Continuing from Part 1, I talk here more about the value of anger, and differentiating types of strong aversive emotion. Anger, rage, critique, and tone. What’s skillful or unskillful for individual or communal liberation? Self-protective nervous system responses, tone-policing, who gets to decide who speaks and how, and how a classical Buddhist approach might not actually be the same as …
Reevaluating anger and rage on a week where writing about rage, and especially women’s rage at injustice, is hitting threshold in my community. A simple promo post for this talk initiated a lovely, spread out conversation with folks on FB, including Rebecca Solnit, who has written eloquently (as always) on this. There’s a bunch of good links in the comment …
Like so many folks, I was troubled by the Senate hearings on Brett Kavanaugh’s fitness for the Supreme Court. Besides the disgusting display of male privilege and delusion the entire thing displayed, AND the heartbreakingly familiar ritual of powerful men completely dismissing a woman’s fully respectable testimony, there was the lying, plain and simple. And of course this is an …
Reflections on Right Speech After the Kavanaugh Hearings Read More »
Two talks on the complex current discourse known as “positionality”, which basically means that the social roles and conditioned state we experience the world through determine how and what we can perceive and know. I propose that the practice of inquiry into positionality is both a foundation for the insight into the emptiness of the sense of self (anattā), and …
Based in our recent exploration of the Diamond Sūtra and the ideal of the Bodhisattva, we begin a series of discussions of what I’ll call the Great Demons, the systemic ills we struggle with and which so clearly are conditions for global suffering right now. We’ll work with three core models for understanding systemic ill, all of which I’ll explain …
The Great Demons: Systemic trauma & social action Read More »
Coming out of a few weeks of conversation about foundational themes in the Buddhist systems called Mahāyāna, or “Great Vehicle,” we look at one of the most important and beloved texts of the Mahāyāna school known as the Perfection of Wisdom (Prajñāpāramitā), the Diamond Sutra (vajracchedikā sūtra). I’m reading through it slowly, in Red Pine’s ch’an/zen-oriented translation, and reflecting on some …
Vastness & Engagement: Exploring the Diamond Sutra Read More »
Part of a series on social justice issues, we look here at the profound virtue of tolerance, and how it can be developed through the practices of mettā and renunciation. Meditation I gave “basics” meditation instructions this evening:
For more resources (for white folks) on uprooting White Privilege, check out the White Awake curriculum developed in part by the folks at Insight Meditation Washington DC.
The Buddhist cosmological framework of the “6 Realms” can be read both as a map of where beings go from lifetime to lifetime, and/or a map of the psychological-emotional-relational states we pass through in the course of this life. Both are valuable. Here’s a discussion of the map in relation to the social justice work around privilege.
Talk: Responding to the tragedy in Orlando. (6.16.16)
May the forces of delusion
not take hold, nor
weaken my resolve.
(Sharing of Merit)