As the world breaks, the spirit of revolt rises against a “world order” focused on brutal wars and the destruction of society, rights, democracy, and a livable planet.
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This is an extended version of reflections I shared at the Sacred Mountain Sangha and Sacred Justice Coalition online Awakening Activism event with input from Palestinian, Israeli, and US-based Dharma practitioners, called “Engaging Gaza and Beyond: A Dharma Call for Action” on June 9, 2024. (You can catch the recording here).
Over the last months, I’ve been closely tracking events on the ground in Gaza, Israel, and the larger world. Like many doing the same, my understanding has significantly shifted from my first article in response to 10/7. The world has also dramatically shifted. On planet Earth, we’re in deep, deep trouble. Solutions are at hand. However, we can’t fully access them until we break the spell of this psychopathic miasma that is driving the destruction of a more equitable, compassionate, and sustainable world.
This psychopathic mindset, which is currently controlling the destiny of the planet, has no empathy, is completely transactional, and only seeks self-survival and power. To break its spell, we need a conscious curriculum that takes us beyond the “business as usual” of late-stage predator capitalism to an informed culture of resilience, resistance, and radical change rooted in a collaborative community.
We, global citizens everywhere, are the last chance to circle out from this culture of death by embodying the higher dream of humanity that lives in harmony with the cosmology of Gaia/Pachamama/Mother Nature. For this, we need to truly free ourselves and all of us from internalized oppression, and those that seek to oppress through violence.
“We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.” Mr. Mandela
Mr. Mandela’s statement has become true to me over these last eight months, witnessing the hellish destruction of Gaza and the explosion of violence and terror in the occupied territories by the IDF and Settlers. All of which is driven by genocidal language from Israel’s government in response to Oct 7. A response made possible by the political cover, primarily by the US, UK, France, and Germany alongside many other global power brokers who have collectively provided $billions of devastating weapons to Israel. The consequent carnage unleashed, with no mercy, on a defenseless civilian population, without any accountability, checks or balances has horrified the world.
The lack of any moral restraint, which, we understand in Buddhism, guards the world, is heralding the normalization of savage brutality as the only way those in power will allow humanity to deal with its conflicts. Instead of upholding humane values, we’re seeing AI-tested weapons tried out in Gaza, (later sold as “battle tested”) and the attempted dismantling of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court by the US and Israel. The ICC is vital for implementing and sustaining global moral and humane guidelines by holding war criminals and nation-states accountable through criminal consequences for acts of:
1. Genocide.
2. Crimes against humanity.
3. War crimes.
4. Crimes of aggression.
Alongside we are witnessing the gutting of democracies, which are becoming, pretty much, a ritual act of collective disempowerment through pseudo-performance cyclic acts of voting for candidates and policies that, increasingly, attack and undo human, workers, and environmental rights and are devoid of any real direct ability of citizens to forge a path other than that decided by lobbyists, and moneyed interest.
Enabling the dismantling of hard-won rights is the ongoing assault of disinformation spewed by media that is intent on deflection, denial, and gaslighting to such an extent that it’s created a sort of global psychotic break as the facts we see in front of our eyes are denied over and over again.
The fire-hose of hellish raw power that has destroyed Gaza, and cities in Ukraine, Syria, Iraq, and so many other places, has, and is, normalizing daily atrocities, genocide, and brutalization. The criminalization and imprisonment of peaceful anti-war, human rights, climate, and pro-democracy protesters are increasingly forcing us to feel we have no choice other than to accept the collapse of nature and human civilization so that an oligarchic ruling class can maintain control of their oppressive agenda.
Why has Palestinian liberation caught fire around the world, with millions of global citizens defying their governments, marching on the streets, alongside students around the world, boycotting universities, and demanding they divest from Israel and this war machinery?
We see people passionately taking to social media to defend Palestinians, resisting and defying their politicians who have been busy justifying the utter moral failure that allows for the slaughter of children, mothers, fathers, and whole families by citing the worn-out phrase “Israel has a right to defend itself” without defining what that means. From what we’ve seen, it actually means, “Israel has the right to genocide without any accountability.”
Besides the sheer moral outrage of Gaza, the uprising for Palestinian rights has traveled like wildfire around the world as everywhere citizens see themselves in the fate of Palestinians. We understand, as Aaron Bushnell said, that “this is what our ruling class has in mind for the world.”
So, to return to Mr. Mandela’s statement, here are four primary themes I’d like to share. Each are interconnected dimensions unveiled by Gaza that also speak to the larger battle for who or what controls the destiny of Planet Earth. Gaza has vividly shown us that the essence of this battle is a fight for humanity itself.
First, I believe anything less than a non-violent revolution would be a betrayal of the enormity of suffering Palestinians have endured in Gaza.
The uprising of citizens around the world protesting against the genocide in Gaza has become an extension of the unfinished revolution against the legacy of Eurocentric colonial systems of oppression. The destruction of Gaza has drawn aside the veil that erased the long brutal journey Palestinians have suffered since the Nakba in 1948. It has also exposed erroneous colonial narratives, for example, the oft-quoted justification for building a Zionist state, “a land without a people for a people without a land” similarly cited by upholders of Apartheid in South Africa.
Those protesting and doing what they can to stop the carnage in Gaza are upholding humane values and want to see Palestine free in the same way we want all to be free. Freedom, as Mr. Mandela said, must include Palestinian freedom, which means self-autonomy and a process of reparative justice, not only for Palestine but for all peoples who underwent colonialization with its incalculable suffering, erasure, genocide, and systemic oppression.
The revolution we need is, I believe, our new, and of course, very old, curriculum. New in that we all now need to figure out how to move beyond business as usual and outside comfort zones that are inextricably linked with the oppression, for the most part, of the voiceless. And old, in that the struggle for liberation from colonialism is a long one, mostly undertaken by people of color, but also the working classes, and all peoples oppressed due to class, caste, race, imperialism, gender, sexual orientation, and in so many other ways.
Ultimately, at the heart of this struggle, we have to unpack the great harm done by the Eurocentric myth, born in the Middle Ages, of our separation from nature. The belief that is our right to control, dominate, and extract from nature has underwritten all other forms of oppression. We are now at the stage when this long falsehood needs urgent exposure and deconstruction and the birth of a legislated new treaty with Nature.
For our collective survival, we need to dismantle the mechanisms by which all planetary life is being increasingly run to service a tiny oligarchic class. Without this radical reorientation intent on dismantling not only the mechanism of mass destruction but also the ideologies and separative consciousness that underwrites it, without entering this profound curriculum with great urgency, we face sure and inevitable extinction.
Second, Gaza links us all directly with the less historically visible but equally horrific levels of violence inflicted by the Eurocentric colonial project that has shaped the world for over 500 years.
The impact of 500 years of Eurocentric colonial settler violence and domination continues to propel ongoing cycles of oppression and bloodshed in many areas of the world. For example, in Africa, the horrific war in the DRC for the last 30 years, which has led to approximately 6 million deaths, continues the legacy of Belgium’s colonial King Leopold, and the vicious, sadistic brutality he unleashed on the people of the Congo. The same colonial impacts are true with the current genocide in Sudan, the violence in Kashmir, and many other parts of the world that were violently oppressed due to European colonization.
Much of the cycles of violence, poverty, displacement, and political instability around the world have come about through US, UK, and EU-backed regime change, loss of land, assets, culture, history, and spirituality, all of which can be traced directly back to colonization and the ongoing systems of oppression that continue to force the Global South, in particular, and these days, we are all increasingly the global south, to become Client States of the US, Western power, and now, in effect an untouchable and unaccountable, and mostly invisible oligarchic class who have brought out our political systems.
Gaza has shown us the craven and distorted web of lies and narratives that continually perpetuate and justify oppression, genocide, and violence against non-white countries and native people while blaming them for their loss. Unpacking the lies, distortion, and projections is also part of our deep collective work of decolonizing our bodies, minds, hearts, and souls. Gaza has exposed that the real terrorists have been “us” —our white-based systems of power—all along.
Third, dismantling colonialism inevitably brings Zionism into focus, which many Jews now challenge, calling for its deconstruction, not only to free Palestinians but also to free Jewish identity from the cycles of violence done in their name.
Zionism is a Eurocentric colonial project (enacted by Britain in 1917) that has politically weaponized the term antisemitism (rendering it now almost meaningless) into which it subsumes Jewish identity for all time, all places, and all geographies. In the process, denying the history of Palestine and the lived experience of Jewish, Muslim, and Christian cohabitation for centuries in what we call the Middle East. The process of dismantling Jewish identity from Zionism invites a central inquiry. Does the survival of Jewish identity depend on the continual perpetuation of massive violence against the Palestinians, the sustaining of a brutal Apartheid state, the continual perpetuation of crimes against humanity, and the justification of ethnic cleansing and genocide?
If we conclude that indeed Jewish identity does depend on continual, immense violence, then we have to also question how such moral collapse is not only being justified but sustained. For example, Israel’s active defiance of the International Court of Justice ruling that it prevents genocide in Gaza was knee-jerk rejected. Israel has declared itself immune and independent from any outside international moral force and in doing so, has effectively unhooked itself from the larger sense of shared humane values. This in itself is not only catastrophic for Palestinians but is also a massive act of Israeli self-injury.
From a Dharma perspective, hatred and violence are never justified. As the Buddha said in his search for peace and a way beyond the wheel of samsara and death, “There has to be another way.” For the people of Israel, there too must be another way. Right now, cheering on this slaughter, as many do in Israel, is a tragedy. A Pew Research Center Poll in May ’24 found that 73% of Israelis approve of Israel’s military response in Gaza, with 34% saying it has not gone far enough. This shows a country caught in a terrible spell that is enacting its trauma of the holocaust, its “Final Solution” on Gaza. This is particularly devastating given that the commitment to “Never Again” arose from the Shoah, the Holocaust.
However, ultimately, I believe Mr. Mandela’s quote still holds the key to the true freedom and safety of Israelis in the same way our freedom and ability to survive is inextricably linked to the freedom of all. True freedom for Israel can only ultimately be bound to the freedom of Palestine, and increasingly, as Mr. Mandela said, the freedom of all of us. Already, “another way” is being forged, particularly by new generations of Jews who have created and joined movements like If Not Now, Jewish Voices for Peace, Jews Against Genocide, and other similar organizations that reject the premise of Zionism with its super lobbies that work to control political power in the US, UK, EU, Arab countries, and further afield.
I believe there is another way, and that wise leaders and citizens of the world can, together, with all stakeholders, find that other way as happened in South Africa and Northern Ireland. At some point, sustaining division, hatred, and mind-numbingly violent systems of oppression becomes utterly unviable. The sheer cost to the human heart becomes untenable. The economic, social, and moral isolation is too hard to bear. The violence, self-denial, and the needed cutting away of empathy, sensitivity, and common humanity to keep it all going, becomes too soul-destroying. At some point, it’s all over. That point is now.
Fourth, we need the Dharma, and its moral voice, to be present for this moment in active and engaged ways. Foremost, right now, we need the voices of Buddhist/ Dharma/ Mindfulness/ Spiritual leaders to help stop the madness of the Israeli government, by calling (at the least) for a ceasefire, the release of humanitarian aid, and a swift move away from the abyss of an extended war to diplomatic and political ways forward.
One of the primary reasons for building an activist Dharma culture to meet these times is systemic change needs to be underwritten by a shift of consciousness. Without that, we will just repeat the same patterns born of allegiance to separative consciousness, or in other words, the conditioned narratives that fuel division. To step out of separative consciousness is to be immune to the spells that subsume the spirit of humanity into this divisive psychopathic agenda that floods the airwaves.
There is a profound and beautiful landscape to explore, which is translating and bridging the technologies of internal liberation to liberation from systems of oppression. The Dharma has an extraordinary wealth of offerings to bring to this much-needed territory, and this in particular, is well within our capacity to engage. However, before skipping ahead, we must unpack the web of confusion and delusion, born of separative consciousness, that has sent us into this planetary free fall rooted in cycles of massive violence like we’re seeing so mercilessly inflicted on Gaza.
Many informed commentators, including Israelis, conclude that Israel’s savagery in Gaza, and now its crazed, extended war agenda with neighboring countries, is imploding Israel itself. To date over half a million Israelis have left Israel, creating a financial and brain drain. Its army is depleted. It has not “won” in Gaza, and instead, it has lost all moral standing in the eyes of the world.
Suicide and extreme mental health issues are becoming rife within the ranks of IDF soldiers. The Times of Israel reports that about 200,000 Israeli citizens are displaced, and that number will only increase with an extended war. Iran’s recent highly strategic strike in response to Israel’s attack on one of its military bases in Syria, revealed Israel’s feted defense systems are now easily ruptured. The US is in an election cycle, its democracy hangs by a thread. Biden is weakened by his devastating “ironclad” support of Israel’s genocide. The US cannot afford to get behind a war with Iran particularly as its power on the global stage is diminishing with each passing day. Israel’s “we’ll go it alone” mentality can only falter with a powerful, battle-ready, highly weaponized Hezbollah now backed, along with Iran, by Russia and China.
An Arab Jewish commentator from within Israel, reports, “IDF spokesperson announced today that the war objectives as presented by Netanyahu are unattainable and a deception of the Israeli public…This old battle for power and money (within Israel) is reaching a boiling point just as Israel loses control of both the narrative and its own security and future.
Another Israeli, a former academic with a PhD in Middle East Studies, also comments, “There is no vision. We’re wilfully blind. That helps when you mount a genocide. The world doesn’t move. Time doesn’t pass. In the midst of life, we are in death.”
Alongside these assessments, an Israeli Jewish friend and long-time Dharma practitioner, involved with helping Israelis connect to the reality of life under occupation, has made clear that only pressure from outside Israel can now stop this madness.
Many of us in the Dharma community have deep affinities with Israel, either by being Jewish, having Jewish ancestry, friends, partners, or/and having visited, taught, or been on pilgrimage to these ancient “holy lands.” From this lens, Israel is personal, unlike, for the most part, other conflict zones. This gives us a particular responsibility to try and help Israel extract itself from the destructive path it set itself on. We have recorded examples of the Buddha actively trying to stop wars, and from that, we can take courage.
From a Dharma lens, regardless of identity, we work to overcome suffering for all beings and therefore are as much concerned for all in Israel, including dear friends, as we are for all dear Palestinian friends and all in Palestine. In the US, we also have the beginnings of a culture of reparation. These days, most Dharma centers do land acknowledgments by naming the native tribes whose land we’re on, before retreats and events. For Palestinians, their ancient history and claim to the land where Israel built its state, has almost been entirely erased in the West. Part of our curriculum is to also make visible and understand the great tragedy that Israel has been for Palestinians, who have been dehumanized, often cast as “terrorists,” and rarely seen as a people fighting for their rights, dignity, and self-autonomy.
From a humane lens, while the Hamas attack of 10/7 was horrific and a great shock, the response of Israel in Gaza is an abomination and must be named as such. The sheer weight of Israel’s indiscriminate use of massively unequal firepower has cemented the perception of Israel, in the mind of the world, as a mass slaughterer of children and babies. No one will forget the reel of raw, sickening images of Israel’s hell-fest in Gaza, its destruction of hospitals, schools, and universities. It’s desecration of religious, and cultural centers, its murder of journalists, doctors, nurses, and whole generations of families, its blocking of basic life support to Gaza, its enabling mass starvation, its mass abduction and torture of Palestinians, its utter moral failure.
In the face of this, silence does not help, on the contrary, it is seen by many as an abdication of our moral responsibility to compassionately engage. To engage is to actively be part of helping Israel and the world ascend out of this vortex of unspeakable, endless violence. Israel cannot do this for itself. It is locked into deep patterns of trauma and a narrative that come what may, its only option is to kill and dominate as many Arabs as it can. We simply cannot stand by and just let this disaster, this horrific descent into a brutal, forever war, happen in our name and be funded by our taxes.
We need sangha spaces that can bring a moral voice and compassionate holding spaces to this moment in the same way we need an oasis in a parched desert. We need to lend our weight to stop this erasure of Palestinian life and this destructive path Israel has led itself into. And we need to see the bigger picture. Israel has become a major catalyst for a far bigger global war, which will be utterly cataclysmic. Already, moves are in place to normalize the “solution” of a larger war that will engulf us all. Just the other day, the US House of Representatives passed a bill to automatically register men 18-26 years old as eligible for the draft. It has not passed the Senate, but a path to this terrifying future is being laid day by day. The EU is also working to normalize an “inevitable” Russia-NATO war and is already gathering hundreds of thousands of troops. We are on the cusp of a world war which we will all lose.
We also need to connect even more terrifying consequential dots. As humans, we face an even greater threat. Every day, we hear reports from around the world of populations running out of water, deaths due to extreme heat, destruction due to massive floods, and now, coming to light, we could soon be plunged into the devastating impacts of the collapse of AMOC. This sudden and irreversible event will completely alter the climate of the world making the planet far more hostile to sustainable life.
The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), which includes the Gulf Stream, (governing the climate by bringing warm, tropical waters north and cold water south), is on course to a tipping point that will happen at any time from now. Much, much sooner than previously thought. This would, scientists say, “immediately cause temperatures to plummet, ocean ecosystems to collapse and storms to proliferate around the world.” This is our real emergency. And yet, we dream on.
In the Dharma we talk about waking up, about inter-being, about compassion, we root ourselves in ethical ways of being in the world, and yet, at this most dire of moments, we are being left by many Dharma spaces, as was sometimes said in our monastic training “to practice on your own.” At this stage, I don’t see much point in trying to convince anyone. We will all land where we will. Besides, our collective webzine, which many of you have already seen, addresses the need for Dharma engagement in response to Gaza. The Zine also calls to help build a dynamic, collaboratively co-created Dharma culture that can respond to these times. I hope my speedily penned offering here, might support our ongoing work towards that end. (FYI, here’s the webzine, Gaza: Calling for a Dharma Response).
Shamanic Transformation
Let everything happen to you. Beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final” ― Rainer Maria Rilke
I haven’t had the time and space to write more about the inner experience of this moment, but at the least, I want to name how emotionally and psychologically profound, impactful, draining, and overwhelming this time is. Some of the more haunting and debilitating feeling tones defy definition. None of this is new, particularly for those in marginal spaces and on various front lines, however, what is new is the quantum shift of intensity. Working with intensity, quick shifts on the ground, and ongoing crisis response is a big part of our new curriculum.
In this unchartered landscape, every feeling is possible. For the most part awful feelings are being triggered. Often, I don’t have clear language to describe the feeling of this sudden free fall we’ve now entered. But I have a potent visceral felt-sense of the psychopathic mindset, that is driving this path of mutual destruction, as a tightening noose engulfing our world. By design, it sets us up to collapse and concede under its weight. To feel it’s all impossible and to give up. While we need to take time out to resource ourselves, we must resist the feeling of giving up and just let all that we love, everything that we know to be humane and beautiful, be destroyed.
As I’ve said before, we are deep into a shamanic journey. We are being dismembered, shattered, and forced to face our deepest collective fears, hatreds, and desires in their most raw, terrifying, and primal forms. However, even as we plunge deeper into these shadow realms, light prevails. Why? Because the fundamental nature of mind/heart, of this citta, is luminous, deathless, victorious, joyful, creative, fun-loving, innocent, deeply knowing, ancient, most ancient. We have been here before, which is why we know where we are, even though we don’t also know, but still, it’s familiar. And, through trusting the deep invitation of the Dharma, of Reality itself, which brings us into the most profound surrender possible, we will rise, phoenix-like from the ashes of this old story.
This old story is finished. It has nothing much left for us other than its hold on us through fear. We need each other to leap beyond, to take a risk, to let go, to enter the way of unknowing. This leap is as huge and consequential as the first forms of life, the ocean creatures propelling themselves onto their first connection with land. We are to take a similar quantum leap together. To hold a light for a path that is so much love, a burning love that can dissolve all that is false. Even if we die in the process, and we will die many times over before this body goes back to where it belongs, to this great Earth, this light will eternally radiate for all who can make the journey after us.
May we take courage from the extraordinary courage, care, resilience, and steadfastness of Palestinians. May we also take courage from citizens around the world, also in Israel, standing up for all that is loving and humane. And, regardless, for the deepest heart in all, however twisted, that longs for freedom and to feel love, may we remember to, yes fiercely protect from their harm, but to never forget that we ultimately find our mutual liberation through mercy and compassion.
May all this help us forge a world worthy of our highest dream. A world that is possible, but which needs all of us to shift from cycling through these old stories of violence and pain to reminding each other we have a story of healing and liberation. The first step, and every step after, begins with entering this heart curriculum fully, placing it central to our lives and our Dharma practice, holding it as our sacred duty, and as our most beautiful offering. May this be so. May all holy ones bring their protections and blessings to all of us now, and always as we journey through this night.
Thanissara, June 21 Solstice, 2024
Thanissara 