liberation without identification
march 24, 2009. early afternoon.
up until now i have been proud of my affiliations with the metta center and with charityfocus. nonviolence education and experiments in kindness/genorosity. what could be more noble? what could be more benign/non-threatening? what identification could illicit more instant respect and admiration from someone? what affiliation could act more as a peace passport?
i had a series of events happen to me in the last few hours that changed my perspective.
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After dropping my sister off at the train station, I decided to stop at the bank because I was out of cash. On the street ahead of me I saw a middle-aged man selling an independent newspaper. Many people were passing him by without even acknowledgment. Now I’ve purchased this paper before, read it through, and that was enough for me. Since then I have not felt compelled to buy another paper, though I do acknowledge the value of offering an independently-produced paper in return for a donation, as opposed to pan-handling, and I want to acknowledge the existence of other beings, regardless. So I said hello as I walked by.
Hi, would you like to buy a paper. No, thank you. A look of bitterness and disappointment. But I’m coming back this way and I’ll stop and chat. Oh, ok.
How can I serve this person? I decided to try an experiment. I withdrew forty dollars from the bank, in small bills. On my way back I stopped and chatted a bit, then I made the proposal. I was to give him five dollars, for five papers, and together we would offer them freely to people, instead of trying to sell it to them. “Ok, let’s do it.” read more…
You know how we have to think back to remember ages sometimes? Even our own on occasion. “How old am I anyway?” you think to yourself, when asked the question. You know its around, say, mid twenties, but not sure exactly. “Lets see, last year I was 23, and then I remember turning twenty-four..ah, yes, I’m twenty-four,” you think to yourself in about 1.25 seconds.
read more…
I wrote this in response to a note from a friend about the provocative social commentary film Zeitgeist: Addendum. Is technology the answer? No, and yes.
There is much talk of what the problems are, and what we need to solve them. I love Thich Nhat Hanh’s perspective on awareness of a problem. He compares mindfulness of one’s suffering, or problem, to a mother comforting a crying child. It only takes a few minutes of a mother cradling a child to figure out what the problem is and then provide what is needed: love, attention, milk…. And as the closing scene with Krishnamurti says: “To understand, is to transform what is.” I hope our societal discourse can likewise focus compassionately and diligently on our problems.
And once we do have our focus squarely on what the problem is, what will we decide about what we need in order to solve that problem and, just as importantly, how to go about it? The how is what I feel moved to talk about.
Technology is often cited as the solution. At first I recoiled from this; can the answer to our deep human problems really be found in a material invention? But then I reconsidered the meaning of technology. Is not sitting in a sharing circle on a Wednesday night, say, a form of (social) technology (designed to increase participation and group interaction) just as much as using a spoon to eat soup is? Well then, perhaps technology is the part of the solution. read more…
about page and an introduction page to start….
