The Night I Didn't Stand Up
The Night I Didn’t Stand Up
The Night I Didn’t Stand Up
That rock concert in New Haven took me by surprise
and why – the national anthem and the crowd was ready.
As one, the many stood and hooted for the band.
I didn’t, a white girl whose knees knocked.
Angry under the videos of carpet bombing
of Cambodia, over-the-top, over-the edge saturation
killing in Cambodia. This was my country tis of thee.
I sat in protest. Forty years later a quarterback kneeled
with more courage than I had in that pot-smoke crowd.
I ducked when some guy yelled I should stand.
There are times when you can’t, when the wrong
is too great, and the great isn’t great enough. So when
Judge Ruth says it’s wrong not to stand but not illegal,
I know it can be right and the only thing you can do.
Better to let wrong drive you to your knees
than sit like a numb ass.
(from the recently published How I Learned to Be White now available from Antrim House )
Purposeful Memoir as a Path to Alignment
Purposeful Memoir as a Path to Alignment
by Jennifer Browdy
Most people think of memoir as a recounting of what we already know about our lives. But, in fact, what we already know is only the beginning of the journey of what I call purposeful memoir, particularly when we’re looking to align the personal, political, and planetary in our life experience—meaning, to understand how our personal choices are shaped by, and affect, both the social and environmental landscapes in which we live.
This profound interconnection is expressed by the Buddhist concept of interbeing. We inter-are with everything else on the planet. The Western attitude of individualism, separatism, and exceptionalism is an illusion bred by the arrogant thinkers of the so-called Enlightenment, which was in fact the beginning of a 500-year period of gathering darkness, leading us to the crisis moment we face today.
We have all, inescapably, been part of the political and planetary patterns of our lifetimes. To take my own life as an example, I was born in New York City in 1962, the year Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was published, just after the Cuban Missile Crisis, and just before the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Bobby Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr. I was too young to understand the tumult around me in my early years, and, yet, these political and planetary happenings shaped who I would become.
On the personal level, I knew that as a child, in what I call ‘Earth’ years up to age 12, I loved spending time out in the woods and fields around my family’s country home. What I had forgotten- and remembered in the course of writing my memoir- was how that dreamy love of communion with nature had been socialized out of me by my teenaged desire to fit in with my peers, and by my formal education.
Once I wrote my way back to that understanding, I found the purpose of my memoir: describing how my own lack of alignment with the natural world I adored was mirrored exponentially, like a creepy funhouse, by the alienation from nature of the dominant society around me.
Writing my memoir was a process of unlearning what I’d been taught in what I call the ‘Water’ years of life: the teenage and young adult years when we humans tend to want to go with the flow of the society around us, seeking approval in conformity. I was catapulted into this exploration by the challenges I met in the ‘Fire’ years of my adulthood: on the personal level, divorce and career troubles; on the political level, frustration with a relentless politics of domination and destruction; and on the planetary level, waking up- horrified- to the unfolding crises of climate and ecological devastation.
Purposeful memoir that aligns the personal, political, and planetary is a tool for deeper understanding of how we got where we are today, as individuals, as a society, and as an interconnected global system.
It is also visionary: we explore the past and present in order to be able to more clearly and boldly imagine the future into which we want to live.
We look backward over our lives in order to see clearly the values and dominant narratives that have structured our relationships and guided our assumptions about what was possible. We soberly assess how we contributed to a present moment that is undeniably in crisis on the political and planetary levels. And then—in a glorious leap—we envision how we can make our own lives a strong link in the chain between past and future generations.
In purposefully following the trail of our own life experience, we follow a kind of Ariadne’s thread back out of the dark labyrinth of the present moment. It helps to have company on the journey, which is why I ended my memoir with a vision of “doing hope with others”—working together in circles of other people who have awakened to the necessity of aligning the personal, political, and planetary in the quest for a thriving future.
Writing this kind of memoir is a slow, grounded form of activism, and I believe it’s just as important as marching and shouting and signing petitions. The more of us who take the time to do the deep work of understanding our own life histories and how our individual lives have intertwined with the larger human and non-human communities on the planet, the stronger we will stand, together, as Gaian warriors who fight for Life.
absence presence
absence presence
In December 2007, I was asked to participate in, Pulling Down, an exhibition and performances about the Holocaust, honoring the Day of Memory, held at the auditorium in Rome, Italy in January 2008.
I was staying in the neighborhood of the Jewish Ghetto and spent many hours walking the streets both day and at night in preparation for the exhibition. I sensed that the streets themselves would let me know what they wanted me to express- that I would find my inspiration there- since it was there the Jews were forced to evacuate their homes.
Coming from a Jewish family, I was interested in exploring my origins and the historical events that took place in those streets during the Holocaust from an artist perspective. From there, the exploration of absence presence was born.
In absence, there is presence. Without presence, there is absence. Empty streets and houses hold a haunting feeling as though the streets themselves know that something is missing. It has been said that the spirit often returns to the places it has known, trying to make sense of its experiences and to find its body.
As more an intuitive rather than rational artist, I’m interested in the invisible manifestation of movement that resides below the surface of knowing. In the process of creation, that invisible world shows me what is there, and its gentle but guiding hand always comes up with more interesting and surprising results than I could have imagined.
I’ve discovered that there is an invisible veil between worlds that creates the illusion of separateness in our lives; however, when people and things begin to materialize from the fiction of one’s art, the question arises not only about how everything is connected, but what is actually real, and which comes first, fact or fiction?
In terms of space, where does the hidden world lie: below, above, next to, or, as in dreams, inward? Does it matter, or is it necessary to place it? Whatever the case, there is still a vanishing quality even in the materialization of this invisible world. And the meaning that comes has a multiplicity effect within the ephemeral world implicit in the invisible.
Presence requires inhabiting the body.
Presence is essential to all spiritual practices and to life. If we are not present we are missing our experience and the opportunity at hand. With this in mind an exploration of absence and presence evolved. Although I establish my parameters—my frame—what takes place within that context is unknown, subject to movement and presence. Shooting only at night, there is absence of light.
In terms of movement and what I know about the fluid system—thanks to my practice of Continuum Movement which recognizes the body’s fluid intelligence and capacity to orchestrate—when there are any isolating phenomena, as there was during the Holocaust—the fluids will compress, forming a barrier to the world. This results in a kind of hologram of survival which can be read like a diary. The social consequences of these behavior barriers give rise to a loss of fundamental resonance, resulting in an inability to feel. The Holocaust was an example of this condition. Unfortunately, aspects of this malady are being acted out now with alarming intensity, both nationally and worldwide.
After shooting in the Jewish Ghetto in Rome, my exploration of absence presence continued in my studio in Brooklyn. Walking into the frame or parameter of the camera and the passage of light, I am able to learn something new about myself, others, and my environment.
Having painted for many years, this process of painting with light is a natural progression. My work is not constructed but emerges as life presents itself moment to moment. The photos are one-shot and not constructed in Photoshop, though I have begun compositing as well. Having worked in various art forms for many years, I have learned to welcome whatever form seems to beckon, rather than reject its entrance into my work.
My intention with these photos is to capture what is hidden, invisible, or that which is not normally seen. And to enter into a non-linear, unpredictable dream state, like a conversation where what is not said has just as much or sometimes even more relevance than what is.
In looking back at my work with absence presence over the last years, I only now fully understand the alchemy of it. That’s the beauty of an art practice. It’s as though an invisible force drives you to create, and in the creating, you are able to work through exactly what’s needed. Like homeopathy, the medicine takes its miniscule root from the ailment—”let like be cured by like”—and in doing so heals you. Not to say that all art is a healing process, but in the relatedness of all things, art itself takes you to the next step of your evolution. It’s only in the reflection, however, that you realize where you have been and how you’ve gotten there.
Roots and Evolution of Mindfulness
Roots and Evolution of Mindfulness
Before reading this article, listen to a spoken introduction with Joel and Michelle Levey.
When we first began our study, practice, and research of mindfulness in the early 70s, we knew fewer than a handful of people who were involved in this path of practice. As our practice and research matured, we began to develop mindfulness-based programs in medicine, higher education, and business. In the mid-70s and early 80s, we knew of no one else bringing these methods into the mainstream. Gradually over the years, a groundswell of insight, interest, and research has emerged, creating a host of benefits and challenges, clarity and confusion, that inspires and confounds the modern mindfulness movement.
Our intent in composing this brief article is to offer an overview of some key perspectives on mindfulness. For people relatively new to mindfulness, it’s helpful to have a clearer understanding of its roots, shoots, and trends in order to access the deeper meaning, purpose, and value of this vital practice.
To the degree to which we wake up with mindfulness and learn to open our hearts and minds, the walls of our conventional, familiar, consensus view of reality become more clear, open, and transparent, revealing a deeper, vaster, multidimensional, and interrelated view of the actual nature of reality than we have previously imagined. This is why what we call mindfulness meditation is traditionally known as Vipassana, or ‘Insight Meditation.’ Mindfulness gives us access to insight and the direct, non-conceptual intuitive wisdom that liberates us from our misconceptions regarding the nature of reality and the true nature of ourselves.
While mindfulness is certainly widely adopted and practiced, our experience is that surprisingly few people are aware of its deep roots and origins in wisdom traditions—its more profound meanings, value, highest implications, and most intriguing applications. Our intent here is to offer insight, inspiration, and illumination on these facets of the jewel of mindfulness as it shines out in our modern times.
Roots of Mindfulness
Mindfulness as a technical term has its historical origins in the ancient Pali word sati used by the Buddha in his teaching on mindfulness over 2600 years ago. Sati literally translates as “memory”- as in remembering what you are paying attention to in the present moment of awareness. In an attempt to meaningfully translate treasured Buddhist meditation manuals, the English translator Rhys Davids was the first to offer an English translation using “mindfulness” in 1881, and, by 1910, mindfulness had become the generally accepted norm. Davids was inspired to use the term “mindfulness” by its use in an Anglican prayer that says, “Always be mindful of the needs of others.” Interestingly, from this initial choice to translate sati as mindfulness, there is an implication that mindfulness is also akin to a newly emerging meme of kindfulness which reminds us that we pay attention to what we care about. The widespread use of the term ‘mindfulness’ has endured to this day where we find the meaning of mindfulness continuing to be adapted, as it is incorporated into common use with an ever expanding variety of mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) that are emerging within health science, corporate, and high-performance arenas of contemporary culture.
Unfortunately, the meaning of the term mindfulness also is becoming increasingly misconstrued through its association with deep relaxation without mindful awareness, creative imagination visualizations, getting a good night’s rest, ‘mindfulness chairs,’ mindful men’s clothing, or even mindful mayonnaise—all of which have little or nothing to do with the meditative practice of mindfulness. Some respected teachers in the realm of mindfulness have gone so far as to say that the word ‘mindfulness’ has all but lost its original meaning.
Roots of the Modern Mindfulness Revolution
While the teachings of mindfulness practice have endured for millennia since the time of the Buddha, the contemporary “mindfulness revolution” was propelled into modern times by the colonial thrust of the British Imperial Army invading and conquering the Buddhist kingdom of Burma in November 1885.
For centuries the Burmese people regarded their king as ‘the protector of the Dhamma‘- the liberating teachings of the Buddha which, when taken to heart, have the power to free us of our delusions and confusions by opening our wisdom eyes to directly discern things as they truly are. Mindfulness is the primary practice of these liberating teachings, and its power lies in quieting the conceptual dualistic overlay of thoughts to allow direct insight into the true nature of reality to arise clearly in the mind.
As the Brits marched into the capital city of Mandalay, the Burmese people looked on in horror as their beloved king and his family, surrounded by British soldiers brandishing rifles, were taken from the royal palace and unceremoniously loaded in an oxcart that carried them to a waiting steamship that would carry them into exile. The royal palace was then transformed into an officers’ club for drinking, dancing, and socializing!
A profound wave of concern rippled through Burmese society giving rise to an unprecedented cultural revolution that activated the Burmese people to protect the precious and vulnerable teachings of the Dhamma. Foremost among these cherished teachings was the practice of mindfulness.
Up to this time in Burma and throughout Southeast Asia, the teachings and practice of mindfulness had been mostly held within the monastic community of ordained monks and nuns, while the religious practices of the lay community focused primarily on generosity and giving of alms to generate spiritual merit, with the assumption that lay people were unlikely to actually realize enlightenment through practicing meditation.
With the advent of the British invasion and the king’s exile, visionary teachers within the monastic community, lead by the monk Ledi Sayadaw, and the householder Saya Thetgyi spread the practices of the Vipassana tradition, from which mindfulness is derived, throughout secular society. In the decades that followed, a contemplative cultural revolution spread throughout Southeast Asia giving rise to a renaissance and wide diffusion of mindfulness teachings with both the monastic and lay communities. (Braun, 2014)
Three Main Streams of Mindfulness Practice
The next wave of mindfulness revolutionaries appeared as droves of globe trotting spiritual seekers, peace core volunteers, government spooks, and mind scientists who traveled to Asia in the 1960s and 70s intent on seeking out enlightening teachers, wisdom teachings, and liberating contemplative technologies. Word of inspiring teachers and meditation retreats quickly spread through the social networks of those times drawing early waves of contemplative pilgrims to the monasteries and meditation centers of Southeast Asia to get their first immersive and transformative experiences of intensive mindfulness meditation practices, which were often presented in 10 day silent retreat formats or longer even more intensive retreats.
Through the influence of many of these early adopters of mindfulness, three principle streams of mindfulness practice have flowed into modern Western culture.
Insight Meditation: One stream of mindfulness practice came to the West through the teachings of Mahasi Sayadaw, U Pandita, Ajahn Chah, Buddhadāsa Bhikkhu, and other Thai and Burmese teachers of the “forest monastery” tradition which emphasized a blend of mindful breathing, noting and noticing of the nuances of momentary changing experiences, mindful walking, mindful eating, integrating mindful awareness into every activity, and resting in open clear awareness without grasping at any momentary experience. This lineage of mindfulness practice is widely referred to as “Insight Meditation” and was introduced to the West primarily through the influence of Jack Kornfield, Sharon Salzberg, and Joseph Goldstein who co-founded the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts in 1975. Kornfield later also co-founded the Spirit Rock in Marin, California in 1988 with a number of other teachers.
The wise and creative teachings offered at these two centers alone have inspired tens of thousands of people over the past 40+ years, giving rise to hundreds of other practice centers around the globe, and playing a significant role in inspiring the global diffusion of mindfulness practice into higher education, medicine, business, military, government, sports, and other arenas of modern life. Within this stream many other respected teachers, including Anagarika Munindra, Dipama, Ajahn Amaro, Ajahn Sumedho, Thannasaro Bhikkhu, Taungpulu Sayadaw, and Dr. Rina Sircar, to name but a few, have deeply inspired the diffusion of mindfulness teachings throughout North America, UK, and Europe.
Vedana Vipassana: The second stream came to the West from the Burmese teacher U Ba Khin, the Accountant General of Burma, who founded the International Meditation Society in Rangoon in 1952 where he attracted the attention of many international students and teachers. As a lay practitioner and respected lineage holder from Saya Thetgyi of the vedana vipassana tradition of mindfulness practice, and also a respected accountant, U Ba Khin accepted the invitation from the Burmese government to assume the role of Accountant General and to assume leadership in order to route out the corruption in the Burmese Treasury Department. U Ba Khin accepted this appointment with two conditions. First was that one wing of the Treasury Department would be transformed into a meditation hall where members of his staff could come and meditate at any time. Second, was that everyone on his staff in the Treasury Department would train with him and participate in at least one intensive ten-day silent Vipassana style mindfulness retreat. As U Ba Khin said, “I refuse to work with incompetence.”
U Ba Khin’s style of mindfulness practice focused on developing concentration through single-pointed concentration on the breath, and then the close application of mindfulness by scanning or “sweeping” mindful awareness slowly through the body from the top of the head to the toes, over and over again, for up to 20 hours per day, leading to a profound state of vivid mental clarity and the purification of embedded congestion within the gross and subtle body. In this austere and intensive style of practice there is only sitting meditation, with no mindful walking, yoga, mindful eating or other practices at all.
In his later life, U Ba Khin passed his legacy of teachings on to seven teachers including S.N. Goenka (a Burmese businessman who is widely known in the West), Robert Hover (a former U.S. aeronautical engineer), Ruth Denison (a German pioneer in embodied movement practices), and John Coleman (a former British MI6 agent), all of whom carried these liberating teachings back to North America and Europe and around the globe. In particular, Goenka’s approach to teaching mindfulness has become very popular and widely available in the West and around the world, especially as the teachings and retreats are offered free of charge. After retreats, the students are encouraged to make donations and “play it forward” to freely fund retreats for future students.
The Order of Interbeing: A third stream of mindfulness teachings came to the West in part due to the U.S. invasion of Vietnam, where the monk Thích Nhất Hạnh and his community were practicing and teaching mindfulness as an integral practice in their non-violent peace work amidst the terrors of the war. As the war raged on and many of his colleagues were brutally murdered, Thay, as his students call him, took refuge in France where he founded the Plum Village international Meditation Center and the Order of Interbeing. There, he continued to teach his unique and highly accessible form of mindfulness which emphasizes the practice of mindful breathing, mindful walking, and the repetition of meditation phrases or gathas, synchronized with inhalation and exhalation. To develop deeper ease and continuity of meditation, words such as calming, smiling and arriving are used to help relax and focus the mind and quell the tendency toward discursive thoughts during meditation practice. Today there are hundreds of centers around the globe teaching Thay’s style of mindfulness practice.
One of Thay’s gifts is his encouragement to bring a gentle, heartfelt, compassionate inner smile to mindfulness practice,—“smiling to our sorrow”—in order to realize that “we are more than our sorrow.” This practice of gentle smiling has influenced mindfulness instruction and how it is often introduced and practiced in the West. Most importantly, his teachings on interbeing—the interconnection of all Life—and the illusion of a ‘separate self’ are fundamental for those who follow this teacher.
Beyond these three primary streams, there are other streams, lineages, and teachers who emphasize a variety of aspects or approaches to the practice, and there are also many teachers and centers that weave together teachings and practices drawn from these different traditions.
Kindfulness | Mindfulness Blossoms As Compassion and Lovingkindness
Being present with kindness and compassion
is being mindful.
– Jon Kabat Zinn
As the practice of mindfulness deepens and matures, it embraces and is responsive to the needs, not only of ourselves, but of all beings who suffer and experience vulnerability or injustice in their lives, society, and world. As many of the foremost Western mindfulness teachers have matured in their practice, the nature and tone of their teachings have warmed, shifting from a more austere focus on “bare attention” and taking on a more compassionate tone that encourages their students to blend mindful awareness with a merciful, warm hearted approach to their mindfulness practice.
It is becoming increasingly more common for mindfulness teachers to expand their studies and practice of mindfulness to draw inspiration from traditions that give greater emphasis to heartfelt qualities such as gratitude, genuine friendliness, compassion, lovingkindness, self-compassion, and engaged social justice action, into mindfulness education and training. This heartwarming, compassionate impulse may be integrated into mindfulness practice simply as a gentle, merciful, inner smile as one musters the courage to look within and mindfully, whole-heartedly embrace the tension, apprehension, sadness or rage found there. Or it may be intentionally cultivated as a robust practice of meditation such as lovingkindness—or metta—wishing well to ourselves, others, and all beings; or generating radiant compassion regarding and embracing the presence of suffering in our lives, relationships, and world; or activating an explicit dedication to practicing mindfulness with an intention of realizing one’s true nature and highest potentials for the benefit of all beings.
As mindfulness matures into kindfulness (Braum, A. 2016), on a societal level, we are witnessing the emergence of more university programs that explicitly include compassion science and encourage compassion-based practices as part of their curriculums. Among the most respected programs in today’s world are:
Stanford University’s CCARE Program- Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education http://ccare.stanford.edu);
Mindful Self Compassion- self-compassion.org/the-program/
The Greater Good Science Center- connected with Stanford and UC Berkeley http://greatergood.berkeley.edu
University of Wisconsin’s Center for Healthy Minds- (http://www.investigatinghealthyminds.org/cihmDrDavidson.html);
Mind and Life Institute- https://www.mindandlife.org/
Max Planck Institute’s Human Cognitive and Brain Science- ReSource Program (https://www.resource-project.org/en/home.html )
Mindfulness, Collective Intuitive Wisdom, & Human Flourishing
The world we have made as a result of the level of the thinking we have done thus far creates problems that we cannot solve at the same level of thinking (i.e. consciousness) at which we have created them… We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if humankind is to survive. – Albert Einstein
Could it be that the global surge of interest in mindfulness is an evolutionary impulse perfectly responsive to the challenges of these times? From our many years of practice, research, and work bringing mindfulness to organizations and communities around the globe, it seems that the greatest value and most highly leveraged application of mindfulness may be to follow Einstein’s advice. How? By equipping individuals and innovation teams with the skills necessary to refine the level of their personal and collective consciousness in order to access the deeper intuitive wisdom necessary to bring forth breakthrough solutions to complex global problems.
As the key to accessing the most-subtle dimensions of intuitive wisdom, the greatest value of mindfulness in this age may be in its capacity to liberate us from our collective ignorance by opening our minds to the wisdom we need to flourish together in this beautiful and fragile world.
One of our most cherished visions and aspirations is to develop cohorts of altruistically motivated, sincere and disciplined individuals and teams, intent on employing mindfulness for accessing or “sourcing” insight from deeper, subtler strata of personal and collective intuitive wisdom. This is in order to bring forth the insights and innovations necessary to resolve the dire challenges of these treacherous times, while promoting human flourishing and thriving for generations to come. (Levey, J. and Levey, M. 2008)
Mainstreaming Mindfulness: Encouraging Trends
In our work and travels with hundreds of leading medical centers, universities, organizations, and governmental groups around the globe over the past 40+ years we are heartened to see an ever widening diffusion of mindfulness teachings. Here are some of the most inspiring examples we have seen:
- Contemplative Science: The rapidly emerging field of contemplative science brings together the best of technology, neuroscience, and inner technology inspired by the wealth of the world’s wisdom traditions giving rise to innovative programs and research in hundreds of universities and respected institutes around the globe. Mind and Life Institute’s International Symposiums on Contemplative Studies have brought together thousands of people from around the world to share their research on mindfulness and many other contemplative practices. (https://www.imconsortium.org)
- Leadership and Contemplative Science: While a myriad of leadership developments are being offered in our world today, few have seriously addressed the development of moral, ethical, and contemplative capacities of leaders. One of the most relevant and inspiring initiatives we have seen in this regard is the Mind and Life Institute’s Academy for Contemplative and Ethical Leadership (ACEL) that we were fortunate to help birth. (https://www.mindandlife.org/legacy-programs/acel/ )The ACEL charter states,
- Mindful Law: Nearly a decade ago Rhonda McGee took a bold step to introduce the first course on Mindfulness in Law class at Berkeley Law School. Since then, 40+ law schools have followed her lead with programs on Mindfulness and Contemplative Lawyering as essential skills for professionals in the judicial system.
- Mindfulness in Medicine: Mindfulness is an essential element of the core curriculum within the 70+ medical schools that participate in the Consortium of Academic Health Centers for Integrative Medicine.https://www.imconsortium.org
- Mindfulness in Government: In recent years, British Parliament’s Mindfulness Roundtable which involved over 120 MPs and Lords from different parties of the government who have trained in mindfulness, gave rise to the development of the Mindfulness Initiative and the Mindful Nation UK Report which encourages the integration of mindfulness in four domains of British society: health care, education, criminal justice, and the workplace. (The Mindfulness Initiative: Mindful Nation UK Report. 2015)
- Wisdom 2.0: Since its inception in 2010, the Wisdom 2.0 conferences have brought together thousands of organizational leaders and consultants from around the planet interested in the interphase of mindfulness, meditation, yoga, leadership, innovation, organizational health and performance, social justice, quality of life, and bottom-line business results. With leaders and presenters from Google, Ford, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, PayPal, Zappos, AETNA, Blackrock, Burning Man, Slack, British Parliament, U.S. Congress, and many other leading organizations to explore the many wise and helpful ways that mindfulness and related practices is delivering measurable value in our lives and world of work. (http://wisdom2conference.com/About)
- Mindful Social and Emotional Learning (SEL): With an ever increasing wealth of affirming data, robust programs are integrating mindfulness with social and emotional learning into a wide array of primary and early childhood development learning programs around the globe.
For a monthly update of compelling research on mindfulness and mindfulness based practices visit: http://GoAMRA.org
These are just a sampling of the significant and inspiring trends that we are seeing in the diffusion of mindfulness into the mainstream mindstream of our world.
References
American Mindfulness Research Association, http://GoAMRA.org
Bodhi, B. 2016. The Transformations of Mindfulness. Published in Handbook of Mindfulness: Culture, Context, and Social Engagement (Mindfulness in Behavioral Health). Edited by Ronald E. Purser, David Forbes and Adam Burke. Springer International Publishing, Switzerland, 2016 https://books.google.com/books?id=nBFVDQAAQBAJ&pg=PA3&lpg=PA3&dq=The+Transformations+of+Mindfulness.+Published+in+Handbook+of+Mindfulness:+Culture,+Context,+and+Social+Engagement+(Mindfulness+in+Behavioral+Health).+Edited+by+Ronald+E.+Purser,+David+Forbes+and+Adam+Burke.+Springer+International+Publishing,+Switzerland,+2016&source=bl&ots=Yh334UtV40&sig=HA4UeflyHZbsU9OCjYGTMouD1LI&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiZ1vqN3e_ZAhUB24MKHW_dB98Q6AEILzAC#v=onepage&q=The%20Transformations%20of%20Mindfulness.%20Published%20in%20Handbook%20of%20Mindfulness%3A%20Culture%2C%20Context%2C%20and%20Social%20Engagement%20(Mindfulness%20in%20Behavioral%20Health).%20Edited%20by%20Ronald%20E.%20Purser%2C%20David%20Forbes%20and%20Adam%20Burke.%20Springer%20International%20Publishing%2C%20Switzerland%2C%202016&f=false
Bhikkhu, T. 2012. Right Mindfulness.
http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/thanissaro/rightmindfulness.pdf
Braum, A. 2016. Kindfulness. Wisdom Publications.
Braun, E., Spring 2014. “Meditation En Masse: How Colonialism Sparked the Global Vipassana Movement” Tricycle. http://www.tricycle.com/feature/meditation-en-masse
Clarke T. C., et al. 2015. “Trends in the Use of Complementary Health Approaches Among Adults: United States, 2002–2012,” National Health Statistics, No. 79, Hyattsville, MD, National Center for Health Statistics, 2015; “Uses of Complementary Health Approaches in the U.S.,” National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health.
Consortium of Academic Health Centers for Integrative Medicine. https://www.imconsortium.org
Gyatso, T. the Dalai Lama. 2001. Dzogchen: The Heart Essence of the Great Perfection. Snow Lion Publications.
https://books.google.com/books?id=4HqLxJRN6MUC&pg=PA254&lpg=PA254&dq=%22dalai+lama%22+Dzogchen+London&source=bl&ots=uKMkzDoubE&sig=j0UcaRAuBVMBTXSju5kDod–hzo&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwizhNa_w5HWAhVBwWMKHQBKA1MQ6AEITDAG#v=onepage&q=%22dalai%20lama%22%20Dzogchen%20London&f=false
Kotler, S. and Wheal, J,. 2016. Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work. HarperCollins.
Levey, J. and Levey, M. 2015. Living in Balance: A Mindful Guide for Thriving in a Complex World. Divine Arts. https://divineartsmedia.com/products/living-in-balance-a-mindful-guide-for-thriving-in-a-complex-world
Levey, J. and Levey, M. 2008. Mind Treasure. Intuition at Work. Sterling Stone Publishers.
Mind and Life Institute ACEL (Academy for Contemplative and Ethical Leadership). 2015. https://www.mindandlife.org/legacy-programs/acel/
Mind and Life Institute—Contemplative Science Symposiums. https://www.mindandlife.org/international-symposium-for-contemplative-research/
The Mindfulness Initiative: Mindful Nation UK Report. 2015. http://www.themindfulnessinitiative.org.uk/publications/mindful-nation-uk-report and http://www.themindfulnessinitiative.org.uk
Mingyur, Y. Rinpoche, and Tworkov, H. 2014. Turning Confusion into Clarity: A Guide to the Foundation Practices of Tibetan Buddhism (Boston: Snow Lion, 2014).
National Business Group on Health and Fidelity, July 14, 2016. Corporate Mindfulness Programs Grow in Popularity.
Pinsker, J. March 10, 2015. Corporations’ Newest Productivity Hack: Meditation. Atlantic.
Purser, R., Milillo, J. 12 May 2014. Mindfulness Revisited: A Buddhist Based Conceptualization. Journal of Management Inquiry. https://www.academia.edu/8102895/Mindfulness_Revisited_A_Buddhist-Based_Conceptualization
Purser, R., Ng, E., & Walsh, Z. (2018). The promise and perils of corporate mindfulness. In Chris Mabey and David Knights (Eds.), Leadership Matters: Finding Voice, Connection and Meaning in the 21st Century (pp. 47-63). New York, NY: Routledge.
Thubten, A. 2012. The Magic of Awareness. https://books.google.com/books?id=tJofqSlqmsYC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Anam+Thubten+Thubten+magic+of+awareness&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjpl5bixJHWAhVD1WMKHb7EAYwQ6AEIKDAA#v=onepage&q=Anam%20Thubten%20Thubten%20magic%20of%20awareness&f=false
Wieczner, J. March 12, 2016. Meditation Has Become a Billion-Dollar Business. Fortune.
Wisdom 2.0, http://wisdom2conference.com/About
Indigenous Worldview Is a Source We Now Urgently Need
Indigenous Worldview Is a Source We Now Urgently Need
COVER: Arhuaco Elder & 1Earth Institute Inc. Director, Calixto Suarez Villafane, © 1Earth Institute Inc. 2018
Our global reality is one of a depleted Earth, the consequence of the havoc we have inflicted through our economies onto our living support system. Are we going to live like lemmings, racing toward self-destruction? Or are we going to sensibly re-learn how to sustainably survive and thrive?
In his article on the coming revolution, “Life After Patriarchy,” Alnoor Ladha thoughtfully wrote: “Climate change, increasing inequality and rampant poverty are not ‘externalities’ of a well-functioning system, as the economists would have us believe, but rather the logical outcome of a set of rules, norms and cultural practices.”[1]
We have programmed our economic operating system with more: more extraction, more consumption, more of everything… What a misapprehension it is to believe that the economy can grow forever when our home and our support systems are finite.
Like every species on this earth, humanity must abide by the rules of the ecosystem that sustains us. As much as we might like to think it, Nature’s laws and feedback cycles have not been suspended on our behalf.
But, if we want to reprogram our economic operating system and bring in wholesale change, we need to address the root of our problems: our thinking.
This is a perfect example of the insanity of doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. And, needless to say, we cannot solve problems in the same frame of mind in which we created them.
We have accepted as our prevailing worldview that economics is some kind of infallible ‘force of nature.’ But we need to remember that our worldviews stem from beliefs that we have learned and have chosen to live by. We can adjust or un-choose.
Learning from Original Instructions
Who can teach us a way of thinking distinct from the prevailing concepts? Though there is not one prescribed way, perhaps we should consider that the answer may lie with our traditional cultures.
An Earth-centered worldview is what has always guided our indigenous cultures around the world. Does it matter that indigenous peoples have lived sustainably for millennia and have treated the Earth with profound respect and acted as Her custodians? Yes. The United Nations estimates that indigenous territories cover approximately 20 percent of the Earth’s landmass. This 20 percent landmass stewarded by indigenous peoples amazingly contains 80 percent of the world’s remaining biodiversity.
As Robin Wall Kimmerer states so succinctly:
The indigenous worldview has been marginalized for generations because it was seen as antiquated and unscientific and its ethics of respect for Mother Earth were in conflict with the Industrial worldview, bent on treatment of the Earth as if what native people call gifts were nothing more than resources destined for consumption by humans. But now, in this time of climate change and massive loss of biodiversity, we understand that the indigenous worldview is neither unscientific nor antiquated but is, in fact, a source of wisdom that we urgently need. [2] [emphasis added]
Reprogramming Our Operating System
We are collectively experiencing profound disintegration and breakdown of our old structures and beliefs; we want our world to make sense again and allow decency to prevail. Our present worldviews no longer serve us. Consequently, we need to adopt a different intelligence, a different worldview, in order to adjust our operating system from the inside out.
Consider the wisdom of Chief Phil Lane:
We are all part of the ancient Sacred Circle of Life, and therefore we are all Indigenous Peoples of Mother Earth…. To embrace and reclaim our Indigenous relationship to all Life is to remember and lovingly celebrate our sacred relationship with our Mother Earth, all relatives of our One Human Family and our kinship with all Life. [3]
This reprogramming of our operating system contains two causally consistent ground rules common to the beliefs of all traditional societies.
Adjustment Instruction 1 | We Are Not Superior
Let us drop the delusion of the universe revolving around us humans. We are learning with surprise and humility that we do not own the Earth. We owe Her our survival.
It is logical, therefore, that if we want to survive, we need to reclaim intuitive ways of knowing and align our thinking with life, not against it.
Let us re-evaluate the worldview that we are the superior sentient master species on Earth and, instead, establish a relation and kinship with nature and spirit. Robin Wall Kimmerer reminds us of “…the fallacy of human exceptionalism, that we are fundamentally different and somehow better, more deserving of the wealth and services of the Earth than other species.” [4]
Make no mistake; this is as revolutionary a shift in collective thinking as when Galileo debunked the geocentric model with the sun and the moon revolving around Earth. Just as our sun does not revolve around the Earth, neither does the Earth revolve around humanity. Because we are not masters, but, rather, interdependent members in a world that includes non–human beings, what hurts them will hurt us.
Adjustment Instruction 2 | We Are Not Separate
“Why does much of the world not comprehend our sacred interrelationship with Nature and Spirit?” This is what Calixto Suarez Villafañe, an Arhuaco elder from the Sierra Nevada De Santa Marta, Colombia, is often asked by his elders.
© Seth Roffman. 2017
Calixto is a director of 1Earth Institute. He also is an emissary for the Mamos majores, or chief Elders of the Arhuaco and Kogi peoples, who rarely descend from their high mountain sanctuaries and are the spiritual leaders and knowledge keepers of the people of the Sierra.
They are the descendants of the Tairona civilization, from which the Inca and Aztec also descended.
The peoples of the Sierra survived the onslaught of the conquistadors by retreating into mountainous sanctuaries in the Sierra and controlling the access routes to their retreats. Nowadays, these high sanctuaries no longer offer safety from deadly paramilitaries and the avaricious grasping of companies and landowners.
According to Calixto:
Until now, what human beings have reached for is self-destruction, the destruction of Mother Earth, of the mountains, the poisoning of the sea, of the rivers, of the lakes, and the reduction of the flora and fauna. We are seeing how we are impoverishing the planet and those who live there. Humans have strayed from their path and are accelerating their self-destruction. [5]
Calixto is signaling a call for action through 1Earth Institute: “As Mamos, we are harmonizers and guidance counselors. The Mamos are calling for a radical change, a transformation.”
Whenever he returns from his travels, Calixto drives for three hours up the Sierra and walks or rides a horse for another 16 hours to report back to the Mamos majores and receive his instructions.
You would not know by meeting them who they are, they present themselves as such humble beings. They are simply dressed: men, women, and children all in white—plus or minus a number of stripes, representative of their region of origin.
They have the distinctive indigenous features of the Tairona, some have quite sharp, angular faces. Outstanding are their eyes. They are the most beautiful, warm, dark eyes, which gaze at and through you—gentle, clear, and yet, you sense the sharp intellect and the slumbering, fierce fire of their souls. They prefer not to look at you directly.
Both sexes wear their dark hair long. Apparently it never goes white with age. The distinctive white caps worn by the Arhuaco men symbolize the snowfields of the mountain peaks of the Sierra.
The Mamos want the world to hear their warning and their deep concerns about the precarious state of all life on Mother Earth:
Our ancestors left us in this space, caring for and harmonizing the Earth and Humanity. We live in harmony with all natures beings: water, earth, fire, wind, the sun, humans, and also animals and plants, which are essence of the divine.
All life on Earth is intrinsically intertwined and interconnected, and we humans are no exception. But how do we see ourselves? As separate entities outside the web of life that surrounds us. This is reflected in Western science, which uses analysis by objective separation through dispassionate observation.
This intentional separation of the ‘knower from the known’ is pervasive throughout our economic logic and ecosystem management in industrialized nations, and therein lies the misbelief which informs our economic activities.
By comparison, most traditional knowledge systems are founded on intuitive and spiritual relatedness. There is no separation in such traditional knowledge systems: time-honored observations are firmly grounded in the knowing that all is related and interconnected, and the observer is a vital part of the system observed.
Once we accept this ‘disconnect myth’ for what it is—an erroneous belief and worldview—we will re-connect with our family of non-human beings and find our way back home. Have we not been lost and felt an inexplicable deep yearning for knowing—a reflective sense of the sacredness of creation—its cohesiveness and absolute interrelationship? “Western civilization, despite its phenomenal achievements, developed on the foundation of this fundamental split between Spirit and nature—between creator and creation.” [6]
The natural law is simple: humility to take from nature, to give back and to maintain balance spiritually and physically. For us, the Arhuaco, humility is a sign of wisdom. That is what we want to pass on to future generations. The Mamos invite us to discover again our truthful identity, our ancestors, our roots and taking care of these roots, and of the knowledge of the Mamos. In this way, we can arrive into the deepest aspects of this knowledge and transmit it to others. – Calixto Suarez Villafañe
Isn’t it extraordinary and comforting for all of us to know that the Mamos care for the Sierra, for Mother Earth, for them, for us, and that their lives are dedicated to maintaining balance? By contrast, are we aware of the forces we are unleashing? Realise, there is a hard reality edge to this for the Mamos: it has become harder and harder for them to continue their work. They need to recover their land and their Kankurwas (sacred temples). They believe we are close to reaching a point of no return.
How then can we reclaim our ‘Indigenous relationship to all Life?’ Together with the Mamos and Indigenous elders from around the world we are preparing a set of indigenous instructions on what we need to do – “to remember and lovingly celebrate our sacred relationship with our Mother Earth, all relatives of our One Human Family and our kinship with all Life.”
1Earth Institute is a global indigenous-nonindigenous partnership and believes that the rethinking of our economies involves integrating traditional wisdom ways to reconnect us to land, country, and spirit. Our view is that the traditional stories are not just tales from other worlds and artifacts from the past, but hold the instructions for our survival and our future.
Behar (Advisory Board member & CEO As You Sow)
© 1Earth Institute Inc. 2018
Gratitude
I would like to acknowledge my debt and gratitude to my dear friend and co-director Calixto Suarez Villafañe; to the inspirational Robin Wall Kimmerer; to all my elders and indigenous elders who have patiently taught me; and to all of our nonhuman teachers and family.
References
[1] Ladha, A. (2018). Life After Patriarchy: Three Reflections on the Coming Revolution, Kosmos Online, available at https://www.kosmosjournal.org/news/life-after-patriarchy-three-reflections-on-the-coming-revolution.
[2] Kimmerer, R. (2016). Harmony with Nature: Fifth Annual Conference at the United Nations, April 2015, Kosmos Journal, Spring/Summer, available at: https://www.kosmosjournal.org/article/harmony-with-nature.
[3] Chief Phil Lane of the Ihanktonwan Dakota and Chickasaw Nations, Indigenous Wisdom for Compassionate Living and Unified Action, available at http://indigenouswisdomcourse.com.
[4] Kimmerer, R. (2014). Returning the Gift, Minding Nature Journal, Vol. 7, No. 2, available at https://www.humansandnature.org/returning-the-gift-article-177.php.
[5] Quotes from Calixto Suarez Villafañe are based on my personal communication with him.
[6] Baring, A. The Real Challenge of Our Times: The Need for a New Worldview, available at http://www.annebaring.com/anbar09_philosophy.htm.
The Deschooling Dialogues: Grief, Collapse, and Mysticism
The Deschooling Dialogues: Grief, Collapse, and Mysticism
This is an edited transcript of a conversation that took place on April 24, 2018 as part of the inaugural quarterly issue of Kosmos Journal. The theme of the first edition is Unlearning Together. As such, it felt appropriate to have a quartet dialogue of unlearning, focused on a complex of issues associated with the inevitable transition to post-capitalism; namely, the issues of grief, collapse and the mystical impulse of transcendence that can provide deep healing in such troubled times. One of the key questions is how we come together to explore the edge of our practice as seekers, as activists, and as advocates for a more just and loving world.
This conversation was facilitated by Alnoor Ladha (AL) as part of an interview series titled, The Deschooling Dialogues: Wisdom from the Front Lines of the Battle Against the Colonized Mind. Rhonda Fabian (RF) is the editor of Kosmos Journal; Martin Winiecki (MW) is the global partnerships coordinator of Tamera, a peace research center in southern Portugal; and Martin Kirk is the co-founder and director of strategy at TheRules, a global network of activists, writers, researchers, coders and others focused on addressing the root causes of inequality, poverty, and climate change.
AL: Thank you for bringing us together Rhonda, and for the critical work you do with Kosmos Journal. Given that this edition’s theme is unlearning together, ‘deschooling’ is the perfect place to start. And especially around grief, because in the Western dualistic mindset that we all have been socialized in, we have a tendency to seek pleasure and avoid pain.
In fact, our moral philosophy, the dominant moral philosophy of utilitarianism and the economic philosophy of neoclassical economics is highly dependent on this premise. Part of the unlearning we’re doing is to re-contextualize and re-understand the role of grief as a mystery unto itself– not as something to avoid or to understand, but to go within and to transmute, to evolving through and with.
Grief is the chrysalis chamber in many ways and it’s necessary in some ways for the redemption for our action. On some level, we can say, “Well, this grief is not ours. It’s for the collective whole.” Yes, that’s true, and in some sense, in a meaningful sense, we are the collective whole. By working with the shadow and light aspects of grief, we are taking responsibility for the emotions that come with the actions we have undertaken as a civilization. Whether it’s collective grief or individual grief or community grief, perhaps it is not something to be avoided, but is actually part of refining our character. So, let’s start there.
MK: One thing that is challenging that I’m trying to process is that we’re not talking about the grief over a death. We’re not talking about a period of grief. At some level, being alive on this planet as this great unfolding happens is to be living in grief in a permanent sense. Because of the amount of destruction and death that is not only happening but is so very visible if you choose to look. It turns grief into a permanent type of practice. You can’t open up a newspaper without there being some event that in any normal time would be a profound story. But in this day and age, where we are so obsessed with the immediate and the dramatic and the daily political soap opera of things, we see these stories passing every single day with a normality, perhaps even with banality. Whether it’s the destruction of Arctic ice, or the extinction of pollinator species or whether it’s the concentration of ocean plastics or the increasing level human violence in immeasurable ways or whether it’s just the sense of insanity that pervades our political structures and systems right now.
It all speaks to a process of death that is underway and is going to be unfolding throughout our lifetimes at some level. It is also married to a birth, a rebirth. At least that’s the hope—with death comes rebirth. However, it seems that death is far more evident than the rebirth in many ways right now. So the question for me is, how do I work with the concept of grief in a way that doesn’t focus on its end point?
I don’t know that trying to process it away is realistic or sensible or wise. I feel I’m not very skilled at this. I feel I am having to unlearn everything I was taught. It’s a struggle. I have no answers. I’m trying to work with my emotions. I’m trying to connect with them. I’m trying to let them be. And trying to not be attached to the outcome that will inevitably pass. It is the big ‘unending.’
RF: Thank you Martin. I think what you describe is the ongoing daily practice. I’m very fortunate to live in the woods and spend a lot of time sitting with the trees and it occurs to me often that, as wars rage, the trees grow slowly.
My teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh says that a tree doesn’t run around trying to save the world. A tree only has one job, and that’s to be a tree. And when trees stop acting like trees, we’re all in trouble. I wish that I could be more like that sometimes, because when you think about it, trees filter toxins out of the atmosphere simply by their presence. They convert sunlight into food energy without discrimination. And through their mycelium and their roots, they connect to the wider web of life. And, in that same way, I feel that I have to be a good tree. To try to convert some of the toxic substances in my energy field, some of the suffering, into compassion, and to offer the ‘food’ of my presence for the benefit of all Life.
Now, all of that and a dollar doesn’t buy you very much if you’re a victim of sexual slavery, or being tortured in a Syrian prison, or your children are starving. And yet, what helps me is to remember that we are bigger than this human experience. That we’re all connected to the same Source. And we return to Source, the Code of Creation. So, in touching peace I add peace to the whole. Without that peace my activism in ineffective.
MK: I know that I should be sitting in my practice deeper. But I find that there’s an element of this grief that part of me is going slightly mad with. And it’s, and one of the symptoms of that madness is that it disconnects me from my spiritual practice.
The thought-form of Wetiko [an Algonquin word that roughly translates to cannibalism] in some sense is grief itself; it has an innate desire for grief. It has a pernicious desire within it to keep me separated from the practices that will allow me to process grief well. Maybe there’s some sense of guilt that we should suffer. After all, we are part of a civilization that has created so much suffering everywhere. Why should we be free of it? Part of me wants to suffer when it sees the suffering. Part of me doesn’t want to be freed from it. Part of me wants to go mad. Because it feels like going mad is an appropriate response, almost as if it is through the madness that one can truly see.
I think at one level I’m accepting this and I don’t beat myself up for it. No human beings have ever lived through a time like this, we have never been able to see such global suffering with such precision and clarity. We are constantly exposed to global horrors on an enormous scale. We see, in real time, the bombs dropping, children being gassed. It happens in our living rooms, in a way the wounds are still fresh and always open.
On one level we are aware of and sense the scale of this terror of global capitalism. Our human brains grew up living in small communities in a contained geographical area with a certain set of influences and inputs. So of course, we are overwhelmed. And on some levels, it is impossible to process. If you try to think about ideas like human extinction, civilizational collapse, all of these vast forces, it’s impossible that a single human mind can process it well. We’ve certainly not been taught how to. I certainly haven’t been.
MW: I would like to follow on this line. There is no doubt that we are in the midst of unprecedented moment where there is no return to old certainties. Part of this pain that we are facing in the world is a pathway toward transformation. Or will we perish in the horror of the onslaught that we are facing? The decision of how we navigate these two avenues profoundly depends on the way we actually respond to that grief that we are facing, that we are receiving, that we are feeling at this moment.
I would like to tell of an experience that for me was actually really significant in dealing with grief. I was visiting a peace village in Colombia called San José de Apartadó, which is a community of farmers who took a stand to remain outside the battle between the FARC and the Colombian paramilitary.
As part of a service commemorating the very painful history of the community, a priest- a liberation theologist- spoke for three hours telling stories of one massacre after the other. After only five minutes I realized my normal self will either collapse or I will just do the usual thing, which is to close my heart and go off somewhere else. At that moment, I made a spiritual oath to stay there in my practice with an open heart and to listen to all the stories and the details. At some point I realized I entered into what I would call a sacred space, a form of transcendence where I felt that if I am able to really bear witness fully, I could remain in a state that is beyond my normal emotional self. And I felt as if, through my heart, I was truly perceiving. I could access a deep empathic state. It was also causing tears. I felt as if there is the collective heart of humanity that wants to awaken. It felt like an incredibly pain-soothing power that wants to operate through us to the extent that we come to the point of pure empathy that lies in receiving this grief.
When I look at our global system structurally, what is keeping our current culture alive is the closed heart of the Western world which keeps us in this illusion that we are separate from each other, that we are egoic Babels that are not interconnected and not interdependent. But there is a ground of existence which is completely interdependent, an eternal realm of existence which in a way we can never lose.
AL: Thank you for sharing this. Yes, it is this state of transcendence that our current crisis can lead us to. There is this idea that is prevalent in spiritual discourse and New Age circles, which is the idea that if you’re feeling pain, you are not healthy. You are not grounded. You are not in your center. But how can we amputate our shadow or even our ego? Actually, by holding reality, our subjective reality, in its full light and its full darkness we can consciously choose how we synthesize the shadow and amalgamate the light.
I have two short anecdotes. My uncle is a Sufi scholar. He would tell us these stories when we were kids about our ancestors and about what their role was in society in ancient Arabia. That they would go into town squares in congregation and pray with a collective intention of healing. They would pray and create sacred geometry and architectures of golden light and hold the energetic force field of these places. They believed they averted war and catastrophe and death and domestic abuse and all of these types things. But they would never claim credit because they didn’t believe in linearity or in cause and effect. They just knew that this was their purpose and needed no other reward except the very act of doing it.
And then, recently, I was listening to Stephen Jenkinson speak. He’s the author of Die Wise and he runs the Orphan Wisdom School. He was speaking to a largely Western audience and suggested, “You’re all looking for purpose. But this very idea of purpose is egoic.” He went on to talk about Indigenous cultures in which there was a cycle of completion. For many Indigenous communities, there’s clear purpose. One is to take care of the land on which they lived, of which they were a part of. The second is to honor the ancestors. The question one asks within these frames is: what kind of ancestor will I be? What kind of steward or caretaker of this land will I be? And because your ancestors were buried on that land, the dual purpose was actually a single purpose. They are the same thing.
This cycle of completion really helps one to understand their purpose. And because you had a relationship with your ancestors, you had a relationship with death itself. You didn’t fear being forgotten. But in our orphaned, Western culture, we fear death because we fear being forgotten. We know that we ourselves are abdicating our responsibility of being stewards of the land and honoring our ancestors.
MK: I agree that part the fear of death is the fear of being forgotten and the fear of being irrelevant and the fear of never having been. One of the things that makes it hard for me sometimes to connect with spiritual practice is that it has to be recreated for me because I didn’t pick it up from my ancestors. I don’t have the language. I don’t have the metaphors, the mythology.
The religious imagery I was brought up with was Protestant UK. And that doesn’t speak to me, the Judeo-Christian tradition doesn’t speak to me. That’s why I cast around to re-create and re-remember truths from many traditions. Without the tethers of things like land, ancestry, access to traditional wisdom, one can feel surrounded by the pain and the suffering. We have to re-access the muscle memory.
RF: I feel your words. I don’t really have ancestral family memory. I don’t know who my father was. I left home very young, at 16, and lived on the streets of New York. And my family, for a time, became the people I met and lived with on the streets. And yet, I know that my ancestors were also present, with me in this circle right now. And yours are too.
It’s absolutely miraculous that our ancestors are right here with us. Look back say 50, 100 generations. They too endured great hardships, struggles, grief. For anyone alive today, your ancestors had to be skillful, smart and lucky for you to exist at all. And we know also that trauma is passed down through the generations in numerous ways. So we are drops of light in a very long evolutionary stream of light. I have to believe that together we are flowing toward an even greater light.
I call on my ancestors. I don’t know them by name, I don’t know what part of the world they’re from. But I ask them to help align my purpose with our highest collective purpose.
MW: Human culture is embedded in a bigger movement of life which doesn’t end at death. We are therefore not confined to this threatening border of death. I want to acknowledge this- it’s very beautiful and inspiring.
I also think that it is very much connected to the idea of tribal culture. Connection with Life requires a cultural container or a framework that actually cultivates community. Not only with the souls of my grandparents and all the generations that came before, but with all the beings that surround us, all that is fundamental to our existence.
Purpose is not just something that is a part of some separated human mind. There is a purpose that is part of life which is evolution pushing forward on its path. When we are no longer driven by the compensation for the loss that we suffered, when we don’t need to invest in personal careers but can actually ground in this sense of community with life, then our purpose is an expression of the purpose of the whole.
However, this embedment needs a foundation where people actually feel this interconnectedness on a daily basis. Right, it’s not just an esoteric buzzword and something that brings book sales for self-help gurus. It needs to be a societal reality,;otherwise, it is just another religious comfort.
AL: Indeed. Even these ideas of ancestry- in some ways, we frame tribal as strictly positive- but there’s also the shadow side where we believe our ancestors are simply the people in our blood lineage. That may be too linear of a definition. If you look at Ancient Egyptian cosmology for example, there was a school of esoteric thought that believes we have star ancestry. We have these star nations that are connected to our higher missions in some way. And they negotiate with our physical DNA line in order to achieve our life objectives.
I’m not suggesting I believe that or not. But it doesn’t have to be DNA ancestry in a traditional sense, but rather to access the notion that we may be a part of something bigger than us, as Martin [Winiecki] described, this affinity to the community of Life. Of course, a part of the world’s endowment is our collective endowment. Including all ancestry, including all life that is extinct or living.
To then go back to physical DNA, I don’t think we fully know what our relationship with our ancestors truly is. Through all the work the scientific community has done on the Human Genome Project, we only understand the workings of about 7% of DNA. The other 93% of DNA that we don’t understand, scientists call junk DNA.
MW: Like Dark Matter.
AL: Yes, it’s the Other. The Unknown. And what they’re finding now is that this DNA has an electromagnetic pulse to it. A very strong electromagnetic current. So in some ways it could be that our ancestors are living through us in this electromagnetic form.
In some ways we’re all in the business of redemption, you know? I know many Westerners, who feel the sense of being orphaned by the migration from Europe to North America wherever. They say, “I actually hate my ancestors. My ancestors were colonialists. They were imperialists. They were slave-traders.” But this is still a connection with your ancestry. And there’s a bravery in facing that as well. To recognize that the agency of our forebears in creating the reality of late-stage capitalism could be the entry point to redemption.
This leads another inquiry: how has the linearity of scientific materialism and scientism and rationalism and binary thought limited us in our ability to transcend the grief of capitalism? How could the impending collapse of capitalism be separate from the scientific method or the Industrial Revolution or Wetiko or any other historical precedent that led to this moment?
MK: First, I’d like to go back to the ancestors and that sense of time, because there’s a linearity in that logic too. They came before me, I will become one, time moves in a certain linear-stages. I take your point about ancestry not just being about direct DNA lineage. But for most people, it is an access point into a bigger concept. So, you have that easier access point.
The ground of being accessed is the emergent reality, the Source, as Rhonda said. That, to me, is a more accessible construct. And when I think about purpose, when I think about things like that, I ultimately come back to the idea that purpose is your connection to that Source of being, which I think of as Love, the force of creation itself. This line of thought helps me access concepts like death, rebirth, and even capitalism.
Capitalism, in all its gross and violent imperfections, is also a process. As such, capitalism may be its own salvation. This is a sort of Sufi thought. It is a part of the universe becoming self-aware. We are so conscious of its shadow right now because it is so obvious. However, its shadow is what takes us through transcendence. It is the power that gets us beyond it. So, it has its own perfection built into it. It is both perfect and violently imperfect at the same time.
RF: I love that we’re touching on the underlying code. When I think of that Code of Creation unwinding through all that underlies Life – the structure of atoms and solar systems- I recognize that we’re fractal manifestations of that code. And I think that somewhere along the way the scientific models made a crucial error about that code—that the basis of the code is competition, that we evolve through a neo-Darwinian selfish gene, by competition. If we can now look deeply at the code through the lens of cooperation rather than competition, things can and will go in a different direction for humanity.
MW: Indeed Rhonda. We are starting to understand what kind of current we are part of. It is very profound that we are still figuring out what it actually is. It’s important to look at the aspect of shadow and grief in this context. If I say I hate my ancestors, then I am actually saying at the same time that I allow the shadow of that story which I don’t want to face, to govern me from that part of myself which I don’t consciously integrate.
If I not only think of ancestors, but of the concept of reincarnation, then I also have to face the possibility that perhaps I was a conqueror. I was a colonialist. There is no way of stepping outside of this until we come to this point of seeing the underlying deep longing for love, which was misguided in a system that was directed against love, against the truth of our bodies, of our souls. A system which turned love, time and again, generation after generation, into hatred.
In some ways, we cannot have a humane transformation if we don’t find another relationship to love, break this eternally repeating cycle of being born, having this longing for love, being disappointed, and then living through resentment and revenge.
MK: That’s a really interesting thought. The idea that we’re all just living out—at least in the Western world—a revenge script. We just feel our expectations have been thwarted around love. I can certainly see that playing out in my life, but if you extrapolate out to the macro, you can see there is indeed revenge. There is anger. There is one-upmanship.
As Rhonda says, it’s the competitive instinct given free rein. And all the energy and all the power pumped into it. We’ve all had our expectations thwarted. We should have been given better. It is, in a sense, kicking against reality.
A conversation that is not had anywhere nearly enough is the recognition of the incredible effort and energy required to keep capitalism alive. If you wanted to put it in financial terms, there are billions of dollars a year just spent on advertising around the world. That’s a number that you can almost say is the degree of propaganda and desire invention required to push against human nature. That is the degree to which it is pushing a rock against our ground of being, against that instinct of love.
We see this with social media and the rise of the communications infrastructures. Everything about it keeps you out of deep thought. That’s the whole point of it. And I think that’s where we are. Our baser desires are primed. They’re getting all the energy, all the validation. Therefore, we can’t access the antidote which is that connection to Source. Which is that deeper spiritual silent voice of conscience that you find in silence. That you find in Nature. That you find in your spiritual practice. Capitalism is designed to de-spiritualize. In that sense it is the opiate of the masses.
Capitalism describes our collective purpose through the prime directive of producing more capital as the number one thing it has to do. This just means, “Focus on something that isn’t love. Focus on something that is purely a human construct that communicates best with your ego, not with your spirit.” Money and ego are in beautiful dialogue with each other. They are of the same nature and they feed each other. This is the depth of the age of delusion, as Buddhist thought describes it. That’s how the trick is cast. It keeps us in our shallow mind, not our deep mind.
RF: As activists, when we try to solely use our shallow mind to solve problems, we’re doomed. We get caught up in those very constructs and we think that technology and rationalism will save us. Just as we think that we’re the good guys and the other person is the bad guy. As long as we address these problems as ‘us versus them,’ we’re doomed. However, when we act from our hearts, we recognize that all beings are my ancestors, all beings are part of my identity. I’m the colonized and I’m the colonizer. I’m the one who is raped and the rapist. When I truly see that, I can begin to understand that toxic energy and how to transform it. Without that sense of wholeness and interbeing with all the energies that are contributing to the problems, I can’t begin to be a part of the solution. My anger just generates more aggression.
AL: In some ways, this is the heart of unlearning together. And in many ways, it is a re-membering. When we define ourselves in opposition to the Other, to Babylon, the Spectacle—whatever the monster may be—we then re-enter dualistic thought, a sense of superiority, and the reification of the ego.
I notice when I say that we are “entering the era of re-membering” or “we are moving from an age of independence to interdependence,” people respond with, “do you want us to return to hunter-gatherer living?” I go back to this Hakim Bey line in his essay series, “Immediatism,” where he says “We don’t want to go back to the Paleolithic, we want to be of the Paleolithic.” We want to access the vast storehouses of psychic power we have forgotten we possessed.
MK: Indeed. This is technology. I feel my practice now is to hold and not turn away from the full horror, while not being transfixed by it, like a deer in headlights. It’s a process of continual renewal inside and continual reconnection to conversations like this. I’m reminded of a quote from this British economist David Fleming. He said “Before you do anything important, consult a conversation.”
RF: I want to express gratitude for the three of you, for the work that you do. We each have our spaces to hold. Some of us can go to the front lines and get arrested and put in jail for our activism. For some, it is ours to witness, to stand and witness the horror. For others, it’s to build community and alternative realities. We all have our work to do.
MW: Yes, I’ve been reminded that unlearning happens by becoming aware of the mind-viruses that keep us hostage. As we are challenged to become aware of the programming that we are driven by, there is such a deep challenge at the moment to understand the depth of the expectation of catastrophe, and come to a place where we can confront reality and know that we are also shaping it. I can say the edge of my practice is really how can I look into the world, not suppressing what happens, and still see beyond the pain, to see the possibility of healing.
AL: Yes, we must become aware of the thought-forms, the mind-viruses, the memetic structures that hold us to that old way of being. And I am reminded of this Vedic line which is, “Our work should never exceed our practice.” And part of our practice is actually this. It is conversation. It is this communalism. It is this sharing. And that is one way to deprogram ourselves from the mythology of a dying system.
Thank you to the three of you for this conversation and your work in the world. And thanks to Rhonda for initiating this conversation. In love and solidarity.
About the Images:
Kelcey Loomer is a mixed-media artist.
“I think of my paintings as abstract maps, where the marks of time and emotion leave traces on the surface. My work focuses on the act of looking inward to feel a connection to the mysteries of life—how the connections to our ancestors, our own past, and to the present moment are all intertwined. My paintings have a unique depth to them that is akin to being in a room where the wallpaper is peeling, revealing hints of color and style from the past inhabitant. They are emotional landscapes that look inward for a sense of place…”
Find Kelcey’s blog here: http://kloomer.blogspot.com/ and her Instagram here: https://www.instagram.
Change the Worldview, Change the World
Change the Worldview, Change the World
Forty years after Thomas Berry’s “The New Story,” new generations are seizing on the power of narrative.
I was sitting in a classroom in Assisi, Italy, with one of the leading environmental thinkers of our time, and he was talking about the power of story. “It seems that we basically communicate meaning by narrative,” he said. “At least that’s my approach to things: that narrative is our basic mode of understanding.”
In that summer of 1991, Thomas Berry (1914—2009) was a 77-year-old sage; a Catholic priest—though never quite comfortably—a cultural historian, and a scholar of world religions, retired from teaching but at the height of his intellectual and prophetic powers. His central focus was addressing the deep roots of the ecological crisis.
As he spoke poignantly of what was being lost—the mass extinction of species and the accelerating devastation of the biosphere—Berry told us, “The difficulty that we’re into has come, to a large extent, from the limitations and inadequacies of our story. And what we need, I think, and what we really have, is a new story.”
As a 21 year old college student who didn’t know much, this was more than enough to radically expand my consciousness. I had never thought about the concept of “the power of story,” or that we ‘know’ things by way of story, or that our ecological crisis stems from our underlying worldview. I had felt it, but had never been handed these words and ideas as tools with which to think.
A couple years earlier, I was a teenager bored with high school when I had been caught and inspired by The Power of Myth, Bill Moyers’ series of interviews with comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell. While evading homework, I read Campbell’s Myths to Live By. But Berry’s work was something different.
Where Campbell anticipated that the mythology of the future would deal with the Earth as a whole, and would likely draw on the photographs of Earth from space as a mythic symbol, it seemed to me that Berry was already weaving just such a mythos. In Berry’s view, our new understanding of the universe and the Earth—the story of galactic emergence and development which had been gradually glued together by 20th-century astronomers and physicists like a cosmological collage—could provide a new sacred origin story, a cosmological homecoming for modern culture. “It’s enormously important for us to know the story of the universe,” Berry told us in Assisi, “and it’s the only way in which we’re going to know who we are.”
For Berry, it all came down to cosmology—the basic worldview of a culture: its foundational story of how the world came to be and how it got to be as it is now, and how we, as humans, fit into it. To address the deep underlying causes of the industrial-capitalist-corporate destruction of the biosphere, we had to examine our worldview.
In Berry’s view, a central cause of the West’s ecological hostility was its separation from nature—a separation that was at once spiritual, religious, psychological, emotional, intellectual, and philosophical. The root of the eco-destruction was an anthropocentric (human-centered) Western worldview that saw an existential gulf, a “radical discontinuity,” between the human and natural worlds.
Despite being a Catholic priest, Berry (like Lynn White Jr. before him) was unsparing in his environmental critique of Christianity. The historical orientation of the Christian tradition—its mandate to subdue and conquer nature, its focus on redemption from a “fallen” world, and the priority placed on a transcendent divinity—all served to alienate humanity from the cosmic-Earth process that gave us being.
In contrast to the Indigenous and Eastern cosmologies expressed in the Native American, African, and Asian traditions Berry taught to his students as founder of the History of Religions program at Fordham, the Western worldview generally saw humans as separate from the Earth and cosmos. And not only separate, but superior, with—as Berry noted ruefully—“all the rights and all the value given to the human, and no rights and no value given to the natural world.”
When this anthropocentric orientation in Western religion and thinking merged with the “new mechanical philosophy” of Descartes and Bacon in the 17th century, in which nature was viewed as a soulless machine, the stage was set for the modern worldview. Human arrogance, capitalist logic, and industrial-scale destruction was unleashed on a desacralized planet. The living community of Earth’s biosphere, which created and sustains us, was reduced to resources for use by the human, dead material to fuel endless “growth,” profit, and “progress.”
To stop this assault on the Earth, Berry told us in Assisi in 1991, requires recognizing that our cultural story is dysfunctional. To change the world, we have to change the worldview.
The New Story
Thirteen years earlier, exactly 40 years ago this year, Thomas Berry wrote and published a groundbreaking essay titled, “The New Story” (1978). After publishing books on Buddhism and The Religions of India earlier in his career, in the 1970s, Berry’s writing took a turn. Increasingly distressed by the destruction of the planet, he penned, from his home in Riverdale, New York, a series of essays—known as the Riverdale Papers—that explored the role of worldview and spirituality in relation to ecology and environmentalism.
“The New Story” began with sentences that would become an iconic expression of Berry’s insight:
“It’s all a question of story. We are in trouble just now because we do not have a good story. We are in between stories. The Old Story—the account of how the world came to be and how we fit into it—is not functioning properly, and we have not learned the New Story.” [original version, 1978]
A decade later, “The New Story” was republished in Berry’s first collection, The Dream of the Earth, along with 15 other essays, and his cosmological vision found a wider global audience. In the words of religious scholars (and former students of Berry) Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim, “‘The New Story’” was “the culmination of a lifetime of Berry’s reflections on the growing ecological crisis and what new paradigm would be essential to counteract the devastating power of extractive and consumer economies. This new story, he felt, could begin to break through the modern view of materialism and reductionism that had objectified nature primarily as a resource for human use.”
Berry’s vision—sometimes referred to as the “New Cosmology”—was part of a wider movement within fields emerging in the 80s and 90s such as eco-philosophy, ecological spirituality, and ecopsychology. Proponents of these ideas questioned the fragmented worldview of modern culture. Cosmologist Brian Swimme worked closely with Berry and expressed this new cosmological vision in his books, The Universe is a Green Dragon and The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos. Radical theologian Matthew Fox critiqued the modern sense of disconnection and separation inherited from the “Newtonian ‘parts’ mentality,” Cartesian dualism, and reductionism.
Authors and activists Charlene Spretnak and Joanna Macy emphasized the practical consequences of our faulty societal story. “In the absence of any comprehension of the sacred whole,” wrote Spretnak, “meaninglessness and destruction are as acceptable as anything else to many people,” while Macy noted the relation between politics and cosmology, stating that a “sense of connection with all beings is politically subversive in the extreme.” Sister Miriam Therese MacGillis gave hundreds of presentations explicating Berry’s perspective on ecology, cosmology, and the New Story.
After publication of The Dream of the Earth, Berry continued to travel widely, teaching and speaking at conferences, universities, religious communities, and gatherings across the United States, United Kingdom, Europe, Canada, the Philippines, and beyond. In 1992 he coauthored The Universe Story with Brian Swimme and, in his last years, he published three more collections of essays, including The Great Work (1999) and The Sacred Universe (2009). By the time of his death in 2009, Berry was widely admired as one of the most influential, profound, evocative, and effective environmental writers of his day. And “while many ignored his warnings over thirty years ago,” state Tucker and Grim, “now his insights about the religious character of the environmental crisis continue to be prescient.”
Unlearning and Relearning the Elemental Stories
Twenty-eight years after writing the essay, “The New Story,” when I interviewed him in 2006, Berry was still grappling with the significance of cosmology and worldview. “It’s not easy to describe what cosmology is,” he told me. “It’s neither religion nor is it science. It’s a mode of knowing.” “The only thing that will save the twenty-first century is cosmology,” he said as we had lunch in North Carolina on a December day. “The only thing that will save anything is cosmology.”
Four decades after Berry wrote “The New Story,” his insights may be more relevant than ever. In the years after I first studied with him that summer in Assisi, I continued to reflect on story, as well as the links between social justice, ecology, and cosmology. It seemed to me that worldview was a key in all of these areas and was one of the connections between them.
Throughout the 20th century, racist and sexist policies and practices were supported by narratives operating in families, schools, workplaces, and the media, as well as in political, economic and legal/judicial institutions. The civil rights movement of the 50s and 60s, and the feminist/womanist movements of the 60s and 70s can be seen, in part, as massive re-storying on a culture-wide level.
Gender, like race, is a social construction, which is to say, a story. And the stories of sexism and racism that have cast such a pall over our history and our present illustrate the power of worldview and narrative in generating and maintaining systemic oppression. Stories become structures, systems, policies, and practices that have profound consequences on the bodies and in the lives of people in targeted communities.
Can we not see systemic racism, sexism, and other oppressions as functions of the same dominant worldview that is destroying the Earth? Settler colonialism at planetary scale? When I interviewed Berry in 1996, he told me, “If a particular society’s cultural world—the dreams that have guided it to a certain point—become dysfunctional, the society must go back and dream again.”
Yet the pervasive worldviews of white supremacy and misogyny continue to undermine our efforts to build justice, community, and democracy in the United States. Every week, as another unarmed Black man is shot by police or a woman is killed by a domestic partner, we see flawed stories turn lethal in seconds. The #BlackLivesMatter, #MeToo and #TimesUp movements are challenging and transforming racist and sexist worldviews in powerful ways.
Dysfunctional dreams. Problematic stories. Distorted worldviews. Can we not recognize these at the root of not only ecological issues, but also social injustices such as white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism?
Perhaps no recent event illustrates the current clash between worldviews better than the Indigenous-led resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline in Standing Rock, North Dakota. Even mainstream media has used the word ‘worldview’, to recognize that this is not simply a conflict between activists and fossil fuel corporations, but fundamentally a clash of cosmologies.
On one side stands arrayed police forces representing the capitalist, industrial, corporatist worldview that sees nature as a resource to be exploited—a distorted dream driven by maximizing profits, regardless of consequences for people, communities, the biosphere, and future generations. On the other side is an Indigenous cosmology in which water is life, Earth is Mother, and reverence, respect, and reciprocity are paramount.
On one side is a worldview and legacy of systemic racism and mistreatment of Native peoples for centuries, in which, as Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “the ultimate logic of racism is genocide.” On the other side is a worldview of cosmological egalitarianism in which nature is holy and every being is sacred.
On one side is the “old story” of Western culture: a mythos of separation, disconnection, and anthropocentrism—of hierarchy and domination, in which division, exploitation, and oppression are the norm. On the other side is the “original story” of Indigenous traditions, a cosmology of community and connection.
The Water Protectors at Standing Rock challenged much more than a pipeline. They confronted the cosmology of the modern world and its destructive, unjust economy. Like the movement for Black Lives—which also is a direct challenge to 500 years of a white, racist worldview—the visionary resistance at Standing Rock may help guide our way into future. By connecting ecology, social justice, and worldview and using the power of spirituality, dream, story, art, and action, these movements bring forth—in practice and politics and society—what is needed most: a cosmology of interconnectedness.
The New Story of our times will be a multiplicity—a kaleidoscope of stories. As the writer and critic John Berger has said, “Never again will a single story be told as if it is the only one.” Long-silenced voices will continue to come to the fore. The stories needed most are emerging from the youth of Ferguson, Baltimore, Standing Rock, and Palestine rather than from the narrators of the status quo. From this diverse chorus, larger themes are taking shape, with recognizable contours bending toward justice and ecology.
We need stories that expose the lies of systemic racism, misogyny, heterosexism, colonialism, and capitalism. We need stories that stand up to fascism and authoritarianism, and stories that expand democracy.
We also need stories that connect us to the majesty of the galaxies and the depths of the ocean, stories that remind us who we are.
We need stories that stop abuse and create justice. Perhaps most of all, in this moment of widespread poverty and injustice, climate crisis, and mass extinction, we need stories that build movements.
In 2018, we seem, in some ways, farther than ever from the dream of a new story, with a level of political polarization that seems to fracture even our sense of common reality. Yet, if the possibility remains that we might heed Thomas Berry’s advice and “reinvent the human…by means of story and shared dream experience,” then now would be the time for massive, creative action. We owe it to the children of the future and the entire Earth community. As Berry wrote in his essay 40 years ago, “no community can exist without a unifying story.”
Social Breakdown and Initiation
Social Breakdown and Initiation
Charles Eisenstein’s New and Ancient Story is a series of conversations, interviews, and talks dedicated to the transformation of self and society. Explorations include technology, spirituality, agriculture, healing, economics, politics, ecology, relationships, education—areas undergoing transition today as our old story nears collapse. Visit CharlesEisenstein.net.
Orland Bishop is the founder of ShadeTree Multicultural Foundation and works in Los Angeles doing peace work with gangs, social healing, youth initiation, as well as research on esoteric and indigenous cosmologies.
Charles:Orland, I flatter myself to see you as a really deep ally in a cause that is so mysterious that I really can’t even say what it is, but there’s a sense of deep alliance. Thank you so much for making the time.
Orland: Absolutely. It’s a real pleasure to be together again, thank you. You’ve been a great source of inspiration for many years, so glad we could spend this time.
Charles: (In our last conversation) …You were talking about Martin Luther King and civil rights. I had this idea that we are in some kind of transition from civil rights to social agreements because the whole concept of rights kind of takes for granted the separate individual in relation to a sovereign state. As we transition, as a civilization, to a more fluid relational self, perhaps that old rubric of individual rights in reference to the state is evolving as well, and I’m curious what you might have to say about that.
Listen to the Conversation
Part 1
Part 2
Orland: I appreciate the framing. I think there is a transition from where someone is empowered to believe more in themselves, to believing in the other just as deeply. A right is not just for me. It’s an acknowledgement that the framework that gives me access to my own potential is the same framework that gives access to someone else’s potential. So this is the idea of civility. Civility is the framework that allows people to communicate in ways that allow the collective potential to be realized and achieved. This process of creating the direction in which an individual joins the collective intention is what a civilization is. It’s hard. The first phase is not rights whereby I think of my own needs, but R-I-T-E. This is where it emerged from, the rite into a relationship with the hierarchies within the deeper conception of society. And society used to be an initiated group, not a group of people trying to do their own thing, but a group that’s trying to realize the collective intention. But that required an R-I-T-E, rite of passage, or rite of leadership into that decision process. When that doesn’t happen, when people just get their rights as they know them to be, the demand is for more, more power.
Charles: So the R-I-G-H-T is kind of a substitute for the sacred R-I-T-E and becomes necessary, maybe only necessary, in the absence of sacred rites of initiation into society or into civility. That’s a really provocative idea because it then leads to the question: In this time of disintegration of all of the social structures that allowed us to be initiated into something, how do we reconstruct a society that is civil in the sense that you’re talking about, in which we have something to be initiated into?
Orland: So this is the framework. The civil rights movement had behind it a spiritual conception that they were not asking for something alone for themselves. They were also bringing something that was missing in the culture. They were bringing civility to the culture which meant: can people acknowledge that power is not withholding, it’s actually sharing? If you want to develop power, you develop it in a collective sense, whereby the highest reaches of human aspiration is in service to something that is sacred. So if I don’t make the other person’s needs sacred, I’m actually debilitating society. I’m creating frameworks of limitations, because the power that I see will remain political, but not become really social. So the higher power in the culture is social. It’s not political or even economic.
So self-interest is actually a betrayal of the self at another level. When I take so much that my own potential gets underdeveloped. Greed is an underdevelopment of the human potential. And in an intellectual society, in which the schooling of the intellect is for achievements for the self, it’s a critical danger when we do not have group aims as part of the exercise of education. Civics must be part of that education. We must realize how to contribute to a greater societal good, in indigenous forms, and indigenous in this sense just means when people who are situated in the particular place realize that the ecology of that place gives each person a unique feeling for what they can contribute to the emergence of what the place could inspire the group to share. An economy doesn’t have to be repressive. There’s enough imagination in this framework for a deeper collaboration and abundance is possible in everything that a group of people can share.
Charles: Today we live in a time where, for many reasons, we are deaf to promptings of land, of place that could coordinate us into a common endeavor and a common aim and earth agreements that situate each one of us in our gifts, in contribution to that aim. We don’t have ways to ‘hear’ the land, partly just because of an ideology that holds nature as a bunch of random forces and also because of a commodity economy that sources everything from distant places and obliterates the uniqueness of things and keeps us indoors in front of screens and so forth. What is the next evolutionary step to cohere again on a level that’s bigger than just the level of a place, but to cohere as a people?
Orland: Yes, you describe very carefully this gap between object and subject. We have, in our societies, objectives. We want to achieve certain goals, certain distinctions in the culture, and then we limit the capacities that are necessary for that development by isolating ourselves from the good that our aims must also inspire. Human being must ‘do good.’ We must embrace beauty. We must embrace truth. These are intrinsic qualities for a kind of moral memory, that we’re not just pursuing achievements in the outer sense. We’re also developing inner capacities to realize, ‘when I achieve something it’s actually good for the world.’ So what I’m pointing to here, is that in the objective reach in the human will, we have an inner subjective awareness that comes with it. Is this thing that I’m acting on creative enough to transform my life? If it’s only objective is the degree to which I get it done but I don’t have an inner experience of goodness for it, then I’ve actually not done anything. So the society becomes mechanistic in the goals it sets because it could just be done without consciousness.
Charles: I’m imagining, though, that you’re not advising people to disengage from action in the world to heal racial and class inequities, and just to come and work on self-consciousness instead. I imagine that’s probably not what you’re saying.
Orland: So it’s not either/or anymore. It’s both simultaneously, what I call objective subjectivity. I’m working on myself as I’m working on the world at the same time. There’s no other way to do it and this process requires a careful observation that, as one of the poets put it, ‘I’m not a workman in the world, I’m a prophetic being. I can see into things and I can see into myself.’ So why not do both?
Charles: There’s no alternative. When you say okay, yes, I need to work on myself but how do I do that, I think it’s through the things that become visible when one is in relationship to something in the world.
Orland: Right. The world has become myself. There’s no self because I am holding the world in it. My world view is the world, so however I see things is really me and the world at the same time. My perception is no longer separate from the world. It includes and holds the world in it. My cognition holds the world in it, so every time i act, I’m actually acting on the world and myself at the same time. It used to be that I could only see one and then look at the other, but consciousness has evolved to be able to hold both simultaneously.
I think we become more real, as well, as we get older in the sense that more of my spiritual capacities become accessible to me in this mid-age range. It’s called a second adolescence, where the chemistry of life gets back into the deeper spiritual body we call the astral body. This is the part of the self that, in a sense, holds the future sense of me. If I want to stay in my old habits, I’m actually going to create illness for myself by a certain age if I don’t release my creative. But this is also true for the whole culture. If we don’t embrace our future potential, the social aims, the cultural aims, the political aims and such will break down because this is actually a representation of the inner life of the human being.
Charles: It looks like it’s happening right now, this breakdown in our culture.
Orland: Right, and because we live in a technological age, we may want to substitute everything with technology, but the need would never be substituted. The need that we have is fundamental for the R-I-T-E part of our lives, the rite of passage part of our lives, the initiation part of our lives has to continue to be developed. There’s no substitute for that because it is actually an intrinsic feeling. No one can give us that unless we are working on something that is actually truthful in our will.
Charles: I’m just digesting that and thinking about the dramatic increase in suicides among middle-aged people, especially men, and I wonder if there’s a connection—when on the soul level you know that something is supposed to happen, initiation is supposed to happen, a new phase of life is supposed to happen, an orientation toward, on a deeper level, an orientation toward what you’re born to serve. And then it doesn’t happen. The initiation doesn’t happen and one feels confined in this obsolete life, this shell, that cannot accommodate who I really want to be.
Orland: The esoteric probably will become more realized in our society as we go along. Esoteric means ‘what’s hidden’. What’s hidden often in the motive of life is to have the knowledge of what is actually generating the questions that I’m having. If a person can’t answer the questions they’re having, with the knowledge society provides, they can only go one place: into themselves. Initiation is often a brush with death.
The human being is always dying. This is the esoteric part of the human life. We’re always dying, but we also are always living and the question is: what experience will pull us to one or the other? The human being is always in a balance between life and death. Some practices tell us to pay attention to one or the other and learn which one tells us the deeper truth. Initiation questions really must take in both. The deeper philosophy of life takes in both. The deeper religions of life takes in both. The contemplation of life and death, it’s not one or the other.
Charles:I’m thinking now, on collective level, that we are probably in a phase where we are drawn to the contemplation of death and to the reality of the death that is present in life because of climate change, perhaps, because of these crises that are putting in front of our face that our entire civilization is mortal.
I think we are having a collective initiation that started with the bomb, which was the first time that it became inescapably obvious that war is not the answer. It became no longer a viable option to defeat the enemy through total war. For the first time in human history, that was no longer an option. Instead, we had ‘mutually assured destruction’ and that gave us a quickening in the evolution toward what I call the story of interbeing—that what we do to the other, we do to ourselves in some form. Now, we have climate change. I think that the dominant narrative of climate change is really problematic, but still its effect on us is to drive home the point that what we do to nature, what we do to other beings, not just human beings but what we do to any being also will affect ourselves. Maybe you have a further comment about that?
Orland: I appreciate you framing it further. We’ve been in a cult of death for a long time—our modern civilization, from colonialism, in which cultures have died. We’ve actually extinguished a lot of significant cultures from the world in the last five- to six-hundred years. So the atomic age is actually not the first of really seeing massive loss of potential. We’ve also eliminated a lot of species from the world.
What has been evolving in those 500 years in modernity is this objective subjectivity, that if I destroy the world, I destroy myself. That’s hidden in the initiation we can call ‘the atomic age,’ but it’s still a rite of passage of humanity, from the ages where electricity and magnetism and fire would only limit destruction to a certain point, now it’s global. This level of destruction has put our contemplation of death at a higher level and we don’t want that. So what do we do? We started to learn how to negotiate the atomic energy age.
Charles: Yes.
Orland: But this is, again, when we put ourselves at risk, we put ourselves in the opportunity of development at the same time.
Charles: Yeah. I’m just wondering if there’s even any other way. I think about the extinction of cultures, languages, stories, not to mention species, and I wonder: is there some gods’-eye-view of the whole thing from which I can understand that actually these extinctions were a necessary sacrifice to complete an evolutionary journey that we are collectively on? Is there another way to understand these extinctions in some other way besides that they were just horrific tragedies? I’m not saying as a substitute for feeling them as a horrific tragedy, but I’m saying like another lens through which to understand them?
Orland: This brings us back to the esoteric question. Some of the areas of research that we are engaged with is to understand what is on the other side of death. What happens in the release of the life forces from the form we call our body, of any body? What happens with the energy once we leave?
Ultimately, most of us will have to become esotericists if we are to make sense of the losses that we have already endured in our culture. Why? Because the energy is still trying to communicate with consciousness. So the bodies are gone, but the beings that inhabit those bodies are still active on different planes of reality, causing environmental changes because it’s still constituted within the framework of what we call reality.
Charles:So I collect stories and I hold circles sometimes where people share stories that involve death, involve communications with loved ones after they died in very dramatic ways. I think that these can be very useful to take in because they subvert the dominant conception of what a self is and ‘who I am’ and open us to other conceptions. I think that some of those people will then jump too quickly to kind of a simplified transmigration of souls from one lifetime to the next, to the next, to the next, which still kind of preserves a sense of a separate self.
These stories really make me curious and they inflame various skeptical parts of myself and wounded parts of myself, parts that maybe want to believe these experiences are authentic and I’m afraid to believe they’re authentic. I will become I wouldn’t say cynical or skeptical even, but it’s more I kind of hold it at a bit of an intellectual distance. I feel a call, though, toward a deeper understanding. Maybe all this is just a long-winded way to say, Orland, what happens after we die?
Orland:What happens to my thoughts when I forget something? Where does my knowing go when I forget something? Before we even get to the death part, when I forget something, it’s still available in some level of consciousness, and if I concentrate my attention I can recover what I forgot. We call it remembering. So remembering is the first process in the step to clarification of this higher practical development. if I choose to remember, my consciousness actually becomes much more complex than if I try to learn something because I will resist learning, but I can’t resist remembering. In early childhood, that’s who I was. I was trying to remember, not learn, and I was hoping that those who were older than me had remembered everything.
Back to perception. Our natural perception is to be open to mystery, but having learned that mysteries actually create strong paradoxes in consciousness—meaning no one can always explain what I’m perceiving—then I have to really advance my cognition. And we have a society that’s saying, ‘do not advance your cognition too far or you will be considered weird.’ You know, we ostracize people that advance themselves. Or, if we can utilize their knowledge we call them geniuses. If they play good music or they create good mathematics, we then make space for them.
Charles:We have these capacities that we, in some semiconscious or unconscious way limit in order to remain in coherency with the times in which we live, to ‘not be weird’, or it could also just be that the particular flavor of genius that would become available to us isn’t necessary or doesn’t even have a home right now. The genius has a purpose of service to what the next evolutionary step of that society is to be. It still feels, though, a bit tragic. Some people, they get to exercise their genius. They get to be a musician, a mathematician. They get to do it and others, sorry, your genius is not what’s needed right now so you just get to be a janitor. That can’t be right. There’s something else here.
Orland: This is the subtle thing about karma and destiny: it’s interwoven. So part of the karmic factor is that there will be some condition that limits my creativity that is beyond the society, but also hidden in the society. This is an agreement that a circumstance will limit my destiny and I have to figure out the rite—R-I-T-E—of passage through that. It’s not just that everyone will have everything they need. Even if you provide everything they need, they will still require something that makes consciousness a deeper effort.
Some people will even self-sabotage their own potential because that is just part of the make-up of what initiation is. The human being must be initiated, regardless of how much society provides the conditions necessary for achievement. It’s really not about achievement, it’s about transformation.
Charles: It seems like there’s two things that might require an initiatory rite. One of them would be to be initiated into society as you were saying, into a useful function that engages the gifts that you come with, and the other is the initiation into the activation of the gifts themselves. If you have one without the other, if you have the social initiation without the activation of the gift, then your utility is limited because you’re only operating from what is automatically available to you. If you have the initiation of your genius without initiation into society, you become kind of the lone genius or even the psychotic.
Orland:We’ve lost the context of the genius. The genius is guided by the muse and so there’s always a sense that the inspiration for the genius to become active is the fact that there are entities or intelligences that are the source of what the genius utilizes to express this unique capacity. Music is not just in the person’s capacity to play, it’s in the spheres, in the harmony of the spheres. It’s already there and it’s discovered and played.
Charles:Yeah, Mozart would just write it down.
Orland:Yes. Right, exactly. So these frequencies are distributed throughout the cosmos so to speak. It’s within the environment in nature and the deep superconscious of the collective. So part of it is that we’re always drawing from something through our perception.
Charles:That’s why initiation is necessary because it’s an attunement to something that’s already there.
Orland:Yes, and when the spirit self-separates from the physical body, there’s a recapitulation, a remembering, of the primary agreement of what the self brought to the world and a witnessing of: did I fulfill it, did I live into this intention? It’s not a moral thing of beliefs. It’s whether I truly made the effort to overcome self-interest and deposit into the world my will, leaving my signature with it that’s free from ‘me.’
Charles:It seems like a bit of a stringent standard that you’re setting up here. You know, when I ask, when I meet somebody and they have incredible potential and I ask well why aren’t they fulfilling that potential and then I hear, well they were abused as children, they went through all kinds of things, no wonder. You’re not saying at the moment of death that they’re going to evaluate that they have failed because, I think really, sometimes when I offer something to people who are deeply wounded like that, I say, “you know, if you accomplish nothing else but to heal 10% of that, then you’ve actually had a really good life.” How does that fit in?
Orland:Yeah, I would agree with that and that’s why I went back to remembering, because anyone who is in a crisis, what they’re trying to do is remember a time when they were not. They want to go back to a time before the abuse. They want to go back to a time before the trauma. The body tries to remember this earlier stage when it was not yet wounded or when it did not forget its higher purpose. We call it healing, and you just mentioned it again. This is the natural first process of the self. It wants to overcome the conditions that limit its conditions to be self-conscious. If it doesn’t happen in remembering, it will try to happen in sleep. If it doesn’t happen in sleep, the only other option it has to happen in society, in waking consciousness. Someone has to insist that there’s an opportunity to heal. Someone has to provide the context. This is society’s work. We should not leave people in their wound. This is why people explore all kinds of therapy because we know it’s possible for that breakthrough. If it doesn’t happen then, then it’s left for these other levels of the mystery which would include that.
Charles:I think that you’ve articulated the most important requisite of successful therapy of any kind, which is that the therapist whether it’s a person or a group has to know that the other person can heal and has to be able to hold that knowing strongly enough that they can hold the other person in that knowing until they can know it themselves. That’s almost the only thing necessary. I guess there are skills and things and learnings that are useful on top of that, but without that there’s nothing.
Orland:Because the highest level of the self-need is belonging. Even if I don’t accomplish anything significant, belonging is most important to the human being. No one wants to just be exiled in a wound by themselves.
Charles:It kind of comes full-circle, because the particular gifts and genius that are especially called for in our times and called forth by our times are precisely the ones that enable us to create conditions for this healing to happen for other people. Everybody’s gift is to serve the healing of somebody else.
Orland:I would definitely say yes to that. Something we share becomes more abundant, not only to me and to us in this time, but it becomes the substance for future times as well. It becomes the criteria for some other soul that is going to be born into the world to say, “this is the right time, this condition is set.” We set the conditions upon which the karma of other people’s lives gets identified.
Charles:Returning to the death moment here, is that okay?
Orland:Yes.
Charles:So there’s this kind of evaluation and then what happens?
Orland:Well, when one goes back into the deeper story, which there’s a memory in the astral body that has to be transformed. This life is a memory. It becomes a memory that has to be transformed to prepare free energy for the soul to possibly reincarnate, for possible futures. It has to dissolve this content and context of life itself. That is the work for those on the other side: dissolving who they had become and allowing the soul to return to a state of creative freedom, to be reincarnated again.
Charles:That doesn’t only happen with death. That happens in life transitions, too. It’s necessary to dissolve who you’ve become.
Orland:Right. So when we don’t complete all of that … that’s why I said in the living experience, we have the same functional capacities that we have in death. We just have to do it in a body, we have to do it within the framework of perception and cognition. The perception and cognition has to pass through the living organs of our individual existence. This is one part of initiation. If it doesn’t happen there, it has to happen on the other side of the body.
Charles: Right. If it happens on this side, then capacities become available.
Orland: Spiritual capacities become available here that we normally would only experience on the other side.
This is the stage in all consciousness development whereby we must contemplate. The will wants to aspire for something to do, but I can only aspire to the level of the contemplative will first, whereby I don’t have to feel the push, but the pull to wait for the inspiration, because the inspiration comes with a kind of initiation as well. The one thing that we don’t want to do is intellectualize it to the degree that I want to make an achievement of it and not a realization of it. When I realize it to be true, what is in me will naturally awake.
Charles: I’m so grateful, Orland. I hesitate often to reach out to you because I just know that you’re doing such important, beautiful work that I don’t want to take you away from it.
Orland: No, this is good to do. This is a source of inspiration for me too.
Charles: Great. Okay, well thank you so much and I’ll talk to you tomorrow.
Orland:Talk to you tomorrow. Take care.
Listen to the complete conversation here.
Healing Into Consciousness
Healing Into Consciousness
Witnessing the birth of my grandchild, I was humbled in a very profound way. Looking into her eyes was like having a glimpse into the eyes of the unknown. I wondered where this newly-born child’s soul had been traveling, how her life would unfold, what her trials and tribulations on this planet would be, and what kind of gifts she brought into this world to share.
Every child is born a blank slate. No matter how loving, caring, and conscious the child’s parents are, they cannot predict what their child’s experiences will be, what lessons he/she is here to learn, and what kind of beliefs the soul will adopt from her personal experiences and social conditionings. Like the very fabric of the Universe, our human existence is complex and multidimensional. The exploration of our human condition and the discovery of our true nature is a mysterious and sophisticated journey. As we become conscious of one aspect of our existence, another is revealed to us. We are led into the arms of the unknown over and over again to discover truths about ourselves, others, and the Universe.
As humans, we have been gifted with an ability to question, explore, and discover the Truth of who we are. Though not an easy path, the longing to awaken to our True Self is built into the core of our being. Discovering the ultimate health that resides in our being is each person’s destiny, no matter how much they stray from the path of self-discovery.
I was five years old when I saw my grandfather die after battling cancer. He was in pain and very frustrated. He finally decided it was enough and grabbed a bottle of morphine that was used to ease his pain and drank from it. Shortly after, he died and everything became calm and peaceful.
Watching his lifeless body, I remember thinking that I will die one day, too. The world will continue going, just as it did after my grandfather’s death. I was suddenly taken into a different dimension of reality where I had a bird’s eye view of the impermanence of life. I knew, in that moment, that the most important things for me while I was on this planet would be to discover who I am, where I came from, and where would I go when I die.
Like everyone else, I ‘forgot’ about this important insight as life took me on its spin. Like all of us, I was inundated with conflicting ideas, beliefs, and conditionings and began to identify with them. I accumulated ideas from my parents, personal life experiences, and those that were imposed on me by social and religious structures. By the time I attained two university degrees (education and architecture), I had forgotten about the awareness of what I thought was the most important thing in life. Something inside me kept feeling misplaced, however. I did not want to fit into the structure that my parents and the world expected of me.
Fortunately, no matter how much we stray from our own path, our inner light never can be lost. Sooner or later, we will all revert back to the Truth that is undeniably at the core of our being.
After going in a roundabout way through many hardships, heartaches, and disappointments, I recognized the falsity that was all around me. I began to internally rebel and longed to find my lost inner peace and authentic Self.
I was 24 years old when I was first introduced to the teachings of George Gurdjieff and Osho. Immediately, they resonated with me and I knew that I was back on track. What they called enlightenment was the path to finding my True Self. So, I left behind what the world considered valuable in terms of a career, material success, and prestige, and, with great passion, focused on meditating and looking inward.
Things gradually began to crystalize as I embarked on this uphill path of self-discovery, which essentially meant unlearning everything that I had learned and with which I was conditioned. After several profound experiences through meditation and introspection, I experienced firsthand what dis-identifying from the body, mind, and emotions truly meant. I saw the partnership between my mind and my ego mutually feeding on all the beliefs and conditionings to stay alive.
My curiosity to explore the workings of my ego-mind and observe them as a scientist of my own inner world helped me understand the ego’s fear to die and disappear into the unknown. When I gathered courage to face the fear and passed through the hurricane into its eye, I was left within the simple existence of my being which felt like an “am-ness” without anything written on it. I saw that this am-ness—which also can be called presence—was at the center of everything in the universe, including humans, trees, rocks, oceans, stars, planets, and even things.
Reconnecting to this place of absolute stillness is not an easy task. In order to find and live from this place of innocence and Pure Being, we must unlearn what we have learned. We must peel away the many layers of adopted beliefs and conditionings. We must transform what is false in us and all the games that our ego plays in order to survive. We must understand that awakening can only happen by with integrity and purity of heart.
Beliefs never lead us to self-discovery. Beliefs keep us ignorant of the universal truth of who we truly are. They keep our energy and consciousness imprisoned in anxiety and false fears about survival.
The easiest way to begin the process of unlearning is first to explore:
What are your beliefs and conditionings; how were they formed; and how can you transform them into consciousness so you can fully live your life and contribute your unique gifts to the world?
Answers to these questions cannot be found with the mind or energy work. Just like a computer program, the mind actually is the generator of the beliefs and cannot see or dis-identify from itself. Only consciousness, which is an integral part of the being, can recognize itself and see what is eternal and indestructible and what is impermanent and finite.
Having worked with thousands of people over the past 25 years, I have discovered a fundamentally new way that helps people access and transform their beliefs (which are not just in the brain but in the entire body) without using the mind. Each person can use this self-healing and self-discovery system on their own, to become self-empowered, to discover what is true and false within them, and to heal into consciousness.
These magnificent colour lithographs of the Great Water Lily of America are the work of British-born printer William Sharp. With their bold and stunning depth of colours, these water lily images by Sharp stand out as some of the finest examples of chromolithography, an art which at the time was only in its infancy. (Source: publicdomainreview.org)
Forgive: The new practice and mantra for Black Men
Forgive: The new practice and mantra for Black Men
At the fragile age of 12, Ulysses Slaughter listened as his mother Clarice was shot to death by his father Ulysses Grant Slaughter Sr. Emerging from his bedroom, he watched as life flowed out of his mother. Stepping over her body that day was the first act in his amazing odyssey toward forgiveness.
Tamara Smiley Hamilton is a professional speaker dedicated to giving voice to the voiceless. She facilitates workplace conversations on conflict, race, and implicit bias. In this podcast, she and Ulysses discuss the meaning of true justice and explore the collective trauma Black men (and women) in particular face on the journey to reconciliation.
Forgive: the new mantra and practice for Black Men, Ulysses Butch Slaughter (Author), Eric K. Grimes (Foreword), Paperback, Create Space Independent Publishing; First Edition 2016
Excerpt
Ulysses Slaughter: …this year’s the 40th anniversary of the passing of my mother Clarice Slaughter. At the age of 12, growing up in Chicago, I listened as my father shot and killed my mother. I was in the apartment when it happened. I wound up being the lead witness in the criminal trial against my father and literally had to step over my mother’s body to get out of my room the morning that she was shot and killed. And Tamara, I use the term “killed” just to make a connection with people who understand that kind of language. I always tell people that my mother is alive and well, and one of the reasons why I’m here today is because she is alive and well. Her messages to me have made me the man that I am.
When I was 12, it was a profound awakening for me and, oftentimes, I think of that moment and I can see it in my mind’s eye right now. I think in that moment where I was confronted with a visual that always seemed it would be the logical conclusion to years of domestic violence that I witnessed as a child in our home. And so coming into June 25, 1978, I have to say I was not as shocked that my mother would wind up being shot and killed. What was more shocking to me was that 33 years later… that I would get an opportunity to forgive my father was more shocking than what actually happened on June 25, 1978. The only way that I could change that was to create a powerful counterbalance to that moment, and forgiving became that counterbalance.
Tamara Hamilton: I would just like to take a little moment to hold a space in honor of your mother, in a brief moment of silence, because it is the 40th anniversary and because she is Clarice Slaughter, the woman who always taught you to be better. So I’m going to have our listeners also pause for just a few seconds as we honor your mother.
(Silence)
Thank you everyone around the world who took time to honor Clarice Slaughter. So when a young person witnesses such a horrific tragedy, you use the word madness, I know sadness is profound. Tell us, what did you have to unlearn about the reaction to what happened to you and what was happening to you as you say for years as a witness to domestic violence and to have your mother be killed in your home while you were there? What did you have to unlearn in order to move towards forgiveness?
Ulysses Slaughter: I like the way that we’re using the word “unlearn” right now, because Tamara in many ways forgiving is about unlearning.
Forgiving is about transcending. Transcending the kind of everyday, common, usual approaches—social approaches—to what we see as infractions. To what we see as pain. So, it was important for me to unlearn, forgive those kind of preset ideas that I had been taught about what the normal response should be to something like that. You know, we’re brought up in a way that says, if this happens, this is the way you should respond to it. If that happens, this is the way you should respond to it. And the response, oftentimes, is a trap. So you have what we would call a tragedy, and then you have the trap. The potential trap that is the response. And the tragedy is not transformed through a trap.
And so it became important for me to ask myself, “What do I want?” If I could have it my way, “What do I want?” There was no personal choice and no freedom in anyone telling me what I had to do… and the choice that I made was the liberation factor for me. That is where my freedom lies, in the choice to decide how I was going to be—that I did not have to deal with my father through a committee of people. We talk about justice, and I think that justice is a very intimate thing. And my father and I—the work that my father and I were able to do in the 18 months between us reconnecting and his passing away—the work that we were able to do, represented the real justice.
It was a cosmic kind of justice. It was not the kind of justice that people, you know, find in a court. People often ask me, “How long did your father spend in jail?” Well my father spent 39 months in prison. And they go, “Wow, 39 months, how could that happen?” And, “How come he didn’t get more time?” And there are a lot of reasons I now understand why he did not get more time. But in the end, it didn’t matter how much time he did. It didn’t matter how much time he did, because that was not going to be the healing factor in the reconciliation for us.
Read the full transcript.
Forget what you know about forgiving
by Ulysses Slaughter
Forget what you know about forgiving for a while. Just totally forget your past ideas.
Some people say forgiving is a response. Some say a reaction. Some people say forgiving is all about the past.
I disagree. I disagree deeply and strongly. I say forgiving is now.
Forgiving is a choice – a sustainable shift in perspective that will change the thoughts, feelings and actions you are living with right now. Forgiving can only be related to now and can only happen now because we can’t change what happened.
Forgiving is not about the past. Forgiving is not even about the future. Forgiving is about the present. Forgiving is the action of now.
Whenever anything happens it will arrive in a moment called now. When we seek to name the experience, to judge it, it is mostly to our own detriment. When we judge an experience as bad, it becomes bad. We enter into an experience, mix it, remix it and hold it in our minds. We commit to making even the worst moments last a lifetime. We are mesmerized by the moment. We won’t forgive the moments, so the moments don’t forgive us.
Some people insist that their feelings are the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. They feel that their truth is the one size truth that fits all. They can’t distinguish what they call truth from their feelings.
But feelings are like clothes. They come in different colors and different styles. We have a choice of what to wear from an unlimited internal wardrobe. But for some reason many of us like to wear the same feelings for a very long time. We like to wear our feelings no matter how much we’ve outgrown them. Imagine a full, grown man – six feet, 200 pounds – wearing clothes he wore at 14. He admits that he’s uncomfortable in the tight garments. He’s constricted. But he insists on wearing the clothes anyway.
People wear feelings too long sometimes. They think their feelings are the only ones available.
Forgiving is like taking off the clothes that you have outgrown. Forgiving happens when we let go of our feelings about the clothes. You don’t judge the clothes because they are too small. You simply take them off now. You can’t take them off yesterday. It’s too late. But you can take them off now. You can say you’ll take them off tomorrow, but when you arrive in tomorrow the new day will be called “now.”
Forgiving is about now. Forgiving is a word that actually tells you what it is. Forgiving is “for giving.”
Consider this: whatever you got in the past is for giving away right now. Whatever you got in the past is forgiven right now. It doesn’t matter the circumstance. Hand it over. Release it. Let it go and it will let you go now.
