"I'm sorry I just have to rant", she said. And then she went on for some minutes about the death penalty and about our droan policy, and about ISIS and how we condemned them for killing while the US engaged in both kinds of killing. "It is hypocrisy!", she ended. Then she asked me how one sits with this sort of horrible thing, and what is wrong with humans that they act so ignorantly? I have been known to have my own such rants, so I was sympathetic to her anger and turmoil. But the question she asked me was far more important.
I have come to this belief through a variety of interlocking and reinforcing teachings and could not even recount exactly how, I can only say what I believe, but I think it is probably worth sharing.
We come with free will and not all of us are tuning into God and making choices that are aligned with the highest truth available. But it is almost like souls also follow developmental stages - young souls learning about scarcity, violence, addiction, appropriate and inappropriate uses of power, etc. Perhaps slightly wiser souls learning about cooperation, giving, receiving, closeness, etc. and eventually the Bodhisattva souls who have come back just to help others. What this means to me is that within a particular life time people may be born into wars, or gang violence, or addiction, or political dramas as part of the lesson they are working on in this life time. Some people maybe come famous actors in larger historic struggles whether they come as Rosa Parks or as George Zimmerman. They are both working on their own personal lessons about (in this case) race or violence/non-violence - but they are also helping these themes be held up to societal awareness and learning. They are helping our whole society learn about these themes.
Have you ever noticed how certain issues/themes show up repeatedly in your life, others not at all? How certain issues capture your attention completely and others do not engage you? That is probably not an accident. I for example have absolutely no interest in addictive substances. While not wanting to hang out with addicts I also have great compassion for the suffering that they engage, and the struggle to be free of it. It simply feels like something I have dealt with at some other time. It is not a concern for me in this life time.
On the societal level I have even heard some argue that the likes of Adolph Hitler, took on lifetimes of suffering in order to offer us a most perfect symbol of hatred, violence and abuse of power - that in a twisted backwards way that was an offering to our collective learning. That by seeing the dark and the ugly we can better see the light and the beauty. I do not know if I would go that far, but it certainly suggests that the project of collective learning is not straightforward.
So unlike the person above, I do not feel that people who are engaging in violence or hatred, or abuse of power are ignorant. I simply feel they are human souls struggling with the lessons they have come to this life time to learn. Granted I may not like their behavior, and in my turn I may rant about it. But when I am in a centered place, when I sit on the banks of the River of God, as I spoke about last month, I simply see the teeming masses of humanity struggling for resources, for love, for connection and for growth. From that deeply centered place I see that we are all the same. I may not be a murder, or an addict or an adulterer in this lifetime, but I know I have been in some other lifetime. I also see that even in a current lifetime of such actions is a person who wants love, who bleeds, who hurts, who yearns. These are other ways we are the same.
The hard part has been to sit with the pain of the world. I have known people who have committed murder and rape and I have known people who have had family members murdered or been raped themselves. I have known people who have lost family members in war (well even people whose last life time was to die in war) and I have known soldiers. Their suffering has been equally real to me. It stopped looking as simple as the victims and the perpetrators.
One of the greatest gifts of the little Buddhism that I have learned is to learn how to breathe it through - breath the suffering through. A practice I first learned from Joanna Macy, who is a Buddhist and and environmentalist. In this practice you see the suffer you breathe it in, passing it through your heart with compassion and you imagine it leaving a whole in your heart and your chest and returning to the world.
A friend of mine recently talked about "spiritual bubble wrap". She was talking about the ways in which we insulate ourselves against the suffering of the world. How we turn away from stories like the next mass shooting where innocent people have been gunned down for simply being somewhere. We go numb. We do not want to feel. Before learning breathing through I would deliberately turn my attention away from certain stories, certain kinds of suffering which felt like too much or "not my issue". I still do this sometimes.
But one day after a week of Joanna's workshop I had the radio on and the story came on about the sentencing of the police officers who during hurricane Katrina shot several black people on the bridge in New Orleans. I started to turn away from the story, to put on the spiritual bubble wrap, but then I remembered to do the breathing through. When I could do that I could notice the sadness of the racism so thick in our society that the police walk in fear of Black people, I could feel pain for the Black people who had already lost their homes and now would loose their lives or limbs because of racism, I could feel the sadness for the people of New Orleans effected by the climate change we have collectively brought. and I could breathe it through. Somehow it was less painful when held in compassion rather than sealed out with bubble wrap.
Buddhists have a loving kindness meditation. It starts with sending love and compassion to yourself, then to your family or loved ones, then to a friend, then to an acquaintance, and then to a stranger and then to someone you are angry or upset with, and finally to the whole world. This for me is simply another way to sit on the banks of the River of God, another way to breath it through. Somehow remembering that we are all just struggling to grow into our better selves, our greater soul, the collective consciousness, really helps me be with the suffering that is this world.
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