Confronting the Confrontational Culture

One of my colleagues this morning (a rainy Monday here) asked me if I had experienced an unusual amount of confrontational energy lately.

Yes, I have. And why do you suppose this is so? The political atmosphere in this country right now is like a powderkeg waiting to blow. The Left is sickened by Right and vice-versa, and everyone is sickened by the divisiveness of the whole thing. Meanwhile, every citizen who isn’t hiding in a cave is being assaulted with vituperation and hateful rhetoric (especially from the Right – sorry, but it’s true) every time we turn on a radio or TV, open up a newspaper, or have to suffer through a moronic rant happening at a nearby table in a Starbuck’s. Too many politicians are counting on the divisiveness to help them; they are attempting to capitalize on the Three Poisons of hatred, greed and attachment-revulsion as much as they possibly can. And we wonder why there’s a lot of confrontational energy generating?

The side-effect of this confrontational, divisive, thick energy is exhaustion. I have never, in my seven years of university teaching, seen this many students so completely wasted with exhaustion only 3 weeks after the semester has started. My courses are not any more difficult this semester than they have ever been, and I doubt anyone else’s are either. And yet they are pale, tired, and clearly suffering.

In a supreme example of “as above so below” and group Karma, these churning energies are manifesting at all kinds of levels. The Northwest passage has opened, hurricanes are howling in the western hemisphere, the headlines are even more sordid than usual, and the world seems fueled by anger and fear.

But every moment in history is both unique and not unique; we are a constantly changing continuum. Nothing, even the bad stuff, is permanent. Nothing is permanent.Not you, not the Republicans, not the Democrats, not the hurricanes. And although we are all impermanent, we are also all interconnected. So there IS something that we can do as individuals, and that is to change the energy one mind at a time. Whether that is possible or not is irrelevant – it is what must be done.

Put your work away; it will be there tomorrow. Turn the TV off, put the newspaper down, sit comfortably, and do whatever it takes to quiet your mind: repeat a mantra, count your breaths, pray…whatever works for you. We all have the Buddha-nature even when we are yelling at the TV. Let yourself contemplate the Six Perfections: Generosity, patience, ethics, effort, concentration/meditation, wisdom. Visualize how you would feel if tomorrow your thoughts were able to lean toward how you might support the political candidates of your choice instead of leaning towards how much you’d like someone to murder the other ones.

One of my Tibetan teachers told me once that it is not possible to go from an agitated mind to a happy mind without passing through the place where the mind is neither agitated nor happy, but is simply in a state of equanimity or equilibrium. We must all allow ourselves to do what we need to do in order to get there. If this takes time away from work, study, or any other aspect of the rat-race, so be it.
May all beings have happiness and the causes of happiness.
May all beings be free from suffering and the causes of suffering.
May all beings know the joy of true freedom.
May all beings have equanimity, free from attachment and aversion.