What is Loving Kindness?

Buddhists teach that everyone suffers. Even those who appear to be cold behind their sense of wealth and superiority. Even those who work in offices where they are expected to police the law. Even those who are hired to torture prisoners.

Given power in civil society is an added stress and loving kindness makes it a kind of torture in itself.  For example, a surgeon or medical doctor learns what causes pain in his or her patients. A prison guard is expected to keep people in their cages. A drug dealer sells a different kind of prison to his customers. Strategists plan the destruction and killing of people they haven't met.

When you look at it deeply, politics and business demands a separation from emotion, sympathy, compassion — for the sake of profit. We call it rationality. Winning the profit margin means selfishly planning your days around meeting your goal, getting more, convincing others to give you what you want, paying attention to how you look, what you wear, how you sound and smell. 

According to brain development a crocodile doesn't have the capacity to feel pity towards the food it eats as it rips the flesh of its meal. But humans are born with the capacity to consider the pain of a fish with a hook through its face. 

Empathy comes early in the life of a human unless it is shut out — consciously or unconsciously. Any animal that gives birth must care for its young by caring what happens to it and is given the "gift of stress" along with brain development.

In civilization, social practices either nurture the awareness of empathy or cut it off. A society run by those who have no connection to caring for others, tends to design its business to separate us from our natural empathic brain signals. 

Big business (not small proprietor owned storefronts), including politics, is run mostly by those who have succeeded or who never developed the capacity to feel connection to another, to feel their pain, or to observe the face of grief.  They are called psychopaths or sociopaths. Their brains are wired to bypass concerns or feelings for others.

What pain does it cause a CEO to cut thousands of jobs in the country they live, in order to plan more profit, and to keep doing it because it's his or her job to do that? When does the signalling for success get turned off?

Examples of dead fascists like Stalin and Hitler reveal millions of deaths are not enough to satisfy. Slave owners willingly organized public displays of brutality to make their point.

Business demands that its practitioners cut off their senses if the only thing that registers, the only feedback, is a number on the bottom line. Pressure wipes out whatever your brain measures in order to take it back to the reptile. 

You cannot see or feel what you're doing to the planet, to your children, to your pets, or even your property — you must consistently keep your mind occupied on that fraction of who you are in order to play the game. Act faster, be more cruel, more alienated, lonely and ultimately swallow that learned contempt on yourself as you do to all life.

At what point would you feel the loving kindness you once possessed? How far back would you have to go to call on that? 

Loving kindness may be an ethic discussed in various religions or beliefs, but it's part of human capacity and could save our lives.

Doctrine of Beauty

Because there is so much news of cruelty and violence in our world and because the spirit of us all can be diminished by hearing and reading about this, I have decided to document beauty wherever I find it.

You may not agree with my point of view and that is fine. To read this and even argue with it, is at least a crack in the wall of darkness that dominates social and corporate funded media, and our public conversations are influenced by that.

Below are values I cling to as I ponder how to bring conversations back to the community and family level. Beauty, in my opinion, is whatever has not been corrupted by greed or hate.  It  inspires and feeds my spirit.

1. Self Esteem.  What is self esteem and where does it come from? Is it winning races, contests, being top of the class or is it a recognition that you are capable, lovable and you belong here.

2. Reverence for Life. Is it gratitude for nature's diversity? Is it putting the well being of our community before our own self-interest or that your self-interest is bound by a reverence for life?

3. Wealth.  What is wealth? I think it is a collection of things which allow me the comfort and security to live without fear for myself and my loved ones. A home, access to water, a bathroom, a bed, a kitchen to prepare my own meals, a pension plan, medical coverage, access to medication, a basic income, respect from my employer, hope for the future, and time in nature.

4. Mental Health.  Confidence in getting through the day, coping with challenges, admitting I'm wrong when I've made a mistake, crying when I need to cry, and laughing when I need to laugh.  Being able to focus on a task, not allowing negative messaging to undermine my contributions, having reasonable expectations and compassion for myself and others.

5. Social Health. When I feel safe to be myself and know we will not be publicly humiliated, a place that values creativity not cruelty.

6. Doctrine of Beauty.  So this is not about the manufactured beauty shown in magazines and advertising, this is the beauty of moments, of a lived life breathing within and around us. To notice what is unique and what is familiar. It is the legacy of a planet that is cherished. We are responsible for maintaining its health and to heal what is broken and sick.  This is about the power of nurture rather than control.

Four Lessons on how to Change the World

Ilona Szabó de Carvalho left her career in banking to lead the Igarapé Institute in Rio de Janeiro, which focuses on security and development policy. In her TED talk she gives us four lessons she learned while tackling the violence around issues of drugs and guns in Brazil.  Carvalho's experience contains an important message for us all – we can challenge big issues and achieve change.

The four lessons she learned in the process are: 1. change the narrative, 2. never underestimate your opponents, 3. use data to drive your arguments, 4. bring together odd bedfellows

What would this look like for those of us who want to change the current political narrative? Below are the thoughts I have wrestled with.

1. change the narrative

We are not nations or religions competing for the most of what each of us want. We are sentient beings trying to survive the cumulative effects of a global hierarchy that enables mass starvation and violence to sustain the power of a few.

The conflict is not between right-wing and left-wing, capitalism and socialism, Christianity and Islam, the conflict is between power and life.

The Operating System has moved beyond tribal competition for territory and is now in the stage where power is valued only as a wholly separate construct from human nature. This requires a structure that upholds, defends and worships the non-human measures of  our culture such as money, technology, numbers, formulas, ideologies, celebrity (not the person but the image), and ideas.  Which also requires a consistent doctrine.

The doctrine tells us that life is not valued because the world is over-populated. Life is a threat to order and must be managed, categorized, brainwashed, dehumanized and reduced through organized war, disease, starvation and addiction. Authorities create fear, insecurity and misery, and make it appear that we ourselves have chosen the conditions we live under.

Hierarchical power requires a rationality that is free of sentiment,  compassion or reverence for life. Any progress that has been made in the last two hundred years is that sophistication and application of purified power and its increasing contempt for anything that breathes. Entertainments must be pornographic to uphold this regime. Food must be genetically modified to its meanest elements. Civil society, art, community must be destroyed for these are the elements of power from within and are difficult to manage. Community is reduced to a shopping mall restricting human interaction to the impersonal , where all other human emotions such as compassion and empathy become a  means to the end of a business transaction. Here we become willing consumers of our own self-hate.

Corporations are the controllers, government are the police and media are the instructors who must continually promote the notion that life in itself has no value, and the more things we possess the more contempt we feel for earth's unpredictable and uncontrollable forces. Social intercourse celebrates and promotes consumerism through the adoration of new gadgets, rare and expensive foods, new trends and sophisticated technology. The household that possesses the most up to date fashionable stuff can congratulate itself as the winner.

Our darkest nights understand that once a weapon of mass destruction is invented that will kill most of the people without destroying the elite playgrounds on earth, it will be used. But it won't solve the problems humanity faces because all, including the elite, are oppressed by the doctrine that power must eat life.

This is the narrative of post-modern literature - Wells' Time Machine, Orwell's 1984, Monty Python, Atwood's Oryx and Crake, and other classics that have warned us.

This is a narrative that makes sense of all that has happened socially and politically. It's not the only narrative but it is one that puts us in the centre of the problem.

2. never underestimate your opponents

First we need to identify who our opponents are. Are they the one-percent, the corporations, the governments, the media, the ideologies? Are they the sum of our apathy, greed and ignorance? Is it our reluctance to examine life?

Many empires have come and gone throughout history so we can’t pin the blame on a singular tribe or a political system. It has been an endless return of revolution and corruption.  That's the force of power-over.

Is the opponent our own ego which separates us from the cause and effects of our habits? Is it the way we try to hide from our inherent malevolence, or inability to see ourselves as the earth sees us? Is it the ruling elite who manipulate us? Is it always the other who is incapable of self governance?

What if we were able to reclaim our human family, to embrace and acknowledge our power from within, through dialogue and reflection. What if we listed all the tricks we use to deny our involvement and responsibility in the evolution and care of this planet? What if we nurtured our world and loved nature? What if the imagination could bridge the small things we can do with the large movements for change?

Our opponent is really our own ignorance on how power is used against us, and how easily we slip into the narrative provided by our oppressors. As we have learned to write, read, decipher symbols, understand metaphors, we can also learn how to recognize power in all its forms.

3. use data to drive your arguments

You can find data in many places. Mainstream media sometimes includes it but other news sources and websites developed by concerned citizens are available.

The Gun Violence Archive; Amnesty International; Humanist and Liberal Religion that celebrates the human experience through diversity; news sites that defend social justice; those who acknowledge the complexity of society and its problems at the cost of making their message less slogan-ready; thought leaders who seek wisdom and do not rely on power-over to influence others; poetry; statistics.  And our own level gaze.

4. bring together odd bedfellows

What and where are the odd bedfellows of this issue? Members of the Gun Club, members of Tax Payers Federation, workers within community services, managers of the CBC, the homeless, the working poor, MP's within all political parties, police chiefs, scientists, environmentalists, artists, writers, philosophers and deans of the academy – all who are willing to talk and listen.

Bring together different narratives of how the world works, different personalities from different faith groups (including atheists and nihilists). Make it clear that their views are important and that everyone has a voice, but the point of the voice is not to be right, but to open doors. 

The future, if there is to be one, must embrace and hold up the reverence and dignity of all.

Mental Health of a Species

Having been conditioned to believe that great empires are measured by the number of other nations it has conquered, and great leaders are equal to the destruction they leave in their wake, we witness the many victims of those values today.  They come in the form of six rapists mutilating a young woman on a bus in Delhi, a young man entering an elementary school in Newtown with an assault weapon and killing twenty unarmed children along with six adults, and the NRA proposing that all schools should have armed guards rather than gun controls.

Is it enough to say that those who seek power, whether it be in business, government or media, are psychopaths who have wrought this dystopia upon the land where the unnamed must duck and sweat in the hope of surviving? Or have we all been made sick and sorry creatures? Is there anything healthy that can come of us if our minds have been invaded by this power imperative?

As long as 40 percent of those who live in "democratic" nations believe they shall be spared by siding with the biggest bullies, they will never know who they are and who they can be through their own potential. As long as they feel part of the club through race, gender or religious identity, the sickness will become more severe and difficult to treat.

How can we say that killing is caused by the dissociated ego when the popularity of Presidents and Prime Ministers supposedly increases (as revealed through dubious polls) when they send their nations to war and organize the killing of millions? How can we be afraid of someone diagnosed with bipolar disorder when we blindly follow ideologies that come from the planning departments of arms industries? How can we expect our children to grow up healthy, when we think we build our economy by purchasing stuff that will be thrown out within a few years, yet dare not invest in the future of people?

Fortunately, many of our young minds have diagnosed the sickness, as have the marginalized who have been abused by it.  This is most tragically illustrated by the protest of Chief Theresa Spence.  She is saying to Canadians and Canada ~ here is your system: here is how life means so little to the structures of power, that your prime minister cannot spare a few minutes to stop the dying of a woman. See how quickly the media and its professional trolls, will dismiss her as manipulative. See how many people will blindly deny this has anything to do with them.

See.  Look.  Hear.  Feel.  This is your home.  This is your planet with its rivers and mountains. This is your family. It calls to you again and again, day after day, with its brave attempt to heal itself by reclaiming the power of life as its own.