Leçon 1
Where Freedom Arises
Experience yourself as entirely interconnected. Reflect on the places and paths that brought you here, now, the particular, and the general. Now, notice your attitude. See how it arises, where it comes from, how it fluctuates with the thoughts, settle into an awareness of attitude.
Watch your breath. You’re not in control of how many or whether you can control how you breathe. Ancestral time - all that is happening now - all that brought you here. Embrace your powerlessness. Stay with the feelings that arise.
This is confronting reality, rather than avoiding or denying it. This is meeting your feelings. This is being alive. Paying attention is the freedom you have. Attention is the beginning of devotion. Devotion, though, to what?
Leçon 2
Where Attitude Becomes Spirit
Experience your attitude, and see the words of Dan Dennett: "That's the Spirit." What this means is that the way you pay attention creates your attitude and that in turn creates how you experience the world. However, remember: "It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." (J. Krishnamurti).
If you find that feelings of despair, rage, or grief arise, these are entirely appropriate to the current context and it is to no one's advantage, least of all your own, that you should suppress or deny these. Your attitude is your ability to stay with all that is happening, like a parent embracing a child. Bringing feelings into focus, and allowing them to exist, even when they are painful, is hugely healing, if painful.
Feelingfulness accords with thoughtfulness, which is the opposite, according to Hannah Arendt, of the particular human deficiency, namely “thoughtlessness,” from which evil emerges. Patanjali made a very similar claim: the chief obstacle to peaceful existence is avidya, ignorance, which, rather than being bliss, is the greatest source of human harm.
If we are indifferent to our own feelings, then we can be indifferent to the people, or the creatures, or even the systems, that are on the receiving end of our deeds, and we cause suffering at every level, suffering that eventually harms us, directly or indirectly.
Attention is the beginning of devotion, and attitude is the spirit, the way, in which you pay attention which must be kind, accepting, and even as it is sometimes painful to sit with a friend who is suffering, compassionate towards ourselves.
Leçon 3
What Is The Good Of Systems?
Experience what is good for you, all the elements that go to benefit and support you. Now, notice this in other humans, in other systems, and begin to see the good of systems arising. I suggest we reverse the traditional teleological metaphor that describes human and non-human organisms as actualizing their potentiality in Aristotelian terms.
The Aristotelian idea suggests that 'the good' of the organism is a future state towards which it is mysteriously pulled. Instead, consider the image of systems being driven from behind, pushed to avoid their own annihilation, as a metaphor that better fits our current understanding of evolution and the laws of thermodynamics.
All of the myriad and minute processes that push systems to adapt and maintain their patterns of existence are flexible (and, at a quantum level, unpredictable). They are reactions of activity dissipating and redistributing energy flows. Scott Sampson visualized the flow of energy through time as akin to a vast river, within which vortexes develop, patterns of existence that maintain themselves for a particular length of time.
Leçon 4
Attunement To Compassion
Compassion arises when you really understand the suffering of all that arises, that arising is not something that happens as a result of choices, but as a result of cause and effect, and that this cause and effect embroils and enmeshes all. We all arise together into this enmeshment, and thus into this suffering.
Suffering takes place in the darkness of ignorance, sometimes even deliberate ignorance. Gently bring this into the light of compassion for all. Instead of indifference, or resentment, ignoring, or by-passing, the microsecond pause that is called by Dogen Zenji practice-realization opens the door to compassionate attunement, the heart of the philosophical practice this meditation is designed to help you experience.
Leçon 5
Space Itself Is Compassionate
Existence is the generosity of space, which allows us to be here now. Existence itself is compassionate, making space for being, for consciousness and awareness to see themselves, to experience being alive. We can experience this with a sense of belonging. We are inextricably incorporated in this moment. It is us. We are it. Compassion reflects itself in us.
Leçon 6
There Is No Them & Us
We are entirely a part of and not at all apart from all that is going on. Blame, resentment, rage, grief, and despair arise in us when we experience ourselves as separate from other elements of the systems that created and sustain us.
Yes, there are actions that harm, exploit, and abuse, and we inevitably feel the impact of those. We are also enmeshed in a competitive universe, where there is a constant jostling for position. But it is the cooperation of systems that allows them to sustain themselves, and it is through creating connections that we create resilience, just as it is through diversity that we enhance our chances of survival.
We can breathe into this interconnected, mutually held space without resorting to sentimentality. We need to find ways to support those systems that support us, and that means recognizing ourselves as reciprocal beings who can give, as well as take.
Leçon 7
Visualizing Ourselves In Practice
Visualizing ourselves in practice, in interaction with one another, with ourselves internally, and with the more-than-human world, we can see ourselves taking part in the work to regenerate the oceans, valleys, forests, rivers, mountains, communities, one another, ourselves, and the great earth.
Inseparably a part of all that is co-arising, we can see our role as one of co-creator that will allow us to take full responsibility for the ecological emergency, and full power in how we make ourselves instruments for loving action, since compassion, which is an aspect of love itself, knows what needs to be done, and can act through us, if we can put ourselves in a position to offer our lives to love.
