Compassion or Condemnation: Is the answer even important?

"Which side of ourselves do we want to be plugging into: the compassionate side, or the condemnatory side? As I've said before, if we try to 'save the world' with righteousness and condemnation then really, there isn't anything left to save." - Russell Brand in a recent Trews episode

It seems to me that this is constantly, constantly, the question. In each and every moment. Compassionate or condemnatory. If we listen to the noise of the external world, the story is clear. Be condemnatory. "Save yourself, that's what everyone else is doing." It's the worst self-fulfilling prophecy I've ever heard of. And we are entering into, more and more, an extremely high stakes world where survival seems less than guaranteed, and so we are vulnerable to propaganda that presents the survival mechanism we should be acting on. We have to be more aware of this than ever, it is an extremely dangerous time. Like the moment when Mowgli has already looked into Kaa's eyes, it is almost too late to avoid being lulled into submission by Big Business, and their Government and Media seducers.

With the seductive eyes of Kaa before us, this life or death situation is, more visibly than most life or death situations, rooted in inner strength moreso than outer. The only hope is cultivating a connection to inner self, and inner wisdom, which will rekindle an awareness of a self-authorized action to take.

In a moment like this, it is all about where in the world we expect to see, and assign merit to, authority. We are being pulled, by cultural gravity, to seeing authority outside of ourselves, without seeing that it will be to our own destruction. Though I like to remain non-conspiratorial, whatever that means, I have little cause *not* to believe that there are actors within the systems I partake in, actively working to create that cultural gravity.

One could ask me for evidence of that, I guess, but to ground myself in this article, I would have to say that I don't need a mountain of evidence, I am consciously relying on a part of me that *knows* what is going on in the world. I try not to play heavily to confirmation bias, and remain open to diverse perspectives, but I take *all* perspectives with a grain of intuitive+critical salt.

And that dynamic itself is what I am advocating for. To lean more heavily on the intuition in our grains of salt, and listen to inner authority, wisdom, and compassion.

We will be faced with situations daily that merit a 'decision', or at least making sense of, such as being presented with news of another school shooting. Being condemnatory is easy. Media does it. "People" are doing it. The story arises, "I don't want people thinking I somehow endorse what happened, just because I'm saying it was more complex than people are saying."

"Tyranny is the deliberate removal of nuance." - Albert Maysles

I keep going back to this. Our self-authoritative selves know that this Universe is complex and nuanced. It is a foundation for compassion for other humans. What goes on in the brain and the human psyche is complex like the Universe itself. If we start listening to our internal authority on and in these daily situations, we have a new compass by which to find our way through them, navigating difficult 'moral' waters.

Where will the cultural gravity for this self-authority come from? The number of audible voices calling us to live compassionately are so far, a poor counterweight, but gaining momentum. The voice of the people has been rising on social media, to counter balance the tack of the mainstream media, which plays heavily to condemnation. Take the lack of the BBC coverage of the recent protests against the re-election of David Cameron in London, people made much noise on Twitter. Other people like Alaine De Boton, with his Art as Therapy exhibitions, are working to remind us of that nuanced, complex nature of... one another. People who know me may tire of hearing his name, but Russell Brand is currently the most external force activating my own internal authority. By constantly 'giving away' his own authority, Russell has won my utmost respect. I connect with him not on the level of an authority to bow down and worship (as some claim my generation is doing with him), but more on the level of Namaste - The spirit in me salutes the spirit in you. For frequent re-inspiration and connection in with a deeper sense-making process of global events, I highly recommend following along with Russell's youtube channel.

Rumi spoke on this in the 13th century: "Out beyond ideas of rightdoing and wrongdoing, there is a field."

And in the 1900's Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said: "If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being."

So simply by taking this question upon ourselves:

"Which side of myself do I want to be plugging into: 

the compassionate side, or the condemnatory side?"

we are already in rebellion, giving a nod to the possibility that the answer to the question is important: that what we each do, and which side of ourselves we choose to act upon, makes a difference. I believe it will make all of the difference in the world. There will be a world worth saving.

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For a language process, and awareness discipline that embody self-authorization, checkout non-violent communication.

For the voice of a real human that is speaking up on behalf of real democratic power, to make up for impotent politics, check out David Graeber on twitter. It will provide a line in to very stirring things going on in the UK in general.

For strictly factual, crowd-sourced news, check out the Infobitt platform: http://www.infobitt.com/

For regular news from non right-wing controlled media, check out Al-Jazeera and Democracy Now

I will post more resources to come on the topic of what does being self-authorizing actually look like.

don't be mesmerized, be mindful

Wanted: Somewhere To Put The Revolutionary In Me! (and all of us)

Lately I've been sorely missing a place to bring my revolutionary self.

I mean that voice in me that walks around my city stirring with the urges of unrest, the unwillingness to be boxed in to society's complacency and norms. The inability to stand aside, and watch others burn our precious planet, or their own precious bodies.

For me, this is the revolutionary self. It is everything in me that knows *more is possible*.

Lately I've been making conscious efforts to re-expose myself to literature and magazines that tie themselves in with the revolutionary spirit brought forward during the initial Occupy Wall Street occupation in NYC. Never have I been more inspired with the revolutionary spirit than I was during that time, and it lasted well into 2012, but since then, it has been largely dormant. It hasn't taken much reading though to re-awaken them, and I find now they're stronger than ever. But with no outlet for them, it's become a very frustrating experience for me.

Frankly, sitting down and writing a fucking blog post about them feels like a lousy last resort. But what else can I do at the end of a day that saw a thanksgiving family gathering on my fathers side, sitting at a table at my grandparents house, waiting for tomorrow to come to celebrate thanksgiving on my mothers side. Such is the paradox of these feelings. Time doesn't stop moving simply because Connor is feeling the internal stir of revolution.

To be clear, and some of you may know immediately what I'm talking about, and some of you may not, I'm talking about the temporary acquisition of a certain lens through which you see the world, and that lens helps you see the stupidity in almost absolutely everything that we encounter daily in a North American city; from traffic jams, to cigarettes, to the horrors of some stuff we've come to call 'food' found in grocery stores. Then there's the resulting state, after having navigated a mere one day in such a North American city, that ends up feeling a lot like 'FUCK IT ALL, JUST FUCK IT ALL, I DON'T KNOW EXACTLY WHAT INSTEAD BUT FOR GODS SAKE NOT THIS, NOT ONE MORE DAY'. Sometimes I even have these feelings while sitting around the table at thanksgiving with my extended family, it's most certainly not a jab at them I love them dearly, but the overall feeling I still have while in this particular state is one of 'I AM SITTING AROUND EATING TRIFLE WHILE THE WORLD BURNS, I DON'T KNOW EXACTLY WHAT INSTEAD BUT FOR GODS SAKE NOT THIS, NOT ONE MORE DAY'. For the most part if you have even once, like I have, 'taken the red pill' and stepped out into the real world to observe what's really happening, there are few things more morally excruciating than stepping *back* into the matrix to play by its rules. Trust me, reading AdBusters is like taking the red pill. The same goes for the writing of David Graeber, whose book The Democracy Project, I just finished reading yesterday and further stirred up this blog post in me.

But to trace back a moment, one might ask, "can't you bring some toned down version of these feelings up with your family so as to relieve all the internal pressure?" and the answer is NO with reasons to follow, and the answer is also not specific to my family, it applies across the board to this feeling of not having anywhere safe to 'put' my revolutionary self.

Reason 1: I do not want to be mistaken for looking for people to complain with, or that my fundamental attitude here is one of disempowerment and complaint.
* it is amazing how quickly a conversation can turn into this, after only a small misstep of the revolutionary self that comes across like this. In the past, this happened a lot in conversations with my father, who is himself a strong social cynic, but one hard pressed to move beyond cynicism into action.

Reason 2: I am not looking to enter into 'debates' about ideologies, current events, rights/wrongs.
* this has also been a pattern of the past involving my dad, on my initiative to start politically inclined conversation, except that it happens most often when the conversation also involves my brother, the two of whom seem to, to this day, be unable to prevent the conversation turning into this. I am not interested in a conversation in which people who are not sufficiently informed on something, try to propose and defend theories on those topics as if they were fact. The whole structure of the conversation is non-collaborative to begin with, and doomed not to satisfy the revolutionary self, still hungry for shared action.

Reason 3: I am not looking for sympathy.
* It is true. I do carry a large sense of responsibility for the world on my shoulders, sometimes so much so that I am reduced to tears at the degree of suffering undergoing all life forms on earth and the planet itself. At times like these, I have had extraordinarily frustrating experiences of others expressing sympathy for me. In that moment, all I want is not their sympathy, but to see that they too share an empathy for all that life on earth, and to cry with me. To let themselves *feel* what is really happening in the world, and for once, weep for it. I really feel that if we all began to weep for it, the things we were weeping for would be in rapid decline.

This was the beauty of Occupy Wall Street, they came together around conversation that started with the revolutionary self, and managed to carry on that conversation without these three things infiltrating the dialogue. And it made it the perfect place for anyone who was feeling the revolutionary impulse that I've been feeling to arrive. That, again, was the beauty of it. You could physically *arrive* there. In a place where you wouldn't be called insane, for thinking that the rest of it was insane. Not only that, because I can find even that much common ground with the majority of my immediate family members, but you could turn that feeling of insanity into shared action with those peers, actively participating in their direct democratic processes that, in themselves, defied our so-called democratic system. I remain hopeful that there may still be hope for this with my immediate family in years to come.

But there is no Occupy Waterloo. These last few weeks I confess to feeling lost in the city, aspects of real happiness when I'm sleeping in bed next to my girlfriend yes, but ultimately even confused/conflicted about that. Everything feels much less radical than I'd like it to be, and anytime that I'm in situations of privilege (even just... riding in a car) there's a voice that sounds the alarm because I know that 'to participate is to perpetuate'.

But 'god I don't just want to go live alone in a cabin in the woods'...

A dilemma at every turn.

Appearing too radical will just turn people off and away from you... Or will it? With all the inner unrest that I suspect so many are feeling, perhaps now is the perfect time to speak radically, attracting them to something with real promise of something different, everything that Obama didn't follow through on...

To be continued...