Protest Hygiene
In today’s day of global protests, whether your karma is pulling you to participate physically or energetically, it’s easy to fall into the ghostly cultural momentum of “progress”. Solutionism, negativity bias, heroic narratives and a slew of other false delusions are the rampant puppeteers in our long, storied history of human hunger.
It may be that the other side of things is where wisdom lies unobstructed, yet seemingly invisible to the impaired vision of stress and binary duality.
The wisdom of caution, the wisdom of defeat, the wisdom of death are all valuable and yet, value is in the eye of the beholder.
In spring we are invited to recover. We are invited into recovery, into refuge.
In each relative moment there is a wave, and part of that wave is a restart. You can always find a restart, that is liberating and liberated from preference, reference and prediction.
This is not nihilistic or bypassing, this is also not hyper saturated co-dependency or fatalism.
This is just ordinary, human, sublime.
But each of us must enter into own defense grid, our own violences and habits, and release. Forgive the debts (but keep the wisdom) and start again.
Even as we protest and fight and work towards a better society.
In my younger days i would have powered through, dissociated, “been strong” and chalked up all the consequences of my misconduct on other things.
Sensitivity is only burdensome in a ghost society.
Real humanity is flexible, adaptive.
To fight for justice flexibly is not what we are hearing most times. We just seem to parrot ableist propaganda, because our capacity to imagine lifeways that aren’t competitive has been cooked by generations of ghosts.
As zen master dogen so poetically said “take the backwards step, turn the light inwards.”
If we combine this nondual, natural approach with critical pedagogy, we can exorcise ghosts and demons as easily as sneezing.
But we have to break the heart.
Open.
Notice the phrase is break open, not break closed.
The heart is not a fist. Not a shield or a weapon. It is always the user that weaponizes a tool, a relationship. It is in our primate animal nature to pick up a rock and know we can kill with it. Wisdom, Dream, sees all the dreams of the rock at once, without preference.
Can you pick up the backwards step?
Are you willing to do the much harder and unrewarded backwards step?
Are you able to see all its dreams at once?