lotusinthemud

there is a weight pressing down on the world...

There is a weight pressing down on the world, a grief that lingers in the bones of humanity. You feel it, don’t you? The tightening in your chest when you wake, the strange restlessness that no amount of movement can shake. The sense that something—everything—is unraveling, and you are caught in the pull of its undoing.

 

This is the time of troubles. The time our ancestors spoke of. The time when the old ways are forgotten, and the sickness of disconnection spreads like rot through the roots of the world. When the stories of the land are drowned beneath the hum of machines and the relentless noise of human minds that have forgotten how to listen.

 

But listen.

 

Even now, the earth is speaking. Even now, the rivers and forests hold wisdom that can mend the torn fabric of your being. Even now, there is a way through the darkness.

 

And it is not found in the mind.

 

When you cannot leave your head, when your mind is a storm that howls with worry and regret, surrender to your surroundings. Not in the way modern humans surrender—to distractions, to numbness, to the easy escape of screens and substances—but in the way a river surrenders to gravity, flowing into the embrace of the land.

 

Go outside.

 

Feel the wind on your skin. Let it remind you that breath is older than thought, and the world is far vaster than your worries. Walk until your footsteps match the rhythms of the land beneath you. Step with reverence. Step as though the earth is alive beneath you—because it is.

 

Lean against the rough bark of a tree and remember that this being has stood here for longer than any human sorrow. Press your palm to stone and know that it has witnessed ages rise and fall, and yet it remains steady and unchanged.

 

Drink from a running stream, and let it teach you the way water knows how to move around obstacles, how it does not resist but simply finds another way.

 

Breathe.

 

Not shallow, hurried breaths, but deep, belly-filling gulps of air, as though you are drinking in the sky itself. Let the wind enter you, sweeping away what no longer serves, clearing out the debris of despair, fear, and heaviness.

 

When the world of humans is too much, let the more-than-human world cradle you. The old ones knew this truth—our grandmothers who sang to the seeds, our grandfathers who knelt in the dirt, our ancestors who listened to the whispers of the wind and the silence of the stones.

 

They knew what we have forgotten:

That we are not alone.

That we were never meant to bear the weight of existence on our own, locked inside our own minds, severed from the great web of life.

 

The forest does not ask you to be anything but what you are. The river does not demand that you solve all the world’s problems before it will offer you its song. The earth does not require your perfection—only your presence.

 

Let yourself be held. Let yourself be reminded. Let yourself become small in the face of mountains, and vast in the embrace of the sky.

 

And when you return to the world of humans, carry the silence of the stones with you. Move like the river. Root like the trees. Let the wind move through you, so that nothing heavy lingers too long.

 

This is how we endure the time of troubles.

This is how we find our way back to ourselves.

This is how we remember what was never truly lost.

 

~ Angell Deer

Sacred Paths

"When the world feels heavy, let the land hold you" (2025 (c) Angell Deer)

but you can do something

From Roshi Joan Halifax:

 

I often think of the words of Daniel Berrigan, SJ: "One cannot level one's moral lance at every evil in the universe. There are just too many of them. But you can do something; and the difference between doing something and doing nothing is everything." One also can see the interconnectedness of the tree of suffering and the roots of greed, hatred, and delusion. Moral outrage as a chronic condition does little but disempower and alienate. In my experience, a dose of moral outrage can nourish action. For some people it is the horrendous genocide in Sudan and Gaza, others it is Trump, others it is the oil companies, others the oligarchs and AI... all share the same roots... and each tragedy must be reckoned with in its own terms. We all have our work cut out for us...

"pursuing ends that give our existence a meaning'

 

“Growing, ripening, aging, dying — the passing of time is predestined, inevitable.

 

There is only one solution if old age is not to be an absurd parody of our former life, and that is to go on pursuing ends that give our existence a meaning — devotion to individuals, to groups or to causes, social, political, intellectual or creative work… In old age we should wish still to have passions strong enough to prevent us turning in on ourselves. One’s life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation, compassion.”

 

~ Simone de Beauvoir 1908-1986

the misuse of language...

“Socrates said, “The misuse of language induces evil in the soul.” He wasn’t talking about grammar. To misuse language is to use it the way politicians and advertisers do, for profit, without taking responsibility for what the words mean. Language used as a means to get power or make money goes wrong: it lies. Language used as an end in itself, to sing a poem or tell a story, goes right, goes towards the truth. A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight. By using words well they strengthen their souls. Story-tellers and poets spend their lives learning that skill and art of using words well. And their words make the souls of their readers stronger, brighter, deeper.”

 

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

 

Interesting that this quotation popped up for me following this morning's discussion with Global Sangha, about the challenges of language, poetry, verbal and non-verbal communication, following our Sunday Pureland Buddhist Puja.

Journey Work

Dharmavidya David Brazier:

Modern people often think that they can control their feelings and moods independently of their lifestyle and life events. Commonly they attempt to do so by taking medicines and this often leads to a deterioration in health.

 

This attitude is a result of the medicalisation of psychology. The psyche (chitta) responds to experience. Different people do respond to similar experiences differently, but this is not a manifestation of illness, it is mostly a difference of character. There is a basal temperament that a person is born with and then there are the cumulative effects of how they deal with the miscellaneous circumstances that come along. We have a tendency to repeat. If I have been a coward once, I am likely to be a coward again. If I have been brave once, I am likely to be brave again. 

 

In life one is tested by events and the results of one's responses tend to be cumulative.. Things happen. When something happens one has to respond. This means that one exercises one’s will. Intentional action has consequences in the world and in the mind. In every moment of life something new is possible, but the drag of habit is strong. Rather than living out our creative possibilities we tend to go round in circles.

The State Of The World At The Start Of 2024

Dharmavidya David Brazier - a reflection:

 

We all, of course, hope for good things in the year to come, but I think that most will agree that the state of the world is currently on the slide. One surely has to start from the fact that we face a serious ecological problem. All the time it is creeping up on us. We all see the signs. We read about  extreme weather events and natural disasters, the fires, floods, desertification, droughts, melting ice, rising sea levels, loss of biodiversity, storms, pollution, extinctions and so on. One would think that faced with such a challenge people would pull together, cooperate and act decisively, but we all know that this is not happening - at least not to a degree likely to be effective. There are innumerable good projects, but they are too little in the face of the scale of the problem.

 

So what is happening. Well, again, I am not saying anything that is not obvious to everybody in pointing out that the world is currently becoming more and more divided and bogged down in conflict. Rather than uniting, we are dividing. At the end of the twentieth century some people were talking about "the end of history". The fall of the iron curtain had left Russia weak, humiliated and dismembered. Most countries welcomed the end of the Cold War and they reduced military spending. There was a sense of hope around. At that juncture the USA took advantage of the situation, increased its military spending and  positioned itself as the sole super-power. Were we at the beginning of the "American Century"?

 

We all know that things have shifted a bit since then. In particular we have seen the rise of China which looks likely to continue. Most commentators think that China poses the biggest challenge to US domination. Responding to this, the USA has tried hard to encircle China in the same way as it used to encircle Russia, but China keeps growing and increasing its military strength. It is nowhere near equal to the USA yet, but the gap narrows. In the first decade of this century we thought that this process would continue, but that it would be a long time before China caught up. Since then, however, two big developments have tipped the scales a bit faster than we were expecting.

 

Firstly, Ukraine. The USA since Clinton has kept pushing NATO's eastward expansion. Russia protested endlessly, but the West was so used to the idea that Russia was now a spent force that nobody listened. However, under Putin, Russia has regrouped and got back onto its feet. The breaking point came when it was proposed that Ukraine become part of NATO & of the EU. Russia could not stand by and let this happen. War broke out and continues. Initially the Ukrainians, with American backing, did much better than anybody expected, but the Russians have learnt how to fight this kind of war and the tables are turning. The war will probably go on for several more years and Ukraine will be devastated. The most significant effect, however, has been that it has driven Russia into an alliance with China. In terms of the primary world conflict this strengthens the Chinese side considerably. 

 

Secondly, Gaza. The USA, already committed to major expenditure to shore up Ukraine, is now suddenly also committed to another major conflict. How long will this one go on for? How much American resources will it drain away? There is plenty of reason to think that this conflict is not going to be over in a few weeks as was originally thought. Not only that, but the ferocity of the Israeli response is causing much disquiet all around the globe. This is costing America a lot in lost  goodwill. In the Global South (what we used to call The third World), sympathy is largely with the Palestinians. This is all very good news to China which has been courting support in those non-aligned countries for some time.

Seeing Wetiko: On Capitalism, Mind Viruses, and Antidotes for a World in Transition

By Alnoor Ladha, Martin Kirk

  

:: link

It’s delicate confronting these priests of the golden bull
They preach from the pulpit of the bottom line
Their minds rustle with million dollar bills
You say Silver burns a hole in your pocket
And Gold burns a hole in your soul
Well, uranium burns a hole in forever
It just gets out of control.
– Buffy Sainte-Marie, “The Priests of the Golden Bull”¹

What if we told you that humanity is being driven to the brink of extinction by an illness? That all the poverty, the climate devastation, the perpetual war, and consumption fetishism we see all around us have roots in a mass psychological infection? What if we went on to say that this infection is not just highly communicable but also self-replicating, according to the laws of cultural evolution, and that it remains so clandestine in our psyches that most hosts will, as a condition of their infected state, vehemently deny that they are infected? What if we then told you that this ‘mind virus’ can be described as a form of cannibalism. Yes, cannibalism. Not necessarily in the literal flesh-eating sense but rather the idea of consuming others – human and non-human – as a means of securing personal wealth and supremacy.

You may dismiss this line of thinking as New Age woo-woo or, worse, a leftist conspiracy theory. But this approach of viewing the transmission of ideas as a key determinant of the emergent reality is increasingly validated by various branches of science, including evolutionary theory, quantum physics, cognitive linguistics, and epigenetics.

The history of this infection is long, strange, and dark. But it leads to hope.

Viruses of the Mind

The New World fell not to a sword but to a meme.
– Daniel Quinn²

One of the most well-accepted scientific theories that helps explain the power of idea-spreading is memetics.

Memes are to culture what genes are to biology: the base unit of evolution. The term was originally coined by the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene. Dawkins writes, “I think that a new kind of replicator has recently emerged . . . It is still drifting clumsily about in its primeval soup, but already it is achieving evolutionary change at a rate which leaves the old gene panting far behind.” He goes on, “Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain, via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation.”³

meditation on a leaf

 

Meditation on a leaf  ~ Thich Nhat Hanh

 

I asked the leaf whether it was frightened because it was autumn and the other leaves were falling.  The leaf told me,

“No.  During the whole spring and summer I was completely alive. I worked hard to help nourish the tree, and now much of me is in the tree. I am not limited by this form. I am also the whole tree, and when I go back to the soil, I will continue to nourish the tree. So I don’t worry at all. As I leave this branch and float to the ground, I will wave to the tree and tell her, ‘I will see you again very soon.”

 

That day there was a wind blowing and, after a while, I saw the leaf leave the branch and float down to the soil, dancing joyfully, because as it floated it saw itself already there in the tree. It was so happy. I bowed my head, knowing that I have a lot to learn from the leaf.”

 

” … So please continue to look back and you will see that you have always been here. Let us look together and penetrate into the life of a leaf, so we may be one with the leaf. Let us penetrate and be one with the cloud or with the wave, to realize our own nature as water and be free from our fear. If we look very deeply, we will transcend birth and death.

 

Tomorrow, I will continue to be. But you will have to be very attentive to see me. I will be a flower, or a leaf. I will be in these forms and I will say hello to you. If you are attentive enough, you will recognize me, and you may greet me. I will be very happy.

on spiritual bypassing and relationship

:: by John Welwood

Spiritual bypassing is a term I coined to describe a process I saw happening in the Buddhist community I was in, and also in myself. Although most of us were sincerely trying to work on ourselves, I noticed a widespread tendency to use spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep or avoid facing unresolved emotional issues, psychological wounds, and unfinished developmental tasks.

When we are spiritually bypassing, we often use the goal of awakening or liberation to rationalize what I call premature transcendence: trying to rise above the raw and messy side of our humanness before we have fully faced and made peace with it. And then we tend to use absolute truth to disparage or dismiss relative human needs, feelings, psychological problems, relational difficulties, and developmental deficits. I see this as an “occupational hazard” of the spiritual path, in that spirituality does involve a vision of going beyond our current karmic situation.

Trying to move beyond our psychological and emotional issues by sidestepping them is dangerous. It sets up a debilitating split between the buddha and the human within us. And it leads to a conceptual, one-sided kind of spirituality where one pole of life is elevated at the expense of its opposite: Absolute truth is favored over relative truth, the impersonal over the personal, emptiness over form, transcendence over embodiment, and detachment over feeling. One might, for example, try to practice nonattachment by dismissing one’s need for love, but this only drives the need underground, so that it often becomes unconsciously acted out in covert and possibly harmful ways instead.

I’m interested in how spiritual bypassing plays out in relationships, where it often wreaks its worst havoc. If you were a yogi in a cave doing years of solo retreat, your psychological wounding might not show up so much because your focus would be entirely on your practice, in an environment that may not aggravate your relational wounds. It’s in relationships that our unresolved psychological issues tend to show up most intensely. That’s because psychological wounds are always relational — they form in and through our relationships with our early caretakers.

solitude

 

 

 

 

 

“Solitude is dangerous. It's very addictive. It becomes a habit after you realize how calm and peaceful it is. It's like you don't want to deal with people anymore because they drain your energy.”

~ Jim Carrey

 

“To practice solitude is to practice being in this singular moment, not caught in the past, not carried away by the future, and most of all not carried away by the crowd. You don’t have to go to the forest.”

~ Thich Nhat Hanh