a hint, a hint for elsewhere

a hint, a hint for elsewhere
where you may find, scrawled across the interwebs
a mirror image of a post
a cryptic poem, doubly spoken
turned into
a portal

A new form of loneliness

Loneliness can exist, of course, all throughout the time of growth and development.


One distinction for the loneliness I sporadically experience (or which, perhaps, underlies even my most crimson moments of sweet solitude), is that these days, compared to when I was younger, my loneliness is no longer quite so wedded to victimhood.


An old blog I used to write in had the tagline "I opt to be misunderstood".


Of course, this was intentionally provocative; It spoke as much about my rebellion as it did about my desire to be loved, cared for, and indeed, understood and comprehended.


These days, there is a loneliness which presupposes that, actually, there will indeed be times when I will not be understood, and that this misunderstanding may be as much about others' lack of capacities to understand as it may be about either my own inability to communicate something comprehensibly, or about my own defeatedness about the elusive nature of "comprehension"; allowing myself to be swallowed up in the identification with Mystery.


Not to "be mysterious", but to be ... allowing of Mystery to be what works its way through me/us, or that supercedes any human attempt at comprehension.


This loneliness is victimless.

The World’s Politest Protesters

"Rather than presenting scenes of smashed shops or violent confrontations with the police—the sort of images we have grown accustomed to in Cairo, Ukraine, and other sites of popular protests against oppressive regimes—the photos from central Hong Kong show smiling students sitting around doing their homework, passing out donations of food, and meticulously picking up litter—even sorting out the recyclables. What, then, is different about these Hong Kong demonstrators? And how might their almost exaggerated politeness help them against the notoriously severe Chinese Communist Party?

The answers to these questions can be found in the appropriately titled “Manual of Disobedience.” Published online several days before the Occupy Central campaign was set to begin, the document (written in Chinese and English) is part how-to guide and part philosophical mission statement. It details the movement’s tactics, the rules for nonviolent protest, the legal codes that may be violated, and the exact procedure to follow should someone be arrested. It also implores protesters to “avoid physical confrontation, but also to avoid developing hatred in [their] heart,” and explains that the protests must be a model of the values that they are striving to see in their society, namely “equality, tolerance, love, and care.” The protesters understand that these values will not only help win over sympathizers, but lay bare the illegitimacy of the regime if it moves against them with excessive force. These aren’t youthful idealists; these are savvy political operators who understand the secrets of successful nonviolent resistance."

-

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2014/10/occupy_central_s_polite_protesters_the_hong_kong_demonstrators_are_disciplined.html

Challenging Bureaucratic Elites

http://www.bmartin.cc/dissent/documents/Schweik_cbe/

An interesting piece!

An historiography of Buddhism

Buddhism strikes me as being one of the relative "golden children" of world religions in white/Western Australian awareness. Unlike Catholicism, which has to contend with its all too famous examples of the mistakes and abuses of institutional power, Buddhism does not have a centralised institutional authority for all Buddhists around the world.

Unlike Islam, which has to defend and differentiate away from ongoing violence committed in its name, Buddhism is typically associated with pacifism or non-violence, apoliticism or quietism.

Unlike, also, Judaism, Jewish-ness, and Zionism, which are poorly differentiated in many people's minds, Buddhism, as a religion, has not been quite as tormented by the loss of homeland, nor people, in diaspora, not as much rooted by a (historically understandable) will to statehood.

Buddhism is conflated more with meditation, its doctrines hinting at being a "psychology" or a "science of the mind". Buddhism talks about actions and consequences, outside of the machinations or whims of an intervening Divinity outside of one's own intentions, motivations, and habits. There are wholesome and unwholesome actions, loving and non-loving actions. The teachings of Buddhism are referred to, in Sanskrit, as the Dharma.

"Buddhism" itself is an invention of post-European contact with a plethora of cultural, spiritual, philosophical, ritualistic and political expressions, which have enough family resemblances with one another to be described under a unifying, and historically quite racialised, category of "Buddhism". Buddhism has been racialised, in that the category "Buddhism" was historically constructed as an amalgamation of many expressions of non-European "Otherness" (in all their beauty/exoticism, as well as their frightening and unfamiliar dangers) and, in descriptions, conflated the expressions of Buddhism with "Orientals" and "Asians".

Part of the evolution of a religion like Buddhism, then, is that the religion itself, the term "Buddhism", itself already indicates its precipitated encounter with a historically more "White" or "Western" or "European" sensibility, and forms of categorisation of religions or religious difference. Just as historically "white/European-dominant" cultures become more intentionally multicultural (however effectively) in their makeup, so Buddhism itself begins to write its own history anew.

Asia goes Christian
and white Australia goes Buddhist.

Who is writing whose history?

I want to outlive all of my extremisms

Seven Heavenly Virtues

Humility
Kindness
Temperance
Diligence
Charity
Chastity
Patience

Religious authorities, get out of the way of describing physical reality

Physicists, listen to the metaphysics of religious authorities, which have historically incorporated the exploration of subjectivity as well as objectifiable, observable exteriorised, material reality.

Developmental Diversity

Workshopping an idea: Developmental Diversity.

I have been interested in a number of adult developmental frameworks in the past few years. By adult development, I mean here across a range of different indicators: The capacity to hold complexity and paradox, capacity to hold different perspectives, capacity to prioritise perspectives depending on criteria also largely of one's own choosing (or consent).

Part of the treasures of any society, then, is its ability to also hold and nurture and support developmental diversity. I mean this as an alternative to "disability". At the same time, I acknowledge that the term "disability" invites a conversation into the ways that some manifestations of the diverse expressions of human development are experienced by self and others as "disabling" from fullest enjoyment and participation in culture according to one's ability or potential.

In other words, I propose the idea of developmental diversity to both support existing disability rights/justice frameworks, while at the same time to precipitate an additional conversation about developmental possibility.

Developmental diversity spans a spectrum of human potentialities. It does not pretend mere relativism, in which developmental differences are seen as all "equal" in capacity or potential. It understands difference and hierarchy simultaneously: That there are some developmental stages for certain people who are more able to hold complexity and paradox than others, to hold more diverse/different/divergent perspectives with less angst than others, that are simultaneously more able to prioritise these perspectives depending on criteria of their own choice than others, after sincere self-interrogation and study, while they are also more able to cultivate an ability to articulate the reasoning behind this choice in a way that could be comprehensible to as many people from a range of developmental abilities as possible.

Developmental diversity, then, is not even exactly a theory or a principle, either. It is a lived experience of the fullest of one's own potential: That we can be so attuned to the diversity of our own developmental capacities (e.g. I can do some things well, I need more support for some other things), that we naturally and simply experience instantaneous compassion and empathy for other people, including people who may be "so different" from ourselves... Others' supposed differences become seen partially also as representations of part of who we are in ourselves, that we may keep more hidden or that we are hindered from knowing of ourselves.

Developmental diversity is a statement of fact. We live in a world in which different individuals and peoples have different developmental abilities, also developmental contexts which both liberate and constrain the abilities that we begin to, or that we can adopt. While developmental diversity is an observable fact of all cultural contexts, it is also a prescriptive way of living, in which the plain recognition of this fact itself can be existentially reorienting for some people.

Myself included.

I can spot the reality of developmental diversity in my society (e.g. some people are more mathematical, some more emotive, some people can see racism more easily and truthfully than others, some people can identify with "Europeanism" with more ease than others, some people can understand sexism in ways that I can never understand because of, for example, lived experience of being women which would shape their own development in a way that it is more privvy to some other forms of sexed/gendered phenomena than I could be). By recognising that there is a diverse range of lived experiences, genetics, cultural contexts, and "languaging" that people experience in the world, and that this affects how people "develop" (that is, qualities which signal their unique expressions of adaptivity) in their cognitive/perspectival abilities, I am immediately more empathic to how I can relate to different people, if at least by simply remaining agnostic and curious.

Even when people engage in behaviours that are pathologically offensive and horrid, murderous and unjust, I immediately see that they are representations of some part of myself that I have kept tamed, hidden, or transmuted. For example, the violence of young men drawn to fundamentalist expressions of religion, are related to my own early worldviews, shaped by ethnocentrism and listless testosterone. I know that feeling, and I know the injustice of not having alternative role models who could teach me kindness, courage, resilience, forgiveness and critical engagement.

I see the work to be done around this, then, does not only entail "going overseas" or leaving my own context in order to shape global outcomes... It is also in fostering a relationship to that sort of energy here in my own contexts.

For example: How do I relate to lost boys here? How am I complicit in a personal or professional world in creating a world with lost boys? What is the call from lost boys? What spiritual leadership is being called for?

And this is just one example.

Developmental diversity is, by its nature, also somewhat synonymous with "spiritual diversity" (insofar as "Spirit" can be seen, in one definition, as but the principle of growth and development), with an added connotation of materiality around it.

Just some thoughts for now...

interventions

Several experimental thoughts on intervening in public displays of racist aggression. Lessons learned from recent Darlinghurst cafe situ (Google if u don't know what I'm referring to), to be applied to public transport.

Heroism:
Simply encouraging the calling out or telling off the perpetrator may not be a battle we could win. They generally will have made it clear that they are not willing to be educated. It may help to role model heroism, but will likely just lead to an escalating yelling match.

A Proposal for building an Alternative Intervention:
I admit it - in this cultural climate of generally avoidant politeness and averted gazes, I find myself cowardly, hard to imagine myself able to step up so publicly to intervene, for fear of breaching the norms of quiet, multiculturalist propriety, fear of direct violence in just a sea of silent, terrified witnesses.

I would, however, like to experiment with turning to the person sitting next to me, to solicit verbal agreement around the horror of the situation.

"Oh my God, don't you think this is fucked up and racist?" I could say. They might nod, "Yes."

Then turn to the person sitting in the other side of me, "hey, what do u think? Isn't this awful?"

"Yes," they might, hopefully, respond.

Gathering, gathering consent, "buy-in" for more public intervention.

Keep bringing other passengers to account for their own feelings. Invite them to identify with their better selves. Appeal directly, personally, to their sense of justice. We will all witness this happening. Attention has been brought away from the fear of racist monopoly, into our confidence in collective righteousness.

"don't u think this is fucked up?" 
more witnesses, to a cabin, a carriage, a tram full of "Yes".

Heroism, here, becomes much more likely, a choir has been built, a visible groundswell of support, the perfect place to precipitate more public preaching.

Someone, here will more likely publicly intervene.

Maybe you?
Maybe me.

Terrorism

As I become more "professionalised" within particular political and public spheres, I sense in myself a swelling of sadness; The so-called "real world", in its current Australian form in the unfinished business of racist settler colonialism, and the myopic pathologies of either modernist materialism or religious fundamentalism, all burdened by the whims of global capital, can bludgeon the warrior in me, can tie a knot in my heart, can stifle the will to truth-telling.

Security, of course, is not itself the problem: It is more in that any will to security begets a concurrent arising and creation of the Other, from whom I must keep myself and all my material comforts protected, "secure". The Other, of course, the embarrassing Other, will constantly change their guise, in tandem with my changing Selfhood, the "Me" whom I keep aloof, detached, arrogantly removed, and "gated" from an Other, in order to preserve the status quo of any of my assimilationist dreams.

In all of this, an addiction to the pursuit of security will put a lid on the effervescence still in me, who chooses art and dreams transformative justice.

I know I might become too comfortable...
That I, like too many others, will become habitually afraid.
This is what terrorism is.

Memory

Multiple generations globally diasporic,
I learn the stories of my family and extended kin, Chinese men and women, not too long ago, who have suffered and continue to suffer unconscionable poverty, hunger, and all correlated heartache...
...I think about the wealth I have grown up with,
the comfort I have known from security,
the many material luxuries I regularly take for granted,
yet I am so often melancholy, in my solitude.

I can admire their perseverance, tenacity, resilience,
all this too, a privileged envy, even as
sadness still continues to beat
ceaselessly in my heart,
swollen with unresolved ancestral memory.

Resilience

One typical exhortation from a conservative political mentality is to both acknowledge the reality of social ills, such as racism, sexism, homophobia, while at the same time suggesting that the best way to deal with these social ills is not through government investment in institutions that promote cultural reform (e.g. affirmative action at universities, funding indigenous media, etc.), but rather through a promotion of individual resilience.

More cynically and simply put,
"Life sucks. Get over it."

On the other end, a more "progressive" or left wing response tends to push for cultural and social reform, rather than individual heroism, in the response to and eradication of these very social ills (e.g. racism/sexism/homophobia). One unfortunate tendency of this, however, may be that, in order to maintain this very sort of response as it is chained to the whims of American-hegemony and global capitalism, is to unwittingly search for the very ills that we stand against, so that we can galvanise, legislate, or fund the appropriate response.

In both these extremes, I present my cynicism as a reaction to the excesses and blindspots of either approach. To encourage only resilience without social reform is to subtly bully those who are more vulnerable, who are not "tough enough" to weather the storms of everyday life; not to mention that this can well give full license to the bullies, who are never held accountable by this politik. At the same time, to encourage only social reform without an occasional nudge toward a "realpolitik" of encouraging one another to recognise our very strengths, our resilient tendencies, may be to unwittingly mire those of us who are oppressed in the very terms of our victimisation. That we may never "get over it" until someone else, or something external to us changes.

That is a lot of power to give away.

As a middle path, I am interested in the model of social groups and peer support in which both political forms are explored, where people can role model resilience for one another, while collectively agitating for political and social change. Where, aside from role modeling, this agitation for political change is itself an expression of that very resilience, because it is contingent on a scaffolding of collective support and coalition, not only on individual heroism.

Financial Goals

My goal is to make more money, and spend less per day.
In order to attain the former, I intend to apply for more/other jobs
and in order to do the latter, my goal is to spend not more than $10 a day for the month of August (except on bills and groceries).

Health

Under colonial capitalism

in which I see myself primarily as a cog in a machine or as a perpetual migrant in need of being proven worthy of all the privileges of colonial citizenship,

I take a day off of work so I can go to the doctor

and this feels like an act of indignant protest. 

How lucky!

how pathetic 

Everyday after the Revolution is Samsara

Even upon the triumph of anticolonial struggle,
Each day is still Samsara. The winners of this war are as human as the losers were, that is,
with all the capacity for oppression (and redemption) that this humanity implies.

The oppressed become the oppressors
And there is no time to be in the least bit surprised.

This, of course, does not mean that I abandon my will to justice,
My will to nudge and edge toward this sort of revolutionary cultural change that is the rightful work of any ethically engaged person...
I tread carefully.

Only that this work itself is foolhardy if it imagines its completion as the summit of all human endeavour. We are tracing a dangerous precipice, not only climbing a mountain.

There is a deep and horrid wellspring of loneliness amidst the hypnotic meaning making of the progressive Left, whose espoused values I mostly share... This loneliness, of course, is not strictly the province of the Left, but it strikes me as part of the poverty of relationship that seems concurrent both with secular multiculturalism and its ethnocentric, parochially conservative counterparts.

This poverty of relationship is not easily remediable either by simply being in the company of others nor by my journaling about it, as if being so identified and named, it might wistfully take its leave of our era.

Solo meditation too, in the highly individualistic models of the imported Buddhism, while deeply nourishing, will not suffice.

For a young and heroic Left, I sense that our hearts must neither harden, nor indeed that we remain only tender and soft to witnessing suffering.
No, I am exploring that we must be collectively heart broken.
Our hearts must break, open.
We must grieve with the people who are not us, who may never be like us.
We must grieve as if all the lost loved ones in the world were our own lost, loved ones.
Grieve, not only in outraged sentimentality, but also as if we have lost our lover to betrayal and deceit.
Grieve and hurt and be hurt and be wounded and broken open to the fullest ache of abandonment and the loss of faith in our future or in any possibility for an alternative...

For when we are so fully defeated, in this sense, we will become stronger again. Wiser. We will be cautious, of course, yet we will love again. We will love again. We will remember our past foibles with fondness! As global citizens, we will cease to either sentimentalise violence or forget the good that was always present among history's oppressive and tragic victors, that we were never "written out of the story", but were simply listening.

We have been listening.
We are still listening.

a day of reckoning

Oh life...
May I not be addicted to miracles,
that every stupendous achievement may become so quickly mundane,
and that the ordinary, once miraculous
will continue to inspire my humility,
as if I were simply
washing my bowls on the very moon to which I once pointed.

Paracetamol Rant

What of poverty or of wealth?
To be made humble in the face of the changing face of the perpetrator or the victim, whose gender or colour continue to morph wildly in a sickening preservation of privilege, power and pain, whose triumph or destruction on begets more of the same, an endless cycle of birth and death and rebirth of a gulf between peoples, greed breeding envy breeding hatred breeding violence.

A hermit prays in silence, a cave for shelter,
Or an inherited condominium ruined by alienated citizenship and class guilt.
A child whose limbs are bombed off by violent and paranoid settlers,
Whose parents are burned alive, with only a journalist left to bury the dead.
So many cities and civilizations risen and then razed by ambition and parochialism,
Lands swollen with latent forests bursting out of fertile Earth, disregarding any memorialisation of human impact.
Stone Age temples whose walls continue to be dusty with the salt of the dried sweat of slaves,
long dead,
Whose walls still echo ancient holy chants, multiple generations of monks and kings whose fervent faith and footsteps continue to reverberate through the temple halls.

No history is lost or discovered, only written and reconstructed.
Heritage is a choice; patterns and lineage can be illuminated in so many ways... Slightly more essential than arbitrary, yet way more deliberative than deterministic.
Today, I choose among my heritages, China, Malaysia, Singapore, America, Australia.
I choose, among my heritages, Peranakan, Hokkien, Cantonese, Hakka, and Pink Dot.
I choose, among my heritages, faggot grief and assimilationist defeat.
I choose, among my heritages, larrikin hope, and all the unfinished business of a world in constant change.

There is no tipping point... Revolutions are like the bursting forth of a collective will to cum, after the tension of preceding processions has become too much to hold or bear. Brief, jubilant relief... And still there is always that undertold story of the aftermath of orgasmic revolution... Not all cigarettes and starlight, not all smiles and deep sleep.
As the grandeur of people power subsides, the dawn may bring crumbled memories of a yesteryear no longer here,
Or worse still
That impending recreation of all the chronic ills that plagued us prior to revolution.
We are separated from one another, once again.
The beatings continue, among ourselves.

To revolve, revolve, revolve... Cycles and cycles of possibility and despair
A quiet evening, on a comfortable chair,
Sipping coffee,
Homesick for a culture that does not exist or has not arrived,
Building, brick by brick, a new world to house a childhood that was never quite as innocent as my memory might cherrypick.

The future is brightest at noon.

Pain Ramble

There is something lonely about harbouring chronic pain... While there may be others who have been through analogous ills, whether psychic or somatic, our own pains are humble reminders of our vulnerable separateness... Others can share interpretative tools to these pains, giving us perspective, convincing us of their relative inconsequentiality or impermanence (say, by offering imminent cures), or even by suggesting that we are not the first to have experienced anything quite as dire, but we are ourselves left to consent or not to consent to these interventions, nursing the sensations that course through our bodies and mind ourselves... Our any words, sounds, or convulsions but meek translations of an otherwise very private ordeal.

Impatient

I am feeling impatience around the ethical incompetence of bureaucrats in relationship building and community accountability.

Where does the money come from?
Where does the money go?

So much of this feels extraordinarily abysmal and heartbreaking and soul-destroying
at the same time that I cannot blame her and her and him,
nor will I overindulge in that exhausting spiritual gimmick (however relevant) of fixating on my own complicity...

I simply want to remain here
Yelling.
While everybody, including the gentler side of my own conscience,
simply shuts the fuck up
and listens.

Thoughts on Education

Some reflections...

One of the things I love most about moving through this period of my life is about my capacity to educate.

It is not that I necessarily wish to over-identify with the role of "teacher" or even of "educator", though they may be expediently and contextually pleasurable identities to loosely hold; rather, I am interested in how I am called into being a conduit between various schools of knowledge.

There is the Subject (which will be taught), the Teacher (who teaches the subject), and the Student (who is taught).

The Teacher teaches the Subject to the Student.

This, of course, is a conventional approach to education, and one which works perfectly well as a framework under many circumstances.

What I am interested in, in that process of transmission, where the Teacher is taught as much on the Subject as the Student is, through the process of Teaching.

It may be a cliche, but the best way to learn really is to teach!
Students ask provocative questions, questions that the Teacher cannot always answer... In that sense, the role of the Teacher is not necessarily the person who IS the repository of knowledge, but rather, is the conduit between a privileged access to knowledge and the Students who await, search for, or who are indeed, active co-participants in this transmission.

A learning community then.

4 pillars

1. Health
2. Wealth
3. Love
4. Service

self-reflections

Self-Reflections

In polite company, I do not
fail to find the right self to exude;
perfect for the occasion.

Good immigrant boy, so obedient and obliging.
"I want to be accepted," he says to himself,
Not fully seeing that he was also an arbiter of the very terms of his acceptability.

******

One day,
We may find some
version of ourselves
taped onto virtual walls for eternal surveillance and perusal,
all our lives
an endless,
epic,
mundane porno
For some poor civilization's descendant
to stumble upon

Organizations as Communities

"A couple of years ago I suffered a severe attack of nostalgia while listening to the voice of Father Paolo Dall'Oglio on Italian radio, a frontline Catholic priest and peace activist in Syria. Being an expatriate Italian myself, and a lapsed Catholic with a deep connection to the Middle East, I loved the story of Deir Mar Musa, the mixed community he founded in 1984 on the ruins of a 6th century monastery.

Nostalgia aside, what caught my attention - as a specialist in burnout prevention among organizations and individuals that work with conflict - was the priest’s insistence that people with different views can live and work together successfully, instead of getting stuck in a quagmire of dysfunctional relationships and institutions.

So as I think about the challenges I’m facing in my work, it’s telling that the best example that sticks in my mind is not an organization, but a community. Maybe the 21st century is the time to think about all organizations as communities, and to see where this radical change in direction might take us."

http://www.opendemocracy.net/transformation/alessandra-pigni/organizations-as-communities-lessons-from-deir-mar-musa-in-syria

Today

Today, I'm tired. Slept late last night. Woke up early this morning.

Missed the first pre-session of the international AIDS conference. Am feeling too melancholy. Tired. Wanting not to burn out so quickly, right as it is all just beginning.

21 Days

21 days alcohol-free and counting...

Also have been without other mental health medication, except for vitamins, minerals and some herbs.

Feeling very good. Proud of myself.
Keeping it real. Taking it slow.
One day at a time.

My intention is to have a wellness that is sustainable, primarily through a life of contemplative/meditation practice, physical work (exercise), and relational integrity.

One day at a time. I want to be and remain well.

Alcohol

Revisiting writing on here again. Trying again, for daily.

It has been about 20 days since my last alcoholic drink.

I am considering giving up drinking alcohol, entirely.
Not quite there yet... I still sense that I will miss things about it.

But I am also aware, as I get older, that I have less and less need for it. And when I do have it, the great times that I have while drunk seem to pass me by that much more quickly, and the hangovers that much more severe. The net sense of it is loss. What am I chasing?

By choosing to give up alcohol, I am not necessarily trying to say that I prefer to "be in control", although that is certainly a part of my motive. It is more that I am interesting in cultivating a consciousness that is more sensitive about control, more discerning about when to keep my guard up or relax it. I am interested in seeing what it means to live less anxiously, without reliance on substances.

I remember a night, a few years ago, when I was living in Sydney... I went out with some friends to a queer party. I had had a somewhat diligent, regular daily meditation at the time, and I had become a little bit enamoured with my increasing capacity to hold steady concentration (on breath) for extended periods of time. Excited to experiment, I wanted to bring this sensitivity to a dance party, and opt to avoid alcohol to see if I could experience the night with nuance.

My drug of choice that evening was an energy drink of some kind. So just caffeine.

I remember feeling anxious and nervous... My usual flood of fearful thoughts, of being Asian at a predominantly white queer party, of being undesireable, of my own reactionary stand-off-ish-ness, etc.

These thoughts came and went... I found my body electrified by the music.
I danced, and danced, the entire party, I danced, until it ended at around 4am.

I was sweating, tons.

Completely sober.

It was one of the best party nights of my life. The fear left me sometime after I started bobbing my head and swinging my arms...
It was a lesson in humility and release.

Check Our Privilege

One "problem" of "checking your privilege"
is that
I think we do not go far enough with this metaphor.

It is not only the relative forms of privilege that I must check; my maleness, my educational privileges, my class privilege, my linguistic privilege, my able-bodiedness, my neurotypicality, and so on...

I take this one step further:

For me, a human birth is a privileged birth.

I check that, remind myself of that, the responsibilities that come with my humanity. The ability to experience both pleasure and pain, to notice how I chase the former and have avoidance toward the latter; that both the chase and the avoidance are signals of the profound unsatisfactoriness of the mundane everyday, in which there is little support for pause, reflection, contemplation, and sincere practice. To be human, to have cognitive and collective capacity to recognise that our political and economic systems reflect a reliance on gross injustice in order to perpetuate cycles of greed, hatred and addictive delusions.

Yes.

To all my friends, regardless of political persuasion, let's check our privilege of being human on a planet over which we have amassed and exerted too much abusive power and influence.

There are responsibilities and humilities that we must practice as a result of a full awareness of our privileged humanity, playing a necessary step in the fate of our beautiful planet.

Questioning, Questioning

Questioning what I believe to be true, what I believe that underlies most of my actions, that liberates and conditions the arising ebb and flow of further thoughts and emotions on any given day, any given moment.

Beliefs themselves, powerful, that enable certain things to be seen, and others to remain invisible

Beliefs like:
Racism is Bad, which means I see microaggressions, I perceive with humble, but deepening sensitivity, the mourning which pervades this land through every rock and road, every creek and every tree, the air is full of unfinished business

Beliefs like:
Buddhism is Good/helpful, which means I see even pleasure as a form of suffering, alongside pain, neither to be avoided, nor to be attached to: Recognised as inherently empty, impermanent, fleeting, as if sensations in a dream

Beliefs like:
Too much wealth can be corrupting, particularly without generosity, without a recognition of wealth as relative wealth, without a recognition of amassed wealth as having been contingent on the built karmic debt of too many displaced lives, human and non-human

All these beliefs which orient me toward some version of "the good" and "the true" and "the beautiful"...

All these beliefs which exert power over my day to day lived experience...
Beliefs which have been systematised into my day-to-day actions, and I fear that they may, at times, become ossified...

and, ossified, become no longer freely chosen
and, unfreely chosen
or unchosen,
they become sources of myopic limitation, yes:
even nobility, or an orientation to it
may cloud my judgement,
orient me toward my own ethnocentrism,
left wing, spiritualist tirades
vanguard discourses which are elite and elitist
which exclude and deny even as they pretend liberation

and that this exclusion, I may sometimes think of as expediently necessary
(indeed, flying paradoxically in the face of my other belief, of the importance of radical inclusion of all difference, including offensive difference, oppressive difference, hateful difference, as the volcanic scars of our human potential and the abuse of our potential, all inseparable from the Real)

and in this exclusion (of those who may not be radically inclusive),
in this paradox, I must I must I must
see that Belief itself was, to a significant extent, a Choice

I chose/have chosen/still choose/am choosing
to believe
that Racism is Bad
that Buddhism is Good/helpful
that Wealth can be corrupting

and that underlying these is another belief:
that I am free at any point,
to disbelieve any of the above
for any purpose, noble or ignoble
and that this is most dangerous, yet most freeing, perhaps
most freeing because most dangerous...

I teeter on the edge of a precipice
and that all my life and work before me shimmers and melts away as illusory commitments
paving way for
this radical calm, sweet nectar of power
amorality

from here, I see I choose what I choose because I have radical freedom
free to Not Have a Choice in the matter, but to choose, anyway,
I choose to Choose that which orients Us toward freedom, full liberation
even as I derive perverse pleasure in that tension that precedes all release

to Choose, then, is also to be Bound.
I play with liberation, then, that is not contingent on any memory of chains
liberation that sees that there are no chains
no need, at all
for liberation.

Bureau of Public Secrets

Interesting old blog! Explores lots of things about "Engaged Buddhism":
http://www.bopsecrets.org/

the things I used to find radical...

... I may not find radical any longer.

Not that they have been shown to be false (although that may be the case)
but often they have been superceded
by other possibilities
or extensions of themselves
or they may have, within a collective field
collapsed under the weight of their own inconsistencies

or perhaps, just as likely,
that they contained creative paradoxes
which were as scaffolding
to hold new things

what were once radical
are stabilised

new possibilities are built upon the groundwork

Bring Your Hegemon

Take up space.

Speak loudly.

Assume, rightly, that you will be heard.
Do not excuse yourself when you belch or fart.
Invite only who you want to your party.
Disregard their spouses.
Let yourself be despised.
Carry on anyway.

Eat,
drink,
fuck.
Merry.
Then, 

forget it all

Laugh heartily.
Take, of what is offered.
Give, without reservation.
Never worry.

Betray your best intentions.
Make amends.
Expect no forgiveness.
Remember your own humanity.
Begin again.

Betrayal

Every day, I become a little bit more of a Luddite...
all this techno prowess, in tandem with a super surveillance culture, resurgence of the Right in response to a splintered Left, who at best will claim,
"But we were never unified!"
"What about my struggle?!"
"Check your privilege!"

Yes, yes dear 

I too am that adept identity politician, 

I too have and will proclaim all the above,
I too know the pain of invisibility and invisibilisation...

...I also know the creative genius of subterranean silence,
plans for strategic subversion,
hit hard on the pressure points of a swollen machine.

Take cover.

I bemoan the stakes we currently play,
all unity mistaken for hegemony,
the digging up or declaration of our past or current victimhoods like postmodern excavations,
building our new homes
made up of these cards.

I proclaim,
unbravely,
"enough!"

Listen to this fragile peace.
Dare to dream, my cowardly dreams.
Betray all my friends, and then
leave, just as I came in,
unnoticed.

Friends and Fans

No more friends.
Only fans. Or un-fans.
Why ppl gotta be so un-fanly?

practising...

...part of practice is occasionally not getting it right
as part and parcel
of the "righting" of the work.

fall down,
get up.
try again.
try again.

"Man of Colour" in Australia

My new friend @guantai5 just shared with me some information about some early use of the term "man of colour" in Australia:

In the book Black Founders: The Unknown Story of Australia's First Black Settlers, by Cassandra Pybus, there was mention of a ‘man of colour’ in the Sydney Gazette 1818 – the Black American ex-convict, William Blue...

Interesting that this phrase was in use in Australia 200 years ago.

Also this:"In the mid-nineteenth century these 'black men' were referred to by many names, but the most common racial epithet was 'men of colour' or, to distinguish them from Asians and other non-White races, 'Black Americans', 'Negroes' or 'niggers'. In Australia at least, such terms described anyone who was 'racially' African, be he from Africa, North America or the Caribbean."

Veering, and Chaos Magick

I feel like veering into more overtly esoteric territory, at the same time this is a "coming out of the closet" of a sorts. I choose not to forsake my critical commitment both to social/global justice as well as to the more "lineage-based" expressions of my spiritual/religious convictions (particularly with Buddhism), but I must admit that I have, as late, been more interested in particular metaphors of relationship to power and effecting change that I've adapted from "Chaos Magick".

From a wikipedia entry:
"[Chaos magick] is a school of the modern magical tradition which emphasizes the pragmatic use of belief systems and the creation of new and unorthodox methods."
Perhaps more succinctly, and this is my working and operative assumption and interpretation, I am inspired by the renderings of chaos magick which strategically use the power of belief itself in order to manipulate more interior and exterior realities in conformance with desired outcomes.

In one interpretation of the "pure form" of my motivation, then, this is about access to, or the accessing of power for the sake of itself, with the object and direction of the power being secondary. In other words, the power of belief (elsewhere described as "placebo effect", and scientifically used as a bogey man in order to render invalid certain practices that are unverifiable in their efficacy within a scientific framework to achieve their intended outcomes).

In the case, I am choosing to "politicise" the placebo effect, to harness the power of belief itself, or perhaps more accurately, the "suspension of disbelief" in order to effect a radical change in consciousness within myself and communities I am a part of, in the service of goals (that are to be determined, and that are somewhat separate from this suspension of disbelief... other than a vague sense this this suspension may "open onesself" up to new experience and possibility).

A less overtly "magic" association of this is in the everyday, integrated work of movies: Watching films.

We "rationally" understand many films to be works of fiction, but we may also appreciate that watching a film is a form of induction into a particular form of ritual, whether the film is purposefully fictive, or even documentary. We are inducted into a ritual that involves payment, attendance with friends, a community of "practitioners" (i.e. filmgoers) with whom to later reflect on meaning and substance, and the implications for lives changed or making a difference simply in the knowledge gained in the process.

To put it another way, we may recognise the works of film to be primarily fictive, or, in the case of documentaries, still edited to reflect the perspectives of the filmmaker(s). A film is housed in a contained context which may not have any immediate bearing upon what happens to our material reality when we leave the cinema, yet the ritual experience of watching a film is granted a modicum of both respect and consent from the viewer... We are willing to believe, for the duration of the film, that there are dragons and demons, that the Matrix is a powerful metaphor for the mundanity and listlessness of everyday secular capitalist urban empire, that there are little boys who can see dead people.

We are, contextually bound, yet inducted into a system of art and intrigue, which can "magically" reorient our relationship to the world once the film is over.

That's primarily what I mean by my burgeoning interest in chaos magic...

Frankly, this seems to have been the role of shamanic magic in its particular performative practices and ritualisations. Real healing can emerge out of these, particularly when some of the ritual inductions include actual, intentionally physical co-participation as part of an induction into a shift in consciousness, through, for example, long periods of fasting, or blood letting, or genital subincisions, or ritualised ingestion of semen as male secret, or the terror of being led into cavernous abyss to be taught new communal rites of passage which significantly mark the transition in the young person's life from one phase into new roles of responsibilities.

These rituals are not "mere placebos" in the shifting of the psyche in an orientation to "difference" or "newness" or "innovation". They are, in the language of the times, about magic. This is no more a "placebo effect" in the profound invention of culture and material outcome as a movie is a "placebo effect" that can induce mass hysteria, outrage, tears, or indignation in a captive audience, followed by endless praiseful reviews, or outcries, bannings, excommunications, and so on.

So this post is intended to notice the ways in which I have used an obsession with identity politics to serve particular ends which I am increasingly sensing are not actually best achieved through their particular underlying belief systems (which I broadly describe as Marxist, materialist, and postmodernist).

What if there is a necessary "regression" that I must insist upon in order to gain and sustain a modicum of respect for the work there is to be done, the sustainability that is required of eldership, and the transition away from heroism into the humility of meditative and interpersonal peace-practice?

That is:
To solve the world's problems not only by identifying the problems to be solved, but to begin with a different perspective:
Not that things are "perfect" (in some saccharine, NewAgey sense of the term),
but rather, from a melancholic and aesthetic perspective (admittedly privileged, yet still an emblem of the peace I want to practice):
That the world's "imperfections", our wars, famines, injustices, and so on, are but the weathered forms of "wabi-sabi" that is our ever-evolving plight as a planet, yet a symbol of our simple familiarity as a species... One which orients still toward perfect forms, yet emboldened for presentation by the glitches, the cracks, the inconsistenies across seasons, the variations in utility.

What does it mean to inherit a diverse range of religious, spiritual, political, meditative, cultural and linguistic systems, and to participate in a process of integrating and disseminating them all which is infinitely creative, and which, to add my own personal intention, would be in the service of:

healing, social justice, further seedings and fruitions of creative transformative possibility, for a more sustainable, loving, compassionate and welcoming society, in which existing divisions are both acknowledged, properly engaged with, as well as ultimately seen to be fully illusory from the perspective of mind, heart and gut?

YES: This is the practice of chaos magic, for me

in Art, in Scriptural recitation, in the setting of personal intentions in meditation, in the listening to disparate voices and attending to "whatever arises in the moment", in the willingness to make error and then to be held accountable to these not only by "others", but also from the parts of me which know integrity, dignity. To do "chaos magic" in borrowing/adapting from the language and thoughts and practices and traditions of people from around the world while keeping abreast of the extent to which my co-optations are both respectful and deviant (perhaps both), and to what extent the consequences (however expediently negative) may well serve an outcome more compassionate and in the service of justice than a simply ethnocentric traditionalism could allow.

I am more libertine than I realise, perhaps.

And this is, also, my strategically employed belief system

to elucidate the many points of this essay online,

nothing else.

I am free to abandon the entirety of the above

pretend that nothing, in fact had been written

nothing of substance had, in fact been shared

but perhaps somewhere on this way, a sunday night was well spent in ecstatic flow.

A whole new set of friends (which includes the ones I already have, albeit in fresh and evolving ways of relating).
A whole new set of possibilities.
I "fast" and I notice what it is that I really crave in my body.

In Conversation: Tim Mansfield

My excellent friend Tim Mansfield on the evolution of technology and the resultant/correlated social/cultural/environmental issues.

Climate Change and Death

I wrote this essay about two years ago, when I was thinking of getting it published in Beams and Struts, which has unfortunately since ceased ongoing publication...

Here it is now, with a few edits.

--

Climate Change and Death

Thinking about global warming and climate change.

Thinking about how I want to think about global warming and climate change.

What can I say that has not already been said? What can I write that hasn’t been elsewhere better articulated?

I grew up in urban Singapore; for me, it is important to see that human habitation and the Natural are not two separate things… Sustainability is possible not (only) from “returning” to some more “natural” (read: near subsistence-level) way of life, but also about investing in good urban infrastructure; where we can deliver resources to more people, more effectively.

But it is one thing to be motivated by contentment in the pursuit of "sustainability" in our current ways of living and being, as a species... It is another to be motivated, at this moment in global history, primarily by the avoidance of the seemingly inevitable calamity and catastrophe of anthropogenic climate change (indeed, already calamitous and catastrophic for many Pacific Islander people)…

I am curious about the fear of dramatic, human-induced climate change, the global warming that now threatens the very survival of our species. On “either side” of the debate around climate-change deniers and those who recognise the reality of climate change, I am interested in considering, from a civilizational perspective, the very real possibility of death of the human species.

I think this is one big, unanswered issue, climate-change or otherwise. 

My bias, clearly, in this article, is in an orientation toward viewing the world and the phenomena of human suffering through a Buddhist-lens. 

For the Buddha, it was not the avoidance of old age, sickness, and death, that led to his Enlightenment, but the full confrontation with the inevitability of aging, sickness, and death of the individual. What too, of our global collective, as a species?

Civilizationally, I am not convinced that even the most ardently engaged climate-change philosophers have fully accounted for the possibility that we are encountering, in our Way-of-Life, a civilizational Old Age, a civilizational Sickness, and civilizational Death.

One fear I have about bringing this up is that this train of thought has racist and classist implications. A disproportionately large number of deaths and calamities resulting from our ongoing global climate crisis happen to people from relatively impoverished countries, who may not have the political infrastructure nor the capital to avoid this calamity… “Making peace” with “their” death is hardly the sort of equanimity I am advocating.

This, of course, begs a larger question about the relationship between Buddhist equanimity and global justice... What does liberation from suffering look like? Whose old age, sickness and death is most tended to?

What would it mean to account for all of this? The death of our people, inclusive of and as indicated by the death of our globe’s poorest, the death of our most dispossessed. As an individual, I exist in a precarious bubble of geographic and class privilege, here in Melbourne Australia, and I am not convinced that it is enough to keep organising around climate change as if it is to avoid some impending disaster, when the disaster has already arrived, it is already here. 

As a species, people have already been displaced from their/our homes, from their/our livelihoods. 

Perhaps, as a species, we are already sick.
Perhaps, we are already dying.

What lessons might we learn from apprehending the phenomenon of global climate change in this way?

What is the morality that arises from assuming the inevitability of our extinction?

Need it be nihilistic?

Might it be Buddhistic?