Decolonizing Activism; Deactivating Colonialism

Utopia

http://www.sbs.com.au/ondemand/video/259748419676/Utopia

Utopia is a documentary by John Pilger exposing how Aboriginal Australians have been targeted for genocide, and the hideous, ongoing machinations of racist, genocidal colonisation in this country.

"In other Western countries, indigenous people still suffer. But unlike Australia, historical treaties have been signed that begin to recognise their right to self-determination. Australia is the only developed country repeatedly condemned for the abuse of its indigenous people. Now and then, Australian governments talk of Reconciliation, an acceptable idea that hasn't built decent homes or got rid of blindness in children, and malnutrition and Dickensian diseases. It hasn't stopped young people suiciding and it hasn't stopped a land grab that began more than two centuries ago. 

Like Apartheid South Africa, reconciliation is not possible without justice, and this will only happen when the first Australians are offered a genuine treaty that shares this rich country, its land, its resources and opportunities. The benefit then will be mutual. But until we give back their nationhood, we can never claim our own."

- John Pilger, speaking to all non-indigenous people who occupy the stolen lands of Australia

reconnecting with Buddhist social justice

I am not other than the system. This is not to suggest that I am synonymous with the system, only that I am not other than it. Thus, to change myself is not other than to change the system.
Even as changing myself is not synonymous with nor sufficient to changing the system, it is also not other than these.

The system is expressed through my being, my actions...
The system is not other than the limits of what is actionable, not other than these actions and the fruits of these actions.

As I moderate my own expressions, I can highlight or modify aspects of the system that are being so expressed. As I challenge my own limitations, so are the system's limitations also challenged.

If the system privileges greed, then by uprooting greed in my own being and behaviour, I uproot some of the greed that the system demands.

There is now a gap.

What are my alternatives? What are the system's alternatives?

If I change, whether I will it or not, if change is the only certainty,
then the system will change, inevitably.

My role is mostly to seed,
till,
water,
rest.

Solidarity Politics

A reflection on two under-fleshed out politics of solidarity:
1. Cognitive Ableism & Neurotypicality
2. Ageism & Adultism

The former can manifest as:
"If you haven't read this essay, you're not in the know, you're not smart enough, you're not progressive enough, you're just not good enough!"
"If you don't speak the right language, if you misspell words, if you don't know how to Google, you're just lazy and uneducated!"

The latter can manifest as:
Endless bickering, macho outwitting, an inattention to the importance of gradual development of inclusion and radicalisation of individuals and communities, spaces which are primarily folks in our 20s/30s, and with little room for the wisdom of elders, or accusations of "selling out" (and the attendant ostracism) when people account for the shifting priorities that come with aging within an imperfect and oppressive system

They both manifest as:
A stigma around imperfection, impatience, characterisations of people as "backward" or "retarded" or "living in the past" for having problematic politics, and a rejection of relationship in the service of abstract idealism.

In brief, I relate to the above as a part of what I call the concerns of "developmental justice", which underlie many of the issues that I see plaguing (identity) politics in general, and of the Left in particular.

on Vocation

What is my life's work?

This word: Vocation

According to wikipedia:
"A vocation (Latin vocātiō - a call, summons) is an occupation to which a person is specially drawn or for which he or she is suited, trained, or qualified. Though now often used in non-religious contexts, the meanings of the term originated in Christianity."

I am expressing this curiousity...

What is my life's work? What "occupation" am I drawn to for which I am (uniquely?) suited, trained or qualified?

To what extent am I already doing my life's work? To what extent am I already being financially compensated for what I am doing? To what extent is financial compensation important as part of the definition of "legitimate" vocation?

If my material needs are being met, then what else is there left? To what extent are concerns about an abstract future in which I am completely and utterly reliant on resources acquired and amassed from my own labour playing a part in how I think of work and vocation?

Here are some...:

Vocation is about friendship, justice, creativity, healing woundedness, catalysing knowledges which begin from wholeness (i.e. "I was / We were never really wounded")

Vocation is about...

completing unfinished business, with grace, mindful attention, flexibility, patience...

The unfinished business of the ills unleashed by colonialism, capitalism

Vocation is meditation & washing dishes

Vocation is every moment as "free time", time freely used to do whatever it is that I am doing, not doing whatever it is that I am not doing, being whoever it is I am being, and not being whoever it is that I am not being.

Vocation is in education, exploration, learning

Vocation is on unlearning, keeping still

Vocation is also all the icky stuff:

Impatience, annoyance, anger, betrayals, disappointments

Vocation is the work in integrating all these 

(and seeing, perhaps, how they are already perfect articulations of that which is already integrated).

Vocation, my life's work... Is vocation a luxury?

I am a religious man, sometimes... Religious, intentionally, triggering revolt from my Rational-Atheist self that decries New Age nonsense (and is sometimes femme-phobic, averse to colour, desperately fearful of mistake, conflating all error with utter failure)


I want to start a Business...
My Business is already started! I am in the middle of my daily business, it is none of your business, it is All of your business.

My business is partially allowing deepening, broadening awareness of all the business of the world, and about knowing my capacities and limitations, knowing what is possible and not-yet possible, seeing the arbitrariness of these impositions, and then choosing to act anyway. Or not act. Or assisting others in acting.


So here:

Vocation is:
Availability as an assistant.
A catalyst.

Balancing the fine tipping-point line between innovation and tradition.
Assisting others in their already-excellent work.

Vocation is:
Pouring tea,
putting labels on envelopes,
calling a friend, saying
"I don't know, what do you think?"

(Buddhist) Meditation & Social Justice

The Buddhist Story

In the need to qualify the heading of this piece, I first admit that this is a response to the strange tendency toward a particular type of fundamentalism (partially a type of stereotyping), when we consider the extreme limitations of any group of people.

This piece is a response to a stereotypical, often middle class community expression of Buddhist meditation. I think of people who may be sitting serenely and calm, but who are simultaneously dis-engaged from the vissicitudes of life. In more extreme cases, communities of Buddhist meditators may espouse ideas which suggest the compulsive use of meditation as an excuse to deny the validity of political and social engagement entirely, citing as our gurus and teachers famous recluses, hermits, and renunciates such as Bodhidharma (the alleged, and mythical fore-patriarch of Zen) as our emblems of "correct" personhood.

Of course, Shakyamuni Buddha himself, in the totality of his personhood, was both "of the world" (as a prince) as well as a "renunciant" (when he left his palace walls to become a wandering ascetic)... At the same time, the hagiography of the Buddha always includes the fact of his disillusionment with both the extremism of mindless social conformity, as well as of mindless, self-mortifying asceticism (that, indeed, both are not so much "opposites" as mirrors of one another).

Nearing death from a harsh, self-imposed discipline of starvation and meditation, it was only after he accepted the sweet milk pudding of the village girl Sujata that he began his final journey to Awakening under the Bodhi tree.

And of course, the story does not end there:
Buddha Shakyamuni "returns" to the world, and famously begins all of the discourses which make up the classical and canonical stories of the Buddha, in service to the world.



The Limitations of the Buddhist Story

At the same time, what the Buddha was doing, in terms of assisting others in alleviating their suffering, does not exactly fit the idea of social justice as we may understand it coming from a post-Marxist tradition of rooting our awareness of suffering in material systems of extreme economic inequality. It is not enough to simply give a man a fish (as the Buddha himself would have done), nor even to teach the man to fish (as a classical well-meaning managerialism might suggest), for as David Loy has written in his excellent book The Great Awakening: A Buddhist Social Theory:

"The dismal record of the last fifty years of development reveals the cruelty of the usual slogan: when we have taught the world's poor to fish, the effect has often been that they deplete their fishing grounds for our consumption..."

We cannot, therefore, end our political consciousness at being "well-meaning", or through the immediacy of interpersonal action alone (giving a starving man a fish), without considering the systemic reasons which drive particular material forms of disenfranchisement and suffering of the people we want to "help".

But that's kind of my point. Because...



...Buddhism is more than Just Meditation...

In a sense, the Buddha himself wasn't "Buddhist".

"Buddhism" is a post-colonial invention, co-created by Asian Buddhists and their (our?) contact with European languages; we may trace our spiritual/religious practices and heritages to some supposed historical figure of Shakyamuni, but even then, not all Buddhists have done this, and many Buddhisms bear hardly a family resemblance to one another in the dizzying smorgasboard of practices and doctrines and cultural commitments.

Part of moving out of a hyper-relativistic and apathetic postmodernity then, is to consciously choose to step into the shoes of political engagement, without necessarily seeing that this is diametrically oppositional to the intrinsic relevance of meditative traditions in that very endeavour.

After all...



...Meditation is more than Just Sitting

My gorgeous friend Trish has written of this in her post Meditation as Political Activity, where she asserts:

"Profound political activity becomes more available to us by practicing... awareness of awareness, because those structures that had previously prevented our right action become more apparent to us, simultaneously evoking the possibility for their ultimate dissolution. The polarity which once had us in its grip no longer has such firm hold over our internal space or our interactions with others. We’re more easily able to discern the differences between opinions and truths, and understand outcomes and possible consequences of action, generating a deeper awareness of our own participation in causal processes in the world.

As we begin to transform ourselves, bringing contemplative awareness into every moment, an ever widening concentric circle of influence grows as we become active and set sparks amongst all folks with whom we are connected in our lives. Both subtle and direct positive influences rain equally upon all people with whom we come in contact, which helps to removing obstacles to communication between us, enriching a place where, with deepened discernment of each others needs a new type of flourishing becomes possible."


To return to the story of the Buddha, we remember that the fundamental power of his presence had not only to do with his meditative power or his immediate vocational capacity to ease the existential ailments of each person he came into contact with, but also that he is, in his very meditative presence, a catalyst in the transformation of systems.

The Buddha spoke to Kings, as much as beggars.
It matters not, in other words, if we are the King, politician, activist or beggar in the struggle to reform our political deadlocks.

It does matter if we can be an agent, in whatever way, to effect change within the hearts and minds of these very Kings, politicians, activists and indeed, even beggars. One of the ways in which we can do this, and indeed, one of the insights of postmodern relativism, is by noting that being a catalytic change agent can occur in some truly profound ways, whether we are the President, or the "wife" of the President.

Meditation seems like a training in pure, catalytic potential; one which can be in the service of justice or injustice (such as Japanese Kamikaze pilots ("suicide bombers") who did Zen meditations before flying off to suicidal and homicidal doom, all in perfect equanimity...).



Of the catalytic power of meditation, housed in a commitment to justice, a great case example is explored in this incredible essay here:

Meditation as A Subersive Act

The author, Sarah Coakley, is a White woman and Anglican priest who teaches at Harvard Divinity School. Her essay explores her experiences teaching meditation in a male prison mostly consisting of incarcerated men of colour, in Boston, Massachusetts. She explores meditation as an act of political subversion, as much as it is an act of alleviating the men's immediate experiences of suffering within the prison, subject as they are to their own interior mental turmoils, as well as being under constant surveillance and the threat of sexual violence. Coakley includes a critical inquiry into race and racism, sexual violence, and mental illness.

While Coakley specifically explores Christian meditation, I find her essay an especially good resource in thinking about meditation as being not-apart from justice and atonement... This is a language which Buddhism has unfortunately almost categorically lacked, but that I am nevertheless eager to find critical correlates for.

A Quick Sketch on Developmental Justice

This post is mostly a rambling of my thoughts, not particularly coherent nor created for an audience, for now... But I want to get all of this out before I start creating more coherent posts about these issues.




First.

An observation:
That the post-Ken Wilberian "Integral theory" intellectual and organisational enterprise, (that I have noticed and/or been a part of, online, in the USA, and in Australia) is disproportionately White.



Second.

That unlike English language American Buddhist literature, post-Wilberian Integral Theory is also disproportionately not Jewish (which, from a normative perspective, says as much about English-American Buddhism's "Jewishness" as it says anything about the "goyim", non-Jewish hegemony of Integral theory).

I have been, in my spiritual and philosophical life, largely been influenced by both.



Third.

That through exposure to Ken Wilber's writings, along with meeting up with amazing folks at Sydney Integral, I was also exposed to the following, teleological theory-praxes of individual and collective adult development...

-> Don Beck and Chris Cowan's "Spiral Dynamics"
-> Susanne Cook-Greuter's "Leadership Development Framework"
-> Terri O' Fallon's independent work ... Terri is also one of the key staff in Pacific Integral, that runs the Generating Transformative Change (GTC) program that I have been a part of... (two of their alumni are based in Australia in New Zealand, so they formed South Pacific Integral to host the GTC in this region... I was part of the first cohort here).
-> Bill Tobert's "Action Inquiry"
and more...



Fourth.

Through my learnings and conversations, I have encountered that materialist theories of social justice begin to emerge at particular stages of the development of consciousness (of both individuals and collectives).



Fifth.

Through a few conversations with Terri O'Fallon, I have encountered the idea of Developmental Justice, which is the sense of justice which takes into account the "rights" of people to be "where they are at" developmentally... (i.e. strictly and dogmatically materialist conceptions of justice can themselves be theoretical and practical enactments of Developmental Injustice).



Sixth.

A consideration of the line... "We can measure the health of a nation by the way it treats its indigenous peoples."

(an additional consideration of how many Indigenous peoples (to my knowledge, of Canada, USA, Australia, and New Zealand, among many others for sure) hold the projections of the dominant national culture's hegemonic concerns around savagery, primitivism, "backwardness", and the associated pathologies of "early" cultural developmental levels... part of my interest in developmental justice, then, emerges from considering a few things:

1. These concepts of Indigenous people (as representations of "early" cultural developmental stages... e.g. hunter-gatherer, tribal, animistic, shamanic, etc.) are partially projections of dominant, modernist culture onto certain groups of people who claim Indigenous/Aboriginal heritage.
2. Some communities and individuals of Indigenous/Aboriginal heritage also introject these concepts, turning them into "self-concepts".
3. To the extent that there is, from a modernist perspective, a lived reality of "backwardness" among a disproportionately large number of people of Indigenous/Aboriginal heritage, then the health of a nation is partially contingent not only on how it socialises Indigenous/Aboriginal people (indeed, all people), into modernist ways of being/doing, but also on the extent to which it can graciously hold, the legitimacy of early developmental ways of being-in-the-world. 
4. How well do we nurture national cultures which hold and support spaces in which people can manifest these "early developmental" stages in healthy forms...?
5. This is true not just for indigenous people, but also for people who are of colonial/migrant heritage.
My friend Tim wisely points out that the ways that some people engage these "early developmental" stuff, in modernist, consumerist pathos, is through encouraging magical ideas of Santa Claus, the tooth fairy, etc., but that these are unfortunately, in the context of modernity, encapsulated within a socialisation into consumerist culture
6. That Indigenous/Aboriginal folks are in a unique cultural/ancestral position to be curators of some of these early developmental stages as linked to Land...
i.e. not just in ways that are of or from early developmental perspectives, but as people who hold the unique struggle of integrating (and iterating) considerations of "early" development in "later" developmental considerations of developmental justice within a national and global culture, in the service of the health of the whole spiral [of human developmental potential] (to use language from Beck and Cowan).



Seventh.

This means, also, considering the ways that Integral Theory, in its hegemonic Whiteness (and straightness, and male-dominance, and upper classness, and American-ness, and so on), may re-inscribe some of the same materialist blindspots of modernist injustice, unwittingly.

(in my observation, tending toward exclamations which reveal privilege and ignorance, rather than outright, malicious oppressive intent)



Eighth.

This also means observing my own involvement in Integral, as the normative means through which I articulate or formulate theories and practices of enacting developmental justice.

Healthy skepticism.
Embracing, including, and integrating the baby AND the bathwater.