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I worry I have been looking but not hearing. I think we are in the Underworld and haven’t figured it out yet. We are frightened and we do not know what will happen next.
Soul seems more dangerous to talk about than sex, violence, death or money these days. I believe something will crawl back out of the Underworld. It will. It always does. But it may not be us.
The night world is where we are. I say it. I say it till we may hear it. And in that darkness, we remember what we love the most.
- Martin Shaw
Through the millennia of wars, with their mountains of slaughtered bodies and oceans of tears, we have forged multiple shape-shifting alliances and identities. In this long journey, our unfathomable undivided soul, shunned and hijacked, has, for the most part, sunk into the underworld. It is, now, to the underworld that we must travel to seek its guidance.
A way of understanding “soul” within the approximation of language that tries to defy the amorphous reality in which we swim, is the ground of consciousness, of life. We live in an immutable ensouled world, where, as the indigenous world knows, all is conscious.
Shaped by the splits of modernity, where soul is replaced by consumer materialism, we feel, acutely, the ache of its loss. Like a ghost ship, it sails trying to find a harbor within the lost sacred matrix of inter-being that is modernity. From this tragic loss of soul, all disasters unfold.
Why? We can only kill, cheat, and dominate another when we don’t know all “others” are part of ourselves. This is because we’re not in touch with “all is resident within one immutable, alive, dynamic, pulsing, benevolent awareness.”
Politicians shout freedom. Freedom for who, and at what cost if some are free but not others? No amount of bombs can secure our freedom when it is at the expense of others. By now, we should have an inkling that none of us are free until all is free.
In this hauntingly somber moment, we sit on the edge of an abyss facing genocide, extinction, and the utter destruction of all humane values. As we take stock of the immense, vast terrors we are capable of, rising deep from the cavern of our collective historic trauma, no bypass will do it.
Instead, it’s a moment to pause and allow the pull of the underworld to call us down, far below the cognitive, separative, dividing mind. Here, make our holy offering, lay on the Earth, and enter the path of deep sorrow and prayer. Then listen.
The compelling movement to transcendence within the meditative metaphor won’t help here. It splits up and away from this plunge into the messy, murky, unknown tides of the underworld. So, it is to the indigenous remembrance I respectfully turn.
Our Elders, the Kogi, remind us that the source, sacred Earth life intelligence, is “Aluna,” the one who goes by many names. Our task as humans, they say, is to embrace the challenges we now face, and not distract ourselves. Aluna needs the human mind to participate in the world because that mind is embodied and can communicate with the cosmic mind.
To enter here is less to see than to feel. Less shining light than sensing through the dark. To follow the current of life, like floating in the aquifers feeding the earth. Here is the whisper of old, the ancient way of remembrance. Here we release from dominance, and in that darkness, we remember what we love the most, and, finally, finally, maybe we allow the eros of life in its fullness to flow through us so we can truly heal our hurting selves and transform our abandoned world.
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.
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.
Bansky
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.
Kent Monkman, Resurgence of the People, 2019
Cold War Steve
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.
Cold War Steve
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.
Artwork - Annika Slabbert
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
Caduceus by Markus Drassl
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.
This is a follow up invitation to join us at Sacred Mountain Sangha for a daily (weekdays only) 40-minute Dharma, chanting and meditation circle.
This is dedicated support a permanent ceasefire in Gaza and hostilities in the Occupied Territories alongside the return of hostages to Israel and return of imprisoned Palestinians, particularly children, held without trial or due process.
Each session includes check-ins and support for extending our Dharma practice to Right Action, protecting all from harm, by calling on political reps and influential leaders to demand a ceasefire and swift transition to a fair and just political process.
We start Dec 4 to Jan 4 online @ 7–7.40am PT/ 3-3.40pm GMT/ 4-40pm CET & CAT
Since hostilities were launched in Gaza by the Israeli State in response to the horrific massacre by Hamas, Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor to the UN estimates “17,144 Palestinians have been killed in the Gaza Strip, including 7,208 children, 3,716 women, and a total of 15,482 civilians. More than 33,830 Palestinians in Gaza have sustained various injuries.
Hundreds of victims’ bodies are still missing under the rubble of buildings or among the corpses scattered in Gaza’s streets and border areas and impossible to locate or retrieve right now, said the human rights organization, which stated that the actual death toll likely exceeds 20,000.
Euro-Med Monitor also highlighted Israel has completely destroyed 56,450 housing units in the Gaza Strip, and has partially damaged 162,950 housing units. This means that more than 45% of the Strip’s total housing units are now unlivable, resulting in a million displaced Palestinians who are currently homeless.”
Right now, the people of Gaza are scrambling to survive the spread of disease, lack of sanitation, water, food, fuel, and medical resources. As said by Namzi Mwafi, We have been taken back to the Stone Age.” Mr Mwafi talks of waking up at 4 a.m., spending hours waiting for water at a crowded filling station. “Sometimes, he has to fight to keep his place in line and sometimes there is nothing left when his turn comes. When he is lucky, he pushes his heavy trolley home through the sand and the family rations the haul to about a glass a day each.”
Meanwhile, while all eyes are on Gaza, a documentary What it’s like to live in the Occupied West Back amid Gaza, tracks the upsurge of destruction of Palestinian life in the West Bank by IDF backed Settlers who are now fully armed by the Israeli government in an ongoing drive to annex the Occupied Territories. Diana Buttu, a Palestinian-Canadian attorney and joint fellow with the Human Rights Program at Harvard Law School, talks in the documentary about how she now feels exactly what her grandmother faced when displaced in the Nakba.
I now know, exactly, the feelings my grandmother had in 1948. The feeling of impending doom, the fear, the worry, the fear of not only your own life, but the destruction of your community, of you as a people, of your town, of your everything. I now feel that and understand that. I feel it with every fiber of my being.
The current ceasefire and mutual release of hostages is a welcome pause. However, the Israeli government has stated its intention of doubling down their attack on Gaza, which not only targets civilians but also the Press (NPR records nearly 60 Journalists have been killed), UN Aid Workers (over 100 killed so far) and the infrastructure that enables life in Gaza. Rather than extend the Ceasefire, which the majority world calls for, the Israeli Defense Minister, Yoav Gallant, has vowed to intensify Israel’s military operation in Gaza. Addressing the IDF he said, when we return to Gaza, we will apply the same force and more.
While the fear and disgust of the attack by Hamas is understandable, we can only interpret the Israeli government’s cataclysmic response as an intention to entirely remove all traces of Palestinian life in Gaza, the occupied territories and beyond. Failing that, there is clear intent to continue submitting Palestinians to ever more brutal forms of Apartheid intensifying the removal of their human rights, rights of movement and freedom of expression.
Israel is breaking records for its cruelties while the whole world is watching. In a virtual blink of the eye, they have shattered generations of diplomatic breakthroughs in the Middle East, chewed through a web of fragile alliances, plunged their society into ghoulish cruelties with which they will forever be haunted.
Israel has opened up a breech in the collective unconscious of the western world, releasing demons that took centuries to lock away. We dreamed for a time of a world of free societies bound together in respect of human rights, and now that dream has transmogrified into a nightmare. …
This mass regression to barbarism … will undermine the moral legitimacy of liberalism and social democracy, weaken support for the alliance of democracies, bring everlasting shame on the political parties supporting it, and take an axe to generations of work on human rights and international law.
Is it still possible to wrestle these demons back into their box and force our leaders to abide by their own stated principles? The future of humanity may be determined in our efforts to save Ghaza.
This is also a defining moment for many in the global Jewish community, particularly those of more progressive leaning, many of whom face the collapse of the myths and narratives that lent unquestioned support of Zionism. It can be a shocking awakening have the veils ripped away that continually deflected from the true nature of one of the world’s most brutal forms of Apartheid.
Daily life euphemisms in Israel like “mowing the lawn” normalize the idea that the only option is perpetual war rather than a political settlement, while hiding the litany of unaccountable killings, forced removals, decimation of ancient olive groves, and the summary imprisonment of thousands of Palestinians, including children, without trial, fair representation or time limits.
From Amanda Gelendar’s twitter post, almost every single Jewish person I know was indoctrinated into Zionism, myself included. We are Zionists until the weight of cognitive dissonance, deceit & propaganda comes crashing down & we realize we were lied to.
As Dharma practitioners, we completely disavow violence, understanding it will never solve this truly heartbreaking, aching, festering wound. Hamas is Israel’s shadow. The harder Israel hits the stronger its shadow grows. Greek economist, author and political commentator, Yanis Varoufakis also points out,
What does it mean to eradicate Hamas today? Who counts as Hamas? Do you ‘eradicate’ the nurses employed by the Hamas-run Health Ministry in Gaza? The teachers employed by the Hamas-run Education Ministry in Gaza? Are you forgetting that, unlike Al Qaida which was never integrated with the Afghan communities, Hamas is utterly interwoven with Gazan society?
For Netanyahu and his fellow supporters of genocide aim at the murder of as many Gazans as it takes to persuade the rest to move from Gaza to some arid desert in the Sinai or to any country that will have them. In short, anyone who believes in the physical elimination of anyone connected with Hamas is supporting genocide in Gaza (as a first step to genocide across the West Bank).
Increasingly, as we hurtle into a hotter, more divided, violent, authoritarian world, the powers that be, scrambling to control last resources, would have us believe brutal acts of oppression and violence are the only way forward. We must resist this lawless and pitiless destiny being imposed on humanity and instead call for Global Resolutions that shift to political, economic and social solutions as in Northern Ireland and South Africa.
As Citizens of the world, we have power. Let us join millions around the world, including 120 countries who just voted for a ceasefire, by engaging this effort to secure safety for the Palestinian people while wresting the soul of Israel from the grip of Netanyahu’s theocratic, fascistic government. Standing up for humane solutions, does indeed further the liberation of the soul of humanity from its inertia, frozenness, fear and complacency.
Please do join us at Sacred Mountain Sangha for a our daily Dharma based meetings dedicated to support a full ceasefire and a shift to fair political solutions.
We start on Monday, December 4th at 7–7.40am Pacific/ 3-3.40pm GMT/ 4-4.40pm CET & CAT. All are welcome.
Bansky - Israeli Occupied Bethlehem
Meanwhile, some important initiatives, statements, petitions, and ways to engage and share on.
Invitation to join me online @ Sangha Live, UK, Dec 2nd, 7-10am PT/ 3-6pm GMT / 4-7pm CET/CAT: Info & Registration here & a short introduction in the video below.
A few reflections leading into this session:
As I age, I feel nearer to death. In this process, I appreciate the shift from the foreground of identities, roles, and dramas to a formless background. Call it Spirit if you like. In the Dharma, we call it awareness, however that word is so journeyed it sometimes feels drained out.
Life often feels like a wave. Even as it hits the shore its return to the ocean is already in motion. That ocean, that background, offers an unexpected lens. A more expansive, deeper view where the compartments we put life in start to dissolve, revealing the actual closeness of everything. Past and future collide, a cosmology of the unseen becomes ever more alive, a toppling of assumptions into the simplicity of awe; all are unexpected companions.
Even though humans mapped out every last thing, in the end, we will have to bow into the essential mystery of life. The first teaching I received from Ajahn Chah was his simple gesture of a bow. Decades later, that still says something important to me. It says, “Let go.”
From that bow, we need to co-create a new story birthed within a radically different understanding of ourselves and our place within a wider Gaian cosmology of being. Somehow, we need to finish with the old stories that imprison human consciousness in cycles of fear, violence, shame, and a range of oppressive whispers and actions that keep the unhappy wheel of karma turning.
Ajahn Chah used the term, which captures this shift, which is to align with the “Living Dharma.” Mindfulness, tapping the living Dharma, the wisdom from beyond, can guide our steps. If we listen to the waves returning to their source, we find lucidity, perhaps even quantum shifts of possibility. We will hear how to heal hearts as together, we stumble toward a truer home.
Spirit Medium
This time is not for dragging through the dungeons of our lifetimes.
Instead, look as the veils lift and let the dead come.
Let the monsters, the vomit wave, raw fear, and howling arrive too.
So many line-up I know them all.
Let the long silences be spoken in true words, like cracking stones falling into the right neighborhoods of the heart.
Sew any loose threads into love messages and offer forgiveness and freedom to all.
The hummingbirds will take each envelope to your destined shore of redemption.
Step from the mind into the rose-scented breeze of love shuddering the wheel to Stop.
It all comes down to this in the end. Freedom for them is freedom for us.
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Friends, I invite you to join me this Saturday for a 3 hour event focused on highlighting the centrality of compassionate, mindful inquiry to support and empower the reclamation of embodied presence needed for these times. Practices include regulating our nervous system, sustaining balance in the midst to increasing intensity and activating our highest intention.
This session will offer a Dharma view of our current zeitgeist with its challenges and opportunities. It will also offer practices to support ourselves, personally and collectively, as we meet the most complex and overwhelming challenge humans have ever faced: the collapse of a viable ecosystem threatening all planetary life.
However daunting, within this challenge, there is also potential for healing and positive change. “Apocalypse” means both the end of the world as we know it and “unveiling” or “revelation.” Mindfulness helps us see beyond the prism of reactivity and confusion and enables access to intuitive awareness crucial for setting priorities as we clarify what is truly meaningful and important to us. Mindfulness also enables the shifts of consciousness needed for systemic shifts.
It will include
A simple breath practice to help regulate our nervous system.
Mindfulness for establishing depth presence and clarifying intention.
Compassion meditation, including the sounding of mantra, for invoking unconditional love in support of all in these times.
The last weeks have been an eon. It’s exhausting. Hate is exhausting. Everyone’s truth ricocheting around endless distorted mirrors is exhausting.
Why are we so consumed since the first photos of young people feeling the Supernova rave? Because to quote a friend from Cape Town, Che, of the original peoples of Southern Africa, “This is not just another war in the Middle East, in Palestine, this is a big one…we are all part of this war.” More from Che here. He’s right, every word. This is a wake-up call.
If you feel turned around, with daily life on hold, ragged and worn through, you’re not alone. It’s taking me ages to land this article on this slippery slope and disappearing ground. It’s a fine needle I’m trying to thread, that is faithful to the Dharma, opening middle ground for some sanity to enter.
It’s challenging to process the political posturing and the cacophony of hurt, rage, and anguish, but the real pain is being felt by those directly impacted. The families engulfed in the terror of Hamas’s attack and the dread and fear the hostages feel ripped from their homes. The mind-numbing catastrophic destruction of Palestinian life buried under the falling stones of bombed buildings.
There are moments in history, like now, when we stand at the edge of an abyss. At such times, we need to be more than a spectator. When Hamas detonated the horror of their atrocities, they let loose a monster vortex that now threatens to consume the world in a ruinous conflagration.
As said by Yuval Noah Harari, the “aim was not to just to destroy Jewish communities but to assassinate any chance of peace.” Netanyahu has the same goal. For years, as reported in many mainstream Israeli news outlets, like the Times of Israel, his policy has been to strengthen Hamas, divide Palestinians, undermine secular Palestinian representation, and nurture Settler violence in the occupied territories while utterly destroying any possibility of a two-state solution.
It should be no surprise that this cynical alliance would ignite a firestorm. Nor should it be surprising that this many-headed-hydra born of ethnic cleansing, historical violence, and ongoing oppression can be contained. Yanis Varoufakis, the Greek political commentator, said, “Our governments allowed successive Israeli governments to believe that, instead of a Peace Treaty, Israel can contain the Palestinians behind fences and a whole architecture of Apartheid.”
On October 7, the luxury of that perverse arrangement ended. When Yoav Gallant, Israel’s defense minister, pronounced, we are fighting human animals and are acting accordingly, to justify a siege of Gaza that ended access to electricity, food, fuel, water, and sanitation to 2.5 million people, a cold stone dropped into my heart. This statement opened the abyss wider. A dread, reluctant to name, began to take shape.
When the Israeli State demanded over a million people leave their homes with no safe passage and nowhere to go while bombs rained down, the abyss gave up its ominous foreboding. We witnessed a grave crime against humanity with Hamas, but as each day passes, it’s hard to doubt the Israeli government’s genocidal intent.
The UNRWA (U.N. Relief & Works Agency) report that Gaza’s last seawater desalination plant has shut down. Six water wells, three pumping stations, and one water reservoir serving over a million people are also out of action. A report from the World Health Organization speaks of those on the ground facing unbearable choices. With over 60,000 displaced people and fuel gone, they are scrambling to squeeze the last drops of fuel from wherever they can. Does the fuel go to desalinating plants so people have a little more water, for food, for emergency rooms in hospitals running on a wing and a prayer while treating horrific wounds?
We have already passed the cliff edge. We are now collectively careering towards the ground, said Dr Michael Ryan, Executive Director of the WHO. He also talked about the unbearable choice of who gets what when the US-Egyptian negotiated 20 trucks of aid, which he said, should be at least 2000 trucks.
Naila Farouky, CEO of the Charity Arab Foundations Forum, speaks what many feel and are now saying: it’s not outside the realm of possibility that Gaza and its inhabitants will be wiped off the face of the earth. And I promise you, if this happens, we will collectively never recover. Not only Palestinians or Arabs - but all of us, the entire world, will never recover from the stain this will leave on our human history.
In the spiel of media and hostilities on social media, it’s rare to see an exploration of how collective trauma in this region continually energizes cycles of violence, bringing us to this calamity. The ageless persecution of Jews culminating in the unfathomable enormity of the “Final Solution.” The shocking devastation of Palestinian life in the Nakba and the severe oppression of their rights, all continues to turn this odious wheel of diminishing options.
It doesn’t help when governing bodies and media weaponize the pain of generational trauma to keep people locked into fear, division and hate. The idea that you can only be pro-Israel or pro-Palestinian, each without care for the other, forsakes both populations by generating unnecessary oppression, explosive acts of brutality, and endless cycles of harm. It also belies the truth of our shared humanity and the creative possibilities that could enable a more beautiful, mutually respectful, open, and vibrant society.
However, without healing deeply rooted generational trauma wired into our nervous system, we are susceptible to the response of flight, fight, and freeze. In part, because of this, the activation of fear and loathing by the Hamas attack enables the worst impulses to dominate. Taking advantage of this dynamic, ruthless leaders easily manipulate citizens. While the West, particularly the U.S., U.K., and French governments, can moderate Israel’s response by demanding a ceasefire, they abstain, plunging us all into a treacherous betrayal of our shared humanity. We must, therefore, amplify the call for sanity and reason to prevail.
Israeli and legendary Haaretz journalist Amira Hass, in an interview on Democracy Now, calls to “stop the carnage in Gaza.” She said the Israeli public is “drunk with the will to take revenge” spurred by “an extreme fascist messianic religious settler right-wing party” who seeks to crush the Palestinians. The recent extreme far-right swing in the Israeli political scene has paved the way for this destruction of Palestinians. Statements in the Knesset, like “the children in Gaza have brought this upon themselves” (Meirav Ben-Ari), normalize this fascistic stance.
Since March, even though hundreds of thousands of Israelis tried to stop this “beyond extreme” coup by Netanyahu, they have not yet succeeded. Instead, they are now potential targets. Proposed regulation in the Knesset would allow arrests of civilians who “Harm National Morale” for posting pro-Palestine content. It will enable police to arrest civilians, remove them from their homes, or seize their property. It also allows police to arrest journalists, halt media broadcasts, and confiscate a media outlet’s output. Prosecuting dissenting Israeli citizens would further isolate Palestinians and distort media coverage within Israel.
When governments and media don’t state the obvious, it confuses, gaslights, and undermines our collective ethical gage. Our brain also disassociates when something shocking happens, like the slaughter unfolding in Gaza. Even though we know what’s happening, it is hard to grasp what is happening. There’s a gap in our ability to truly comprehend the nature of an atrocity, even as we see it unfolding. This defensive neurological wiring is also partly why populations become frozen or get caught up in genocide even when it’s in their midst. Those who speak out help break the spell of collective amnesia—speaking out in the face of attempted destruction of Palestinian life and the assumption that all Israeli’s and Jews support this, helps break the spell of a narrative that violence is the only way.
It is possible to choose a different path. In this YouTube clip, “Little Rock,” an extraordinary 19-year-old and survivor from Kibbutz Beeri, where Hamas slaughtered over a hundred neighbors and destroyed the community. She calls for her government to stop hostilities and engage in a political process. Her message is simple and trustworthy. Stop the Bombing of Gaza. Exchange Prisoners Now. Sit Down for Peace Talks.
The Buddha, before his enlightenment, after exhausting pathways available to him, pondered, “Might there be another way?” How much suffering can we all take in this world before we look beyond division and hatred? Instead, might there be a middle way? Might there be a different story, a new story we can co-create?
Jacob Argamani, a man who has lived in South Israel his whole life and whose daughter, Noa, was abducted from the Supernova Festival, cried out in agony, “Let us make Peace with our neighbors in any way possible. I want there to be Peace; I want my daughter to come back. Enough with the wars. They too have casualties, they too have captives, and they have mothers who weep. We are two peoples to one Father. Let’s make real Peace.”
Exploring a middle ground and aiming for Peace is not a betrayal of alliances but the only real way forward to save our collective moral souls. At least for the children’s and grandchildren’s sake so they don’t become perpetual pawns in this blinding, vicious, sadistic, cruel carnage that offers no viable future other than deepening cycles of death and bloodshed.
In President Biden’s address to the nation, he said, “We are at a global inflection point that is bigger than party or politics.” We all recognize this truth. To navigate a global inflection point needs wise leadership. We are exhausted by sociopathic, self-serving leaders. They generate and feed off dividing people. Yet, to undermine their power, we also need to resolve our own divisions. Yuval Noah Harari offers a cautionary warning of the danger of such populist leaders.
It’s very clear to most Israeli’s, this goes way deeper and longer. We’ve had a strong man populist leader Benjamin Netanyahu who built his career on dividing the nation against itself, for years. On attacking State institutions and that oppose his policies, and on spreading conspiracy-theories, labelling the serving elites of the country as deep state traitors; and this over many years corroded the basic institutions of the State.
This is why now the State has been missing in the hour of greatest need of the citizens. People in democracies all over the world should learn the lessons from our tragedy. If you allow your country to be divided against itself to such a degree, there could be a very, very high price to pay for it.” (Full interview here)
So, where does this leave us? The way of the Dharma is a path of non-violence and non-harming. Sometimes, this is interpreted as quietism, as if there’s some injunction against speaking out strongly in the Buddhist code. On the contrary, the Buddha frequently challenged and argued down those with distorted and harmful views. He mediated between warring parties, and on one occasion, he tried to stop a neighboring army from destroying his people. He did not succeed. But the point is, he tried. The Dharma obligates us to try and bring Peace.
While outcomes are beyond our control, if no voices call for peacefully brokered solutions, the violence will only get far worse. In one of the most densely populated areas in the world, where nearly half the population are children, we can’t stand quietly by while indiscriminate bombing kills innocents, strengthens Hamas, protects Netanyahu’s disastrous rule, and drags the Western alliance into moral defeat and a far larger conflict.
We can challenge media euphemisms like “collateral damage” and influential outlets like the New York Times and their narratives covering for war crimes. Gaza hasn’t “fallen” into a humanitarian crisis - it was pushed. People haven’t “fled” their homes - they were ordered out. Supplies aren’t “dwindling” - they’ve been cut off. Language matters in times like this. Intention also matters. The deep intention of compassion that Buddhist practice is predicated upon us working against extremism and militant violence on all sides.
Not everyone will agree with walking the middle way, but now is the time to speak out for those who do or usually look on quietly from the sidelines. After so much erosion of ethical leadership, we must defend international law. In particular, at this time, the guidelines set out by the Rome Statute’s accountability for genocide and crimes against humanity that are liable for prosecution at the Hague. We, the everyday people, need our voices heard. And we need to listen to the voices of those most vulnerable to violence to stand for them when they cannot stand for themselves.
Here in the U.S., Democracy hangs by a few threads. Republicans have allowed themselves to become a theocratic cult intent on overturning democracy, which the Democrats face in the November 2024 elections. Within this context, it pains me to criticize President Biden. A lot hangs on his shoulders. America is clawing itself back from its own abyss while fighting a proxy war against Putin, who is intent on undermining Western democracies.
However, I see Biden’s visit to Israel as a tragic lost opportunity. What was needed, and what I believe the world calls for, is the U.S. to demand a complete ceasefire. The opportunity to shift the dial toward a safer world was there, not through bombs, but by inviting a collaborative multi-partnered humanitarian response to alleviate the suffering of the people of Gaza. To bear-hug Netanyahu rather than reprimand him set a terrible precedent.
Listen to what Netanyahu really thinks of America here. He takes America for a fool, and the President obliged.
To return to Che’s wise words. The Palestinian-Israeli dynamic, and all of us, are in a much bigger story shaped by a 500-year-old Euro-centric project of brutal colonization and the systems it birthed that profoundly shape us all. From Che, let us be witness to the fruits of a system that is rooted in Destruction and Domination and bring this awareness to the garden of life to cultivate new old ways of being that is rooted in something else.
The old new way requires we enter a radical shift of ontology. That is a different way of looking, being, and responding, which is happening already. This new story has many names, but one important facet is “resistance.”
Currently, with 400+ US congressional staffers are passing around a letter urging their bosses to call for a ceasefire. Author and columnist Caitlin Johnstone commentsthere’s a silent mutiny brewing in the State Department over the Biden administration’s Gaza actions, mainstream reporters have been refusing to parrot Israel narratives, and the streets are full of pro-Palestine demonstrators. This is different. I know it’s against the law to express any kind of hope on Twitter, but what we are seeing right now is a deviation from the usual script.
On the world stage, demonstrations have erupted worldwide, including across the West, calling for a ceasefire and dignity for Palestinians. In Spain, Ione Belarra, the social rights minister, suggested the Spanish government should bring Netanyahu — and we need to also include the leaders of Hamas that ordered their horrific attack — before the international criminal court to face war crimes charges.
A few days ago, Jewish Voice for Peace demonstrated at the State Capitol with a clear message, “Not in Our Name.” As reported, “Hundreds of American Jews are holding a sit-in at Congress — and we won’t leave until Congress calls for a ceasefire in Gaza,” As thousands of US Jews protested outside, over 350 were inside, including two dozen rabbis, holding prayerful resistance.
The cosmopolitan tradition of Jewish social justice advocacy of Tikkun Olam, “to intend to repair and improve the world,” is deeply rooted in the soul legacy of Judaism. At the same time, the brutality we witnessed from Hamas does not represent the true heart of Islam. This beautiful word is these days mostly defiled for political expediency, but it actually means Peace.
To deviate from the script means we citizens, who share the same humane values for all, must forge a different path from the endless cycles of violence forged by a global Apartheid that sacrifices peoples, countries, and our beautiful Earth to benefit a wealthy minority.
However, the ultimate Apartheid is the one we generate against the sensitivity of our own heart. Our true heart where all resides to be known, understood and loved.
Let us reclaim what we can, our hearts, our humane values, our commitment to peace, as we walk the middle way with the lamp of love in our hearts through this valley of death. Let’s hold this light and call for a political settlement, as in Northern Ireland and South Africa, to end this horrific round of violence.
We are a people who only demand our freedom and our rights; this is the least that any human beings on the face of the earth can demand.
If I die, remember that I—we—were individuals, humans.
We had names, dreams, and achievements, and our only fault was to be classified as inferior.
My battery is about to die again. Pray for us. Said Shoaib, Gaza.
Organizers say more than 600,000 Israelis turned out today (March 25) the 12th consecutive week of protests, the biggest demonstration in the country’s history. Israelis say their democracy is at stake.
Dearest Sangha friends, Kittisaro and I extend our heartfelt solidarity with you at this time of extreme threat to our shared values for a democratic society. I’m also heartened by the hundreds of thousands protesting on the streets that is now sending shock waves through the government. The fight to sustain and grow an equitable democracy in the face of a global uprising of authoritarianism and Fascism is also our struggle. We, too, are up against a fight for democracy in our home countries of the U.S. and the U.K.
Recently, CIVICUS Monitor reported that the U.K.’s authoritarian trend toward curtailing and violating civic freedoms has now downgraded its status alongside Guatemala, Ghana, Tunisia as free and fair societies. The curtailment of freedom of assembly, freedom of expression, and the right to protest are some of the first civic rights in the process of being overturned in the U.K. There is also great concern that the U.K. government’s attempt to repeal the Human Rights Act will end its alliance with the European Convention of Human Rights, threatening the most vulnerable and those wrongly arrested and imprisoned for peaceful demonstrations while opening the door to overturning a slew of other rights.
In the U.S., in the Republican-run States, we see extensive book bans, severe repression of women’s reproductive rights, an attempt to eradicate the visibility and equal rights of the LGBTQ+ community, and the disappearance of historical facts of colonialism and African American and Indigenous histories in educational curriculums. Right now, a bill that will likely pass the Florida State Legislature criminalizes those housing or driving undocumented immigrants, even if related, many of whom have been in the U.S. from childhood but consistently denied a fair path to citizenship. Inevitably this will devastate families, undermine businesses, and demonize an already large vulnerable sector of the population.
In South Carolina, the Republicans are pushing legislation to execute women who have abortions, with no exceptions, even in the case of rape or incest, with the bill vague enough that it could, in theory, be extended to those who miscarry. This ideology is not from the fringe but an increasingly mainstream Republican strategy. Seeing the recent demonstration in Tel Aviv, where hundreds of women’s rights protestors dressed as Handmaidens, struck a painful and terrifying chord with those of us everywhere fighting to preserve hard-won rights.
A tactic of fascistic authoritarianism is using speed and relentless bombardment to stun the population while, by stealth, rolling back rights won over decades of struggle. Another tactic, aided by unscrupulous media, is to inflame hatred and drive division like a stake through the heart of civil society to the point where almost no family, community, or institution is untarnished. These shock tactics aim to overwhelm the public’s ability to hold ground and respond effectively.
I remember the shock in the 2016 U.S. election as we sat through that fateful evening with family in Nashville when Trump took the presidency. We were sure, nonchalant even, that Hilary Clinton would win. The horror of watching the U.S. map turn red left us almost speechless. It was a staggering blow. That sleepless night, I could feel the geo-political tectonic plates moving beneath us as a chilling shadow descended over the world.
With Trump as the perfect archetypal demagogue throwing open the gates of hell, we witnessed the inversion of morals, rationality and democratic processes. At the same time, the politics of chaos, raw fear and hatred were unleashed and normalized. Since then, “truth as lies and lies as truth” has become political expediency. Its most dangerous application is the crazy-making levels of gaslighting by right-wing media busy underwriting a collective psychotic break from society’s ability to react to the dire and urgent reality of a fast-warming world descending into environmental collapse.
When the Trumpian chill descended on Britain with lightning rapidity through the Trojan Horse of Brexit with its ubiquitous myths of “sunny uplands”, it quickly turned a stable democracy into a divided nation. It opened the door to political authoritarianism, a massive wealth transfer to the tax-exempt billionaire class; it sent the country into economic free fall and captured the hundred-year-old venerable BBC, now an arm of right-wing propaganda.
As the authoritarian freeze circles the globe, we’ve seen the loss of a fragile democracy in Myanmar, the overturning of freedoms in Hong Kong and China, the return of authoritarian regimes in Poland and Hungry, and like Netanhayu’s craven attempt to avoid criminal charges through political control, criminally indicted former President Zuma threw South Africa into chaos and societal breakdown to avoid prison. More recently, we’ve seen surprising electoral far-right wins in Sweden and Italy and even in Holland with the shock gains of the right-wing, anti-green, pro-farmers Boerenpartij Party, and, of course, we see the daily horror of Putin’s genocidal attack on Ukraine.
All of this is to say you are not alone in what you are experiencing in Israel. However, distinguishing Israel from the U.K. and U.S. is the extraordinary speed of Netanyahu’s move for complete control of the judiciary, which amounts to a coup by the extreme religious right. As historian and author Yuval Noah Harari said, this marks the unthinkable reality of Israel’s fast tipping into a dictatorship. The country’s chief justice, Esther Hayut, also called the weakening (and likely hostile takeover) of the Supreme Court a “fatal blow” to democratic institutions. As tens of thousands of protesters have flooded the streets, one sign, as reported in the New Yorker, summed up civic society’s horror: “For Sale: Democracy. Model: 1948. No brakes.”
For those less familiar with Israeli politics, Netanayhu’s enablers from the far-right religious Zionist movement led by notorious Itamar Ben-Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit “Jewish Power” party in tandem with the Religious Zionist Party are together attempting to perpetuate the crime of destroying Israel’s secular democracy. Ben Gvir is considered so dangerous that it prompted former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to describe him as a “more imminent danger to Israel than a nuclear-armed Iran.” Ben Gvir has a long history of inflaming hatred toward Arabs and has been convicted of supporting a terrorist organization and inciting racism.
Given the complex nature of Israel’s fragile geo-political position alongside its internal mix of crushing Palestinian rights, militarized incursions into the Occupied Territories, the extremism of fanatical Settlers, and deep tensions between the secular and religious in society, the last thing everyone needs is this extreme right-wing Netanyahu-Ben Gvir alliance.
While truly shocking for liberal-minded Israelis, it will be even more devastating for Israeli Arabs, Palestinians and all not Jewish-identified people living under the Israeli state’s umbrella. While this steep rise of nationalism may seem like safety for those who voted for it, as so painfully known in Israel and from the indelible lessons of the last century, Fascism has nothing to offer except hatred, division, the destruction of civil society and humane values, and ultimately, the horrors of genocide.
So, here we are. It shouldn’t be the way it is, right now, this is the way it is. So, first, we must take stock and shake off any last vestiges of denial that we are going back to “business as usual” soon. We need to understand in our bones that the more beautiful world we dream, hope, and work for is under extreme threat by those who now hold an excessive amount of political, economic and media power, and if successfully captured, the power of state, military and legislature. In response, we need to understand ourselves, not just as individuals or meditation practitioners interested in awakening, but as needed members of a Dharma-informed resistance movement.
I have a folder marked “Climate” on my laptop filled with years of collected articles, information, and initiatives I’m involved with. After my Zoom call with beloved sangha member and Tovana teacher Ilan Luttenberg, who invited me to write this article, I created a new folder titled “Fascism.” The pathway to ensuring eco-sustainability, human rights, animal rights and climate justice has to run through democracy. We don’t have the luxury of being bogged down by indecision. Instead, we must grapple with the reality of a double-headed hydra of malignant forces focused on plunging the world into a brutal and violent descent.
As Ajahn Chah said, Dharma practice is preparation for more significant challenges. We practiced for this moment. While it’s tempting to retreat into meditative quietism and spiritual bypass, we need to expand our understanding of the fullness of the Buddha’s transmission instead. As one schooled in politics and military strategy from the warrior caste, the Buddha overturned the oppressive caste system of his time. He overturned the sacrifice of animals, engaged and advised political, monarchic and military power, tried to stop wars, mediated water rights, and debated with his detractors to great effect. He threatened the religious hierarchy so profoundly they consistently tried to undermine him and even kill him.
The heartbeat of the awakened mind is bodhicitta, meaning the force of compassion rooted in the understanding that reality is seamless. In other words, all is present within this one awareness. Zen master Dogen articulated this insight as “enlightenment is the intimacy of all things.” Dharma practice inducts us into the direct knowing heart in allegiance with the intuitive, quantum-like guiding intelligence of the living Dharma. Even in the face of fear, we can still access an innate, indomitable fountain of love, compassion and clarity of seeing, which means even though employing our intellect, we must engage from the heart.
So, alongside the reality check of challenges we face, mindfully, in the true meaning of the word – to remember – we remember that we also carry power. The power of love, community, strategic response, joining together en masse, holding an authentic relational field that is compassionate, nourishing, resourcing, and listening to the heartbeat of the Dharma. In this case, the Dharma of reality is our refuge, guide, and source of strength. The task before us then is to use all non-violent methods available to us to defeat Fascism, uplift humanity, and for all its tattered corruptions to save and improve democracy.
How does this translate into practice? We have practiced internally for hours, months, and even years in retreat, exploring the internal realms. We have practiced in community building sangha and a body of teachings. Now it’s time to consider a practice that engages society where we move out of our silos, our bubbles and comfortable spaces to build bridges and create alliances. In Israel, I encourage the Sangha to join the protests as part of the front-line challenge against this unabashed attempt at a full-on coup. Now is the moment because once a coup and control of the judiciary are secured, it will be harder to roll back.
To find courage, remember our parents, grandparents and ancestors’ struggles and how each generation had to fight for a better world. Remember all spiritually-based activists who inspire us to pick up the challenge. Find what skills are present in the Sangha as writers, speakers, organizers, and artists and explore strategies for optimum engagement. Hold meditation circles for peace, perhaps in the streets.
Meanwhile, I encourage everyone to get the small handbook “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century” (here in brief) by the Levin professor of History at Yale University, Timothy Synder who has written extensively on fascism and is a pro-democracy lecturer and activist.
Whatever ways you find to meet this moment, Kittisaro and myself, alongside so many of us here in our Sangha circles, are with you and hold you in our hearts most tenderly. These days, together, may we all be as radical as possible in the spirit of Dharma to grow the beautiful world of our higher dreams. If not now, when?
My friend wrote an angry poem sparked by being served one of England’s increasingly ubiquitous “no-fault” and no reason given eviction orders. In this perfect English rose garden, jolly pub and soft green lawned village, she and her partner never missed paying rent, were an asset to the community, and devotedly restored a village heritage building as a labour of love adding value to the local Lord’s sprawling estate. After years of living quietly, being evicted was a shock. Like many of us self-effacing Englanders, even though wrongly treated, my friend didn’t want her angry poem to go public. Though thankfully, she agreed I could anonymously share it (below) prompting this article.
It usually takes anger to crack open the ways we normalize systemic injustice. However, socially ingrained English “niceness” weaves a sealed veneer that represses unacceptable displays of rage. Yet outrage is a healthy response to the ruling class destroying the social fabric of Britain while plundering public assets to ferret away in their offshore Non-dom trusts. No matter how criminal the act, it seems these self-appointed elite are above the law. Boris Johnson is a perfect example of an Etonian who train-smashed the country and yet continues to breeze around the world on the millionaire lecture circuit.
Britain has been brought to its knees by Tory Brexit hoisted aloft on a scaffolding of gaslight lies for which no one takes responsibility. Brexit and thirteen years of forced Tory austerity has led to extensive food-bank dependency and untreated sewage flowing unabated into rivers and coastlines. This is the direct outcome of Thatcher’s “there is no such thing as a society.” Yet still, the Tory parade of slick contortions, faithfully reported by the now State-controlled BBC, continues to drive their unswerving penchant for Dickensian deprivation for the majority. Nowadays, millions of UK residents struggle to provide food and heat in their homes while fossil fuel companies and major corporations stack up billions in profits; tax free with no questions asked.
As recent food shortages pinched the country tighter, British Secretary of State, Environment and Rural Affairs Therese Coffey, suggested people eat turnips. There’s nothing wrong with turnips, but in this context, citing turnips, a food usually used as cattle fodder, adds insult to injury. Coffey’s British version of “let them eat cake” is an egregious reinforcement of Tory obsession with deepening class division stunting Britain’s ability to move forward as a collaborative, visionary nation.
Just this week, Rishi Sunak (the third Prime Minister elected without input from the people) eulogized Northern Ireland’s great fortune of accessing EU and UK markets without the slightest awareness of the stinging irony that the Tories demolished any access to EU trade for England, Scotland and Wales. Britain’s extreme Brexit trade isolation, a sleight of hand that Sunak enthusiastically cheered along, has effectively pushed it into economic free-fall.
The moral of the story? There are as many to fill a library. But, in essence, Tory Brexit, like Trumpian MAGA and Putin’s Russia, as extreme right-wing political forces, do not know how to build a thriving society. Instead, they destroy the connective tissue that holds society together leaving people without a positive vision or means to engage in creative regeneration.
The destruction of the public commons is deliberate. An isolated people struggling to survive are at the mercy of narcissistic and sociopathic leaders who intend to fashion a society where they maintain power and are free to loot. While poverty deepens in Britain and the cost of living rises beyond what is affordable for millions, Tories just spent £25k on a crystal-encrusted vanity portrait of the Prime Minister and £40k on his shooting trip. It seems they lose no chance to underline their disdain for nurses, doctors, railway workers, postal staff, and so many working-class striking, in the heart of winter, for some kind of living wage.
CYRM6G The Oyster Lunch 1735 by Troy Jean Francois de 1679-1752 France French
Despite all the polished political rhetoric, the tale of Brexit Britain is a shocking story of self-serving politicians plunging a country into poverty while heightening divisions across families, communities and all sections of society. What replaces a once much happier kingdom is now a ruling class wielding raw power and their assumed right to abscond with the collective purse. Just like, on a smaller scale, the unaccountable power used to evict my friend. And like the villages, towns, and communities ripped apart, as reflected in her poem below.
To feel anger is to be alive to injustice. When mindfully transformed, anger clarifies and burns away the dross. Outrage is the fire that moves people to stand up and fight for their rights. The village is our global world, while the landlords who control the political, economic and media domains seem intent on evicting us from our collective home, Earth. So, let the fire of anger warm our heart, energize our passion, and bring us out on the streets together. We have a future to win.
Goodbye to a Village
Sneaky, bitching Witch-burning village Good-bye to gossip-mongering Shifty people… Goodbye to pikey*-burning Bonfire crew, status-grabbing middle management and six-sandwiches-short-of-a-picknick Lord what’s-his-face.
Good-bye to those who were good but drowned out by the voices of the many that weren’t. The silently suffering single mums. The stupid clay-pigeon shooters and the Mafia pub landlady.
Goodbye to the pagan TV vicar. The grumpy gits working themselves into the grave. The estate managers-from -hell hiking rents up beyond anything Sussex wages can support.
Good-bye to smug home-owners. The Parish Council Dodos and the Bonfire Society The same old same olds chatting at the Pub. The neighbours currently on the third husband.
The guys that shot themselves or jumped off a cliff.
Story of a village…
Now it’s the gauging-out of the working class. The maintenance team sacked or walking off. Time for the Rock Stars to move in with their recording studios and black electric Audi fleets.
Good-bye Village, it was crazy-making. Knowing you, I learned a lot - some good, some bad. I guess you’ll carry on in some weird drug-induced bubble. You are a communal mirage. A fixation of the imagination of an “English Village.”
* Pikey a pejorative term for Travellers or Romanis.
Queen Elizabeth II ascended the throne four years before I was born. For those who grew up under the sway of the British imperial system, her stoic face was a constant tenor through the decades of seismic cultural shifts in Britain and the post-Second World War world. Like the glue we licked behind her miniature visage on our first and second-class stamps, the Queen was foremost an archetypal matron holding it all together. Her face alone, rarely breaking beyond a careful smile, imprinted duty, a stiff upper lip, and the stilted deflection, diverting “real speak” to the engrained platitudes that shape, and often imprison, the nation’s psyche.
I am not immune from the sense of belonging to this strange, emotionally stunted tribe. I still have my letter from Prince Charles in a Kensington Palace embossed envelope thanking me kindly for a copy of my first published poetry book. I still have my special tea cups with monarchy portraits and the memory of my sweet, East End (of London) working-class grandparents, with the Queen’s congratulatory letter on their 60th wedding anniversary hanging proudly over their central mantel place.
I have watched royal weddings at odd hours from different continents and kept an eye on the shenanigans of the Queen’s tumultuous household, mirroring the nation’s implosion of the nuclear family. And I am an avid viewer of The Crown.
On Facebook, I posted the June ’22 Jubilee video of the Queen’s tea party with Paddington Bear to prickly comments about Paddington Bear being an immigrant (from Peru) and “look how badly Britain istreating its immigrants.” While painfully true, I still marvelled at the translucent vulnerability in the Queen’s eyes as she sat, so near death, opposite this beloved bear, enjoying marmalade sandwiches.
Essentially, this staid woman invokes respect. She called forth double rainbows at her death. She embodied the “Keep Calm and Carry On” branding of my mother’s generation forged by German Blitz bombers, flying twenty miles long and twenty miles wide up the River Thames to unleash their devastation on London. During that whole time, the Queen refused to leave the Capital.
But… and, this “but” is as deep and wide as the brutal plunder and oppression of the British Empire, which aches for acknowledgement and reparation for its centuries of devastating colonialism. All of which were underwritten by the Monarchy. So, while the government and Monarchy rush the nation to swear allegiance to a new King, I feel we should resist and instead engage this spell breaker of the Queen’s death with some serious questions.
Not so fast with the sixteenth-century pageantry and assumptions that we are all onboard. Yesterday, a man who unwittingly got caught up in a procession in Oxford to proclaim the new King spontaneously called out, “who elected him?” He later said he doubted anyone heard him. Even so, he was promptly handcuffed, arrested and charged under the new Police, Crime, Sentencing & Courts Act 2022, a fascistic Brexit “law” criminalizing the public’s democratic right to protest. Paul Powlesland, a young Barrister, held up a blank piece of paper at Parliament Square. A police officer confirmed that if he wrote “Not My King,” he would be arrested under the same act. Here he explains how that moment shifted him to Republicanism.
Under the Monarchy’s gaze, Britain has endured twelve years of Thatcherite policies with her “there is no such thing as a society” austerity, which has sprouted food banks in most towns and cities across the country. The Tory government’s Brexit ideology, headed by the right-wing billionaire media, has crushed businesses. The UK has shifted from the world’s fifth largest economy to “emerging market economy” status in just a few senseless years. Tories, abandoning workers’ rights with alacrity, have left Britain at the mercy of unprotected corporate plunder.
Currently, while the UK is officially under wraps for ten days of mourning, the Tory government is losing no time ripping up the Paris Agreement and its obligations. One of the first acts of yet another (the third since Brexit) just installed prime minister, Liz “rip out solar and wind installations” Truss, lifted the hard-won fight to ban fracking while transferring £130Bn for fossil fuels. To add insult to injury, throughout the summer, Tories did nothing to stop massive flows of untreated raw sewage from being released into pristine rivers and across coastlines, closing beaches and horrifying the public.
Still, they continue ripping the country apart. Liz Truss’s encore is installing Jacob Rees-Mogg, a supercilious, top-hatted climate denialist with an affected upper-class accent, as Secretary of State for Energy, Business, and Industrial Strategy. Rees-Mogg advocates for extracting every last drop of oil and gas from the North Sea and adaptation to climate change. Just ask Pakistan’s 33 million climate-displaced people how that is going for them.
With the “Sunlit Uplands” Brexit promise of the Tories failing so badly, Britain has yet to acknowledge it suffered a coup by an oligarchic, fossil-fuel-serving ruling, criminal class. Their lackeys are the graduates from upper-class public (private in the US) schools, who make up 74% of the current government or just 2% representation of the entire population. From a progressive forward-looking nation, the UK has devolved at dizzying speed into a nostalgic, backwards-falling country immersed in its mythic distortion of “greatness.” The reality is that Britain is now a glorified Petri dish for oligarchs to experiment with how far they can push a nation into hunger-games-type feudalism to maintain and grow their immense wealth and power.
Given this demoralising context, I would vote for the Monarchy to be dismantled or downsized. Monarchy and its liege, the Tory party, are the lynchpin that sustains an outdated and oppressive class system with its deeply inequitable distribution of land, resources, and opportunities. The struggle to move from under the British class system is a theme running through my own life in tandem with surviving the violence of my Irish father, who grew up in extreme poverty in the Dublin slums. Primarily, I trace my father’s destructive effect on our family to the impact of British colonialism with its constructed famine, workhouses, and unrelenting generational oppression.
Even after decades of self-awareness and healing work, I’m struck by how perniciously, and stubbornly class conditioning is wired into the psyche. The “who do you think you are?” dismissal. For example, millionaire Lord Alan Sugar, tweeted to a young man, who is economically struggling but had the temerity, in Sugar’s mind, to criticize his luxury yacht, “Shutyour bloody mouth, you jealous scum,”
For the Monarchy to work, it has to veil the brutal mechanisms that enable its survival, which includes even brutalising its own. Prince Harry said he “had no one to turn to, even in his own family,” when his bi-racial wife, Meghan Markle, was pushed to the edge of suicide by the British establishment and the feral racism running through British society. In the end, the relentless hounding of the UK’s treacherous Tabloid press drove them from England.
While the Monarchy aims to bond British citizens to itself through nostalgia, charitable works, good press, and tradition, what we see in the actions of Liz Truss, Jacob Rees-Mogg, and Lord Sugar is the more accurate face of the British ruling class. A class of colonisers now plundering Britain itself, all the while using the death of the Queen to force-feed an archaic national narrative that is creating a dangerous void into which an authoritarian police state is already emerging.
In my view, we don’t need a new King, and he won’t help us. Charles won’t even stand up for his son, Harry. However, the Monarchy and its Tory liege will not implode by itself. Instead, we should withdraw sentimental allegiance (including my teacups!) and build a thriving, equitable, reinvigorated progressive democracy based on proportional representation. A system informed by local Citizen Assemblies that has some chance of meeting the enormity of the poly-crises we face. We are doomed if we fail, choosing instead to be dragged along by a system entirely ill-equipped to meet our new terrifying realities.
Already an inspiring counter-movement is fast-unfolding in the UK that is in open rebellion, which is different and perhaps cuts deeper than Extinction Rebellion. Trade Union leaders have been massively organising working-class engagement through the Enough is Enough and Don’t Pay campaigns. Hundreds of thousands have signed up, are turning up for rallies, and have pledged not to pay bills. People literally can’t afford the cost of living due to the enormous price hikes the Tories inflicted, leaving little choice between freezing, starving or not paying.
If the Queen’s death symbolizes the end of an era, it can also initiate the beginning of a new reshaping of the power dynamics in Britain. Increasingly, the planet is run to fit the agenda of oligarchs, fossil-fuel moguls and media robber barons. It’s the same old story. At some point, the peasants will have had enough and start strategizing how to storm the castle. That time is now.
In the UK, there is tremendous potential in the two primary rebellions, Workers Rebellion and Extinction Rebellion aligning with organizations focused on an equitable, inclusive, sustainable vision for the future. Do we want a society with people reduced to living on charitable donations, like food banks from the government or patronage from the Monarchy? What if, instead, people have a fair share, are recipients of moral reparations and have equal opportunities to empower themselves and each other in mutually collaborative ways?
Neither do we need an endless show of torturous royal duty that precludes deeper national inquiry. Suppose we want to express loyalty meaningfully rather than pay obeisance to a distant, billionaire Monarchy. What could be a wiser Queen to serve than Grandmother Earth? She produces everything we need and use, day in and day out. For myself, I acknowledge Queen Elizabeth II’s dutiful life, but I vote for Queen Earth.
This article has just been published by Barre Center for Buddhist Studies in their Insight Journal. A follow-up conversation will be on June 5th on Exploring Dharma Practice & Right Action in the Age of Climate Change. To register, go here.
“If we do not do the impossible, we shall be faced with the unthinkable.” * Murray Bookchin
Today, I’m relieved we are blessed with unexpected spring rains sweeping over Sonoma County here in California. This area is vulnerable to the rise of infernos that have decimated several small towns over the last five years. Now, as the fall fire season arrives ever earlier, anxiety rises in tandem with evacuations, red alerts, and suffocating smoke. Some consequences are less visible. In January, for example, our home insurance company raised its quote by 500% before announcing it was leaving California. The future, it seems, will not be covered. I find it easier to capture such apocalyptic moments in verse, like when the fires turned day into night across the Bay area.
At midday, the black-red smoke sky announces, “You can’t live here anymore.” We are all queued refugees from America’s strangeness. In the gaping void, monsters rush in.
How do we sustain hope in the enormity of what we face? The monsters of environmental tipping points are in plain sight. Still, you would hardly know it from the greenwashing, and tepid responses of those holding most power in our societies. Right now, a heatwave is hammering India and Pakistan. “We’re living in hell,” said Nazeer Ahmed from the Balochistan region, as temperatures hit 50C/122F+. Despite the urgency of mass strategic mobilization, a disingenuous fossil fuel industry continues to press down harder on the gas pedal. Hope is hard when environmental, political, and societal disintegration hangs over us like Damocles’s sword.
Most days, I don’t feel particularly hopeful. However, I do believe quantum revolutionary shifts can happen, though an upsurge of violence often precedes them before the old system gives way. For instance, a dominant narrative of post-apartheid South Africa is that it was a peaceful transition of power. However, as recorded in Gary Kynoch’s book, Township Violence and the End of Apartheid, this was not the case. What unfolded in the four years leading to the first democratic elections in April 1994 was the bloodiest period of the entire Apartheid era, with an estimated 14,000 deaths attributed to political violence.
When Kittisaro, my husband and teaching partner, and I first led a series of retreats at the Buddhist Retreat Centre in Ixopo, KwaZulu Natal during 1994/5, in an area bearing the brunt of a ten-year civil war, it was an initiation. Those holding power rarely support true democracy. Instead, it has to be fought for. Another glowering monster closer to home is the fight to sustain democracy here in the US. We are in this battle right now. If democratic rights are lost, it will have devastating consequences for climate justice, not only here but around the world. What does a battle we can’t afford to lose mean for us?
During the twelve years I trained as a Buddhist nun in the Thai Forest School of Ajahn Chah, the teaching I most took to heart was the brilliance of the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths. I value its instruction to actively meet suffering, explore its causes, and cultivate a path of non-suffering. In his talk “Two Kinds of Peace,” Ajahn Chah distinguished between the peace of meditative calm, or samadhi, which primarily depends on a tranquil environment, and the more profound peace that arises from wisdom. This deeper level of peace is transportable regardless of the internal or external context. To quote Ajahn Chah directly,
So, when the mind is at its most calm, what should you do? Train it. Practice with it. Use it to contemplate. Don’t be scared of things. Don’t attach. Developing samādhi so you can just sit there and attach to blissful mental states isn’t the true purpose of the practice. You must withdraw from that. The Buddha said that you must fight this war, not just hide out in a trench trying to avoid the enemy’s bullets. When it’s time to fight, you really have to come out with guns blazing. Eventually, you have to come out of that trench. You can’t stay sleeping there when it’s time to fight. This is the way the practice is. You can’t allow your mind to just hide, cringing in the shadows.
We must look directly at what is in front of us. The recent reports from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change make it crystal clear we are on “Red alert” and “It’s now or never.” If we don’t act in support of systemic change, we will not avoid climate hellscapes becoming the norm. That knowledge is a challenge to us all. We have to act, not just as individuals but as a collective, which is a good thing. It means we have to think collectively and join the larger mass of people needed to tip the scales.
Even though hope for the future hangs by fraying threads, there is enormous potential in our ability to organize as Dharma practitioners and as citizens. Amid a world on fire, we have the skills to balance between hope and nihilism. This is not only a mindful practice but a heartful one. These are times when our hearts must lead. What do we truly love and can we commit to activism as a feat of love itself?
An essential motivation in these times is the intent, practice, and expression of the Bodhisattva path. What does it mean to show up as bodhisattvas in deep service to this sacred web of life? And what internal narratives and fears keep us from speaking out and standing up? As we face wars, flooding, fire, and the old ghosts of fascism, I want to advocate for a deeper inquiry that enables honest conversations about the monsters living beneath this “business-as-usual” and what we want to do about them.
Meet the ghosts…They wail at the empty feast of silent ash, burnt forests, charred animals, birds dashed to Earth, billions of tiny earth workers of evolution, houses, cars, and life dreams … vanish
Here I offer my grief, your grief and all our grief at this nearing last station of our world’s end.
One way or another, we have reached a world end. In The Creation of Consciousness, Jungian Edward Edinger says: The breakdown of a central myth is like the shattering of a vessel containing a precious essence; the fluid is spilt and drains away, and meaning is lost. In its place, primitive contents are reactivated.
As our civilizational myth of endless growth and dominance over nature shatter, we either evolve or become dragged into a regressive free fall. In the intensity, we will likely feel everything possible to feel, grief, despair, wrath, disbelief, panic, and overwhelm. You name it, I’ve probably been there, and likely you have too. These days though, I’m also feeling something else shining through the anxiety and distress.
The Dharma points to the indestructible nature of mind, calling it “diamond-like.” In the Shurangama Sutra, a foundational Zen text, Quan Yin/Avalokitesvara Bodhisattva states this about her/his/their awakening, illuminating the fundamental nature of the Citta - mind/heart.
“Suddenly, I transcended the mundane and transcendental worlds, and throughout the ten directions, a perfect brightness prevailed. I obtained two supreme states. First, I united with the fundamental, wonderfully enlightened mind of all the Buddhas of the ten directions, and I gained a strength of compassion equal to that of all Buddhas. Second, I united with all living beings in the six paths, and I gained a kind regard for all living beings equally.”
While shadows are all around, there’s also immense light and tender love for the beauty, suffering, and all. This joyous lightness is the gift of the heart. Yet, we still have enormous hurdles to navigate, including the fears that hold us back.
The other day, going 70 miles an hour down the freeway, my mind was connecting the obvious dots. I’m flying along in a fossil fuel chariot with millions of others around the planet, speeding our collective demise. Even though caught in this fearsome web, I feel the determination to break the doom scroll of inevitability by committing fully to a different world. This pledge means releasing social fear, including an internalized quietism that Buddhist culture usually elevates over speaking out, keeping us complicit. Releasing these subtle oppressions in my body feels daring, like a wobbly yet liberating ascendency.
Despite the complexity we are navigating, I hope all our hearts can ascend from circling, freeze, flight, and fight so we can rise together, inspired by the spirit of those who fought for a better world, regardless of the odds. To break fossil fuel interests controlling the planet, it will take all the inspiration we can muster and us all rising together to shift out from under this dystopian descent.
It’s my practice to infuse a hopeful realism into my life and climate work, which currently is an initiative that came into being during the fires. Talking together with sangha friends, we decided to put climate action front and centre, an intention that morphed into PAEAN: Peoples Alliance for Earth Action Now. I chose the acronym before the name as it expresses the hope for millions of voices rising with joy, wild love, and courage to do what we can. Our by-line is Dharma Based Climate Action, People Rising Together for ReLOVEution. If it starts with a revolution within our hearts, all else will follow.
There always was, and still is a horizon out to sea beyond where the albatross of our faded dream lands on fields of plastic, the wreckage or our waste slips down her throat. *
Where storms in Africa run their rivers through our soul leaping like oryx in the sunset of dying hope spinning down to sludge and shopping malls draining the water away
Even so. We rise. Over and over again.
We rise. Because of this, Be this. Be loyal to your true heart. She will lead the way.
The albatross reference inspired by V.S. Jordan’s poem, Midway V Poem – On Witnessing an Albatross Feeding, inspired by Chris Jordan’s Midway documentary.
Thanks to Suvaco Norman Hansen for Murry Bookchin’s quote.
PEOPLES ALLIANCE for EARTH ACTION NOW Jan 30, 2022 Online - DETAILS/Sign Up
PAEAN means the rising of many voices together in a song of joy, praise, and triumph. It is also the acronym for Peoples Alliance for Earth Action Now.
The Buddha was a spell breaker, and as we rise in service of the sacred web of life, we too are spell breakers.
The failure of leadership at COP26 clarifies that now is the time for people everywhere to join forces, locally and worldwide, in service of the just, conscious, and spiritually informed transition still within our reach.
At 23 years, I joined an alms mendicant order, shaved off my long hair, put on a robe, took on precepts and a rigorous daily schedule, which I observed for 12 years as a Buddhist nun. There was much to learn and unlearn during that time, all within the enduring and essential teaching, “look directly at the way things are and contemplate their nature.” That is, see through the eye of Dharma. In particular, see suffering and its causes, then attend to those causes by employing the medicine of meditative transformation internally and externally.
As bodhisattvas in training, we follow the Buddha’s encouragement to; “Go forth for the good of many, out of compassion for the world and the welfare, good, and happiness of all.” These days, we need to go forth from the trance of business as usual. 2022 could well be when this treacherous spell breaks. A UN global poll from last year, states two-thirds of people know climate change is a global emergency. In Europe, 90% of young people know it’s the world’s greatest threat. Most everyone on the planet knows we’re in deep trouble.
However, we face a wall of denial, distraction, and distortion from those who have the power to reverse course but do not see it profitable to do so. Most governments are under the yoke of the fossil fuel industry. For example, some governments’ more ambitious climate policies are threatened by $billions worth of lawsuits if they don’t shape climate policies around the demands of the foreign fossil fuel industry. In step, media barons ensure their wall of denial minimizes or actively distorts an accurate picture of our precarious situation.
People need to know we are passing truly significant, terrifying climate tipping points. Thwaites Glacier (the size of Florida) in the Antarctic is within years of collapse, raising sea levels by 2 feet/ 65cm, potentially (most likely) destabilizing the entire West Antarctic ice sheet. The world’s largest rain forest, the mighty Amazon, now emits more carbon than it captures. Extreme warming across the Eastern Siberian tundra releases significant methane gases, exponentially warming the biosphere. This is just one, albeit significant, snapshot of our collapsing ecosystem that is unfolding everywhere at speed.
Instead of grappling with this deadly diagnosis, we hope if we look away, it will go away. However, as Dharma practitioners, we train ourselves to meet challenges, knowing they have the potential to stimulate awakening from the morass of ignorance. As said the tantrika, Saraha Mahasiddha, “The greater the mental afflictions, the mightier the primordial wisdom. The larger the pile of wood, the greater the blaze (of awakening.)”
As the spell breaks, we start to touch into the enormity of our current reality. We are shifting from an internal narrative of a guaranteed future to the likelihood, in our lifetime, of civilizational collapse and mass extinction, not only of other life forms but of humanity. This actual probability is an extraordinarily challenging internal shift of perception to undergo. Breaking a civilizational meta-narrative is a dangerous moment. Even if we disagree with this shift, it’s happening anyway.
In his book, The Creation of Consciousness, Jungian Edward Edinger says, “the breakdown of a central myth is like the shattering of a vessel containing a precious essence; the fluid is spilt and drains away, and meaning is lost. In its place, primitive contents are reactivated. Differentiated values disappear and are replaced by the elemental motivations of power and pleasure, or else the individual is exposed to emptiness and despair.”
When, as is inevitable, the truth of our situation surfaces more fully into the collective consciousness, we can expect massive reactivity, which in actuality, is already happening in the march of truth as lies, lies as truth, a symptom in itself of a mass psychotic break from reality. Underneath this battleground for the future flow murky streams of raw fear, rage at the loss of power, and terror that the old God of our creation is abandoning us. The stage is set for a harrowing confrontation with our illusions from the force of reality.
Grappling with our planetary reality, for me, is an ongoing journey cycling through panic, despair, grief, fear, anguish, wrath, unnameable horror, and all nuances in-between. Lately, I’ve also noticed early life somatic patterning being activated. Here lay fear, frozenness, impotence and isolation. If you find it hard to get mobilized, you’re not alone, especially in these times of Covid loneliness. Amid the urgency, we also have to slow down to metabolize the enormity of where we are so we can stay kind, resourced, and grounded.
Within this intensifying planetary curriculum running through our personal and collective fault lines, opening up early, epigenetic, ancestral wounds, we can still track each breath into embodied, timeless presence. Rather than being swept away, a mindful relationship to “what is” opens into a freer, more liminal space, where intuitive leaps of creativity and understanding unfold. This free space is a more mapless territory allowing us to navigate by the starlight of inner intuitive guidance. Even just a sliver of spaciousness enables the revelatory light of awareness to shift our assumptions.
The feelings aren’t wrong or some kind of personal failure. They are the immune system of Mother Nature hauling us awake, and they are a barometer through which we track our collective pulse. Mostly though, we are feeling Mother Nature’s heartbreak. She, and therefore, we, are dying, though actually, we are killing her. Her billions of extraordinary life forms, woven together over billions of years, are now weighed by humans, treated as if machines, and sold on Amazon. All the while, the actual Amazon burns down.
Beloved teacher Thich Nhat Hanh said, “Only love can save us from climate change.” I believe this Koan he bequeathed runs straight to the heart of our task, one we can’t decode alone. It will take all of us to fathom this potent bodhisattva protector spirit of fierce compassion permeating our personal and collective souls. Meanwhile, we can hold faith in its power to dissolve obstructions to the long-awaited embodiment of our new story, of which we are the attending midwives.
Implementing the Buddha’s “right action” and Saraha’s turning poison to nectar, together, we have the power to go against the stream of division, hate, and destruction. Rather than being pulled into the vortex of despair, let’s pick up the challenge and focus on the work at hand. We are all in the monastery now, simplifying, prioritizing, and keeping our Dharma eye on that guiding night star that shone on the night of the Buddha’s enlightenment and still illuminates our onward path through its subtle promptings of the heart.
The Buddha said, “one who has nothing to serve lives unhappily,” pondering what to serve, he understood it is the Dharma. This service always includes uplifting and sustaining the welfare of all beings. Still, we overlook the centrality of this greatest of beings, Mother Nature, who was, after all, the only being that could fully affirm the Buddha’s awakening. We owe everything to Her, so now it’s our time to heed Her call for help. PAEAN is our response to that call.
We hope PAEAN will inspire, help gather, and support small local, and online, groups engaging climate action that will collectively interlink with global initiatives working for the same outcome. Motivated by the tremendous legacy of faith-based social revolutionaries, our approach is grounded in a wise and compassionate practice. We invite you to join us!
Thanissara 