The Heart of the Matter

Hola Everybody,
First, as you seek to makes amends, please consider the person who should be first on that list: you. How can you make amends to another if you cannot offer the same to yourself? It’s a lot like love…

Secondly, remember that whenever you relive an insult -- or think, or dwell on it -- you have repeated that same insult. In this way, you relive and re-experience all the insults of your life. 

Think about that... 

Atonement

All isms end up in schisms.
 -- Huston Smith

Several years ago, I was having a very rough time at a community meeting. I was trying to educate a group of people on the effectiveness of alternative to incarceration programs. Specifically, I was part of an effort to take over an abandoned property and turning it into transitional housing for the men and women returning from incarceration. 

For me, it was a no-brainer: treat the root causes and crime decreases. Treat the addiction and it has a double effect. It’s more effective and cheaper than incarceration which is an extremely expensive failure. Address education meaningfully by investing in smaller classroom size and making schools more accessible to parents and we prevent crime before it ever begins. we had the charts, the facts -- in short we had everything I thought we needed to help people see that locking up millions of individuals (mostly young people of color) wasn’t a very smart or effective way to create a moral and just society.

Man, we were getting beat up that day! We were getting nowhere and the hate -- man, the hate was palpable. LOL

At one point, during an intermission, this young white brother came up to me and asked if he could address the audience briefly. I don’t why I trusted this individual, I had never seen him before, and I had had it to here

::grabs deez nuts::

... with angry white men. But inwardly acknowledging that the meeting couldn’t possibly get any worse, I shrugged and told him, “Go ahead, finish putting me out of my misery.”

He got up and told of how two men brutally murdered the woman who raised him, his grandmother -- the only family he had. He told of the agonizing pain and hardship; the anger he felt; of how he wanted those who took his grandmother’s life to be punished -- to have their lives taken also. 

Then he spoke about something that floored everybody. He spoke about his journey from being consumed with vengeance to forgiveness. In the process of speaking of that healing process, he managed to do what all my facts and charts didn’t: he opened people’s hearts to the possibility of a different community; of a different society. A society based not on revenge and killing and an “eye for an eye,” but a society predicated on empathy and compassion and equality -- what my friend, Eddie Ellis, called “human Justice.” I was never so moved as when I heard this man speak so openly about being torn down only to arise again. What a lesson! And, no, he wasn’t a religious man, at least not in a rigid sense.

I think this man was able to touch upon the essential nature of vengeance and forgiveness. Vengeance comes from desire -- a desire to make things “right” no matter what the expense. If you killed mine, then I must kill you or yours. And in the short term, vengeance serves to alleviate our pain. But in the long term the desire for vengeance -- like all unskillful desire -- erodes our basic humanity. It eats at us from the inside until we become empty of anything even remotely resembling an enlightened species. Compassion and empathy comes from the part of the brain that triggers love, creativity, collaboration and, physiologically, it releases chemicals and responses that heal -- that strengthen the immune system and encourages fellowship.

I would suggest a different form of spirituality: one that recognizes a universal energy in everything, the humility to admit mistakes, one that promotes flexibility instead of rigidity, and a willingness to tolerate differences.

And isn’t that a story that mirrors any kind of redemption? Couldn’t such a shift be an evolutionary quantum leap? In fact, this is where we stand today: at the precipice of an evolutionary and spiritual chasm, and leap we must or become the first species to cause its own extinction.

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization…

Hate and Fear [Homophobia]

Hola mi Gente,

I thought I’d post the following in light of the horrible mass murder in Orlando. 

Homophobia and Fundamentalism

Hundreds gather to donate blood in the aftermath of the massacre in Orlando

If you feared no one you would hate no one.

Researchers have been most effective in uncovering the dark side of homophobia. One researcher, who interviewed over 400 men incarcerated for gay-bashing noted that the gay bashers generally saw nothing wrong in what they did, and more often than not, stated that their religious leaders and traditions condoned their behavior. One particular adolescent stated that the pastor of his church had said, “Homosexuals represent the devil, Satan.”

Another study showed that homophobes were more prone to be aroused by gay porn than others. Somewhere, deep inside, those who bash gays are actually lashing out at something inside of themselves. As with other marginalized groups, gays become the object of hatred and scapegoating. On a societal level, we purposely encourage hate for those who are deemed different. Killing a gay person, in an unspeakable manner is often considered less heinous than killing an individual who is heterosexual. The same can be said for other marginalized groups, such as black and brown people, or women, for example. A rape victim “asked for it” by dressing provocatively, or a massacred black man was deemed as reaching for a weapon.

Societies in which gender roles are strictly defined and where a high patriarchal god is worshiped are also often violent societies. We see that example in the US, one of the most “religious” of advanced democracies. We scream in outrage if a breast is exposed on prime time TV, but say nothing to the fact that our children are exposed to thousands of violent images and messages daily. We teach our young boys to hate gays. How many times have you heard one young boy call another a “faggot” or a queer in jest or anger? Boys are taught that emotions are weak, that demonstrating kindness or love is effeminate or weak. Not manly. I once witnessed a man slash another man, horribly disfiguring his face for life, because one called the other a “faggot” in jest. 

I used to run a leadership development workshop and when asked to define leadership values, almost no one ever mentioned nurturing as a valuable leadership asset. Nurturing, relating, bonding, empathizing -- these are all deemed womanly (and therefore weak) qualities, not qualities that strong leaders possess (of, course, this isn’t true at all). I’ve heard grown men tell their daughters that they would prefer a whore as a daughter than a lesbian.

Much of physical and psychological violence and hatred is rooted in religious fundamentalism and the social construction of rigid gender roles. The man who allegedly confessed to the hate crime of beheading a gay man in Puerto Rico said he became enraged when he realized the individual he thought was a woman, was a man dressed in women’s clothing. He had picked him up at an area known for prostitution and he freaked when he realized the object of his lust was a homosexual. As I heard this, I realized that this man was attacking something he couldn't face inside himself. The tragedy being that the gay man dressed in women’s clothing died simply because everything his killer feared was projected onto him. How else do you explain the decapitation if not as some warped, deep-seated, repressed sense of self-loathing?

Hatred is an extreme form of anger but also a form of deep connection. The teachings of the path I follow take anger very seriously, because anger causes so much suffering. I see hate as being rooted primarily in fear. Fear being a powerful core emotion.

When anger is acted out and results in violence, the damage is obvious. Some years ago, I came across the words of the Cambodian monk, Maha Ghosananda, who observed, “When this defilement of anger really gets strong, it has no sense of good or evil, right or wrong, of husbands, wives, children. It can even drink human blood.” This was a tragic comment upon a bloody civil war that had torn Cambodia apart and literally killed almost everyone he knew.

An angry mind is a suffering mind. An angry mind is agitated and unyielding, constricted and narrow in its thinking. Judgment and perspective cannot exist in such an environment. All sense disappears. One feels restless and driven. Nothing is satisfying, everything is tense. What happens during anger is that as the sense of self increases, so does the sense of the other. A major reason anger is so very painful is that it instantly creates a sharp distinction between self and other. An imaginary line is drawn that cannot be passed. For example, if I make the statement, “A homosexual is the devil,” I am drawing a line as well as dehumanizing the object of my fear and wrath.

There is an intoxicating effect to anger along with a strong feeling of self-righteousness. Thoughts rooted in justification take over: “He was dressed as a woman. He was not a real man. He was a freak!” This, combined with feelings of defiance and rectitude (“I am right!”), creates the killing ground for mindless hate and fear. Underlying the delusional intoxication of anger is the pain of a mind so narrowly constricted that it closes itself off from human all connection.

Anger is like a poison in the mind. It generates an unhealthy cycle of cause and effect. Every thought, word, or act has an angry after-effect. Like throwing a pebble into a pond, an act or thought sets into motion a series of ripple effects irradiating out in every direction. We are stuck with what we have done, and with the effects that we have caused.

I believe that the majority of harmful patterns of behavior are rooted in unconscious anger, hatred, and fear. On a more subtle level, angry people gossip about others, spread false accusations about others as a way of justifying their angry and fearful state of mind. Existing in an environment of fear, hate, and anger, they lash out at others and create the necessary condition that maintains their bloated egos. I guess the answer is not to respond in anger, but to generate love instead. However, one can also choose to love from afar. We can choose to minimize our contact with harmful and negative influences.

Unfortunately, sometimes there isn’t a choice: you can become an object of hate and violence simply for being you... for being black, Latinx, a woman, or gay. But the evolved response to hatred and fear is not merely punishment, but a human justice that considers all who have been impacted, including the perpetrators of horrific and hateful acts. As with the hundreds that gathered to donate blood for the injured in Orlando, in order to stop the cycle of violence, we have to create a justice that is rooted in love. For, in the words of Cornel West, “Justice is what love looks like in public.” But more on that some other time. For now, we grieve… 

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization…