Episode #171: Tempel Smith, Part 1
Tempel Smith, a meditation teacher who is also an active, committed social activist, is used to finding a balance among differing perspectives, points of view and ideologies.
It traces back to his childhood. His father was a professor of German who developed a strong, Marxist perspective about how society shapes the people within it. His mother, on the other hand, was a neuroscientist who viewed the world through a lens of genetic determinism. As different as his parents’ views were in many ways, Tempel chuckles that, “The funny thing about that is they're both very deconstructive!” So ultimately, they shared a conviction that strong forces were driving the individual unconsciousness in ways that most people weren’t aware—they just completely differed on what those “strong forces” are.
As a young man, Tempel found peace of mind in the form of long canoe trips in the Canadian wilderness. There, for the first time, he experienced the feeling of becoming “untangled” with the messiness of society. “It was a very private, but powerful way of understanding myself, of growing myself, and of solving some of my inner insecurities,” he recalls. While he later would connect those youthful explorations in nature to the spirituality he experienced on the meditation cushion, he had no real framework for making sense of the inner world he was discovering at the time. “They were very happenstance, and when they would happen, I didn't know how to train in them,” he says. “But that there were these huge experiences happening, and no language for it, but that also kept them clean, from having to put them into context.”
Tempel left his home in Rhode Island to study in Reed College in Portland, Oregon, where he majored in Physics. Once again, he found his parents’ perspectives guiding the path he was trying to take in the world, in this case, his mother’s. “Material science was my cosmology,” he explains. “I was using it to simplify my understanding of the world, and that everything could be broken down into its molecular structure. Once we had done that, we would have worked out a lot of the confusion of the world! That mapped onto my mom's belief system.”
Yet there again, Tempel found himself caught up in the tension between divergent forces. “Reed College has a reputation of being a very radical progressive college, and Portland being a place of very intense forces of old Oregon conservativeness.” Tempel began volunteering to support environmental conservation, and after a nearby abortion center was bombed, he took up that cause as well. It was certainly a diverse crowd he now running with, as he was planning strategies with “Catholic activists, Quaker activists, Jewish activists, atheist activists, and meeting native peoples.”
Eventually he traveled down to Nevada to join a large protest at a nuclear site, where he met protesters who had dedicated their lives to these progressive causes. But it wasn’t just their actions that impressed him, it was also who they were in the world. “I met these incredible people where it was their life's work and their spirituality to live on the front line of their values… I'd never met progressive Christians who were that bright a light! And so that was very eye opening.”
The protest in Nevada became increasingly tense, with potential violence on both sides lurking just under the surface. This was a key moment for Tempel, who began to realize he had a choice in his response. But being just twenty years old, he wasn’t so in control of his emotions, either. “At that time, there's so much brewing inside me,” he says, “I'm so angry at the way things are, and I'm so impatient. I'm trying to be peaceful, but it's all I can do is stop myself from reacting. And I'd be arrested next to a seventy-year-old Quaker woman who truly loved the arresting guard! It was a force to see them glow like that, and so I had an awakening there, like, I know what I want my heart to look like. And these people haven't fled to the wilderness to do it… They were awake within society! It was the very first time I had seen people who had done that, who had real love in their heart and courage, but the courage was not aggressive. It had fueled this beauty in them that was so reliable.”
Back at the camp, Tempel became increasingly aware of both those who were living examples of this nonviolent, socially engaged spirit, and those who believed they needed to use any means necessary to achieve their aims. “There are some very convincing angry activists, and they would say, ‘No, love is so slow, let's really get in there and break up this nuclear test site! And to my 20 year old mind, it was all kind of a jungle of possibilities.” But eventually, he realized his path was that of peaceful engagement. The question was how to pursue it.
Tempel knew the answer didn't lay in the sciences, as he was by now totally disillusioned with the notion that study could provide any of the answers he was looking for. And while he had a friend beginning to practice Zen meditation, he didn’t feel any pull towards that, either. But on while on a visit home in Providence, his neighbor told him about a recent course he had taken at the nearby Insight Meditation Society, and so Tempel signed up for a nine-day silent course.
Suspicious at first, he was soon won over by the teacher’s obvious experience and wisdom. “I was absolutely flummoxed that this teacher could describe what had happened inside my own mind and could give me tangible things to do to impact my internal experience,” he notes. “I've never seen anybody even come close to do that!”
Like the past canoeing trips, he was feeling his mind get untangled, but now it was happening in just four days, rather than the usual two months it took in Canada. What’s more, he realized he wasn’t on his own, that he was following on a well-trodden path that countless yogis had explored before him. A year later he headed back to another retreat, and he knew by then he had found his practice. “I wanted was to glow like those Quaker activists, I wanted to go further into a meditation study, and I wanted my daily life to be matching my values.”
Back at Reed College, Tempel ran into Robert Beatty, who was there on an internship. Robert had learned meditation from Ruth Dennison, who had been taught by Sayagyi U Ba Khin. Tempel began to do more intensive retreats, joining numerous courses in the Mahasi and Goenka traditions. He began to take in “a Theravadin view that it's not about some psychological growth, and retreat by retreat, you can kind of be a little further awake than you were. There was this incredibly powerful modality that would totally break down your relationship to the conventional world.”
Through his meditation experiences, one thing became very clear to Tempel: “Self is your attempt to lend some organization to the chaos.” In other words, “you realize the futility of trying to sort out your happiness with Self in the system, or personality development, or gaining sway over your sense doors and the objects you have contact with. That whole game is fruitless.”
This insight also served to settle the dichotomy he had held since childhood, as he found that “deconstruction, of the sense of Self, whether it was biochemical or from evolution, it's just your raw animal nature, or the societally reinforced personality structures. Both of that nature and nurture, neuroscience and Marxism, got resolved, with enough insight on a meditation retreat.” Now feeling the increasing futility of agency in the world, Tempel enrolled in longer and longer meditation retreats to attempt to better understand this inner landscape, as well as hoping to learn how to integrate into the world. When he realized one key missing ingredient in his practice was metta, or loving kindness, he signed up for a three-month retreat on the Brahma Viharas.
But now the danger was that he was becoming a “retreat dweller;” moving on from one intensive experience to the other while getting further and further away from the past social engagement that was so important to him. And once again, he felt in a tense limbo between two very divergent communities: while his yogi friends found his activism a distraction from the real work of insight, his activist friends dismissed meditation as a selfish pursuit. He eventually found inspiration about how to reconcile all this in the writings of the Vietnamese monk, Thich Nhat Hanh. Tempel learned that “these were things did not have to be in opposition, as we experienced them at the moment.”
It was around that time that his friend Diana Winston, who is currently the director of UCLA’s Mindful Awareness Research Center, suggested visiting Myanmar to practice under Sayadaw U Pandita. In hopes of reaching “escape velocity,” which he defines as “some type of Dharma momentum that wouldn't wear off when you left retreat,” he agreed.
Tempel’s spiritual journey continued on to Myanmar, where he practiced intensively in the U Pandita and Pa Auk traditions. There he found that Burmese meditation monasteries provided a framework for supporting the individual spiritual journey that he had wondered about on his early canoe trips in the Canadian wilderness. His experiences in Myanmar are the subject of Part 2 of our conversation.