I can’t think of a concept I’m more grateful for having encountered than "conflicting emotions".
Passion and aggression … desire and loathing … lust and dread … the maelstrom of incoherent thoughts fluttering like time-worn prayer flags to fictitious gods. And at the base of it: mistaken conclusions coming up out of mere confusion and false beliefs.
—-
I’ve always felt a strong connection with bullies. Thinking this through any number of times I’ve usually come up with one strong reason for this: I have a mean streak that’s a kilometre long and a mile wide.
So when I authentically engage that complex I can almost taste the saliva that arises from that zeal … to hurt, to control and inflict pain … to spindle and reduce and degrade … so elemental.
So, for example, talking to black-garbed radicals late at night in the tear-gas drenched streets of Quebec City there was no gulf, there was no disconnect, there was no dissonance. I could share their contempt, their revulsion, their appetite for revenge and retaliation. But I didn’t need to join in their flawed thinking and their failed logic; no, actually, injuring police would not in any way further the project of emancipation … it would not in the slightest bit deter the neo-liberal agenda. Absent bourgeois sentimentality I could simply push through the childish tit for tat and invite those strong young people to a demonstration of real strength; integrity of purpose and purity of motive … praxis in action.
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When I try to imagine the young men of Afghanistan who are plotting against the Canadian soldiers to whom I feel so bonded, I have to see them as on one hand dispossessed/disenfranchised beyond what my fellow citizens could understand and on the other hand grounded by the existentials of being an old people and an old culture in the old land that has so long been theirs. I can imagine their smoldering indignation … but I can’t imagine how they would ever accept "solutions" from outside their own community.
I think I can empathize with the rebels and insurgents. But I can’t see what would move them to perceive outside interventions as anything other than yet more self-serving neo-colonialism, yet more patronizing manipulation, yet more high-minded cant. Until and unless there is actually justice under the law "the rule of law" will be seen as a wicked sham … the stuff than can be used to magnetized youth who’ve seen too many of their people suffer too much indignity for too long.
a mumbling stream of thoughts, cold and clear in the winter sun, tumbling over quiet stones …
Mangalam!
What, I can't edit my blog post?
That can't be so … surely not …
Greetings,
Thanks for the post..I love mumbling steams…*smiles
The Jedi stand firm on high ground. They watch from a distance.
They observe a dead Republic and a fleeting reality.
Very soon the Jedi will make themselves known to the Multi-verse.
And with them…comes a New Reality.
*only what you bring with you
*ps…edit your blog from your profile page.
Yaaa, something like that … such a magnificent depiction … such a dramatically tragic scene, the very best standing away in magnificent isolation. It's a gloriously mythic scene … amazing how fiction captures the undercurrents of a culture in its fatal spams.
I wonder where we'd be now if Nelson Mandela had stood away in his royal magnificence, or Gadhi … if Jesus had stood away and become a desert hermit … if Socrates had stood away, at home drinking alone.
Fortunately the truly wise don't inform themselves with such fantasies.
"The immature monk retreats to the security of mountain caves to practice;
the mature monk practices in the market square."
cheers
p.s. yaa, found it … not sure why "Edit Blog" in "Profile" seems so incoherent to me.
HeyHo the deed is done
and now I've got an orange "mangalam".
Incredibly written, the wit and depth samsara of it. Your intense poetic justice says all. "the maelstrom of incoherent thoughts fluttering like time-worn prayer flags to fictitious gods" And, purifying the klesas with klesas- also kilesa?…purifying the poison with poison?. How we grow, -practice of the wise with others. Thank you for this beautiful "mumblng stream of thoughts…"
Kilesa is new to me but from what you write, "purify poison with poison" I'm quite sure it's the same … from the Pali or Sanskrit.
The image I have in mind is how, if two sticks were rubbed together til flames arose they would both of them be consumed.
I often go back to that … letting emotions "self-lilberate" … if only we can restrain ourselves from being swept along with the fiction, sucked in by the mirage.
If those zealots could experience their anger and resentment and indignation without letting it spill over into the madness of violence … maybe that would be the stuff of discourse.
I'm sure Gandhi fully experienced the pain of appreciating needless suffering, arbitrary injustice …
kind of you to spend a moment
Namaste