Civil-ization? - LaMotte & Gély

The world is a field of conflicting opposites.  You
will never wake up one morning to discover that the
politicians made peace on earth, because peace is not
the nature of this world, or politicians,
[or its inhabitants.]
We come to stay for only a while...
We are strangers and pilgrims on the earth...

Fred LaMotte
excerpt from a post on Uradiance

[brackets mine]

~

"For as long as I can remember, I have believed in God, but
not the institutional God...  God is incomprehensible.  We
can't put Spirituality in a little capsule for consumption.
The way the world works doesn't change.  The big guy
crushes the little guy.  For two thousand years [or longer]
it hasn't changed.  There is no humanity in so-called
civilization."

Gabriel Gély

Gabriel was an artist who lived with the Inuit peoples of Canada
for 38 years.  He lived with them when they were living 
 a "traditional" lifestyle [their tradition].  And lived with
them during their transition to settlement lifestyles.
He died at age 96 in 2020 in Nova Scotia

Excerpt from an Interview with Rod MacIver
of Heron Dance

[brackets mine]

~

Personal Note:

It seems that history keeps repeating itself.
Our own "American" indigenous peoples were put on
reservations (settlements) after many of them were 
massacred by the white anglos, including women and children.
The white man believed they had a "manifest destiny" from God;
that they were entitled to the land, and so took it.

The same thing happened at The Alamo in Texas.
The Americans decided they wanted the land that belonged
to the Mexicans, and they took it.
The same in Ukraine, Putin wants an empire, 
and he's trying to take it...

White Supremacists want to kill Blacks and Jews -
in the name of God...

It seems that every civilization has its history of 
violence and injustices.
We are not immune...

"the enemy is us"
even with our
lofty "non-dual"
spiritual
words.

_/\_

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

The saying on one of my T's
(the picture on the T is much better!)

 

A Solemn Journey...

Photo by Martin Stranka

I feel deeply for a world in pain...
I know others of you do too...
A world bound by insanity and ignorance,
hatred and greed;
holding onto racist ideologies,
beliefs of empires of the past,
tattered by time and flamed by delusion.
Volatile violence erupting from darkened minds;
the new "prophets" of a civilization in denial
- uncivil -

burdening others with their detritus; like
robots blindly playing their part in the universal
tick-tock - already dead - lost to false beliefs -
blinded by their own nightmare,
wanting to inflict their pain on others...
Children killing children...
Survivors traumatized for life...

And we - the collective "we" - carry on-
business as usual...

Nothing changes...
And yet - Everything changes...

Life is a solemn journey for many...

Prayers for a broken world...

Mystic Meandering
May 15, 2022
revised May 24, 2022

~

Photo from No Mind's Land

 

 

Eradicating Violence? - J. Krishnamurti

...is it possible to eradicate violence in ourselves?

I am asking whether it is possible for a human being living
psychologically in any society to clear violence from himself
inwardly?  If it is, the very process will produce a different way

of living in this world.

Some of us, in order to rid ourselves of violence, have used a
concept, an ideal, called non-violence, and we think by having
an ideal of the opposite to violence, non-violence, we can get rid
of the fact, the actual - but we cannot.  We have had ideals
without number, all the sacred books are full of them, 
yet we are still violent - so why not deal with violence itself and
forget the word altogether?

If you want to understand the actual you must give your whole
attention, all your energy, to it.  That attention and energy are
distracted when you create a fictitious, ideal world.  So can you
completely banish the ideal?  The man who is really serious,
with the urge to find out what truth is, what love is, has no
concept at all.  He lives only what is.

To investigate the fact of our own anger you must pass no 
judgement on it, for the moment you conceive of its opposite
you condemn it and therefore you cannot see it as it is.  When
you say you dislike or hate someone, that is a fact, although
it sounds terrible.  If you look at it, go into it completely, it
ceases, but if you say, "I must not hate; I must have love in my
heart," then you are living in a hypocritical world with double
standards.

To live completely, fully, in the moment is to live with what is,
the actual, without any sense of condemnation or justification -

then you understand it so totally that you are finished with it.

When you see clearly the problem is solved.

J. Krishnamurti
from Freedom from the Known

with thanks to The Beauty We Love

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering
Bleeding Enso 
2011

~

Enso is a sacred symbol of Zen Buddhism meaning circle...
It is traditionally drawn using only one brush stroke as a 
meditative practice in letting go of the mind...  While at
first glance, the enso symbol appears no more than a 
misshapen circle, it symbolizes many things: the beauty
in imperfection, the art of letting go of expectations, the
circle of life, and connection.  The enso is a manifestation
of the artist at the moment of creation and the acceptance of
the innermost self.  The enso is said to leave the artist fully
exposed at that one particular moment in time.

Barbara Bash - Artist

(I have no idea what I was feeling at the time I created 
this enso on wax paper, thus the drips - the only one I ever did.)

 

 

Tattered Truth - Thomas Merton

We are all convinced that we desire the truth above all.
Nothing strange about this.  It is natural to man, an intelligent being,
to desire the truth. But actually, what we desire is not "the truth"
so much as "to be in the right."

To seek the pure truth for its own sake may be natural to us, but we
are not able to act always in this respect according to our nature.

What we seek is not the pure truth, but the partial truth that justifies
our prejudices, our limitations, our selfishness.  This is not "the truth."
It is only an argument strong enough to prove us "right."
And usually our desire to be right is correlative to our conviction that
somebody else (perhaps everybody else) is wrong.

Why do we want to prove them wrong?

Because we need them to be wrong.  For if they are wrong, 
and we are right, then our untruth becomes truth: our selfishness
becomes justice and virtue: our cruelty and lust cannot be fairly
condemned.

We can rest secure in the fiction we have determined to embrace as
"truth."  What we desire is not the truth, but rather that our lie
should be proved "right," and our iniquity be vindicated as "just."

No wonder we hate.  No wonder we are violent.  No wonder we
exhaust ourselves in preparing for war!

And in doing so, of course, we offer the "enemy" another reason 
to believe that he is right, that he must arm, that he must get ready
to destroy us.

Our own lie provides the foundation of truth on which he erects
his own lie, and the two lies together react to produce
hatred, murder, disaster.

Thomas Merton

from - Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander

With thanks to The Beauty We Love

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering
"Tattered Truth"

 

Free to BE - Fred LaMotte

The first discipline of non-violence is to honor every human
being as a unique soul-body, refusing to identify them by
race, gender, religion, or political party.

Yet just as much as right-wing movements, today's "progressive"
movement often promotes conflict and division by labeling
individual Persons by their group identity.  Some of us who
talk about "diversity" actually stifle it, because real diversity
is not to promote tribalism [or nationalism], but to recognize
the incomparable [unique] Personhood of individuals.
[As it also says in the Declaration of Independence.]

It is much easier to hate a category than a Person, whether
your animosity is toward Muslims or Christians, "black people",
or "white people", liberals or conservatives.

The beginning of world peace is to free each human soul-body
from racial, political, or religious abstractions.  Our incidental
association with a group is not who we really are.

I do not identify my Self [Eternal Being] as a color, as rich
or poor, capitalist or socialist, Republican or Democrat,
Christian or Pagan [or American].  I am neither "good" nor
"evil."  Those are just conceptual chains with which your mind
attempts to enthrall me.  But I am not your concept of me:
you are.

If you want to superimpose a group identity on me, that is your
act of violence against the singularity of my Personhood.  You
are free to label me, but I am also free...  I refuse to identify with
your label...

I Am who I Am...

Fred LaMotte
Uradiance
(from a 2018 post)

[brackets mine]

Photo from Stillness Speaks

~

This is a newspaper clipping from 1968 that I still have.
The same year that Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy
were assassinated...

~

We are truly Free when we recognize our Eternal Beingness
in each other, and, the diverseness of our individuality
that expresses that Beingness, and treat each other with
respect and compassion...

Conflict - David Skitt

A Commentary on Krishnamurti's POV on the world

Conflict and violence Krishnamurti sees as issues of basic concern...
But in his view history shows there has been a repeated failure
of education, science, politics and organized religion to end them.
What is needed in our time therefore is to own up to that failure,
to make a clean sweep of all these past, defective endeavors,
and to adopt an entirely new approach.  It is hard to imagine taking
a more radical position than this: Put aside everything you have
 learned from others, ever read, and start your own inquiry into
what life is about, what really matters.  Stand on your own two
feet.  Stop being a second-hand human being.

He proposes that this means looking at what is actually
happening in life and in our consciousness - 'what is, not what
should be' - without condemning or justifying, without resisting
or wanting to change it, holding it instead 'like a precious jewel.'
In doing so, he says, we are looking at human consciousness,
not just our own.

A constant source of human confusion, in Krishnamurti's view,
is our rooted tendency to make images of ourselves, others, and
of life and death that are put together by thought based on memory,
on past experiences or hearsay.  Instead of looking afresh at what is
new in the now, being open to the unknown, and unpredictable, we
'translate the present into the past.'  He sees such images are
inevitably conflictual because they are time-bound and therefore
partial and inadequate.  Yet we frequently act as though we are
programmed by them.

Krishnamurti maintains that we fail to make the most of our
mind and our life while subject to latent or manifest anger and fear.
Also, our sense of self is usually experienced as inherently [separate]
from another's, whereas all human beings share far more
psychologically than separates them.  Not to see that is a huge error
of perception, because our sense of shared humanity is lost. This
feeling of psychological [separateness] breeds a fear of isolation
that leads, among other things, to a spurious sense of safety in
numbers, which is then, unfortunately and divisively, carried to
excess in nationalism, political ideology, and religious [fanaticism].
These provide a false cohesion held together by fear that there
are those 'outside' who threaten us and are in some way not as fully
human as we are.

Seeing the problems in our personal life and in the world with a
mind free from the dictates of the past, from faith, belief,
stereotyping, and fantasy, is to see that what goes wrong in the
world outside reflects what goes wrong in one's own mind.  This
is the share of all men, of all humanity, unless we all change,
each one of us, change to something that is not projected by thought.
Where there is insight into that, Krishnamurti says, there is a wholly
different way of living, in which an awakened awareness of what
causes human suffering also brings with it greater sensitivity to the
beauty and immensity of life.

David Skitt

KFT.org

via - No Mind's Land

Violence - J. Krishnamurti

We are trying to understand violence as a fact,
not as an idea, as a fact which exists in the human being,
and the human being is myself.  And to go into the
problem I must be completely vulnerable, open, to it.
I must expose myself to myself - not necessarily
expose myself to you because you may not be interested -
but I must be in a state of mind that demands to see this thing
right to the end...

Now it must be obvious to me that I am a violent human being.
I have experienced violence in anger, violence in hatred, creating
enmity, violence in jealousy and so on - I have experienced it, I
have known it, and I say to myself 'I want to understand this whole
 problem, not just one fragment of it expressed in war, but this
aggression in man that also exists in animals, of which I am a part.

Violence is not merely killing another.  It is violence when we use
a sharp word, when we make a gesture to brush away a person, when
we obey because of fear.  So violence isn't merely organized butchery
in the name of God, in the name of society or country.  Violence is
much more subtle, much deeper...

When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a
European, or anything else, you are being violent.  Do you see why
it is violent?  Because you are separating yourself from the rest of
mankind.  When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality,
by tradition, it breeds violence.  So a man who is seeking to
understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion,
to any political party or system; he is concerned with the
total understanding of mankind.

The moment you protect a belief, an idea, a dogma, the thing that
you demand or that you hold, that very protection indicates anger.
So can you look at anger without any explanation or justification...
Can you look at anger completely objectively?

To go beyond violence I cannot suppress it, I cannot deny it...
I have to look at it.  I must become intimate with it.  You have
to learn how to look at anger...  You have to learn why you are not
objective, why you condemn or justify.  You have to learn that you
condemn and justify because it is part of the social structure you live
in, your conditioning as a German or an Indian or a Negro
 or an American or whatever you happen to have been born with,
 all the dulling of the mind that this conditioning results in.

To live completely, fully, in the moment is to live with what is,
including the anger...  The face of violence is not only outside
you but inside you...

J. Krishnamurti
excerpt from: Freedom from the Known

via - The Beauty We Love

~

All violence begins with disconnection [a sense of separation].
All outward violence begins as inner loneliness [a sense of not belonging].

[We must] break the code of disconnection...

Glenn Doyle Melton

From the article:
One Teacher's Brilliant Strategy to Stop Future School Shootings

Creating Enmity - J. Krishnamurti

Surely that thing which you fight you become.  If I am angry
and you meet me with anger what is the result?  More anger.
You have become that which I am.  If I am evil and you fight
me with evil means then you also become evil, however
righteous you may feel.  If I am brutal and you use brutal
methods to overcome me, then you become brutal like me.
And this we have done for thousands of years.  Surely there
is a different approach than to meet hate by hate.  If I use
violent methods to quell anger in myself then I am using
wrong means for a right end, and thereby the right end
ceases to be.  In this there is no understanding.  Anger is
to be understood; it is not to be overcome through violent
means.  Anger may be the result of many causes and
without comprehending them there is no escape from anger.

We have created the enemy, and becoming ourselves the enemy
in no way brings about an end to enmity.  We have to understand
the cause of our enmity and cease to feed it by our thought,
feeling, and action.  This is an arduous task demanding constant
self-awareness [and Self awareness] and intelligent pliability,
for what we are society is...  The enemy and the friend are
the outcome of our thought and action.  We are responsible for
creating enmity and so it is more important to be aware of our
own thought and action than to be concerned with the foe and
the friend, for right thinking puts an end to division.
Love transcends the friend and the enemy.

J. Krishnamurti
from: The Book of Life

via - The Beauty We Love

Taking Responsibility - Pema Chodron

All activities should be done with the intention of speaking
so that another person can hear you, rather than using words
that cause the barriers to go up and the ears to close.  Everything
you say can further  polarize the situation and convince you
[and others] of how separate you are.  On the other hand,
everything you say and do and think can support your desire
to communicate from the Heart, to move closer and
step out of this myth of isolation and separateness that
 we're all caught in.

...you don't have to get frozen in [language] of
loser or winner,
good guy or bad guy...

We have two alternatives.  Either we hold onto our fixed versions
of reality, or we begin to challenge them, and start dissolving
the barriers that we erect between ourselves and the world.

Pema Chodron
Buddhist Teacher
From: Comfortable with Uncertainty

photo - two pieces of bread that look like faces
facing each other...

~

How We Get There - Fred LaMotte

We wonder why everyone is so stressed.  But many of us would
not know who we are without conflict...

Democrat against Republican, socialist against capitalist,
woman vs man, black vs white, vegan vs omnivore,
the enlightened vs the ignorant...

Maybe the answer is never one side vs the other.  Maybe we could
rest the [conflicted] mind in the Heart. Maybe we could all go meet
in Rumi's field, under the stars, beyond the ideas of right and wrong.
How can we get there?
Listen to the Silence.

Fred LaMotte
Uradiance

~

With great grief for the hatred and violence
in this country...

To feel one's grief is being authentic, allowing
yourself to feel another's grief, the collective grief
of people heartbroken from the trauma of violence. It
softens you, opens the heart and gives you a different lens
with which to see others with a sense of connectedness
and compassion; dissolving the barriers that separate,
allowing a different vision than your own dearly held beliefs
and opinions, whether spiritual or political.  And in that
is a deepening sense of inner peace and equilibrium...

~

2nd photo - the Om (Aum) symbol is a sacred symbol of the
universal name of God (or Ultimate Reality),
Om (Aum) is the ever present "sound"/vibration of
 an already unified Universe, which expresses itself dualistically
in our experience here.
When you are in meditative Silence, listening, you are aware
of it, the Universal Om - the Hum of the Universe.
  It pervades even the chaos,
and every "sound" becomes the sound of OM/Aum singing
the song of the Universe...  Just listen...
One experiences the wholeness of Life,
despite what is happening...
At least that it my experience.

Out Beyond Polarities - Rumi & Babka

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing
there is a field.  I'll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in *that* grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase 'each other'
doesn't make any sense...

Rumi

The great Persian poet and Sufi Mystic, Rumi, speaks in
this poem of a field, a clearing, a place empty of divisiveness,
empty of opposition, empty of what we think is certain.

Violence reverberates throughout the world in strains so familiar
that we often are complacent when there is another headline.

We don't often consider how our collective guilt extends the cruelty
and division in the world.  We are guilty of the failure to be
compassionate, and the polarity between the secular and the sacred,

and the unwillingness to be spiritually curious about our shared
responsibility for the violence we see in the world, [in the form of]
poverty, racism, homophobia; the violence of certainty, which claims
the superiority of being 'right'; the violence of oppression,
of absolutes, of nationalism.

We must meet each other in the space where we are all beyond
right and wrong [beyond polarities]... surpassed in the simplicity
of tenderness, the attentive word, the awareness that we each live,
in every moment, exposed to death.

We must practice deliberate compassion.
Each of us deserves to be valued and held as we are,
where we are...

Susie Paulik Babka, PhD

Associate of Religious Studies

Excerpt from an article she wrote in the Huffington Post,
"Out Beyond Ideas: A Field of Empathy in Response to Violence"
about the violent death of her father and 4 others in a
cycling accident.

Zeitgeist...

In the first minutes of dawn,
at the edge of the dark of night,
I awake...

Inexplicable dread overtakes me...

.....a dream?

...or the zeitgeist of our time?

~

In the dark hours of time,
a "virus" slipped in;
a failing, narcissistic system;
a divisive ideology,
resurrected from former shadow
minds of tribal hatred,
attempting to invade and isolate
through the power of greed and
self-interest...

Turning us
against ourselves with its myopic lens,
demeaning and deriding
"other" cultures,
"other" races,
"other" religions
"other" peoples -
while pretending
to protect its own...

The "virus" imposes boundaries on a boundaryless world,
polarizing unity into fragments
that shatter,
creating the current paradigm
of Ignorance,
Paranoia,
Protectionism,
Isolationism,
Narcissism,
Nationalism,
Fear and Violence.

But those who know the beauty of true Light,
endure the false light,
knowing that the mindless "virus" cannot
shatter the pristine Light of a radiant Cosmos,
for it cannot be rent in two
by the darkness of ignorant minds
whose pretense and perniciousness
would even attempt to destroy
what cannot be destroyed:

The Eternal, Infinite Light and movement of
a Grand Cosmic Mystery
with its own Rhythms and Purposes
unknown
by
feeble, darkened minds;
by the ineptness of fake power.

Mystic Meandering
January 23, 2017

~

Zeitgeist - the defining spirit of the time, or culture.

~*~

Yet another mass school shooting Weds here in the US,
moving me to tears - children killing children once again;
and what humanity is doing to itself is heartbreaking...
The more my heart opens, the more I feel the emotional
pain of those who have been traumatized for life by
the shadow side of humanity.

May the Infinite Spirit of Love heal our
wounded hearts and help us to endure our
wounded society...

_/\_

Namaste

~

Photo - I don't remember what this is a picture of
but it seemed fitting...

The World's Insanity - Ivan Granger

Islamic extremists have certainly grabbed headlines in recent years, but the world also has its Christian extremists, Jewish extremists, Hindu extremists… as well as plenty of atheist and non-religious extremist groups. Extremism is not a problem of a particular religion; it is a disruption in the human psyche in general.

Religious extremism has very little to do with religion, if you think about it. It is partly a reflexive response to the intensely fragmenting nature of the modern world. And it is partly a reaction against unavoidable, sometimes unsettling encounters with different peoples and cultures and beliefs in our ever more integrated and multi-layered world. But mostly—mostly it is an act of desperation when the heart of true religion has been lost. People become violently obsessed with rules and traditions and texts only when they have lost the sense of what they really point to.

If you know where the Beloved lives, you are content, no need to argue with others over street names. Conflict only arises when you aren’t so certain you know the way; that’s when another person’s map threatens your certainty. Fundamentalism and extremism are an admission of that spiritual uncertainty. Absolutism is not an expression of faith; it is a symptom of the lack of faith. It is a symptom of the lack of true spiritual experience and knowledge.

The real long-term solution to the problem of violent religious extremism in the world is to reawaken that sweet, secret, sacred bliss within ourselves, to gently and generously share it with others, and to create environments nurturing to that continuing quest. The more we fill the world’s dry troughs with fresh water, the less likely it is that people will go insane with blind thirst.

Ivan Granger
Poetry Chaikhana

Written in 2010