Spacious Solidarity Blog: Day 88
Last night I dreamt I was with a good friend on a conveyor belt moving slowly along a beach. The beach steadily became more and more steep until all we could do was jump into the water and hope we’d be able to climb back out.
There was no slow, steady easing in. No playful wading, no tentative paddling. It was literally a jump from sandy shore to fathomless depths.
I feel like that is what’s happening now. I don’t feel particularly ready for the revolution, although I could also say that my whole life has been preparing me for this moment.
Yet, I know I’ve still got so much more work to do.
Lately I’ve been feeling this sense of urgency around waking up. Not just my own awakening but everyone’s. That everyone needs to wake the fuck up.
And I’ve been thinking about how to help make waking up so accessible and so irresistible that no one will be able say no. That it will become the thing to do. And everyone will be doing it and doing it now.
I’d like everyone to jump right in, headfirst at the deep end. Because that’s what the world needs right now. A groundswell of enough people committed to seeing clearly how ignorance works and what’s possible when it ceases.
To realise fully the fruition of wisdom and compassion in every cell of their bodies.
Today I’m teaching about the klesas (root poisons/afflictive mental states) and how to liberate them through moment by moment, embodied awareness. I’m challenging my students to trust that awareness and love are enough.
Enough to unhook from the habits of thoughts and emotions that bind us in cycles of suffering and drop into the mystery of what’s here, right now. What can be felt in this body that is always here, always waiting for us to come into deep, unconditional relationship with it and all it has to reveal to us.
After talking a bit about this critical way of working with our minds, one of the retreatants asks if it’s about asking the klesa how it feels. Yes, exactly. When we’re angry or needy or confused we could simply ask, “how is this?”
A great Buddhist teacher once said that in order to know that a certain person doesn’t exist, first we have to know how they do.
It’s the same with the klesas. In fact, at the most fundamental level, they are what keep the whole self-construct at play. Intact. Holding the whole magic show up.
But when we can see clearly how they work, enchanting us with all their promises of safety, and comfort, and knowing, and being in control, and having it all figured out, and being right, and being best, then the whole apparatus starts falling apart. Or as my brother puts it, the wheels start falling off the simulation.
It’s scary, edging into the unknownness of that space where who we thought we were is so clearly insubstantial but what we truly are has yet to fully emerge. Most people live their whole lives avoiding that place.
Most people employ all sorts of coping mechanisms, tell themselves all sorts of stories, to stay well clear of it. And they end up hurting themselves and everyone around them in the process. And if they have any power whatsoever, they do so with impunity.
And in that avoidance the seeds of the klesas take root and grow. And it is from that avoidance that mental states that lead to racism and racist policies and practices and structures and systems proliferate.
But I don’t say all that. I stick with just trusting that if we do the work at our end, it will have an effect out there.
I’m getting ready though. Getting ready to say it all. Loudly and unapologetically and with a clarity that I feel so deep in my bones that even after I’m dead and gone and my bones have turned to ash, the tiny specks that are left of this body will sparkle in the midday sun like stars in a cloudless sky.