How Cancel Culture is Trashing the Dharma:

TALE OF A SLANDERED MINDFULNESS TEACHER

by Blake Shields Abramovitz

Part One

I try my best

to be just like I am

but everybody wants you

to be just like them

They say sing while you slave

and I just get bored

— Bob Dylan

i

Full disclosure: I am a shadowy alt right operative.

But (like so many of us) I have a front, a cover— the better to oppress with impunity.

I pose as a bohemian meditator artist.

I’ve been doing this for decades. Already at sixteen, I appeared to be a poet obsessed with Jim Morrison, road-tripping to Wyoming Rainbow Gatherings with my flower-child girlfriend, blazing through psychedelic kingdoms on Jerry Park LSD. My cover has been deep. I have taken no chances.

To perfect the ruse, I devised to read Chomsky, Zinn, and Malcolm X from a tender age. Then I protested foreign wars, head-banged to Rage Against the Machine, voted for Obama and Bernie, befriended progressives of all colors and sexual orientations, and wrote poetry about exploited peoples— all the while posing as a working actor in liberal Hollywood.

But grok this: My true identity was buried so deep under the alluvial sands of my psyche that I myself never knew about it until recently. I found out from— or perhaps you’ve guessed— a social justice activist.

“Blake is dangerous,” she began telling the folks in our little progressive Buddhist meditation community. “He’s alt-right.”

And so, like Luke Skywalker hanging off of that creepy antenna thing at the end of “The Empire Strikes Back,” informed by the terrifying Darth Vader of his true parentage, only then did I understand:

I, Blake Shields Abramovitz, the artist son of sixties civil rights activists and counterculture outlaws, the Venice Beach yoga and meditation teacher, the romantic poet, actor, Doors freak, and anti-war protester, had been the fucking Manchurian candidate of the alt right all along.

ii

The enraged social justice activist who crusaded to drive me from my spiritual home, Mettagroup, will of course go nameless here. It would be unethical for a teacher to violate the anonymity of a student. Suffice to say she was a troubled woman of thirty, a meditation protégé of mine recently emerged from an elite university, and probably suffering from a personality disorder. I mention that last point not to be unkind, but because, as will become clear, it’s relevant.

Also relevant is that she is a member of what’s considered a marginalized group. I’m not going to say which one— again for her protection. Maybe she’s black, or maybe she’s trans, or maybe she’s an immigrant, but in any case, during my ejection I was said to be “supporting the oppression of marginalized peoples.” (I disagree, and it should go without saying that every individual, regardless of group identity memberships, should be extended every human dignity.)

Now, let me sketch a scene, an authentic slice of life to drop you into the abject center of the farce (tragedy?) I have to tell.

I’m sitting with my meditation teacher and employer George on his stylish deck overlooking Historic Filipino Town in Los Angeles. A sea of glittering lights stretches westward to the sea. We’re talking. We’re drinking Chinese milk tea from tiny porcelain cups.

Hold on. George needs a better introduction: This is one rare, fascinating human being. A passionate progressive, a survivor of unthinkable trials, he has done an extraordinary amount of work on himself, achieved stunning successes as a meditator, and managed a degree of psychological healing most therapists don’t even aspire to facilitate. His raison d’etre as a meditation teacher is service, especially to those who likewise survived dark backgrounds— like me. And he was a good friend.

But back to his stylish deck, and the milk tea. I say to him, “So, this girl is smearing me. She’s telling community members I’m ‘alt right,’ whatever that means.”

I later find that it refers to: People who feel moved to craft a white ethno-state on the mainland United States. For anyone who has ever met me, this is so ludicrous that I still find it funny, despite how the slander upended my life.

“She’s telling students of ours, friends of mine, that I’m an ‘unsafe person,’” I continue, “that I’m violent toward women. This is, like, not okay. Right?”

I sip my tea. I am concerned, naturally, but reasonably at ease in the familiar home of my dear friend and mentor, George.

Then, without warning, curtains rise on Act One of the farce. Order slips. George DEMURES.

Wait. I must have imagined that.

No, I know George, and that was definitely him demurring.

There’s a sinking feeling in my gut. I sit up straighter.

George fixes me with his luminous, cat-like eyes. And in his mellifluous baritone, he tells me: “You’re doing this to yourself, you know.”

I am Jack’s utter bewilderment, if you’ll permit a Fight Club reference.

“Doing what?” I say. “She’s slandering me.”

“Well,” he shrugs. “That’s what the left does. That’s the tactic. It may not be right. But it works.” After a moment, his eyes widen meaningfully. “Have you considered radio silence?” I sit motionless, suddenly very alone. I look out at the glittering sprawl of the L.A. city lights. Then I look back at him, hoping for— a wink, a punchline? My Chinese milk tea has gone suddenly cold.

Within two months of this conversation, I will have been fired, ostracized from Mettagroup, and any association between George and me will have been permanently severed.

Furthermore, a community will have fractured. Livelihoods will have been compromised, and the lives of dozens of students jolted. And this affair will have shaken a certain hope we practitioners had always nurtured: That we could apply what we’d learned— about meditation, emotional regulation, tolerance, generosity of spirit— to real circumstances.

I don’t want to be unfair to George. This is not a hit piece. The man helped me, taught me many invaluable things, and was for a time a generous mentor. But as someone who cares about the Dharma— that is, the practice and teaching of Buddhist meditation and philosophy— I’m obliged to point something out: Only in the grip of moral confusion could a teacher permit volatile community members to seize the wheel with a meanspirited politics, and splinter a community in this way. And it is precisely George’s intelligence and cultivation that make it all so alarming. This can happen to anyone. It can happen anywhere. And, I will claim, it is happening anywhere— almost anywhere one cares to look.

iii

I was a valued teacher at Mettagroup. It had been my home for eight years. I taught alongside George for two of those years, with admirable feedback. How did my cozy Dharma family deteriorate so precipitously?

Well, it began as all great tragedies begin: With a Facebook post.

The aforementioned community member joined a political discussion on my page, became incensed, and promptly made it her pet project to cancel me. Enlisting several credulous others, she led a sustained campaign to destroy my reputation, and discredit me as a teacher.

You might be forgiven for wondering at this point: “Well, what did you do? What inflamed her so? What conduct made George, a respected Dharma teacher, take her side? Did you goose step into the meditation hall like some weird Buddhist Richard Spencer, spewing bigoted bile?” Fortunately, you needn’t wonder, because there is a record of the conversation, which I will now quote at some length.

A last word of preamble, for context: In early 2018, I re-posted a video of a conversation between Jordan Peterson, the firebrand Canadian psychology professor and author, and Camille Paglia, the legendary feminist and contrarian. The pair touched on contemporary gender relations, MeToo, social challenges facing men and boys, and so on. I found it a bracing conversation, and so, naïvely thinking of my page as a forum for lively discussion, I re-posted it.

My soon-to-be persecutor objected. She insisted in the comments that these two thinkers were “problematic,” beyond the pale, complicit in a terrible racist, patriarchal tyranny.

During the exchange that followed, I typed out some musings so subversive, so radioactive, that they would alter the course of my life. Here they are, unedited:

Mindful that this is charged and tender territory, I don’t want to say too much, especially in dialogue with a beloved and valued community member. 😉💜🙏🏻

I think we probably strongly agree about a few things: That racism and misogyny surely exist in our culture and that they represent terrible forces we should oppose with all our hearts.

And as I’ve continued to study, I’ve found myself thinking along different lines from some of my social justice-oriented friends on the left.

Flawed as it is, I actually don’t believe that Western culture can be reduced down to a racist and patriarchal system of oppression. I think that view misses quite a bit, actually— such as the fact that the West has produced the freest and most successful societies anywhere in history.

I also don’t agree with the formulation that all white people are racists, or that all men are sexists. I think these are hurtful positions, out of alignment both with reality and any ethic of kindness or collaboration.

Moreover, they trivialize the real suffering of actual victims of actual violence and oppression: Girls sold into slavery in the sex trafficking industry, young men locked up for life for possession of a joint…

We also discussed MeToo, in particular the surreal case of comedian Aziz Ansari, who, if you’ll recall, was villainized in the national press for being rude to a date.

My heresies droned on:

But is it really necessary for people to turn to the national media to work out problems in their personal relationships?

Barring some crime or violation, are women really incapable of navigating their own sexual lives— the experience of feeling pestered, for instance— without having to “go public?” The women I admire are just tougher, cleverer, funnier, and more resilient than that.

A possible outcome of the overreach of this movement is that young men and boys will simply become alienated and check out of the conversation, because it’s too hurtful. Like, “I don’t need this.”

We don’t want that. That would be a bad thing for everyone. We want engaged and well supported young men…

At this point things broke down. Outraged, my interlocutor accused me openly of misogyny— and the rest is history.

That’s what happened. That’s it. No secret scandal— just a taut conversation where I shared perfectly mainstream views with a student.

Well, to be fair, there was one more infraction. After a meditation retreat some months later, I was overheard chatting with two buddies about that selfsame Dr. Jordan Peterson. And at one point— brace yourself— I performed an affectionate impression of the man. That was the last straw. I never taught for Mettagroup again.

Now, you might appreciate my Jordan Peterson impression, or you might not (it’s pretty good). You might like what I wrote on Facebook that day, or you might not. You might think I was out of line discussing charged issues with a troubled student. You might think I’m a bit of a klutz. You might be right. But that, I will contend, is precisely not the point.

To be continued…