faith and trust

Yesterday I received an email from Robert Conrad, Secretary of the Board of Unfettered Mind and, apparently, Ken’s personal attorney on occasion.  I am publishing his email to me followed by the response I sent  him this evening.  It is heartening to see that the Board of UM has engaged in consultations with the Faith Trust Institute whose expertise in matters of clergy misconduct is well-known and highly regarded.

I would also like to add that I have re-published previously archived posts after some readers expressed the wish that my story remain available as an online resource to anyone interested in studying with Ken.

Here is Robert Conrad’s email to me:

Dear Patricia,

This letter continues our correspondence and is in response to your emails of October 26, 2012, and November 9, 2012, which in turn, were in response to my email to you of September 17, 2012.  In my last email to you I wrote in part:

"My definition of "evil" is intentionally causing harm.  There is no other way to put what you are now and have been doing. I have read your latest blog of September 16, 2012; it is factually so much in error (either by the sin of omission or by misstatements), that you have simply rewritten events to suit your current version of you as victim."

I was not suggesting that evil exists in the world as a separate force or that you are an evil person.  Instead, I was merely saying that I believe that it is wrong to intentionally cause harm to another person.  My September email was not directed to the events in 2009, but to your blog writings this year about Ken.

Over the last couple of months, the Board of Unfettered Mind has consulted with the FaithTrust Institute to better understand its role in situations where a person wishes to complain about the actions of a teacher.  Thus, the Board has recently posted on the Unfettered Mind website a revised complaint procedure and is currently working on ethics policies, as encouraged by George Draffan.  You will note the absence of any reconciliation or mediation process; this was at the suggestion of the FaithTrust Institute which is of the opinion that it is not the Board’s function to engage in either of these processes. 

You have expressed your view that the Board is not unbiased and therefore will not be able to hear you or will not mete out the proper sanctions in your situation.  Nonetheless, I have great faith in the Board’s ability to do so.  If you wish to follow the Board’s procedures, your complaint will be taken seriously and reviewed.  If, then, you wish to discuss your complaint with someone other than Stephanie Siebert, the President, I am willing to discuss with you any issues you wish to raise.

As an aside, it seems that you might have been under the impression from Ken’s comments about closing down the Unfettered Mind ning website that he is presently engaged in teaching one-on-one or to groups.  Actually, Ken began winding down his teaching practice in 2008 and brought it to an end in July 2012.

Sincerely yours,

Robert Conrad 

 ***

And here is my reply:

 

Dear Robert,

I appreciate your clarifying what you meant by your allusion to "evil" in reference to my blog, but I understood you the first time.  You assumed, and apparently still assume, that my intention was to cause harm.  Perhaps you are inferring intentions from results.  If so, you are in error.  My intention is, and has always been, to prevent Ken’s harmful behaviour with me from being repeated with other students, and to ensure that Unfettered Mind created a place where grievances could be aired.  If Ken has been harmed by my publication of the truth, then I guess the truth hurts, but that has nothing to do with my intentions.  I’ve mentioned in emails to you, Ken and Stephanie that I was concerned for Ken’s well-being and that remains true, even if none of you has ever expressed concern for mine.

Thank you for letting me know that you have been consulting with the Faith Trust Institute and that this has led to changes in Unfettered Mind’s grievance procedure and to an effort to develop an ethics policy.  If you recall, in February 2011, I wrote to Stephanie as President of the Board and urged Unfettered Mind to adopt formal guidelines and a code of ethics to deal appropriately with the boundary violations that had occurred with me as a student of Ken’s.  So I am pleased to hear about these developments.

But I am also disappointed.  In those first communications with Stephanie I explicitly stated that I needed to know UM’s ethics policies before submitting my grievance and yet, here we are, almost two years later, and you tell me that you are “currently working” on them.  Although I appreciate your invitation to submit my complaint to you, my position has not changed and I do not intend to submit a complaint to anyone from Unfettered Mind without first being provided with a copy of your code of ethics.  You might also explain to me whether and how it can be applied retroactively to my situation with Ken in 2009.  To the best of my knowledge, no policy, grievance procedure or code of ethics was in place at that time.  Is that correct?

I have reviewed your complaint procedure and I have two comments.  The first is that “boundary violation” is not defined.  The second is that it mentions the possibility of sanctions.  In reference to my situation, you reiterate that possibility in your email, saying that the Board is prepared to “mete out sanctions”.  I would advise you to avoid punitive measures.  Preventative, remedial and restorative ones are enough.  If you are hoping to help a grievant recover, acknowledgement of harm done would be the natural first step in that process.  I am still waiting for this.

You say that you “have great faith” in the Board of Unfettered Mind.  I don’t.  Nor do I have much faith in you at this point, Robert.  In your emails to date, acting as Secretary of UM, you have not once acknowledged that Stephanie Siebert lied in saying that there was no relationship of any kind between me and Ken.  You have never retracted either your statement that my actions were evil or your insinuation that I was never a student of Ken’s.  You have never heard my complaint sympathetically but instead have insinuated that I was the abuser.  You accused me of pursuing Ken and charged me with factual errors without ever telling me which ones you found erroneous.  Moreover, acting as Ken’s attorney, you threatened to sue people who discussed my story publicly.

Am I now to believe that you can hear me without bias?  What reason have you given me to believe that?  What reason have you given me to trust your judgment?

Finally, on the subject of Ken's teaching one-on-one or to groups, Ken posted the following on his Unfettered Mind Facebook page on December 7 2012:

A close read of Sherry Turkle's book, Alone Together, has reinforced my doubts about social networks as a medium for spiritual guidance. For myself, in the future I am going to rely solely on in-person, real time interactions such as the sutra sessions. {emphasis mine}

In your email, you say that Ken brought his teaching practice to an end in July 2012 and that he is no longer “engaged in teaching one-on-one or to groups”.  Maybe you should tell Ken that.

sincerely,
Patricia

Bigger Picture, Narrower View

An Open Response to Stephen Batchelor’s 

"Buddhism and Sex: The Bigger Picture"

Stephen,

I was very disappointed by your essay.  

In the name of considering “the bigger picture”, you side-step the issue of misconduct and focus on the doctrinal elements that, you say, enable ethical transgressions in Buddhist institutions.  You do not attempt to define teacher misconduct or circumscribe abusive behavior.  Instead you posit “beliefs” as the origin of the problem, and promote Secular Buddhism (your brand) as the solution.

While I agree with you that institutionally entrenched inequalities may “facilitate and legitimate” abusive behavior, they cannot make Buddhist teachers abusive, and getting rid of them cannot protect Buddhist students from abuse.  Institutional inequalities do not cause sexual abuse any more than inequalities in families cause incest.  That is because, contrary to what you claim, inequalities are not the “core issue”.  Exploitation is.  The key to dismantling sexual abuse lies not in getting rid of inequalities but in naming and stopping their exploitation, and then removing the perpetrator from his position of authority.

You maintain that power disparities stem from beliefs in the teacher’s enlightenment and students’ submissiveness, a “two-tier model of authority” that, you say, has become entrenched in Buddhism as an “organized religion”.  You blame this model for “the majority of cases of abuse” insofar as it provides what you call “sexual opportunities” for Buddhist teachers.  

First of all, sexual misconduct is not about “lust unbidden” any more than rape is.  It is a form of assault and/or exploitation that uses sex.  Second, the power disparity between a Buddhist teacher and student exists by virtue of the former being entrusted with the student’s mind, heart, soul or psyche.  It is similar to the power disparity that exists between University professors and their students, therapists and their patients, lawyers and their clients, parents and their children.  It is rooted, not in the teacher’s “mystical-ontological” authority, as you claim, but in the trust he holds by way of his privileged position in a fiduciary relationship.  The potential for exploitation is built into this relationship, ipso facto, without a teacher having to be additionally empowered by beliefs in his magic woo-woo, elevated to the status of a “guru” or perceived as “enlightened”.  How much power a student relinquishes may indeed depend on beliefs and the nature of the relationship s/he has with the teacher, but the abuse of that power is a consequence of the teacher’s beliefs and behavior, not the student’s, and should never be blamed on the latter.

On the subject of blaming the victim, your third point reads like an attempt to discredit reports of those coming forward to denounce their teachers. You say:

3.  The Buddha himself was accused of having sexual intercourse with the female ascetics Sundari and Cinca.  Tradition explains that these accusations were unfounded, and used by those jealous of his success to discredit him. Having sex with one’s students is not a contemporary issue that has only started to rear its head in the simultaneously permissive and puritanical societies of the West.  It is simply what human beings in positions of authority are liable to do or be accused of doing.

Could you be more explicit about what you are insinuating here and perhaps also explain the relevance of this point to your “bigger picture”?  You could begin by naming one contemporary example of a teacher being falsely accused by a student.

The most blatant lacuna of your essay is that it cannot be applied to exploitation in secular Buddhist institutions, a situation that is not so uncommon.  In my particular case, for example, misconduct occurred at the hands of a teacher who did not flaunt a title, don robes, pose as enlightened, demand my submission, or threaten post-mortem consequences in another lifetime. He called himself a “meditation consultant”.  In fact, his teaching model was set up to consciously and deliberately get away from the hierarchical structures of more traditional Buddhist organizations and proffered “a path outside established institutions”.  Everything about this presentation passed the secular test.  Nevertheless, misconduct occurred and has never been acknowledged by him or his organization.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, your essay does not provide a map for concretely dealing with teacher misconduct.  Maybe that is because you do not really want to do anything about it.

Last July I wrote to you for support in my attempt to confront my teacher about his misconduct with me and another student, and you responded that you were “a long time friend of Ken McLeod, so may not be entirely neutral in this particular case.”  You said you would inquire about his organization’s grievance policy and possibly, if “appropriate”, discuss the matter with him personally.  You did not get back to me after that and, as far as I know, never acted on this.  In the meantime, the other student and I were left to our own devices, there was never any adequate grievance procedure set up by Unfettered Mind, and Ken McLeod is still teaching.  

You had an opportunity to do something about teacher misconduct in a real-life situation but instead penned this theoretical treatment that further obscures the issues.  Could it be that your allegiance to an old boys’ network is getting in the way of concrete action?  Or have you simply positioned yourself as an innocent bystander?  Either way, a passive gaze, even one that purports to embrace the bigger picture, enables an exploitative teacher far more than any special status attributed to him by students.  

The real enabler of teacher misconduct, Stephen, is not the sacralisation of Buddhism, but the same perverse dynamics that operate in other, secular or religious, institutions when they are spear-headed by a narcissist cosseted by sycophants whose mutually gratifying affiliation blinds them to the harm they are causing.  The answer lies not in secularization but quite simply in raising individual awareness about the signs and pitfalls of narcissistic leadership, groupthink and cult behavior.