Highlights
Things are changing very, very quickly now, and we know there’s going to be very, very difficult consequences, so we have to prepare ourselves. We have to strengthen ourselves. And we have to learn to withstand and be ready inwardly for shifts of the outer world that are gonna affect us internally when things aren’t as calm, or as stable, or as expected or predictable.
Ajahn Chah’s teaching: if your house burns down, don’t burn down with it. So that if things are going down, to maintain some inner sense of presence, inner strength. It’s the inner, it’s what we’re training for. And particularly, when we’re dislocated, we can be very activated in our trauma. When human beings are not trained, the mind’s not trained, and we feel fear, and we get pushed out of our hearts and our awareness into our old patterning in the mind, we can become very, very quickly aggressive, violent, fearful, panicky. These are not emotions that are gonna help. So how do we stay rooted in this?
We’ve got to actually, at that moment when something’s uncomfortable, learn to have a little more endurance, a little more strength that we can bring to that moment, a willingness to have inner sense of renunciation, to simplify. So these are things we can already start to do in our life. How can we simplify our situation? How can we put to one side what we don’t really need anymore physically, mentally, emotionally, psychically?
This is not the individual person, the hero journey of just conquering and doing it anymore on my own and sort of outstripping everyone else. This is coming from a very different energy, the same energy that the Kogi talk about, the same energy the Indigenous peoples talk about and demonstrated at a place like Standing Rock. This is the story where we work as a collective, we work in collaboration. We can only do this together.
Avalokitesvara is also the one that got shattered by the enormity of the task of liberating all beings, and if you remember in the story, was put back together by Amitabha Buddha. Whenever Avalokitesvara is being shattered, they call out for help. And in a way, that’s what’s happening to us at this cusp, this time we’re in. It’s like we’re being shattered, and we call for help. And it’s an appropriate response. You realize we’ve reached the limit in a certain way of what our conditioned mind can do.
The transcript of this talk can be found here.
