Spacious Solidarity Blog: Day 97

I want to talk about power and influence. What it means to have it and what it means to wield it. The Black Lives Matter movement is about racial justice rooted in a radical shift in how we relate to one another, a radical shift in what power means and how it is used.

But I don’t want to just think and talk about power and influence. I want to feel into my own relationship to these words, the images, memories, sensations, and emotions they evoke in me.

I want to edge into this material from a place of experience and location. An understanding of my own personal experience and my own personal location in the world.

By location I mean where I am situated, body and mind, in the complex web of conditions that make up our current world order. As a queer woman/non-binary person of faith, a child of immigrants, an immigrant myself, raised upper-middle class, private school educated, bilingual, feminist, anti-racist, left-leaning, socialist.

And so many other locations I realise I can’t yet even name, impossible to put into words.

As I feel into this location what emerges is a sense of in-betweenness. I feel in between woman and non-binary, somedays feeling more like one than the other, somedays feeling neither.

I feel in between Chilean and American and British, so much of my conditioning deeply rooted in my Chilean heritage and ancestry, upbringing in American suburbs, early adulthood living and working in San Francisco, and currently living and working and practicing and sharing the dharma in a predominantly British context.

Sometimes I feel as though I’m floating above the ocean between all these places.

I feel in between an experience of a high degree of privilege based on my skin colour and socio-economic background and an experience of lack of privilege as a survivor of prejudice and discrimination based on my “difference” growing up in a bi-lingual, bi-cultural household and my identity as a lesbian.

Our world is deeply stratified, and further sub-stratified. I know some of the complexities of this being a queer woman/non-binary person, where even within the gay community I can still experience sexism and even among women I can still experience homophobia.

Add to that internalized oppression and you get an even more potent cocktail of sexist women and homophobic gay people. Even that sentence feels highly simplistic. It’s so much more complicated sometimes, hard to put one’s finger on.

The landscape of belonging can sometimes feel like walking on egg shells. As soon as you begin to feel like, “Yes, maybe this is a place I belong,” something happens that can make you question whether a group is really worth investing in.

You don’t want to get your heart broken.

And so it is with spiritual communities, they are not free of the dynamics of power and influence either.

What am I trying to say? What is the connection between location, identity and power?

As I ask myself that question an image comes to mind of the elderly white man who approached police in a Black Lives Matter protest in Buffalo, New York.

If you watch the video closely you’ll see something both remarkable and chilling. Just after the man falls to the ground and starts bleeding from the ears, one cop bends down towards him, presumably to check if he is ok.

Immediately another cop stops him. You can almost hear him saying, “leave it alone.” Together, they walk away.

Somehow, the first cop’s initial impulse to respond with care was easily squashed by the second cop. In order to understand how that’s possible, we have to understand how power works.

The thing that I am trying to say, and taking a real roundabout way of saying it, is that there are always unseen forces at play that are deeply invested in people remaining ignorant and compliant.

But these forces are not rogue energies, simply floating around in the atmosphere and every once in a while possessing a few bad apples and making bad things happen.

They only and ever exist and thrive in the human heart and work their way through the stratification we have made based on stories of separation and supremacy.

These forces thrive on those stories. And our belief in those stories adds fuel to the fire.

And once these forces are firmly rooted in the human heart, that person’s energy becomes so fully and completely co-opted by them that they then go on to enact those forces in the world in whatever way they can, including through the manipulation of others.

In today’s world, on a macro level of society as a whole and the micro level of “the group”, including religious organisations, there are puppet masters. People who are so invested in their own world view, access to power and privilege, that they will do whatever it takes to maintain that power.

They use all opportunities and channels, any and all positions of authority to influence others so that others will speak and act on their behalf and so that they don’t have to.

Lately I’ve been wondering, where are the billionaires? We don’t hear from them very often if at all. This is because they don’t have to speak to us directly.

They exert their control over the world through their brilliant puppet-mastery over those in positions of power - politicians, policy-makers, judges, CEOs, the media and through a coordinated and consistent campaign of manipulation.

But why would others allow themselves to be manipulated? Well, that goes back to the pecking order. As long as we live in a world where we are pitted against one another, where there is power and influence to be gained by dominating others and maintaining dominance over others, then we are manipulatable.

This is where the dharma becomes an incredible force for good in the world. Particularly the teachings on delusion and conceit. As long as we believe we are separate and as long as we think some people are better than others, we will continue to believe the narratives that reinforce those views.

To break the spell we have to be willing to examine everything about how we arrived in this moment. How we’ve been conditioned, our location, what comes up for us in our minds and just as importantly in our bodies, sensations, and emotions in response to the world.

In that examination we begin to interrupt the programme. The way we’ve been programmed. How we have all been programmed.

In that examination, as uncomfortable and confusing as it can be at times, is the promise of arriving at the wholeness we desperately long for but which continues to elude us.

Only then will we be able to write a new programme. One based on a skillful use of energy. One that does not require energy to be used to dominate and control others.

Only then will we be free.