Developing Beneficent Power
Adult Development reaches its asymptotic plateau with what we might call here “the contextual stage”, where our actions are responsive to what is offered by the context comprising all we are aware of. As vectors, our actions have a direction and a magnitude. From this perspective, the contextual stage of adult development means we have become masterly in surveying possible directions. How does magnitude come into play?
What follows is for those who have both entered the contextual stage of adult development and found resonance with the orientation towards benefiting the totality.
Our limit on benefiting the totality is the insufficiency of our effective power in realizing our vision. Beneficent power is power exercised for the benefit of the totality.
In this essay, we are going to walk through a sequence:
- Aesthetics of Being: An offering: the moral aesthetic of benefiting the totality.
- Adult Development: Why the contextual stage of adult development is foundational for this moral aesthetic.
- Effective Power: Why effective power allows the full flourishing of benefiting the totality.
- Nobility: Nobility as assuming responsibility for the uncomfortable trade-offs that exercising power entails.
- Seeing Nobly: Cultivating the noble stance so as to see with the eyes of nobility.
- Cultivating Individual Power: Approaches to cultivating individual power.
- Cultivating Collective Power: Approaches to cultivating collective power.
- Recognition of Transformations: What keeps power responsive to changing context?
- Beneficent Power: Stepping into Beneficent Power.
- Searchless Responsiveness: The completion of what has been generated.
Aesthetics of Being
Some believe that in every situation there is an intrinsically right thing to do, whether they know it or not. In contrast, I talk of “moral aesthetics”, the way an individual brings a complex and personal moral view to a situation. The remainder of this essay presumes you have some resonance with the moral aesthetic of benefiting the totality.
Benefiting the totality is slightly different from the standard Western Buddhist formula of “benefit all sentient beings”; most importantly, the totality includes you and society and structures and nature and…all that you are aware of.
Each of our totalities has a real horizon of intimacy that arises from interaction. A mind-made “totality” of all that we hear about on the news is a conceptual totality, perhaps information about possibilities for interaction, but not a lived totality until we have interactive intimacy and capacity for engagement.
The patterns of engagement in a situation rarely form coherent and closed conceptual systems. There can be useful descriptions of our worlds, but they are always partial.
See Moral Aesthetic and Adult Development
Adult Development
Our realized moral aesthetic (as opposed to our concept of it) is limited by our developmental stage. For example, if a young child conceives of themselves as acting to benefit all, it may be because they understand that that is what it is to be a good person. If a teenager does so, it may be because they understand that it is the custom of their group. The moral aesthetic of benefiting the totality is fully realized when there is a growing identification as the context, not solely as an individual or as a member of a group. We can call this the contextual order of mind.
Arriving at the contextual order of mind is rare at a young age, as it generally requires having engaged successfully as a responsible party with many different contexts. The contextual order of mind is a prerequisite for exercising beneficent power because until you see the whole field, you cannot assume responsibility for the negative externalities and uncomfortable trade-offs that are entailed in potent actions across that field.
The contextual order of mind is, however, only a prerequisite for beneficent power: it is arriving at the capability of seeing innumerable possibilities of action. Beneficent power involves the actual capability to take actions of great force.
See Moral Aesthetic and Adult Development
Effective Power
When we talk of power here, we are talking of power as effectiveness, the capacity to produce intended effects in the world. This may or may not involve power as formal authority or power as coercion.
Knowing what to do does not make it happen. At minimum, we must try to make something happen by actual engagement. When we do, we discover what we are successful at, what we seem unable to do but can imagine ourselves capable of, and what seems dictated by fortune.
What if we had a more vivid vision? Built stronger coalitions? Accumulated and deployed more resources? Worked in greater coordination with others? These are examples of capacities that very few of us will ever reach the limits of. We all have great potential to increase our effective power.
Nobility
When we talk of nobility here, we are talking of the noble stance, not of the culture of aristocracy.
When we bring a moral aesthetic to bear on our totality, some actions may be immediately clear. That which is less clear, we can either wait for the moment that clarity arrives or seek clarity. There is also clarity without resolution, that is, the state of clear moral dilemma: whatever you do, someone or something will suffer or worsen. Here, nobility comes into play; it can be more fully defined as assuming responsibility for the uncomfortable trade-offs that exercising power entails.
Our totality is not always tractable via a rational calculus. This is where nobility must be brought to bear.
You cannot avoid trade-offs. You can only assume responsibility for the trade-off, including the unforeseen consequences. While reasons may illuminate such a choice, the choice itself is fundamentally an aesthetic commitment to a possible world of meaning. That is the essence of nobility.
Seeing Nobly
A view, here, is a salience landscape that highlights affordances for interactions. By interacting as if we already fully inhabited a view, we can fumble our way to fully inhabiting it. This will, inevitably, mean that we will inhabit the view gracelessly at first.
When we cultivate nobility, we start to see with the eyes of nobility. The eyes of nobility see many problems as insoluble trade-offs, and are willing to accept the challenge to step into the assumption of responsibility.
For example, in everyday life, we encounter the insoluble trade-offs of placing our attention, allocating resources, and balancing between present and future. Even if a framework guides us with reasons, we will find ourselves without reasons for choosing the framework. We will never find a single moment in life without confronting insoluble trade-offs, and so the opportunity to step into nobility is never absent.
Cultivating Individual Power
At this point, having a vision of power that is beneficent, you may be asking: how can I cultivate power?
Here, my main goal is to bring to awareness that an increase in effective power is possible. The appropriate methods to cultivate individual power lie outside this essay.
The bottom-up constraint on effective power is contact with the situation. The ability to act effectively is limited by failure to comprehend the unique detail of the actual situation you are facing. How could you achieve greater contact with what is actually happening?
A continually emerging vision of the future that is reachable from the present provides top-down direction. What does the future look like in practical, sensory, and emotional detail?
The degree of cohesion in a group constitutes a limit on the coordination of effective action. What would increase the likelihood of others cooperating with you in your ventures?
Boldness determines if there is enough collective energy to create sufficient concentration of energy for a breakthrough change. What breakthroughs could happen by generating sufficient concentration of energy?
Agility, the responsive evolution of all these as circumstances change, overcomes pattern momentum's tendency to drift from contact with reality. What effective patterns might be varied now, both to discover more effective power and to prepare for when they fade?
See Effective Power — The Five Elements
Cultivating Collective Power
Similarly, my main goal here is to bring to awareness that an increase in collective effective power is possible. The appropriate methods to cultivate collective power lie outside this essay.
In a collective, contact with the situation starts with individual contact. Additional dimensions are added, though, of how the members of a group constitute a useful diversity of differentiated patterns of contact, and how communication within the collective forms a shared understanding of the situation richer than any individual's.
Additionally, there are many aspects of forming a cohesive collective: shared meanings, shared vocabulary, appreciation of differentiated roles, and human warmth all contribute.
In a collective, vision can be unified or distributed (delegated). This is the consideration of concentration and dispersion. Concentration creates a single focus of energy at the cost of committing little energy elsewhere.
Agility is very strongly rooted in individuals' recognition of the transformations that make previously successful patterns obsolete.
See Cultivating Collective Power
Recognition of Transformations
What keeps power responsive? Recognizing that the world we knew is always fading and a new one being born.
This recognition of arising, transforming, and dissipating can be approached both as a skill and as a stance. Cultivating the skill can serve as a gateway to the stance.
As a skill, this is recognition of transformations: how are things changing? The skill is cultivated by developing the capacity to see specific types of change, for example, right now, in this situation:
- what is initiating?
- what is splitting into diversity?
- what is unifying into singularity?
- what is being removed from the situation?
- what is entering the situation?
- what potential is accumulating?
These facets do not only occur. They also have potentials and degrees of intensity; they form limits on each other and act to promote or inhibit each other.
Recognition of transformations is the entry skill for responsive power.
See Recognition of Transformations
Beneficent Power
Stepping into beneficent power is moving from felt care to manifesting care, boldly. Even with the assumption of responsibility for uncomfortable trade-offs, there is no guarantee that things will go well. It is likely that some will disagree with your actions, seeing only the dismaying side of the trade-off.
This is the bittersweet beauty of benefiting the totality through stepping into beneficent power.
Searchless Responsiveness
Searchless responsiveness is to be without any ultimate master project while maintaining responsiveness to context, allowing local projects to arise, transform, and dissipate. This is both the base and the completion of beneficent power: as it is cultivated and deployed, it is simultaneously released again and again.
Capability grants effective power; nobility guides effective power; searchless responsiveness is the space where nobility arises, transforms, and dissipates in a way that is always fresh beneficence, never the repetition of beneficence once fresh and now stale.
Having great power can elevate one into the realm of the gods. In Vajrayana Buddhism it is traditionally said that those in the god realm eventually begin to stink, as their once-successful patterns “rot” and no longer match what the situation calls for.
Searchlessness is the continual release of compulsion to repeat patterns. Responsiveness is the continual restoring of contact with the actual situation. Together, as searchless responsiveness, they keep your power fresh, and so actually beneficent.
Developing Beneficent Power
If you
- have started to enter the contextual order of mind of adult development
- resonate with the moral aesthetic of benefiting the totality
then you have the base to develop beneficent power.
The path of developing beneficent power is to
- cultivate individual power
- cultivate collective power
- cultivate the noble stance
Recognition of transformations is an entry-point for letting beneficent power transform fluidly. The fruition of beneficent power is found when competency in this path is combined with searchless responsiveness, allowing beneficent power to flow through you as the situation requires.
May you be filled with beneficent power!