This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Theory of Change - Gil Fronsdal. It likely contains inaccuracies.
The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. Please visit website www.audiodharma.org to find the authoritative record of this talk.
Good morning, everyone, and welcome. For today’s talk, I’d like to bring up a topic. The purpose of bringing it up is not to offer some definitive teachings that come to a nice, great conclusion, but rather to inspire you—maybe provoke isn’t the right word, but evoke in you—a reflection, so you might think more deeply about this topic and how it works for you personally.
I think it’s a very important topic for us as individuals in our own lives, in our interpersonal lives, and in our societal life to really reflect deeply on this and understand how it works for us. This is because we probably all operate with it, but it’s often unexamined and unconsidered. So what I’m encouraging here is to take this topic and really consider how it is for you.
The topic is: What is your theory of change?
If you’re involved in changing yourself, changing your family, your community, your society, or your world, you are operating under some theory, some hypothesis, some assumptions about how change happens. I encounter a lot of people who want to see change, but they’ve never examined their theory of change. They have a gut reaction and some idea of, “Of course, this is how it should be.” Sometimes it’s very aggressive. Some people want something to be different, and their idea is to bark, or worse, and be hostile to get what they want to happen. Other people’s theory of change is to fawn and to be very gentle and kind; they’re trying to get something, but they think this is how you make things happen.
When we’re involved in Buddhist practice, are you involved in any process of change? Are you looking for a change when you’re practicing? If so, what is your theory of change? How is that change supposed to happen? What is the understanding of how it happens? What needs to be done for it to happen? Or do you just take the word of some poor teacher who says, “Yes, it’s really good to meditate. Everyone should meditate. You’ll feel so much better if you meditate.” Okay. Well, that’s my theory of change: I’ll just follow this teacher’s word. In that case, you have an unexamined theory that believing in someone else is what’s going to help you find your way.
So often, it’s unexamined. Ask yourself the question: What theory do you have? What beliefs do you have around how change happens, and has it really been examined? Can it be examined more deeply? Can it be reconsidered? Are there better theories of how change happens?
In this regard, I came across this quote by E.B. White from his book Charlotte’s Web that says something like, “Every morning I wake up torn between the desire to change the world and the inclination to savor it. This makes it very difficult to plan.”
So, how do we live in this world? Is this a world in dire need of us to change, about to fall apart? Or is this a world where it’s okay to enjoy the holiday, enjoy the Sunday, go to the park, and just enjoy the natural wonder of this world? How do we manage these two views? To say it in other terms, do we care for our life, or do we enjoy our life? Do we change our life, or do we enjoy the life we have? There’s a whole series of things to examine in these questions of change and theories of change.
One of the first things to examine is what we see. How do we understand the current circumstances? Do we see that the sky is falling and we have to run? Do we see that the world is burning and there’s nowhere to run? Is what we see hopeless, and all you can do is give up? Or do we see fires that we can put out, and no one else is going to do it, so we should? Do we see a world where goodness prevails? Do we see a world where evil prevails? How do we interpret the world? How do we see ourselves?
Some people see themselves in very negative ways, as somehow wrong in all the different ways that could be. Some people see themselves as wrong and believe that’s just how it is; they’re stuck that way. Some people see themselves as being way too right: “Everything is right about me, and everyone else needs to understand that too. Everything I say must be true.”
So the question is, what are we seeing? And are we seeing accurately? Are we seeing in a useful way? Some people have this belief that if I see it, it must be true. “If I see it, I’ll believe it.” But that is kind of naive because often how we see is through the lens of interpretation, through the lens of desires, through the lens of aversions. Sometimes how we see has been shaped by culture, family, religion, or politicians. So the way we see is not always so accurate. This makes the whole question of a theory of change difficult from the very beginning. It requires a careful consideration of what’s going on here with me, with my family, in my place of work, in this nation, in this world.
Of course, there are many things to see. Part of what we see has to do with our selection—what we choose to see and what we choose to ignore. That also makes it very complicated because there’s already a preference that goes into how we see.
The way that this practice of ours can assist with this is that by calming down, by quieting the discursive mind, we begin to let go of some of the overlays, the projections, the preferences, and the selectivity we bring to whatever situation we’re in. We’re seeing it very partially, through the lens of our desires. It’s remarkable to quiet the mind down, to quiet the thinking mind down, to quiet the desiring mind down, and to be able to see with fresh eyes.
I have, not a few times, been disturbed by how I saw a person through a filter that was not accurate. Maybe I had old information about the person and hadn’t seen how they had changed. I wasn’t ready to see that the person was showing up in a very different state than how I had known them. So I operated under assumptions that I knew the person, but I didn’t know what was salient and important at the moment because I was operating on stories, ideas, and memories. I’ve had the wonderful experience of being quiet and calm, settled, with my mind clear, and seeing someone I’ve known for a long time with fresh eyes—really just allowing them to be completely as they are, without needing or wanting anything from them, without projecting anything. All that gets reduced dramatically, and so I see the person in a more whole way.
This has also been true with myself. We do the same thing with ourselves. We see ourselves very partially, through the lens of what our society expects of a person or what society tells us is important. I’ve told a story sometimes about when I moved. I used to live in San Francisco for quite a bit of time in one of the poorer neighborhoods, and I was kind of a poor hippie. I had an old car and was very happy with it. I had no questions about it, no issues around it; it was just my car, very simple and straightforward.
But then I moved down here to the peninsula. At first, I was living up on Skyline, way up there in the woods, but I would come down periodically to Palo Alto. The main reason was to teach this group. I would come down, have dinner, and then I would go and teach. After a few years of this—it might have taken four or five years—I started to notice that I had one of the oldest cars in Palo Alto because, even back then, a lot of people had relatively new cars. Then one day, there arose in my mind: “I should get a new car.” It was really clear that the desire was not because my car was falling apart or inadequate, but because now I was comparing myself to what was going on in the society around me. Somehow that comparison generated this desire for a new car.
That’s one thing about a car. What about a new you? How are you comparing yourself to the people around you? Does it change how you understand yourself based on the community you’re with all the time? I suspect some of you have lived in different communities in your life, growing up in different places and now being here. I can imagine that your shifting understanding of yourself and what it means to be a “right” person is shaped by who you compare yourself to.
In that comparison, are you seeing yourself accurately? My theory of change in 1995, I think, was that the change I wanted was to have a new car. The change needed to be in response to what I saw around me; it needed to be about my status or how people saw me. I remember I went driving around to a few car dealers. I think it was a Honda dealership here in Redwood City, and I was driving a new little Honda Civic with windows you had to use your arms to turn. I went for a drive, and I guess I was driving the car and the dealer was in the passenger seat. We were coming up to a light on El Camino, and he was telling me, “You deserve an air conditioner.” Wow, that idea had never crossed my mind. What did I do to deserve an air conditioner? He was there to create a whole idea about myself that he was hoping I’d buy into.
So, what do we see? We’re not so innocent in seeing ourselves or anything else. What is the lens through which we see things? What is the emotion through which we see our life? Do we see it through fear, inadequacy, and insecurity? Do we see it through love and generosity? Do we see it through the idea that things are perfect? Is that a terrible thing to say, given how imperfect the world is? There are some people whose spirituality is very much centered on seeing the perfection of this moment, just how it is. The Zen master Suzuki Roshi1 made a big impact on a lot of people when he said, “You’re perfect just as you are, and there’s room for improvement.” He was holding both of them together. There’s something about it being perfect, and we can change.
A theory of change also involves what vision you have for what’s possible. There are some people in this field of change who believe in something called heliotropism2, which literally means something like “turning with the sun.” The vision we have is one of the things that we follow. So if the vision we have is of danger, fear about terrible people, immigrants coming to do all kinds of horrible things to you, and if that’s the vision we imbibe, then what we see as needing to be done is affected by this future we see coming.
If we have a vision of peace, a vision of a world where people are generous and kind to each other; if we see a vision of a family or a community like this, where we care for each other, respect each other, and allow each other to be exactly who we are in some spacious, accepting way—that vision, the theory is, can cause things to begin orienting themselves in that direction, even subconsciously, just like a sunflower moves with the sun. Something inside of us can start shifting and changing in profound, unconscious ways depending on the vision that we live by.
So what vision do you live by? What sense of a future do you live by? What sense of possibility do you have? Is it one that inspires you or deflates you? Is it realistic or too much of a fantasy? A theory of change also involves a vision of what’s possible.
Imagine if Martin Luther King Jr., instead of standing in Washington and giving that wonderful speech, “I Have a Dream,” had instead given a talk titled, “I Have a Nightmare.” What a different world we’d be living in.
So, how does change happen? If you have an idea of a change, how does it come about? I’ve thought about the idea of a theory of change a fair amount in the last year or so, having to do with what’s happening more broadly in this country with politics. I see a lot of people, including myself, wanting to react without ever considering the theory of change—getting angry and yelling and making big protests as if that’s going to cause a change. Is that how change happens?
Some people believe that change often happens with vision. If you have a great, wonderful, inspiring vision that you really stand behind, that’s more likely to happen. In politics, it seemingly works if you have a really bad, frightening vision; that’s what makes some people vote for you.
Another theory is that change happens by the stories we tell. Many of us are telling personal stories that are undermining ourselves. Some psychologists say that one of the leading causes of depression is rumination—repeatedly chewing over the same story, the same dire situation, the same undermining, deflating kind of story, until we drain ourselves of our vitality and get depressed. Stories make a big difference. When politicians say the same story over and over again, it can have a huge effect if that’s where we get our conditioning for how we’re going to see the world. In the academic study of religion, it’s sometimes said that religions mostly exist because of their stories, not their doctrines.
I have a term called the “acupuncture point of change,” which was inspired by a person who has inspired me a lot: Mahatma Gandhi. He was in jail in India during his independence movement, arrested by the British. He spent his time in jail considering what to do next, what strategy he would use to bring independence to India. Finally, he was released and began to implement his strategy for change. He started the Salt March. He marched to the sea because the British had a monopoly on salt production. No one was allowed to collect salt; they had to buy it from the British, and everyone had to have salt. So he marched to the sea, went into the water, and picked up a little piece of salt. That was enough to be arrested again. And that brought the British Empire down. That was the acupuncture point of change. That little thing made a huge difference in the transition. A lot more had to happen, of course.
But where’s the acupuncture point of change for us? If we look at the whole big scenario of our life, our situation, how dire it is, it can be so overwhelming. We think we have to take a sledgehammer to whatever is going on. Maybe. But is there an acupuncture point of change? Is there a story? A particular act? Is there something we can do? Where’s that point that’ll make a difference?
Do we have a sledgehammer theory of change? Do we have a theory that someone else is responsible? Do we outsource all change? If we want peace in this world, are other people supposed to do it? Or do we insource it? Do we always understand that we have a role? I don’t want to use the word “responsibility” necessarily, but do we always begin with, “What’s my role? What can be my contribution? In what way can I, in a generous way, make the change that I want to see in the world?”
A theory of change that I’ve had is that if I feel like I really need something from some people, rather than demanding it or expecting it, in certain circumstances, if I have a need, I offer it to others. For example, if you have a need to be heard by someone—and this is a theory of change I used when I was on an ethics committee, mediating a lot of problems—social conflict doesn’t change until people feel heard. So I was operating under this assumption. Sometimes I’ve wanted to be heard, and so I will make an effort to really understand and hear them and make sure they feel heard. The theory is that once they feel settled and heard, then they’ll be interested in me. It doesn’t always work, but it’s a better effort than the alternative. I’ve known wonderful stories where people have had challenges in a relationship, a number of people told me this had to do with their in-laws, and they started giving simple, inexpensive gifts. That began to change the relationship. Rather than getting a mediator, these acts of kindness worked.
Buddhism also has a theory of change. One of the core principles of Buddhism is that everything is changing all the time. This is the teaching on anicca3, the Pali word for impermanence or inconstancy. But the change we live in—in ourselves, in society—is not random. We have a role in that change. Our contribution is to either have the change move in a wholesome direction or an unwholesome direction.
It’s very much like going down a river in a canoe with a rudder. The river is doing most of the work, carrying you in the current. But you see the sandbank, you see the rapids on one side of the river. If you have enough warning, you just adjust the rudder a little bit to avoid the danger and stay in the good current. The direction of the rudder makes a huge difference.
The idea that we’re living in a river of life is a deep metaphor that Buddhism uses. We want to stay in the current, to avoid the sandbanks, avoid the edges where the tigers are waiting, and avoid the rapids. What’s wonderful here in this metaphor is that at the same time as avoiding the dangers, we’re putting ourselves in the good place. It’s the same movement: just adjusting the rudder.
Buddhism is about instituting a change. It has a vision of change. In some places in Buddhism, having that vision is considered a whole new stage of practice. A beginner doesn’t quite yet have the personal vision of what’s possible. But once we see it or have a sense of it—a personal vision of how much peace, freedom, ease, happiness, and well-being are possible in our deep inner life—wow. Not only is it possible, but why should I sacrifice it for these other purposes? This feels wholesome. This feels whole. We might not always feel this way, we might just have a hint of this possibility, but at some point in Buddhism, one has to have a vision of what’s possible. For some people, it’s more of a negative vision: “I don’t have to suffer this way anymore. I’ve wasted much of my life suffering unnecessarily. This is no longer necessary.” For others, it’s the other side of that coin: when we don’t suffer, there’s peace and happiness.
The vision is that at the end of the river is the ocean of freedom that the river will take us to, but we’re adjusting the rudder all the time. This is an important metaphor because in the dharma, we have a very important role. We can’t outsource our peace; we can’t outsource our inner freedom. We have to do it ourselves. On the other hand, we have to realize that it’s not only up to us. Just like you don’t cause the canoe to go down the river, you just create the conditions that allow the current to carry it. In Buddhism, we don’t create the personal change we’re looking for; we create the conditions that allow the inner growth to happen.
The metaphor for personal change in Buddhism is one of growth. We’re growing something. We’re allowing some natural processes inside of us to grow and develop. We’re cultivating something, not creating something. How do we cultivate and create the conditions that allow something positive and useful to grow?
It turns out we don’t have to choose between changing the world and savoring the world. We can savor changing the world. They can be one and the same thing. To say it in a different way, we can care for our life and enjoy our life at the same time. How? When the efforts we make to change are done wholesomely, in a way that feels good, healthy, heartwarming, and inspiring. It feels nice to do something, rather than being involved in change with greed, hostility, or a heavy, critical self-view.
The idea in Buddhism is to find ways to make whatever change you’re going to make in beautiful ways. The Pali word for beautiful, kalyana4, also means ethical. So, ethical and beauty are the same in Buddhism. The word “wholesome” is also a synonym for this. How we do the change is as important as the change we’re going to make. Don’t give up the wholesome. Always find what is the wholesome, beautiful, ethical way to instigate change.
How do we do all this? How do we see what’s going on clearly and realistically? How do we have a vision that’s inspiring? And how do we go about knowing what is wholesome and beautiful? This is one of the purposes of meditation: to practice regularly and seriously enough that there starts to be a shift inside. The distractions, preoccupations, judgments, fears, greed, and hostilities of the mind have all had a chance to settle enough—they don’t have to go away—that we begin feeling and sensing there’s much more here than the narrow, selective way in which we’ve seen our life up until that point.
The function of meditation is to relax that narrowness so we start opening up to a wider sense of wholeness, a wider sense of what’s possible, with a vision that’s cleared of its selectivity, bias, and preconceived ideas enough that we start seeing, feeling, and experiencing for ourselves what’s possible. We clear the space so the sun of awareness, the sun of life, can shine on what it is that wants to grow inside. The Buddhist idea is there are seeds inside that want to sprout and grow, and in the right conditions, what will grow are wholesome seeds. If you’re not careful, you also have unwholesome seeds inside, and those are the seeds that you might sprout and grow. Be careful what you grow.
So, what is your theory of change? Do you have one? Is it a good one? Is it a helpful one? From the perspective of this talk today, does your theory of change inspire you? Does it nourish you? Does it give you a sense of inspiration to live a beautiful, ethical, and wholesome life? And maybe as important, is your theory of change one that’s going to make this world that we live in a better place, bringing peace, happiness, care, and compassion to this world? Wouldn’t it be wonderful if these two visions—the vision you have for yourself and the vision you have for the world—are one and the same?
So, theory of change. Did I give you something to think about? That was my goal. I’d encourage you to talk to people about it. Find friends and strangers and say, “I’m supposed to talk about theory of change. Can we talk about this? I’d like to hear yours first.”
May you reflect on your theory of change, and in doing so, I hope all of us will change the world for a better place. Thank you.
Shunryu Suzuki Roshi (1904-1971): A prominent Sōtō Zen monk and teacher who helped popularize Zen Buddhism in the United States. He founded the San Francisco Zen Center. ↩
Heliotropism: The directional growth of a plant in response to sunlight. The term is used metaphorically to describe the tendency of people or systems to orient themselves towards a positive vision or energy source. ↩
Anicca: A Pali word for “impermanence” or “inconstancy,” a fundamental doctrine of Buddhism. ↩
Kalyana: A Pali word that means “beautiful,” “lovely,” or “wholesome.” In Buddhism, ethical conduct is considered beautiful. ↩