Highlights
So when I regard the other as not unfathomable subject, unknowable, dimensioned, but flat and object, that move right there, as soon as I’ve done that, it opens up the possibility for domination. If it’s an object I don’t have to be in this, maybe time consuming, go slow, I might not get what I want kind of mode. I might lose control, all sorts of things might happen. It’s scarier but I’m in relationship.
There’s something really deeply beautiful by “dance with the one that brung you,” by using your own sense of the sacred and and your own sense of the cosmos, that you are sensing what is calling you and to follow that. Let that not be something that other people’s only know.
It’s worth trying because of what it renders in me, because through the experiment and moving through the awkwardness, I actually think that we do discover more comfort with the process. I think this is where Buddhism can be so incredibly helpful as a guard against arrogance and a guard against reifying.
Can I come out of the closet about the ways that I perceive the world in a way that, I’m not trying to convince anybody but I’m just not hiding it, and that itself is setting up different conditions for others … And so, we don’t know how going with the stream, we can pretty much guarantee that the stream will continue like it does. But if we go against the stream to use a Buddhist analogy, if we stand against the stream of habit and the need to belong and fit in and be considered normal and acceptable at this party, if we’re just true to that, we are setting about conditions for others to do the same. And a different world really is possible.
There was a whole debate about can fish feel. Why was it so important to some people that fish couldn’t feel? Before judging it, let’s just be really interested that at some level we can identify with that, we can recognize the dilemma that it presents because if fish can feel I have to change my relationship to fish if I am used to exploiting and using and and and regarding them as if they don’t feel. So again and again, whether it’s other humans or whether it’s the ecological other or even a river, the necessary precursor to domination is to take subject and make object, to reduce to flatten …. we don’t arrive with those perceptions on our own. Those are themselves conditioned. If we’re born into a dominating culture, which many are not, but if we are, of course, we take on that conditioning. We can’t not take on that conditioning. It’s essential that we belong in order to survive. And so we take it on and then as we were saying before, we contribute to it, further it. We are both conditioned by it and then we, without an intervention of some kind, further its power, its claim and that this is the way things are. This is objective reality. The normalizing of that dominating way of looking is a way to understand our current exploitive culture.
