commodity in the capitalist mode of production.

A few years ago, it became clear that the institution intended to re-package and resell the video recordings without our knowledge, our consent, or any agreement as to our compensation. When I questioned the integrity of this, I was simply told by the Executive Director, “Truly, everything about the online programming is different.” But this didn’t feel different at all. Rather, the product of my labor being stolen from me with a smile felt distinctly familiar - as did the rumbling in my spine, the heat in my heart, and the bending of spacetime around and within me. 

Our team then accidentally became aware of a long-standing policy regarding our dana: if donations of under $800 intended for us came in “late” (over a week after the end of our program) the money was not given to us, but instead was integrated into another organizational fund – without notifying us or the donors. When I erupted in astonishment, the director again denied and avoided engagement. 

I did not go along with it. Conflict ensued. At an impasse with the executive director, I reached out to the royal court of Guiding Teachers for intervention and received no response. After a harshly worded and emotional protest on my part, the director finally acquiesced and promised not to sell the videos our teachings. Eventually, with no other acknowledgement or path forward, I posted a frustrated and damning statement on social media.

And lo! The drowsy conclave jumped into action. A courier was swiftly sent from their chambers to inform me I was now under probation. If I wanted to teach there the coming year, I was not allowed to communicate directly with staff and if I had any perceived attitudinal infractions over the next few years - in any setting - I would not be welcome back.

I wrote a letter apologizing for the vehemence of my tone while also condemning the injustice of their actions. I informed them that I would easily and happily agree to their terms if they, 1. stopped stealing our dana; 2. agreed that teachers’ held the publishing rights to our recorded works; 3. began a collaborative process for developing equitable contracts with the teachers, and; 4. some process be put into place institutionally for precisely these kinds of conflicts. 

Shifting from institutional directives to personal deflections, I was approached by a representative with whom they clearly imagined I would have natural allegiance with and sympathy for. I quickly realized that their purpose for contact was not for actual dialog, but merely to press me to agree to their terms without themselves committing to address any of mine. While privately I was told that the organization was moving forward with all of my recommendations, publicly I was offered stale refrains about the need for patience with a logistically complex and inherently slow process. 

At one point in my life, I might have been amazed - even seduced - by the organizational switcheroo which uses institutional protocols to avoid responsibility for failed personal relationships, and then go and try to use personal relationships to evade institutional responsibility for failed organizational protocols. But at this point in my life, it just seemed dumb, so I decided to stop teaching there.

Several years before this incident, I had been trying to form some sort of union or guild among my colleagues – aware that we were vulnerable to this exact kind of dynamic. But for reasons any labor organizer would be familiar with, it didn’t amount to much more than a handful of decent conversations.

After 20 years of doing all I could to craft a livelihood that ducked out from under the dynamics of capitalist exploitation and alienation, I had been caught in the place in the very place I had taken refuge. The Buddeoisie had gotten rid of me.

In the strain of thirst, a dream’s created
A vision of a thought of an illusion, unsated 
But let loose the line and confusion’s abated…

The Pali word kamma (Saskrit, karma) is understood by many people in the West to be a kind of mystical force of morality underpinning our lives and the universe. But in the dusty dictionaries of Theravada Buddhism, kamma is principally translated simply as “action,” “work,” “doing,” i.e. “labor” - activities which are not necessarily seen as distinct from the word’s more mystical implications. Volitional action generates future results, results that are experienced according to natural (sometimes obvious, sometimes incomprehensible) law. Our kamma is not merely our fate, but something we are actively responsible for generating. 

It is a concept that does not firmly differentiate between a deed, its moral character, the doer, or the result. And while the word is most conventionally translated into English as “action,” it is not incorrect to translate it as “work.” For example, “kammakassa” is plowing, “kumbhakārakamma” is the work of a potter, while “pāpakamma” can refer to a bad deed, one who has done a bad deed, and/or the effect of a bad deed. 

Using “work” for “kamma” we read,

One becomes a thief by work (kamma).
by work one becomes a soldier.
One becomes a priest by work,
by work one becomes a king.
So that is how the wise
see work as it really is—
seers of dependent origination,
skilled in work and its result.
By work the world goes around
By work the population goes around
Sentient beings are fastened by work,
which is like the lynch pin of a moving chariot…

Buddha, Sutta Nipata 3.9

Of work (kamma) I am constituted. Work is my inheritance; Work is the matrix; Work is my kinsman; Work is my refuge. Whatever work I perform, be it good or bad, to that I shall be heir. This must be reflected upon again and again by one who has gone forth (into monastic life).

Buddha, Dasadhamma Sutta

and

Students, beings are owners of their work, heirs to their work; they originate from their work, are bound to their work, have their work as their refuge. It is work that distinguishes beings as inferior and superior.

Buddha, Cūḷa Kamma-vibhaṅga Sutta

One day, it is said, the Buddha gathered his robe and bowl and went out into the village of Ekanālā for alms. The Buddha decided to stand by the estate of a great landowner, Kasi Bhāradvāja, as he and his workers stopped for their midday meal. Kasi Bhāradvāja was not impressed,

“I, contemplative, plow & sow. Having plowed & sown, I eat. You, too, contemplative, should plow & sow. Having plowed & sown, you (will) eat.”

“I, too, brahman, plow & sow. Having plowed & sown, I eat.”

“But, contemplative, we don’t see the Master Gotama’s yoke or plow, plowshare, goad, or oxen, and yet the Master Gotama says this: ‘I, too, brahman, plow & sow. Having plowed & sown, I eat.’”

Then Kasi Bhāradvāja addressed the Blessed One with a verse:

“You claim to be a plowman, but we don’t see your plowing. Being asked, tell us about your plowing so that we may know your plowing.”

The Buddha:

Conviction is my seed, austerity my rain, discernment my yoke & plow,
moral shame my pole, mind my yoke-tie, mindfulness my plowshare & goad.
Guarded in body, guarded in speech, restrained in the requisites,
I make truth a weed-cutter, and composure my unyoking.
Persistence, my beast of burden, bearing me toward rest from the yoke,
takes me, without turning back, to where, having gone, one doesn’t grieve.
That’s how my plowing is plowed.
It has as its fruit the deathless.
Having plowed this plowing, one is unyoked from all suffering & stress.

Kasibaradvaja Sutta

Worldly labor seeks to extend life into the future. The spiritual effort of the Buddha, on the other hand, was intended to put an end to the cycle of continued existence fueled by greed, hatred, and ignorance. The awakening experience is frequently defined as an end of work – in both the spiritual and material realms. It is an end of production of Self, of compulsive existence, of indentured conscription to the rounds of rebirth and self-production - as well as the culmination of spiritual endeavoring after which there is no more to be done.

Upon his awakening, the Buddha’s is said to have exclaimed,

Birth is destroyed.
The holy life has been lived.
Done is what had to be done.
There is no more coming to any state of being.

It is a phrase repeated throughout the Pali cannon by those who have attained the goal of enlightenment: done is what had to be done. No more coming to any state of being, no more becoming. The stream is cut, being comes to a halt. While his past kamma still rolled along playing out, keeping him alive, he did not generate new kamma, and was referred to for the rest of his life as the Tathagatha – “one thus gone.”

In producing, we create ourselves and our world. We recreate the world materially through our actions, but alongside and intertwined with that process is mental/emotional one in which we tend to conjure and reaffirm ourselves conceptually – and it is in this conceptual experience of becoming we mostly tend to live in and be bound by. According to the Buddha, the creation and cultivation of the sense of Self that is one of the most consequential – and delusional - outcomes of these volitional moments of action, of work.

Marx recognized this in his own way,

Let us suppose that we had carried out production as human beings. Each of us would have, in two ways, affirmed himself, and the other person. (i) In my production I would have objectified my individuality, its specific character, and, therefore, enjoyed not only an individual manifestation of my life during the activity, but also, when looking at the object, I would have the individual pleasure of knowing my personality to be objective, visible to the senses, and, hence, a power beyond all doubt. (ii) In your enjoyment, or use, of my product I would have the direct enjoyment both of being conscious of having satisfied a human need by my work, that is, of having objectified man's essential nature, and of having thus created an object corresponding to the need of another man's essential nature ... Our products would be so many mirrors in which we saw reflected our essential nature.

~ Karl Marx, "Comment on James Mill" (1844)

Even Marx – the master of materialism – unknowingly acknowledged that is only through reflection – the most insubstantial of phenomena, visually or conceptually - that we are assured of ourselves, our existence, our supposed “essence” and of the social world of which we are a part. This so-called essence is actually an inferred phenomenon, not a direct experience at all. The Buddha argued that precisely because it cannot be directly experienced, we can understand this sense of Self-essence as something constructed, fabricated. When we learn to observe the mind-body process carefully enough, the production of Self can be directly witnessed – not as the essential “me” at the center of existence, but as a hologram generated by mental push and pull in response to direct sensory experience – the most fundamental kamma/labor of the mind. 

These insights do not mean that we don’t exist, but rather that we are misinterpreting existence in a way that perpetuates it. Likewise, the world outside of us certainly exists, but we are often not really living there. We mostly abide in this “hall of mirrors” of Self and World that we perpetually and relentlessly construct and reinforce in our minds.

We cleave ourselves into the future through imagined action. The sandwich I will eat. The call I will make. The accolade I will receive. The retribution I will dispense. This is how we become. We imagine ourselves in some future state and try to pull ourselves toward it. Though we grasp at shadows, thinner than air, we instigate our becoming through action motivated by this impulsive force of mind - wanting, thirst. We cobble, compose, construct, compound, posit, reify, assert, form, compile, establish, fashion, forge, produce, rear, manufacture, and fuse, ourselves together again and again in springing contraction to each decaying moment. We do it through wanting, through fixation on views that define and defend our existence. We do it through aversion, anger, fear – the constriction of the mind around an object that – even in agony - feels like home. The sense of Self is the most consistent and insistent product of our labor, our kamma. But like all conditioned things, as soon as it is born it immediately crumbles, and so requires immediate and relentless reassertion.

This is the tension of existence. The most fundamental sense of alienation we experience is not of a being separated from ourselves, or our labor, of the products of our labor, or other people – as Marx may have it - but the stress of a continually disintegrating illusion of Self that we are terrified to live without. Though it is agonizing, the work of becoming is not difficult to do. In fact it is compulsive. We are slaves to becoming. And becoming is exhausting. 

The energy it takes to maintain an idea, a body, a state, a self, a union, a hope - is suffering, stress: dukkha. But to stop this process, to slow it down, question or even investigate it goes against the deepest urgency of existence, of being, of life. To accept the dukkha of existence is to recognize the instability at its heart – and the terror that it inspires. The Buddha spoke of iti kammakkhayā dukkhakkhayo: “the end of misery through the end of kamma.” And so we can begin to recognize the immense relief and the magnitude embedded in the phrase, “done is what had to be done.”

O house-builder, you are seen! You will not build this house again. For your rafters are broken and your ridgepole shattered. My mind has reached the Unconditioned; I have attained the destruction of craving.
~ Buddha, Jaravagga Sutta

Making mind matter takes more than chatter
Spittle and spatter go into the batter
Pounding it flatter, pounding it flatter

From the Buddhist perspective, the production of the Self is nearly inseparable from the experience of ownership – something considered equally, and dangerously, illusory. Ownership implies the ability to control, which never exists in any unconditional way. Because all phenomena are impermanent, unstable, undependable, and subject to decay, we cannot truly own any external objects. The fact of a house being mine wont keep it from deteriorating. The fact of a mother being mine wont keep her from dying. 

Internally, the body and mind we think of as “ours” are equally inconstant: impermanent and undependable – subject to changing conditions beyond the reach our desires for them, thus defying the notion of our owning them. Nothing can be owned because it cannot be controlled, but also because there is no real owner. 

The Buddha proposed that any belief in ownership, any fixation on it, and any ambitions or attachments toward it are rooted in delusion. This is why he so highly praised the ideal of the akincana, “one who owns nothing, who is ownerless.” 

The ignorant dullard who creates acquisition
encounters suffering again and again…
Having seen renunciation as security
do not take up or reject anything.
Buddha, Sutta Nipata 5.4

Or

Owning nothing, taking nothing: 
this is the island with nothing further. 
I call this nibbana (nirvana). 
the extinction of old age and death.
~ Buddha, Sutta Nipata 5.10 

According to Marx, the tension at the heart of capitalist economy is that workers do not own the products of their labor and are paid less than the value they create. The value generated by their labor is appropriated by those who employ them. This appropriation is the source of all profit, which expands outside of the workers’ control or benefit, and which they eventually encounter as a force outside of themselves – as Capital - to which they are eternally subject on every social, political, and economic front. This multi-faceted dynamic is the source of the experience of alienation, or estrangement (German, entfremdung), from 1. the product of their labor; 2. the act of production itself; 3. their own essential nature; and 3. other workers/people. The product of our own labor, which we are forced to sell, is used to dominate us and reinforce that domination at every angle.

The vast implications of this system are hard to fathom. As the cycle progressed historically, money became not just a medium of exchange – but the whole point of production. Commodities were no longer produced by a craftsperson for their own use or for barter – but primarily for their exchange value. Thus, the money form of Capital essentially becomes congealed labor power and is, more than anything else, control over the labor power of others: a kind of materialized kamma.

…only at the very culmination of the development of private property does this, its secret, re-emerge, namely that on the one hand it is the product of alienated labor, and that secondly it is the means by which labor alienates itself, the realization of this alienation… Though private property appears to be the source, the cause of alienated labor, it is really its consequence.

- Marx, Grundrisse p65?

At some level, this material perspective is not out of accordance with the Buddha’s in which dukkha is produced by mutually generative loops of reinforcing cycles of ownership and Self in place of private property and alienation. But it also highlights the contradiction that while Marx perceived the source of alienation from Self-essence (rooted in social subjugation) to be the original pain of capitalism, the Buddha understands the belief in Self-essence (rooted in ignorance) to be the foundational source of human suffering. While many would see these contradictions as mutually annihilating, I think of them as more fruitful than that.

If there is no essential Self and ownership is an illusion, what is the solution to the experience of alienation and subjugation? Is it merely wisdom? This is the classic suspicion that many leftists have of spiritual practice: that it blames the exploited for their suffering and proposes only an individualistic spiritual solution, acquiescing to the material and social relationships of oppression. 

But if it is actually true that the ending of the Self is the ending of ownership – how might Marx’s framework be reconsidered with these adjustments to the foundation? 

Marx’s solution to alienation is the collective ownership of the products of social labor. People should have equal access to all that is produced - and in a way that is not mediated by any kind of exchange of their labor power: to each according to their need, from each according to their ability.

“Communism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products of society: all that it does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate the labor of others by means of such appropriation.”

~ Marx / Engels, The Communist Manifesto

In his vision of the communist ideal, all society has equal share in the ownership of the social production, thus relieving the causal source of their alienation. Because all labor is considered social labor, it is a vision of communal ownership of collective action. And so, to cross streams, if alienated labor is the source of private property, ownership of action (in Pali, kammasakka) is the source of its destruction. 

Marx saw collective ownership as a reification of the self in society, but the Buddha might still be suspicious that the framework of mine versus ours are two sides of the same coin. I think that it may not be merely semantic to suggest that collective non-ownership, rooted in the abandonment of kamma, might be another way forward that allows us to overcome some of the obstacles to Marx’s vision. 

In our society, Self and ownership are two of the most fundamental experiences by which we define our sense of security – and so defending those is only natural. We cannot merely expect people to feel safe taking those away. What does it take to truly see “Renunciation as security?” It cannot be one in which we expect people to keep their sense of Self and lose their sense of ownership. Both must be interrogated at the same time.

Now roll it and fold it.
Sew it and stitch it. 
Mash it and mix it…

Shadows of swaying trees fluttered through the warm autumn sunlight of my grandfather’s living room. My mom had fallen asleep on the couch and the hush of the wind could just be heard behind the quiet fullness of the room. There was nowhere to go. Nothing to be done. It felt like an almost mystically perfect Sunday afternoon. 

But my grandfather was anxious. At 94, his sense of internal and external composition no longer had the stability of his younger self, and he didn’t like it. I asked him what was wrong,

My memory is still there, but sometimes I just have a hard time… he searched… understanding where I am… and what I am supposed to be doing. His face was strained. We are in Ohio- is that right? My mom had awoken by then and was alert enough to affirm this framework. It just seems like there is no… no direction… no… plan of attack, for lack of a better phrase… I don’t have any idea what is happening with the company. It seems like I should be getting some kind of report, some kind of statement of our position, what we are planning, what we are supposed to be doing. People keep telling me I am in charge of the company, but I don’t feel like I am. He sighed. I feel like I should be doing something. I don’t have the slightest idea what is going on with the company. Nobody tells me. I mean, are we solvent? Who is making the decisions? He trailed off inwardly, exasperated.

Of course, there was no company and there never had been. But he was losing his sense of internal organization, structure, of action and direction that had given his sense of self a purpose. And without it, in the beautiful quietude of the fall, he was not only lost but disturbed. 

Sometimes, usually when spanning vast swaths of space and time zones, I will wake up in the dark and not know where I am – or even who I am. For some years, when this happened, I would strain to regather myself and re-orient as quickly as I could. Ah, OK, I am in such in such town, in so and so’s house, in this bed, in this room… But over the years I have learned to enjoy those spaces, appreciate the unknowingness of all the views that normally constellate my sense of Self and position in the world. 

In the days that proceeded my father’s death from a brain tumor, his ability to compose and maintain the structure and meaning of his world shifted as well. At first, his fantasies of responsibility were rather solid: Representatives of the Red Army were asking him to come to a meeting about the situation in Ukraine. But as the walls bounding his mind crumbled more fully, the visions became more abstract. He spent hours opening drawers in the air, pulling invisible things out, putting invisible things in - organizing, processing, storing. But his activity was not calming. It steadily escalated into deepening anxiety – an ever-expanding sense that there was much more to be done, outpacing his ability to keep up with it all. 

Earlier in the week, when his mind was more intact, I had warned him that in the coming days things were probably going to get a little weird. During long periods of my meditation practice, I had watched various kinds of unraveling of my own mind, I had experienced the letting go of the structures of self and of composing meaning in the world, and I knew how scary these spaces could be. Without orientation, without direction, without measurability, we don’t necessarily experience the loosening of the framework as liberating. The deeper patterns of restlessness and anxiety, that reach for composition to find stability, are still present. But I knew that with death or disease, when the mind cannot clench back the world of fabrications into familiar terms, it could be bewildering and nightmarish. 

I encouraged him to remember love: to remember the people that he loved, and the people around him that loved him. I have complete faith in these recollections, and in the equanimity that comes with wisdom, to provide a stability much deeper than the fantasies and formations we conjure in our heads. But it takes a long time and a lot of practice for the mind to trust disintegration as safety, “renunciation as security” as the Buddha said. It is not really reasonable to expect someone to spontaneously develop this capacity at the very end of their lives, when the disintegration is most threatening, and they are least capable of mounting the necessary forces of meaningful engagement. Not that it isn’t still good to try. But it is better to train in neutral terrain when our capacity is great rather than wait until hostile territory when we are at our weakest.

Considering his lack of training or familiarity with the deconstructed mindscapes he encountered, my father did well. But a vague and haunting existential agitation, an unnamed and invisible restless dis-ease, slowly dominated a blurred landscape filled with a proliferation of signless incoherence. It was only pharmaceuticals that finally and mercifully provided him the ease he needed to let go of this self he believed he was constructing, the work he was so determined to pursue. And if for no other reason, this is why I practice meditation. I never want to miss the opportunity to lie in the lapping rippled sunlight of an autumn afternoon and let go of who I am.

When love is strong, when equanimity is at its greatest crest, or even when concentration is firm, the mind doesn’t need to compose anything, cling to anything, defend against anything. Phenomena can arise and pass clearly seen, without interference or wobble – without the need to construct a Self or a world around it. When those factors are not there, and the mind encounters conditions it has not yet learned to perceive clearly or compassionately, the mind posits itself in dialectical response to the array of sensory phenomena arising and passing in and out of existence.  We get caught in grasping, rejecting, conceiving – working and becoming.

My own meditation practice is now mostly watching the mind cling to fabrication when it doesn’t feel protected by love or wisdom, and letting go of control when it does. The content of the thoughts, the objects of fantasy or anger, are almost entirely irrelevant when one begins to see they are mostly just dull mechanisms designed to construct a coherent sense of me and what feels like mine. These spasms bother me less and less because the goal is not to control my mind, but to understand it. Where I don’t see clearly, I suffer. Where I do, I don’t. The process cannot be forced. But it also cannot be abandoned. All that is composed will decompose. It is only through insight into the undependable changing nature of all conditioned phenomena that the mind unclenches and stops asserting itself in response to sensory experience. The mind will be free when it is ready to be free.

Where never dark, nor ever sunny 
A pleasureless treasure costs no money
Empty of flavor, sweeter than honey…

We must recognize that the undependable nature of existence is scary, and that the fear is valid and primordial and requires profound effort, training, and support to overcome. By releasing us from the dialectic of Self, reclaiming responsibility for our karmic labor, and abandoning the illusion of ownership, vipassana meditation may be the smallest scale at which we can build the faith needed to accept a society not based on private property for its sense of stability. 

But how does it translate to scale? If we are to learn to trust generosity and solidarity as foundations for society, of collective responsibility and non-ownership of social labor as the deepest safety, it is going to take time. The loss of the illusion of private property evokes more fear than relief in many, and faith in these possibilities can only come through practice. We must experiment over and over by down the experience of ownership into its various facets: Who has the authority; the responsibility; the interest; the ability; the need; who receivers the benefit, and, importantly, how do we repair harm created from historic property relations? 

We can experiment in creating work that no one owns, that creates no value, that cannot be bought or sold: work whose product is unbinding, that dismantles the Self entirely. If we want the world to plant trees whose fruit we may never taste, people need to learn to love the experience of doing good because it is good, not because we will personally reap the harvest.

It must be kept in mind that the new forces of production and relations of production do not develop out of nothing, nor drop from the sky, nor from the womb of the self-positing Idea; but from within and in antithesis to the existing development of production and the inherited, traditional relations of property.

~ Marx, Grundrisse p278

And we cannot worry too much about the scale of these experiments. Revolutionary practice is increasingly threatened with corruption as it grows, so maintaining it at a small scale always helps keep it protected.

I teach meditation and spoon-carving, though the spheres are small and contained. I participate in a number of cultural, social, artistic, culinary practices that are all part of small, simple communities of practice on the fringes of the mainstream. In their isolation, they take place in a protected field in which people can explore something profound about who we are in relation to one another without needing the results to be validated or sustained by the market economy. Existing outside the dominant modes of production, utilizing unnecessary and unproductive labor, they enter a different world of human activity. From one vantage point, they may be called something like “hobbies.” But they are also cultural, and in my view, the experience is something closer to a sacrament. 

In religious contexts, ceremony reenacts the miracle, remembers the vision, aligns us with the world as it should be, as it is promised to be. It is the small thing that remembers, replicates, and reasserts the possibility of the big thing. It is the ritual which preserves and protects knowledge of this across generations, time, and space. 

The practices I am drawn to conjure a container to hone my ability to witness and take responsibility for the profound and subtle forces at play in the creation of Self and world. Their meaning is not only consummated through their consumption, but their production. They are practices that are a process, that result in more clear understanding of ownership and action, of non-alienated labor, of kamma that is dignified and unowned. Frederick Engels wrote “Freedom is dependency acknowledged.”

I have produced, gathered, and given away a collection of ceremonial objects for which there is no ceremony other than cooking, eating, and feeding. I have baked pies, sang songs, helped teach skills that have no purpose greater than sharing. They are ceremonies of quotidian self-production, an honoring of the mysterious yet discernable forces at play in the creation of our world. 

When I carve a spoon, I don’t need a boss, a patron, or a customer to realize its value. Its purpose is not fulfilled by purchase or exchange – which would rather diminish its integrity. All I need to find someone who eats or someone who serves, for it is only by use or by giving that the external value is realized without betraying the inner value of the process of creation. 

When I offer a spoon to my newborn nephew, the kamma is of an entirely different quality than if I had bought it at a store. In mine, a lineage of non-exploitative relationships remains in-tact: from Ghandi’s pear tree, to my teacher’s guidance, to mother’s apple tree, to my love for my brother, to this child’s nourishment, the lineage of action is clear and unbroken. The spoon may sit in the same drawer as a stainless-steel spoon from a factory in China but they are the result of very different relationships, different processes, and recreate very different worlds. 

Mine is also inefficient and non-essential. It does not serve its purpose as a spoon any better. 

The practice of creating and giving away helps me work through the entanglements of attachment and identification – whether the form is a spoon, a song, pie, or an essay. Though most people might not be particularly interested in the goal of dismantling the Self, I wonder if we can transform our social dynamics of ownership without at least the willingness and tools to reconsider it.

During periods of intensive meditation retreat, I generally don’t like to carve, write, make music, or create anything because it is very hard to craft something without also creating my Self alongside it.  There are times when I am beyond my capacity to manage the disintegration, and I know I need that raft of Self, and so can use these techniques to reconstruct it in relatively wholesome form. We can still explore the process by trying to create something beautiful – internally and externally, even if identification and ownership arise. The value of the learning is immense, and quite literally priceless. As the Haida artist Bill Reid said, “Joy is a well-made object, equaled only by the joy of making it.”

Now, here’s where we trim, here’s where we skim. 
Here’s where the center comes over the brim…

My mother and I stood above the kitchen sink with a pile of apples before us and a small array of knives at our disposal. We were testing cheap new knives from an historic-now-touristy store in nearby Amish country. These definitely peel better, but they don’t core well, she commented, while sticking with the new knife as I switched to an old dull one. Both your grandmothers really intimidated me with their peeling skills, she admitted, I was always so nervous. They were from a different era… where it was like a sin to waste anything.  

Her ribbons were certainly thinner than mine, but at least they didn’t look as if we were practicing entirely different skills. She had shown me how to make a pie before, but this felt like a more rigorous transmission. We had several cookbooks out and websites open as she explained her experience with the matrices of butter and shortening, temperature and sweetness, pan materials, and mixing techniques. 

That day, only my grandfather and aunt were in the other room, but we were reenacting a ceremony that had involved countless others through the years. Many of the stories, memories, and lessons we had learned or collectively shared came back to us as we rolled out the dough and prepared the filling. We all knew who needed coffee with their pie, who liked to pour cream over theirs, who preferred vanilla ice cream, who liked it dry, and who preferred it with a slice of cheese. (“Apple pie without the cheese is like a kiss without the squeeze,” my grandfather would still repeat every time he took a satisfied bite of cheddar before chasing it down with a forkful of pie.) My family culture was brought back to life each time this ceremony was re-enacted.

And a single truth became immediately clear to me: if there was pie, it would always be shared. No matter who unexpectedly came to the door, we would cut the pie to accommodate. If somehow we could not cut a thinner slice, people would share, or the cooks would discretely go without. But anyhow, that is why we always made two. Help was always appreciated, but this was not an exchange. No one had to pay with money or labor or even appreciation, though appreciation is always appreciated. 

It was not complicated. It was obvious. Pie is always freely offered without restraint or condition. It is the simple culture of unowned goodness: from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs.