Masks of Illusion by George Merrill

Discrimination is the only way to go.

In thinking about the riots in Baltimore recently, I wonder if today’s racial tensions are not because we discriminate too much, but that we don’t discriminate enough.

I say that because the word discriminate means to make informed distinctions between, not to pass judgments upon. So if I, as a white man, treat my neighbor the black man contemptuously for no other reason than he is black, it says that although I don’t know the first thing about how to discriminate I’m sure skilled at judging.

This whole business of discrimination became clearer to me some years ago when I began to study and practice Buddhist meditation. Buddhist practices put the onus on the practitioner, i.e., me and not what someone else may be about. In short in the practice I’m challenged to discriminate carefully what’s going on in my own thinking and feeling and whether that is having an effect on how I am seeing others. It’s a variation on Jesus’ admonition to take the splinter out of my own eye first before deciding that someone else’s needs extraction. Recovering people have a wonderful way of putting this human failing.  They advise us not to take someone else’s inventory.  Being driven by illusions is a failing of our human condition and is very democratic, afflicting white and black alike. There’s one caveat; the people with the power need be more alert to this failing because if they are not,  all kinds of mischief will follow.

Buddhists teach that we are all victims of our own illusions.  Identifying our illusions, and holding them up to the light for detoxification is the spiritual task. We’re typically more adept at identifying others’ illusions than we are our own. It’s just the way it is.

In order to illustrate the power illusions have to affect our behavior, this story comes up regularly in various Buddhist teachings.

A man is walking a long path. It’s growing dark, and while he can still find his way, it’s becoming more difficult to see. Ahead of him he spots a long thin object lying on the road. He immediately thinks it’s a snake, becomes frightened and turns and runs. In fact, the object is only a rope. His illusion prompted his fear, not the reality.  Had he given himself enough time to discriminate he may have understood that but instead, on a momentary impression, his mind took over, convinced him that what he saw was something dangerous and he acted accordingly.

I would offer the thought that this is simply the way we are, all of us. The inability of the white community to be more discriminating of its illusions has gone down harder with the African American community since the white majority has historically had the social power.  Whites have had the luxury of entertaining their illusions with more impunity than blacks have. It may seem counter-intuitive to say this, but our troubles arise when we discriminate too little.

It’s hard to know another person, to get beyond the masks that we wear, the masks that, over the years, we’ve fashioned from our treasured illusions.

Columnist George Merrill is an Episcopal Church priest and pastoral psychotherapist.  A writer and photographer, he’s authored two books on spirituality: Reflections: Psychological and Spiritual Images of the Heart and The Bay of the Mother of God: A Yankee Discovers the Chesapeake Bay. He is a native New Yorker, previously directing counseling services in Hartford, Connecticut, and in Baltimore. George’s essays, some award winning, have appeared in regional magazines and are broadcast twice monthly on Delmarva Public Radio.

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