Escaping Negative Thinking (Fear) and Toxic Positivity (Hope): Dharma or Dharmic Thinking as a Third Way that Resolves a False Binary - Kundan Chhabra

Escaping Negative Thinking (Fear) and Toxic Positivity (Hope): Dharma or Dharmic Thinking as a Third Way that Resolves a False Binary 

By Kundan Chhabra

It’s easy to feel overwhelmed and burdened living within an oppressive colonial system. Multiple form of injustice interact, like environmental racism combined with medical racism, which compounds impacts.

As Buddhists, how do we maintain the calm mind that is needed in the fight for collective justice? How do we avoid spiraling into the negative thinking that leads to burnout, hopelessness and despair?

Especially for us racialized BIPOC Buddhist practitioners: we want some hope, something to hold on to. We don’t want to live in fear. (But, according to many forms of Buddhism, hope and fear are two sides of the same coin; when we hope for something, we also fear that it won’t happen. More on this later.)

When we experience fear, we are often presented with “toxic positivity” as an alternative, a pendulum swing to the other side of a false binary that is often wrapped up in “spiritual bypassing,” which can lead to “spiritual gaslighting.” Spiritual bypassing is a way of applying watered-down, twisted versions of deep spiritual concepts to bypass feeling difficult emotions, the very emotions that can spur us to take action toward improving things. Often, these empty platitudes are appropriated from Dharmic traditions, such as Buddhism and Hinduism. For example, “None of this is real. It’s all the mind’s fantasies anyway. Things will get better if only you think positively, because you are creating your own reality.” This appropriation of Buddhist and Hindu concepts is itself a form of injustice, reinforcing epistemicide (cultural genocide).

When spiritual bypassing is used by the dominant culture to invalidate and silence BIPOC people by denying us our own lived experiences, we suffer the impacts of “spiritual gaslighting,” gaslighting via these empty spiritual platitudes. For example, some responses to our holding others accountable for racial injustice may be, “Why can’t we appropriate your culture? I thought we were all one?” Or, “Why are you being angry?! I thought Buddhists were pacifists?”

But Dharmic practices, in both Buddhism and Hinduism, aren’t about the denial of reality but about awakening to reality exactly as it is, so that we can take skillful action toward collective change with the least amount of harm to all beings.

 We recognize that there are several levels to “reality.” Yes, there are the mind’s “projections,” but not everything is a “projection.” Some things really are happening—we’ve gotta recognize both of these to take skillful Dharmic action. For example, if someone punches me, it hurts. That’s real. It’s neither an “illusion” nor a “projection.” This hurt (which may also lead to anger) is a signal that a boundary has been violated and needs to be restored. Now, if you observe your mind creating additional meanings or interpretations out of that action, such as, “It’s all my fault; I shouldn’t have looked so weak and invited attack,” or its opposite, “I shouldn’t have appeared so threatening,” then, yes, it’s a projection that may in fact prevent you from even stating a boundary or doing it skillfully and effectively. An important outcome of Buddhist practice is being able to observe our cascading responses and perceptions, while also recognizing reality.

On a systemic level, we’ve gotta realize that justice issues like systemic racism/sexism/etc. really are indeed happening. They are real. And it’s not because “I am not good enough” or any of the mind’s projections that abusers want us to believe to keep our minds confused so that we don’t hold them accountable.

But constant self-advocating and endless attempts at changing the system are overwhelming emotional labor. So we try to “stay positive” and try to “hope” for something better. But hope, according to Buddhist teachings, is actually a kind of suffering. It’s a grasping-for-something kind of feeling, an unpleasant reaching, a tension-filled yearning.

Hope tempts us toward toxic positivity, whereas fear propels us toward negative thinking. 

The Buddhist practice is to overcome both fear and hope. But this doesn’t mean we despair into hopelessness.

This practice, then, is a key to resolving the false binary we mentioned earlier. Beyond both systemic oppression and the mind’s projections, another layer of reality exists both inside and outside of you. An innate completeness beyond hope and fear resides inside all of us; when we connect to both openness and awareness, we know we are already complete, already enough. Bön and Dzogchen Buddhism point to the 84,000 positive qualities, including the Four Immeasurables of love, compassion, joy and equanimity, already inside you, ready to be offered and expressed. There’s no “hope,” no “grasping” here. You are already complete.

When you connect to this inner reality, you also connect to the true nature of reality beyond the painful, oppressive divisiveness of systemic oppression. There is a vast peace and a love here. It’s Dharma as both true reality and the expression of that reality simultaneously. As Professor Vamsee Juluri says in his book Saraswati’s Intelligence: 

“Dharma is far more than what we are required to do or not to do. There is no list of things to get through to reap some reward in the end. Dharma is just the way everything is, without distortion, untruth, and most of all, without violence and destruction. So it is for each one of us to recognize Dharma as the reality that we live, and then decide on actions that will best support that reality.”

When we see this Dharma on one level as actual reality itself (with systemic oppression also being real but as a temporary subset of a larger reality), we can also refer to it by the Hindu word “Brahman” (not to be confused with “Brahma” and “Brahmin”). Brahman is infinity in the form of infinite cooperation, harmony, peace and love. A complementary idea in Theravada Buddhism is “sunnata” in Pali (Or “shunyatta” in Sanskrit). This is an infinite emptiness, a void that is also infinitely peaceful because there’s nothing there.

So, Dharma is also its expression in the form of right “karma”—bridging the gap between the cruelty of systemic oppression and the love of Brahman (the peace of sunnata)—that is, true reality. In this sense, karma is neither a cosmic scorecard nor a replacement for the vengeful theistic god that it’s often misconstrued as in the West. Karma is simply “action and consequences.”

Our Buddhist practice is to connect daily to Dharma on both levels, to discover our role in bridging that gap and to restore Dharma on Earth. Our practice is to enact that Dharma, the “Dharmic thinking” that helps us overcome both negative thinking and toxic positivity.