Reclaiming the Divine

It’s relatively unpopular to openly discuss one’s spiritual or religious beliefs these days; lest one be read as socially conservative, and out of sync with the repressive potential of some religious paradigms. Yet, I am convinced that reclaiming our shared divine inheritance has the potential to transform our lives, and power direly needed social change. At the most basic level, reclaiming the Divine in all of us requires drawing a clear distinction between exclusionary religions that are egocentric, and a spiritual model that is rooted in the principles of interconnectedness and no-self.

The former traditions, the most obvious being the Abrahamic religions, are hotbeds of conflict precisely because they have come to disavow the Divine power and goodness that is intrinsic to all beings and things in the universe. They form static identities with hard boundaries that compel the rest of us to reckon with the material effects of our imposed outsider status: We are the “Children of God,” the chosen few, and you are not. The source of their certitude, the veracity of their claim, is anchored in a transcendental figure with whom only they are acquainted, and from whom only they receive revelation. This is a convenient turn of events indeed. Others are thus made to live in the shadow of such an exclusive relationship.

By withholding Divinity, by claiming that some are “chosen” and others are damned, such traditions disavow the reality of the interconnectedness of all beings with Divine Being, and the inter-being of earthly beings with each other. If we can agree that Being as such is the Source, if we can agree that all that is comes from, and is infused with, the divine creativity of the Source, then no special relationship to the Source can really be claimed. Well, choseness can be claimed, and surely it is, but it cannot be proved to the satisfaction of all parties involved.

What we can be sure of is that we are all here, we all are, and must find a way to live together. Thinking “we” rather “me,” seeing “you” in “me,” moves against our atomistic existence and the Western insistence upon the rights bearing individual. We move toward a notion of collectivity, toward a notion of responsibility for others and for the environment in which we live. We inter-are with the earth, and with each other. Our ability to flourish is contingent upon the happiness and flourishing of all that lives in and around us. For example, to the extent that the earth lives, so do we. This should be obvious: without food we cannot live. If we ruin the environment that enables food to grow we perish along with it. I have no illusions about the arrogant pretensions of some to create synthetic food-stuffs (read: processed food) meant to replace the divine nutrients that sustain us. However, incidences of various cancers, immune diseases, arthritis, kidney disease and other ailments continue to be linked to synthetic foods and the chemicals used to bolster meat production and preserve vegetables and fruit. In short, the “replacements” and additives are killing life rather than sustaining it. (GMOs are equally problematic, but I’d digress to much if I got into it now.)

The spiritual model I have in mind does not propose a God that is anthropomorphic or separate from you and I. Quite the contrary. The “God” I have in mind (if it can be called that) is dispersed energetic light radiating through all things as all things, sowing the seed of Divinity in each of us as its Being exceeds our own. In reclaiming the Divine we re-member, that is, put back together, our awareness of the Divine inside of us.

Such remembrance has had enormous implications for how I move through the world, how I relate to other sentient beings, and how I engage with the natural environment. I no longer feel so separate and alienated from everything around me, and as such, I no longer regard human being as a form of being meant to instrumentalize everything to my own ends. My impulse is to think connection, integration, affinity, and cooperation. As a spiritual practice, my reclamation of the Divine is a living-belief system: it is alive, active, mutable and an open-ended way of being in my daily life. Being open to my own potential to touch the Divine in me has transformed my life from one of intense suffering, addiction, and fear to a life of joy, understanding, peacefulness and courage. I invite you to come along on the path toward the Divine, toward that which is majestic, formless, and noble in you. From our internal, personal transformations we can effect a change much grander, one that may bring a suffering world back to the basic goodness already within itself.

“We are all Oscar Grant”

I mourn not only the loss of Oscar Grant’s life,

I mourn the killing of love as it withers under the force of violence swelling up around us;

Violence that is at its core pervasive sadness, pain, suffering and a deep longing to be seen, loved and held as we hold our beloveds.

Yes, we are all Oscar Grant.

Oakland, California – January 6, 2009

It is said that violence begets more violence. As I read news reports of turbulent protests, police officers outfitted in full riot-gear, and a city on the brink of tearing itself apart, I am convinced that the old saying is true. The question I’d like to address here is why violence tends to trigger more of the same and, more importantly, what methods can we use, right now, to replace violence and aggression with love, compassion and understanding.

For those unfamiliar with the events leading to last night’s civil unrest, here’s the short version:

Following a confrontation on BART on January 1st (that’s, Bay Area Rapid Transit, our version of the subway), Oscar Grant and several of his friends were detained by BART police. Handcuffed and on his stomach, Oscar sustained a bullet wound to his back that ricocheted off the concrete and re-entered his torso. It was the second wound that killed him.

Last night, not far away from my loft in West Oakland, protesters took to the streets to voice their anger and outrage over Oscar Grant’s death. Some sat on turnstiles at the Fruitvale BART station where Oscar Grant died, while others marched in the streets. The street protests turned into attacks on police cars, private businesses and private property. The image above is of a car set ablaze in downtown Oakland. After smashing in the window of a small business one protester was quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle saying the owner of the business “…should be glad she just lost her business and not her life.”

The protester’s sentiment, the violence of the protests and the killing itself are all heart breaking. While I too feel Oscar Grant died unjustly, I also believe that the anger and frustration motivating the riotous social unrest that coursed through Oakland originates from the same place as the feelings and thoughts that led Johannes Mehserle to shoot an unarmed man in the back.

Now, I don’t claim to be a mind reader, nor do I claim to know exactly what Johannes Merserle was thinking in the moments leading up to Grant’s death, but I do know that fear, anxiety, resentment, agitation and dissociation lead us to consider ourselves wholly separate from other people. That feeling of separation generates an “us versus them” and a “me versus you” mentality, which disables compassion, kindness and love, all of which cultivate connection and kinship.

It seems to me that the kind of policing we have come to know in the United States is founded on this incorrect view, this sense of fundamental and qualitative difference between police officers and those who are policed. (Never mind the “protect and serve motto.” Police patrols in the U.S. were established to protect property, not people. In fact, the first patrols were slave patrols: men on horseback patrolling the countryside for runaway slaves. The continuity should not be lost on you.) Policing agencies of all sorts (and here I also have military forces in mind) are trained to search out “criminals/enemies” and prevent them from doing “harm” to the larger group. However, histories of racism, political repression and antipathy toward poor people, have created a situation in which policing is infected by these deep-rooted animosities, and leads police to presume they know (consciously or unconsciously) who the criminal/enemies are in advance. Those of us who grew up in, and or, currently live in, heavily surveilled neighborhoods know quite well that we are seen as pariahs, seen as embodied blight, or simply seen as “the problem.” We are not, in short, seen as human beings who feel the same joys and sorrows as those sent to watch over us.

This knowledge has effects.

It breaks hearts, spirits and the will to be anything other than what one is socially expected, or assumed, to be. Of course, this is not true for everyone, but it certainly helps to explain how masses of people, namely, the impoverished and people of color (which is often one and the same), come to tautologically confirm the popular and scholarly analyses of their so called pathological lifestyles. With little genuine love directed at these communities from those who are ostensibly nothing like them, it follows that little love is returned. Consider the confusion young children feel when they are the targets of anti-black racism, or, in another context, anti-Palestinian violence. How are they to process such hatred, such anger and violence when they have done nothing wrong; when they have done nothing besides exist? Consider the suffering one feels when being subjected to homophobic violence. In each case, we have seen that those who suffer from violence often respond in kind: “Well, I hate Israelis; or, I hate white people; or, straight people are homophobic assholes!” Often we think these responses are justified, but it seems to me that another response is possible and necessary.

Another response to systemic hatred and violence is necessary because riotous protests only increase hate and fear-based policing, which in turn triggers more outrage and social unrest. Last night shows us that social unrest is read as mass criminality to be stamped out with tear gas, rubber, then metal bullets, mass incarceration and wholesale repression.

We must all take the anger we feel and transform it into love for those who commit acts of violence. We must reconceive the source of violence so we see it as the outcome of unaddressed pain and suffering, and the outcome of a misconception about the interconnectedness between self and other.  In so doing, we can begin to understand that addressing the root pain is more effective than meeting violence with more violence. Indeed, we can begin to see that the “other” is not so different from ourselves.

We have the ability to do this right now. We can begin to see that what makes us human is far more unifying than the list of things that make us different kinds of humans. We can begin to do this with little things: the person who bumps into you during your commute; the person who cut you off on the highway; the person who was rude to you on the phone. In each case, the person on the other side of your pain is also suffering; suffering from worry (“I’m gonna be late to work!), from anxiety (“If I don’t pick up my kid in the next five minutes the daycare will charge me a $50 late fee.), or from frustration, (“I wish I had a better job.”) All of these feelings are ones we have felt before, perhaps under different circumstances, but they are not wholly foreign. In moments such as these we can be aware of the infraction and wish that the person be free from the suffering that led them to hurt us. Responding with loving-kindness may not stop them from hurting people completely, but it certainly plants the seed. More importantly, it helps you not escalate the immediate situation in which you find yourself.

We must begin to replace violence with love, and a willingness to listen and be open to that which we do not fully understand.The teachers of nonviolence like MLK, Ghandi, the Dalai Lama, and Thich Nhat Hanh, all understood this principle: violence cannot be eliminated by force, it has to be loved out of existence.

This is the lesson we should learn from the unfortunate death of Oscar Grant.

Hot Coals

Holding onto anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned.

-Buddha

My mother’s ex-husband has a daughter who is four years older than me. When we were younger, and our parents were married, she spent weekends at our place and would let me hang out with her and her friends. I looked up to them, developed a tiny crush on one of her friends, and generally played the role of the annoying, younger sister.

Meanwhile, her dad was a raging alcoholic who wreaked havoc on my life for seven years. His “episodes” conveniently happened when she was away (she lived with her mother) so she didn’t have the displeasure of seeing her father’s alter-ego, or my mother’s bloodied face.

The trauma was mine to bear alone.

I didn’t realize how much I resented her for missing out on all of this madness until many years later. I remember seeing her in my mid-twenties and wondering why she was talking to me as if nothing happened. I scowled, was short with her, and vowed to never speak to her again. In fact, everyone on her dad’s side of the family with whom I had a connection was summarily eliminated from my life. They were all guilty by association in my mind. They were just as bad as he because they did not intervene to save us, nor did they reprimand him for his bad behavior (as far as I knew). Their silence was complicity; tacit consent to domestic violence and the familial dysfunction that followed in the quietude of our daily lives.

Every now and then I’d receive emails from his daughter. She’d ask me out to dinner, ask about my family, and generally make a good faith effort to reconnect. In each instance I’d read the email then delete it as if it were spam; even the emails with pictures of her son who’s about six or seven years old now.

While reading through a client contract today she IM-ed me via Gmail to ask for a favor. My first response was, “you’ve got to be kidding me.” Then I leaned back in my chair, thought about all the favors, kindness and generosity that recently saved me from serious trouble.

I wondered what would happen if I ignored her request. I wondered what the cost would be to her if I pretended to not see her need. Clearly she needed help, and I was sure she’d ask someone else if she could. But here I was, available, and on the verge of withholding assistance because she failed to save me from trauma she couldn’t have prevented anyway.

Something in me changed when I decided to respond and call her mom to relay a message.

I think I let go.

I let go of the idea that she was responsible for her father’s behavior, and for my safety.

I let go of my habit of punishing her for something she did not do.

I let go of my need to be avenged by others, and my need for resolution in the wrong-doer’s sense of guilt.

I think I let go of the anger that was burning my hand as I waited to hurl it her way.

I recently read a passage in Thich Nhat Hahn’s essay, “The Six Paramitas” that probably planted the seed for the release I realized today. It reads thus:

To suppress our pain is not the teaching of inclusiveness. We have to receive it, embrace it, and transform it. The only way to do this is to make our heart big. We look deeply in order to understand and forgive. Otherwise we will be caught in anger and hatred, and think that we will feel better only after we punish the other person. Revenge is an unwholesome nutriment. The intention to help others is a wholesome nutriment.

And so it is. I feel better in the absence of revenge. I feel better because I’m no longer burning myself as I wait to throw a flame at anyone related to my mother’s ex-husband. As I look deeper into his behavior, it is clear to me that his actions were borne from his suffering. While this is not an excuse for hurting others, it is certainly a source of action that I understand.

My anger did not change the past and it didn’t enrich my present. All anger seems to do is truncate the potential of the future.

I’m Pointing At You, But Pointing At Me

One of my lojong cards reads: Don’t talk about injured limbs.

That’s it. Well, that’s it for the ‘slogan’ side. On the commentary side the card instructs us to avoid maligning others, particularly when they’re already down (eh-hem, which would be waiting in ambush), but to generally avoid talking shit about – and to – other people because it’s a jackass thing to do.

The card doesn’t say it’s a jackass thing to do, that’s my opinion. The teachings would say, much more eloquently and without the explicatives, that when we negatively assess others we’re really talking about ourselves.

How so, you ask?

Simple: there’s really only one of us here. If you buy this argument (which you should), then you’ll agree that there’s a bit of me in you and vice versa. Typically what we despise most in our adversaries and loved ones alike, are those parts of ourselves we’d rather not embrace, recognize or work on.

So, as I replay the argument my (ex?) girlfriend and I had on thanksgiving, knowing that she was really talking about herself makes me feel a bit better. She’s pointing the finger at me to get to herself. The same, of course, can be said of me.

This is the major insight. No one gets off the hook. We are both embattled; we’ve been bruised and abused for many years and in many ways. Often, when we feel assaulted (and I’m using the universal ‘we’ here), we are not only responding to the current infraction, but to a host of past hurts that are knowingly or unknowingly, rekindled by our current situation. The response I had to her was both about her and about so many other people. I like to think about this in terms of the palimpsest, or that writing pad we used to play with as kids that was carbon on the bottom with a film on the top. When I’d write or draw on it I could see the image I made, but when I lifted the film the image would disappear. Here’s the important part: though the image disappeared on the surface layer, the inscription itself remained just below the film.* Our lives are just like those pads. Everything makes an impression, even if we can’t see the lines on the surface.

Every now and then something triggers the old impressions, reminds us of something from the past or hurts us in a similar way. There were patterns in my relationship that fell into both of our old grooves, old patterns which were often ways of protecting ourselves against past assaults. The argument we had was just as much about my old hurts and her old hurts, as it was about the new ones we inflicted on each other. What we weren’t attentive to in the moment was that all of the finger pointing kept us from accounting for how our behavior toward each other revealed more about who we are, what we’ve been through, and where we need to grow, than it revealed about the other person. As I pointed out and screamed about her “injured limbs” I was really pointing at my own.

*For all my Freudian friends out there, you’ll remember Freud’s writing about the mystic writing pad. This is exactly what he had in mind.