The Unmasking Continues
Covid is a warning shot, a harbinger of things to come. If we imagine our response to the pandemic as a practice run for future crises, we are doing rather poorly.
Meeting the Coming World
Covid is a warning shot, a harbinger of things to come. If we imagine our response to the pandemic as a practice run for future crises, we are doing rather poorly.
Re-blogged from Engagedharma.net : This article was originally published in TIME Magazine Myanmar’s Women Are Fighting for a New Future
We wanted to celebrate the power of the people, and the uniqueness of this movement. It was also curated so as to be accessible to outsiders just learning about #WhatsHappeningInMyanmar
We are in the midst of an awakening, a rough transition from the dream of modernity and the emerging reality of its failing, if not wholly false, promises of universal prosperity and abundance.
For two decades before his death, he became a study in deepening humility, self-deprecating humor, compassion and generosity, a slow softening process. I don’t know if it was deliberate or if some inexorable conviction took hold of him and he simply released and rode its momentum all the way into shore.
Modernity constantly encroaches upon and threatens to consume decolonial thinking, diversity, extremity, classifying certain people as outlaws, certain thoughts as unsanctioned and presuming to define normality, centrism and the norms of authentic self-expression. This is modernity cannibalizing itself to sanitize culture for the sake of preserving its own ever-narrowing definition.
If there is an object of practice, it is to stop trying to be something, to unwrap the most subtle layers, progressively unmasking the operation and direction of the CEO, the games, identities, directives and assumed capacities of ego, until there is nothing left but living in the stream, free of all bardos. Non-meditation.
A quiet heart is a still place within a storm. It is where the voices of ego, judgement, instinctive self-preservation and grasping may penetrate, but to which an aggressive response is not automatic. A quiet heart is not immune to desire or greed, not dissociated from attachment, anger or sadness, confusion or grasping.
It seems perfectly logical to say we will all be confronted with a series of moments tightening the grip of death in which we will have to decide what we believe and what our conscious role shall be in attending and adapting to a process that is both in and out of our hands, that is entirely real and entirely illusory.
Being in an increasingly delicate and uncertain state for the past year for multiple reasons, it’s time to reassemble the elements of one’s known and unknown universe, the pieces scattered over a troubled and troubling landscape, to rediscover–or recover–one’s place in relationship to the ones close at hand and the ones far from view.