You want to be a better person. You want to be a good person. This desire explodes in the scorching fire of proliferating examples of clearly bad people. Who doesn’t want to cut down the forest of idiocy sprouting from President Areyoufuckingkiddingme on a daily basis? Who doesn’t think, when witnessing a racist doing their racist thing, I will embody the anti-racist thing to counter this turd on legs that feels emboldened by President Monsterbaby.
And so you answer push with pull, right with left, hate with love.
And you are lost. Read:
Are the great spiritual teachings really advocating that we fight evil because we are on the side of light, the side of peace? Are they telling us to fight against that other ‘undesirable’ side, the bad and the black? That is a big question. If there is wisdom in the sacred teachings, there should not be any war. As long as a person is involved with warfare, trying to defend or attack, then his action is not sacred; it is mundane, dualistic, a battlefield situation. One would not expect the great teachings to be as simple-minded as that, trying to be good, fighting the bad. Such would be the approach of the Hollywood western movie—even before you have seen the conclusion, you already know precisely that the ‘goodies’ will not be killed and the ‘baddies’ are going to get smashed. This approach is obviously simple-minded; but it is just this type of situation that we are creating in terms of ‘spiritual’ struggle, ‘spiritual’ achievement.
— Trungpa, Chogyam. Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism (p. 112). Shambhala. Kindle Edition. (Buy the book on my Kit store.)
Can you simply breathe while evil spreads? Would such removed gentleness somehow — mystically, mysteriously, through invisible connections — undo the savagery coursing through American society?
Photo via By I, MarcusObal, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link