Waiting to Inhale

Hola mi gente,
Some people got pissed about yesterday’s post and insisted I’m a cynic. That’s just bullshit. What I find insightful that some so-called progressives are now pathologizing dissent. SMDH

Waiting to Inhale

(or Drowning in Love)

A wise woman and her student were standing by a pool chatting about longing and ambition. “What do you want more than anything else?” the wise woman asked.

“To perfect my ability to love all of creation the way I love myself,” the young man replied.

At that very moment, the wise woman tackled the student and before he could react, shoved his head beneath the water. Accustomed to his teacher’s sometimes unorthodox manner of instruction, at first he didn’t resist.

One minute went by... then another. Finally, as his lungs screamed for air, the student began to struggle and kick, but his teacher was strong. Finally, she released her grip and the student surfaced, struggling for breath.

“What did you want more than anything else during these last few minutes?” the wise woman asked.

“Nothing else was in my mind except the desire for air,” the student managed to gasp.

“Excellent!” beamed the wise woman. “As soon as you are equally single-minded in your desire to perfect your ability to love all of creation in the very manner in which you love yourself, you will achieve your goal.”

My name is Eddie and I'm in recovery from civilization... 

Thanks for reading. If you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it, please consider helping me out by sharing it, liking me on Facebook, following me on Twitter, or even throwing me some money on GoFundMe HERE or via PayPal HERE so I can keep calling it like I see it.

The Spiritual Warrior

Hola mi gente,
This is a work in progress. A very rough of the second part of my upcoming presentation.

The Spiritual Warrior and the Runaway Society

How do I bear witness to the unbearable? Why are people so deliberately cruel? How do I not bring more rage into the world?

Towards the end of Emile Zola’s Beast of Man, an engineer and a fireman are quarreling in the locomotive of a passenger train. In his rage, the fireman has stoked the engine’s fire into an inferno. They grab at each other’s throats, each trying to force the other through the open door. Losing their balance, both fall out and perish. The train rumbles on at breakneck speed. The passengers, soldiers en route to the war front, are sleeping or drunkenly unaware of the impending disaster.

Our society resembles this runaway train. We have become a runaway society.

Some of us act within the world as a response to suffering. Still, at times it might seem our work is impossible. I remember being part of a huge protest rally in DC and walking next to an elderly woman and I asked how she could still do all this without being discouraged. Her answer is one I’ll never forget. She reminded me that some of us have ancestors who fought against slavery though they knew they would probably never be free themselves.

That was a powerful reminder for me… 

What does personal liberation look like in a world gone mad? Is personal liberation a worthy goal when there are so many suffering? 

Excerpt: In this section, I use my experiences as an engaged activist to talk about the Buddhist notion of the spiritual warrior -- the Bodhisattva -- who takes a vow to forestall their own liberation until all beings are liberated.

How can the Dharma inform social justice? 

Using stories and anecdotes from a range of practices culled over a 20 year period of activism, I show how Buddhism has (and has not) influenced the work.

Question and Answer/ Interaction

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

Thanks for reading. If you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it, please consider helping me out by sharing it, liking me on Facebook, following me on Twitter, or even throwing me some money on GoFundMe HERE or via PayPal HERE so I can keep calling it like I see it.

Sunday Sermon [F.E.A.R.]

Hola Everybody,
This election cycle is, among many other things, a reminder how fear-based living creates suffering. It also embraces authoritarianism and I’m not talking about the Orange One.

Feeding the Demon

Fear: Fuck Everything And Run

The following is based on a true event, but it reminds of a story I read about a long time ago... 

I took the train one night and, as is often the case on weekends, the NYC mass transit system (MTA) is a complicated mess. Most of the construction and structural upgrades occur during the weekends, so trains are re-routed, stations by-passed and it’s almost impossible to keep track. As a result, there are usually mobs of clueless tourists moving about aimlessly in our transit system. As a result, part of being a New Yorker is often adopting the duty of a de facto tour guide.

And so it was that night, when a tourist (don’t ask, you can tell) approached me for assistance. I assured her the oncoming train would take her to her destination (she and I were getting off on the same stop) and, as she struck up small talk, the train began to roll into the station.

As we entered, I immediately sensed something weird in the car. Everyone seemed tense and, sure enough, there was a person talking very loud, using profanity, and it had everyone ill-at-ease. As a New Yorker you learn to ignore such outbursts. Paying too much attention, or being obvious about one’s attention, often serves to encourage unwanted behavior. So being able to ignore unusual behavior becomes second nature to most New Yorkers. 

Unfortunately, Tourist Lady wasn’t a New Yorker and she committed infraction no.1: she made eye contact with the individual, who seemed especially belligerent. I took her by the elbow, guiding her to a transit map with the outward intention of showing her where she should get off. My real intention was to try to deflect the unwanted attention she was unwittingly inviting. I hoped that this would help sever the connection between Belligerent Subway Dude and Tourist Lady. 

No dice... 

Belligerent Dude, who was apparently drunk, sidles up to us and asks Tourist Lady if she needs some assistance with directions. Tourist Lady (who’s not drunk, merely naïve), answers, in what could have been construed as a snobby dismissal, that no, she didn’t need help (and I believe she even threw in a little eye-roll to boot).

This, of course, sets Belligerent Dude off who starts in on her, making comments about her that weren’t too nice. Naïve Tourist Lady, instinctively edges closer to me and realizes, too late, that she probably shouldn’t have paid any mind to Belligerent Dude because he’ drunk. Belligerent Dude thinks she is a snobby bitch and expresses that sentiment for all to hear.

Belligerent Dude begins talking about Tourist Lady's breasts, her legs, I mean, he’s just going off on her, and I know she’s embarrassed. Out of the blue, from the other end of the car, a man yells out, “Shut the fuck up, already!” and Belligerent Dude, as if on cue, goes off on that individual. In fact, he threatens the individual, who I shall call Fake Brave Guy, with a severe “beat down.” Once Fake Brave Guy realizes that he will have to exert more than bravado in order to handle Belligerent Dude, he backs off a little, but Belligerent Dude, who’s also a big dude, gets right in Fake Brave Guy’s face and challenges him -- actually calls him a “fuckin pussy,” adding that he will “kick his motherfuckin ass” for good measure.

Fake Brave Guy suddenly remembers the next stop is his and quickly makes his exit. Of course, I’m sitting there hoping Belligerent Dude finds something else to do, but fuckin Tourist Lady is still staring at him. So, Belligerent sits right across from us and continues his running commentary on Tourist Lady’s physical attributes. And I’m sitting there thinking that reading my ebook is all I want to do. And now, he’s starting to get on my nerves.

Finally, I tell Belligerent Dude, “Listen man, why you gotta disrespect me like that? Can’t you see she’s with me? I mean, how would you like it if someone talked about your woman like that right in front of you? That shit ain’t right... ” I added a few choice words of my own and stared right into his eyes, hoping that my once vaunted psycho-I-don't-give-a-fuck-look hadn’t softened from lack of use, but it wasn’t working. Tourist Lady also chose this point in time to move away from me a little, apparently undecided whether I was the pan or the fire. In other words, my psycho look worked on her rather than on Belligerent Dude.

Belligerent Dude responded by informing me that he was, in fact, on his way to meet his woman, and if anybody spoke to his woman in the manner that he was speaking to Tourist Lady (now my woman), he would kick that motherfucker’s ass. It was an obvious challenge, but one I was determined to ignore.

I looked at him as if I was tired and before I could say anything more, an older man sat next to Belligerent Dude and, in a soothing voice, began talking to him. At first Belligerent Dude was hostile to the old man, but because the old man was non-threatening and seemed genuinely interested in him -- asking him about his girlfriend and how she was -- Belligerent Dude directed his focus from me and started talking to the old man. 

In a loud voice, Belligerent Dude began talking about his woman, in the process enumerating all her great qualities, and how he couldn’t wait to see her. The old man continued in this vein, asking more questions, and generally managing to communicate the feeling that he was interested in Belligerent Dude’s story -- in him as an individual. Eventually, as Belligerent Dude continued to vent and he disclosed more and more, he revealed that he hadn’t seen his woman in a long time, and that he wasn’t sure that she would see him, and with the old man’s prompting, Belligerent Dude’s tough facade cracked a little as he continued to talk.

He had just come out of jail, he told the old man, and he didn’t really have anyone. All he had, he said, was that he was headed to the last known address of the woman he loved, but he was afraid that she wouldn’t be there, or if she was, if she would even accept him.

As the train arrived at my stop and I got off (with Tourist Lady close behind), the last thing I saw was the old man comforting Belligerent Dude, who had completely broken down sobbing like a child... 

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

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…