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Love in the Belly of the Beast Looking out at the world these days one cannot help but notice the huge possibility for global connection and understanding. Yet that possibility exists alongside an enormous amount of separation and alienation. Most of us have opinions about why that is and think we know the solution. Few of us understand how our opinions contribute to the problem. The challenge and reward of seeing this for myself was pounded home last week as I conducted a training called “Coaching In The Workplace” at Lockheed Martin.
My friend Ron and I lead the program together. As we approach the massive, grey complex of buildings on the first morning, dark weather, misting rain and a tight security clearance add to my discomfort about being there. Once inside I begin to notice that natural light rarely penetrates the hallways, many people wear lab coats, all have badges, and no one reaches out with their eyes to connect. Everyone and everything is reserved, toned down and austere. As this atmosphere of ultra-sobriety engulfs me, I joke to Ron that the word “fun” probably isn’t all that relevant here. As we move on to our room and begin to set up, my internalized opinions start to work overtime. My mind flashes with similarities between where we are and scenes from with The Matrix trilogy - green light, long straight hallways, tight closed doors with God-knows-what behind them, Smith everywhere in different disguises. My masterpiece of internal dialogue is interrupted when our host says, “Hey! You guys can’t move those tables. If you do the union will write us up on a Grievance Complaint”. Ron and I are stopped short. I can barely believe my ears. We have five tables to move, at most a ten-minute job, and we can’t do it because it will threaten someone’s job?! Suddenly my mind is engulfed with thoughts about the depth of dysfunction facing our society today. Pounding down on me like a full color drumbeat my mind runs amok in a flurry of opinions: “…With 5%of the world’s people and consuming 35% of its resources we live in an unsustainable society. Yet we don’t stop. And we don’t even lead the way environmentally. Our economic resurgence is built on war and the fear of attack. To pay for it we borrow from domestic programs like highways, schools, and programs for the poor. While already having the largest percentage of prison population in the world we seriously ramp up both the legality and the technology of surveillance. Our government uses subsidies to encourage growth in oil and gas, the very industries causing such a problem, and virtually ignores alternative energy sources like sun, wind and water. Ron and I can’t do the silliest little job ourselves or it will initiate a grievance procedure…” I sink into a kind resigned stupor watching the union people move our tables. It all seems incredibly unrealistic and unworkable, top to bottom. Yet even from this strange beginning something is building within me: I find that I’m liking these people. The union guys are great, helpful with everything we asked, and very willing to pitch in and make changes. No doubt they have kids at home to feed and clothe and educate. As I stand back watching the union people move our tables I continue to notice this growing contradiction within me: there is a difference between my opinions and what is actually happening. My judgments about these people and their business, are simply not working in the face of what it feels like to talk with them. The breadth of this paradox is defying easy resolution. I am beginning to feel uncomfortably stuck, creased in the widening gap between my experience in the moment and long harbored, seemingly well-conceived personal views. Soon after beginning the program we notice that virtually everyone faces significant challenges in their work. As usual in the business world these days, they feel pressured to work longer hours, do more with less, and produce at a higher level than ever before. In a certain sense they are no different than any of the rest of us trying to get something accomplished, except that unlike most of us they have giant budgets to work with. One guy, Jeff, was in the final bidding phase of a $500 million contract with the South Korean government to outfit seven surveillance planes. Another guy, Bill, was mid-way through a tight $250 million weapons contract and needed to cut 10% of his staff. Carl was under pressure to deliver a fully outfitted and functional nuclear submarine using new testing procedures within a very narrow timeline. They talked like any other business manager about the need for growth and effective marketing. They had kids to get to school and college tuitions to pay and wives and husbands at home in varying degrees of health. They had to be effective, efficient and produce. Throughout all this discussion I quietly shuttered inside at the thought of our immense weapons industry being growth dependent, marketing itself like any other business, and using deep connections in Washington to increase business. Looking into the eyes of Doug brought a shiver to my spine. Usually I’m fine with big, strong guys in cowboy boots, but cold unfeeling eyes glued to an expressionless face made him tough to connect with. From the beginning I joked with Ron about Doug being a CIA operative sent out to check our level of threat and report back. After over 40 years with the company he had no desire for retirement because, as he says, “Nothin’ in life’s more exciting or interesting than this.” For the first day and a half Doug participated with calculation and distance, always expressionless, ultra serious and seated nearest to the door. Yet he contributed, he came back on time (unusual for these guys) and there was something quite genuine and straightforward in his questions. Like the others he had an engaging kind of interest, willingness to learn and ability to pay attention. Again I was strung taught between my judgments and my experience of people. Ron and I would constantly clarify the course material using either straight forward business examples or a story of one of us doing something funny or kind of stupid. We would poke fun at each other and tell tales revealing our own frailties. The more we joked and played the more Doug softened. Late in the afternoon of our last day we thought we glimpsed a tight smile on Doug’s face. To our amazement shortly after that he made a joke, then soon followed it up with others and before long began laughing out loud. We couldn’t believe it. We teased him saying, “When it’s hard to get you guys to stop cracking jokes we know we’re really getting our message across”. Doug perfectly reflected my experience of the whole two days: on the one hand he scared the shit out of me. On the other, he warmed my heart and was clearly just another struggling human being trying to get it right. In the end, against all our expectations of a super-critical assessment, his evaluation of us was “excellent” in every category. Doug left me opinionless and vulnerably outside any easy answers. None of my typical perspectives could hold the breadth of my experience. The grace that washed up on my shore that day in the form of Doug and the others left its high-water mark in my heart…. something about seeing God in every one of those eyes, all in various disguises and shades of revealing. The book Change Your Questions Change Your Life by Marilee Adams forms the basis of the material which Ron and I present. One idea we present about the power of questions goes like this: “Questions drive your thoughts. Thoughts in turn create a feeling. That feeling then drives actions and thus outcomes or results. So business results are really a product of the quality of questions you ask. If you want to change or improve your results you need to look at the questions that drive your actions. You gain power over your life when you realize what questions may be driving the things you do.” Now these people are all highly educated engineers, trained to analyze and work with unambiguous, concrete data. To this kind of talk they would politely respond with, “Huh?”. We would back up our assertions with everyday examples such as “Look at the clothes you are wearing. What had you wear these particular clothes today? You are literally wearing the answer to questions like ‘What would look good?’ ‘What would be appropriate?’ ‘What would be comfortable?” and then they would energetically add, ”Yea, and what’s clean?” With each example we would share a little of our world and they would share a little of theirs. Each time another person would open up about what mattered to them and we would respond with a question that helped view the situation from a different perspective. We used examples that included all of life not just the business world, so challenges like raising a teenager, and balancing work and home responsibilities, were available topics. Each time I let my heart be touched by a kind of basic humanity in their stories. Every time I did a kind of growing respect followed. And on we went for two days. Every step of the way the gift of being together dug deeper and deeper into my heart. Each day when training was done coming out of the grey building - outside the grey hallways and grey rugs and strict security and tight regulations and high expectations and pressure to get it right - “Moe” our Iranian driver met us with his car. Again contrasts were stark. Anywhere within a few feet of Moe and you could smell the dank odor of long-past-shower-time. His clothes looked slept in for at least the last two weeks. His hair was matted down tight and dirty to his scull. All of this was overlaid with the ironic stench of a “Pines Fresh” air freshener hanging from the rearview mirror. Indeed nothing about it was fresh. At first in his car I couldn’t get over the smell of everything. My mind was alive with opinions about how it all “should” be and what we’d have to do to get picked up by someone who didn’t smell like they had slept in a dumpster all night. But we got to talking. He would ask us about our day and listen intently as we described our interests, course material, and challenges with the people. He would then talk about the latest book he had picked up at the library and how it related to what we said. I remember marveling at the depth of his curiosity and how thrilled he was to be learning about all these things. On that first ride home as we listened and laughed and shared together with Moe I felt increasingly awed by the guy. At one point in our ride we were talking about people being conscious of their life and the effects of what they do. Moe said: “You know that awareness you guys talk about? It sounds just like a muscle, some people are strong with it, and some are not.” As we got out of the car and I started to thank Moe for the ride, I looked into his laughing eyes I saw a joy so deep, so unpretentious, and so real it brought tears to my eyes. I laughed and cried at the same time as his spirit just poured into me. I felt washed clean. Stunned at seeing, once again, how I use opinions and judgments to distance myself from people I looked back and said yet another warm good-bye until morning. Throughout the second day of training we found ourselves really looking forward to our “Moe Time” as we called it. Late that afternoon as we left the large buildings that were so full of so much intelligence - yet so muted and secure and cautious – we came out, glad to be done, and jumped into the car happily facing square into the eyes of Moe’s delight. He drove us wherever we wanted to go, made suggestions, awaited our return, and all the while we talked excitedly about things we were learning and seeing in life. Moe was a real highlight during those two days. He was continuously alive and interested in a most refreshing way. In the end I had to give it up: I decided his smell was essential to the magic. Using good questions encourages the expression of others and keeps attention off oneself. Ron and I would usually answer participants questions with more questions in order to provoke their own knowledge and mastery, not ours. Responding with an answer seemed to subtly confirm that we were different and separate. Responding with a question elicited their own conscience and character and asked each of us to meet somewhere outside our opinions. Every question and response brought me deeper into relationship with the very people I had initially pushed out of my heart with some kind of label. At the conclusion of our classroom time I was left with a much larger series of questions inside than any I’d ever asked of them: “Could I be in the presence of love with these people regardless of what they do and my opinion about it? Could everything be just another aspect of love? Could it be that there is nothing to resist because all I’m actually resisting is my own love? All of this just kept boiling up within me every time I looked in the eyes of these new people in my life. What began to emerge within me was a wondrous realization that love might just be the entirety of every thing that exists. Not love like feel-good fall-in-love, but love like a presence, like an essence, that resides in and behind all things. As this idea sunk in deeper I thought: just maybe every single person is a carrier of that essence if I just stopped my opinions, trained myself to see it, and related to people that way. Late that evening on the way back to the hotel, just for a moment, as I was quietly enthralled with the light in Moe’s eyes, another startling thought occurred to me: Love is the highest truth! And if love is the highest truth, then all real truth must contain love or it is fake truth. Maybe there is no real truth without love. Much as I thought my opinions about the war industry were true, the truth is, they were fake truth because I was using them to create separation and distance, not connect with people more deeply. On the ride I reflected back many years ago to when I had a friend, an elder, named Joseph. At the time it was very late in his life and very early in mine. He would talk to me of things I never thought about before. One time I said to him, “After you’re gone, what’s the one thing – the most important thing – I should remember for the rest of my life?” We were sitting on a hillside and he just kind of stared off into the distance scratching his beard and said, “Nothing is as it seems”. That was about the last thing he ever said to me. I had forgotten he ever said it until these two days of work forced me to see the life that exists outside my opinions. Joseph always talked about cultivating awareness and paying attention, about feeling the world, not just thinking about it. Yet this one sentence, “Nothing is as it seems” never really made much sense. Indeed it has taken me years to understand why this simple truth was most important. As I walked into Lockheed Martin that first day, quietly clear about my moral superiority, it was I who was in the belly of the beast, not them. Opinions are the cornerstone of separation and alienation in our world. We throw them about as though there is nothing more real. Unreal power is the power of opinion. Real power lies in the eyes of the beholder, in the seeing of the Being, in recognizing the connecting spirit. “Nothing is as it seems” is a powerful reminder to look through the unreal to the love that drives it.
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Lockheed Martin is the largest manufacturer of weapons in the world. Their 125,000 employees build most of our nations warplanes, rockets and guidance systems for nuclear missiles, sensors for spy satellites and scores of other military and intelligence systems. Their information-technology products also sort our mail, total our taxes, cut social security checks, count the census, run space flights, and monitor air traffic. Lockheed stock has tripled in the last four years and their gross revenue is now something like $40 billion each year. Needless to say, war and security fears have been great for business.