Self Reflection in the Face of Overwhelming Injustices

To be in oneself in such a way that all agendas vanish.

This was my prevailing thought this morning while sitting quietly. Today out of a brief experience of absolute stillness, a view of reality emerged that made some things clearer to me as to who and what I am.

The world is built on the illusion that everything moves in a straight line. If life has taught me anything I know this to be untrue. There is a false narrative that exists where only credentials are to be respected. Only those who have obeyed the authoritarian structures of how knowledge is obtained are to be honored. Only those who played by the rules can get into the party.

My life was not one that has moved in a straight line. Currently, I am manager of a large garden in the Bronx. A space we have managed to transform into a fully functioning program that feeds, engages and heals the community around us. A community that has the effects of oppression and trauma passed down through generations of social abuse. Most of my white friends can not imagine what it is like to be the only white person anywhere close by and struggle to bring a level of empathy and presence in front of something that reeks of injustice. 

We do not know where our pundits will come from. They do not necessarily have to come from Yale or Harvard. Those are institutions are privileged. 

The statement I made at the beginning of this: To be in oneself in such a way that all agendas vanish. This means to have a moment where the stillness is all that I can wish for. The designs of the mind to try to solve life, disappear. There is only the wish to immerse oneself into this sea of vibration where only the breath exists.

All this has been experienced and understood without credentials. It is unhindered. It has no agenda. The only purpose is to be.

I am not sure there is a point to all this. It does not seem to serve anything other than to purge myself of my own insecurities. Insecurities given to me by a social construct that judges everything and seeks to put each one of us into a categorical box. And yet my life has been without boxes.

If you have not seen this video of Kimberly Jones speaking on aspects of the Black Lives Matters protests of the past week, you should avail yourself now. {https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sb9_qGOa9Go&fbclid=IwAR06GdS664R-VVHwmOXuCouH67c0fKoKOgaleTDpR15ivkmwdGkS2vat6FI&app=desktop]  I will not even try to paraphrase what she says. It must be heard. It is effective and moving.

We live in a system of castes. This inequity is not new. It has always existed as long as we have had so called civilizations. Kimberly Jones is speaking specifically on the shittly deal people of color have always gotten. A system of abuse, slavery, and extraction that has persisted for 450 years. To me this level of compartmentalizing people is a poison. It has made us sick. The overseers of this parade have come to think that it provides a level of comfort and progress for themselves, but in the process, they have polluted everything. Not only the environment, but our minds. Our minds are polluted from the false belief that if we fall in line with these variant structures, if we adhere, we are better than the others. I call bullshit on this.

What disturbs me most is that this poisonous thinking has penetrated every circle in life including places one would think they should not exist. When you hear Ms. Jones speak so passionately, and with such fury, you have to feel in your bones the level of injustice that escapes us while we are doing yoga in a quiet suburban studio or having a nice hike in our new Timberland boots in the local state park. 450 years the game has been rigged against people who were stolen, abused and murdered. Do we not connect the dots that as immigrants’ children, these events, these poisons found their way around the world and created other conditions of injustice. The systemic murder for Jews, gypsies, Armenians, muslims, kurds, indigenous peoples, etc. It is all connected. Slavery, holocausts and genocides are all born from the same evil seeds. It is this grain of thought that believes people should be systemically culled and placed into categories of varying degrees of usefulness to serve a small class of pirates.

We need to start thinking of the 1% as pirates because that is exactly what they are. Pirates raid, pillage,extract, rape, and murder. They are known to leave nothing but a burning pile behind them. Is this anything less than what the current ruling classes are being accused of? 

This kind of caste thinking is something Gurdjieff pointed out repeatedly. In order to develop conscience, this feature, which has been sewn deeply in all of us, needs to be eradicated.

"While these properties are being manifested in them, any relationship 'on an equal footing' with anybody at all is paralyzed.  And thanks to this, their inner sincere, as well as their outer habitual, relationships have become established in such a way, particularly in recent times, that it is now quite usual, if someone belongs to a caste considered higher than that of another, for impulses called 'haughtiness,' 'contempt,' 'condescension,' and so on to arise in him toward the other.  And if someone considers his own caste lower than that of another, there will unfailingly arise in him the impulses they call 'self-abasement,' 'false humility,' 'obsequiousness,' 'cringing,' and many others of the same sort, all of which together constantly deprive your favorites of what is called the 'awareness of one's own individuality,' which ought to be present in them also.

 "And so these properties, becoming inherent in their common presence, gradually caused your favorites to lose the habit of being sincere with others like themselves and finally to cease automatically to be capable of it, even with those belonging to their own caste.  —Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson, G.I. Gurdjieff

The question I wrestle with today is how this truth plays out in my own psyche. How have I been given over to self judgement based on a comparison to everything around me. A world without any real support systems. Everything is designed to foster competition. Every man for himself.

Black Lives Matter is presenting us with an enormous opportunity. One where we can begin to have reconciliation to the fact that this grand injustice is an indication of a disease that has penetrated everything. It is a long work to eject it from the culture. In order for there be a change, we need to have a recognition of how this injustice lives within US.

It invades deep into my personal meditations, and has changed everything down to a cellular level. Only my breath has the possibility of freedom. And this is where freedom begins. Inner liberation. We need to recognize that our sleep is in all things and until we begin to wake up, nothing will ever progress. The world will just continue to be shit, built on top of shit.

It is within this mountain of crap that I seek enlightenment.