Adebayo C. Akomolafe says:

Life is flamboyantly mysterious – and so awesomely so that we numb ourselves to its outrageous intensity in order to survive. We occupy, and are occupied by, a multidimensional ecology of being – a wildness of potential so effusive that to speak with any sort of certainty about anything is in fact to be rude. Not even the most sophisticated claim to Truth will suffice – for truth itself is not enough; not even the most elaborately articulated vision will stand sure, for no perspective is wide enough, deep enough or colourful enough to embrace its deepest contradictions. We open ourselves to more of the magic around us when we treat others and the world around us (and in us) with the strangeness they deserve – for nothing is what it supposedly is. In a way, our world is estranged to its remarkable strangeness and beauty, scared away from its own power, and designed to silence other ways of knowing – the very soft feminine, intuitive, nonlinear, magical, carnal, participatory, relational ways of being alive. I urge you to crank up your shamanic prowess, break through your cognitive cubicles, and learn anew how beautiful your world can be. You don’t necessarily need psychedelic technologies or the thrill of travel to experience magic. Look closely at small things and realize how worlds inhabit our world – and how wonderful this is. Deep your feet into the soulful music of lazy bath water; eat a meal away from the haunting tyranny of the wall-clock; or, if your skies are privileged to host the labored movements of wildly pregnant clouds, run with feet unshod outside the sultry airs of your house and be the first to taste the magical raindrops of ancient lore. Dare to procrastinate. Insist on heading out into the dark. Nothing could be more subversive than playfully ‘feeling’ in a world contrived to banish the chaotic mystical beauty of our very musical realities. Feel today.

Adebayo works at The Tavistock Institute of Human Relations … very interesting posts daily. Gorgeous language, expansive content. Check him out.

In July I posted a link and a few paragraphs from a BPF article on the trend to McMindfullness, with the following paragraph:

Bhikkhu Bodhi, an outspoken western Buddhist monk, has warned: “absent a sharp social critique, Buddhist practices could easily be used to justify and stabilize the status quo, becoming a reinforcement of consumer capitalism.” Unfortunately, a more ethical and socially responsible view of mindfulness is now seen by many practitioners as a tangential concern, or as an unnecessary politicizing of one’s personal journey of self-transformation.

Since then I’ve discovered Charles Eisenstein, or at least begun reading deeply into his thought, and seems he presents a wonderful example of someone who sees a way forward for society as a whole to embrace mindfulness, or at least the insights that come from it, in a way that incorporates  both a sharp social critique and an ethical, socially responsible view.

His philosophical insights are rather complex and difficult, at least for me at this point, to reduce to a few paragraphs, and trying to do so seems to risk putting people off by creating the impression that his comments are facile and overly ambitious.

Rather than try to digest his thoughts as I understand them so far, I’ll just say here that he (and his ideas) seem to embody the Buddha’s teachings – apparently without claiming to be a Buddhist – better than any American with equally high profile credentials and visibility that I’ve come across. He offers his writings on a gift, or donation, basis so you can go to his website and read the full text of his books (at least the latest one) and decide what you think of it. Then there’s the opportunity to download it or order a print version, again, paying whatever you feel led to contribute.

I’m really just beginning to get into his thought deeply, and am finding it very helpful in bringing me back into a positive view of my meditation practice.

I have long been convinced that ‘there are no individual solutions’ (a loose quote from Peter Marin) to our world’s problems. One of the issues that keeps coming up for me is that at times it seems my spiritual practice is just one of those solutions that blisses me out and doesn’t really contribute to the overall betterment. Just a process, as Trungpa says in Spiritual Materialism, of collecting nice spiritual practices, feeling good about myself for having all these lovely collected practices on my mantle, but not truly a liberating practice that is taking me on the bodhisattva path.

So I have been happy to find, in Eisenstein’s writings, some confirmation that what I’m about is not so far from all that. I guess what is most interesting is that from his very different perspective, that of a scientific philosophical analysis of the whole of life’s evolution, it is the misunderstanding of self, the reification of this illusion we call the self, that is at the heart of our social malaise.

Of course, in Buddhist teachings, this ignorance of the true, impermanent, empty nature of self – and the craving to make that self real – is what causes our suffering.

I’ve been struggling to articulate all this for a while now, and tho I’m still not there, I’m getting a better idea of what it is that’s driven me into this state of disillusionment and doubt, and getting better at seeing how and why what he says is beginning to make me feel better about things.

The best I can do at this point to articulate that is to say that it is clarifying to see that our personal, my personal, suffering has the same root cause as the suffering and degrading of humanity at the social level.

I am working on a better understanding and better explanation of all this… and I’m working on doing better in my meditation practice!