Where did Tom go? Where has Tom been? Who is Tom?

http://www.medialens.org/cogitations/080216_non_violence_and.php


Coming to the Middle East has not only given me lots to feel compassionate about, but it has taught me extremely valuable lessons.

If you fancy a bit of ramble then read on, otherwise wait for a post more centred around Palestine.

I have been caught up in some ego-driven desire to be 'a good person' and this has been driving me since... Well I can't quite tell but it's always quietly been there lurking in the shadows.

As all of you probably know, this time last year I was in pain, tomorrow last year, yesterday last year, for a significant time. I had a lot of time to think and it made me a much stronger person. I really appreciated the fragility and mortality of life and I became very dependant. Dependant on family, friends, compassion, empathy, medicines of one sort or another, meditation, and strength. It really showed me how bad pain is (I know it's obvious but I ignored it at all costs before it hit me hard enough to acknowledge it!) and how 'unacceptable' it is for any of us to go through physical pain unecessarily.

This awoke a deep well of compassion within me, I knew it was there and had explored it and ignored it at different times before - I didn't find it culturally acceptable or compatible with modern life, so I left it to fester and lived in a small box of ego... mostly because that's what everyone else was doing, and I thought that compassion was a negative emotion, and while it was difficult to do at first you soon get carried away with yourself!

Back to the awakening.

Pain forced me to acknowledge suffering, and love showed me that it was possible to do things that would help other people in a similar situation, then a load of amazing activists showed me that we can have an effect even on the big bad world, and that it was fun and rewarding. Love is rewarding, compassion is rewarding and campaigning is rewarding, for me at least.

Somewhere along the way, however, that 'rewarding' started to take over from what was driving it - a strong desire to alleviate suffering or prevent unecessary suffering.

I don't think it ever took over completely but there were certainly moments/times/acts/days/weeks in the last 7/8 months, where it was more than half of the mix. I also have a load of other problems like wanting to be 'right' and wanting attention and wanting to be wise and getting a bit fascist about everyone being 'good' so that we can all enjoy a wonderful world together, and cynically criticising people in the process(hypocracy, irony...) but those are on a slightly different plane.

And now, I'm in Palestine, I realise that it isn't that easy to sacrifice yourself to help others, it isn't that easy to solve everything, and that you are an infinitely more complex animal than you think... and I started distancing myself from things because they were overwhelming. The problem here isn't just a power-hungry few, or a profiteering clan shipping arms off to the world, it's the psychology of a nation, 5 million or so, most of them comfortable seeing themselves as part of an ethnic group that is superior to the Arabs, even a lot of the activists. It is so hopeless here, you can't demonstrate without being a victim of violence, Ghandi was up against far far less than the average participant in non-violent resistance in the West Bank and Gaza, at least in terms of violent oppression. So what can you do?

Lots actually, but it was in the West Bank, bearing witness to the emotional pain, the hopelessness and despair that comes after trying every possilbe way of changing the unjust situation that's facing you and your children and has been for 60 years, knowing that you are being slowly snuffed out or transfered out of sight of the Jewish majority in Israel.

The selfishness of Jerusalem and the ego of the place, "a country of takers" is how Israel has been described to me and it kind of fits, as generalisations about millions of people go. It's more an atmosphere than a collective judgement, more a way of life. It rubbed off on me in some way, not an obvious way, but my spirituality or universal love turned into being about 'i need to feel love' rather than 'a want to give you myself/my efforts/my energy in anyway that you will accept' which made it manipulative, manipulative love for everyone! Yes! How enlightened I had become! Rooooolll up for your loving manipulation!

One of the consequences of this growing selfishness, I think getting arrested really egnited a lot of it, a lot of other things as well, a deeper connection to what's going on here and a deeper understanding of freedom and power, but a fear and a selfishness that wasn't so strong before.

like the article posted says,

We can imagine a mind dominated by unconditional compassion for all sentient beings as a vast space, like a huge landscape. In this kind of context our own individual problems would appear very small, very manageable. By comparison, a mind limited to concern for ourselves is a very restricted space, like a small box room.

obviously we're all somewhere between the two unless we're in a moment of self or a moment of compassion/love, but I certainly haven't got to the "unconditional compassion for all sentient beings" yet, well I've felt it twice very strongly but I think that the conditionallity was lying dormant at the time, but it was an amazing full/emptiness/truth/enlightenment. Both times during spiritual practice in a group. Getting back to this, I was boxing myself in, and started coming out with desires to get rid of things, real desire to see change here "by any means possible" like Malcom X says. But this was very far from how I embarked on the journey - compassion for all of humanity, compassion for every single one of the 6,779,833,757 hearts beating in unison(at around 7pm on the 14th May 2009 according to the International Programs census).

It's easy for compassion to spin into anger or vengeance or revenge - but I think that this is a really superfiscial way of expressing it. Follow it past the point of percieved comfort and it becomes a fullness and roundness that gives life a lot of importance - its very very easy to strike back with anger/fustration, to close yourself off to suffering just at the point when it is really important to develop your compassion. But, as the Dalai Lama says again and again, it's blind.

There's no truth in violently expressing anger, it's superfiscial. If you really want to express your anger or your compassion or how upset you are by someone's behaviour then make them understand deep down, show them what they are doing, show them how valuable life is, hit their soul, not their skin - and it will be more effective, that person might change forever, that person might flip for a moment, that person might get more angry - you can never tell and it's not a command, but when it works it's worth more than a lifetime of forcefully educating people.

So all these things spin round in a cycle, in a circle, we are always chasing one idea and leaving another, taking up yet another and neglecting the one we just took up, taking up another that suits our ego or personal desire or sounds cool or clever or neat and slowly and quietly leaving a life-changing idea that brought us on to the round a bout in the first place.

I pretty much forgot my raison d'etre that I adopted after my experience with my nerves going haywire and the raison d'etre that has driven so much of what I have loved about my life in such a short time - compassion for all sentient beings. I didn't include the unconditional part because I wasn't aware that feeling compassion for Bush Blair Kim Jong Ill or General Than Shwe was I good thing to do, and I was still concerned with being 'good' to a certain extent, to the point where I was holding it over people and making them feel bad (which is mean and I'm deeply sorry to all those affected by my volatile ego). I still don't have the answer for that one except that I don't feel compassion for them as vectors of so much suffering but I do feel compassion for them as people, and would if I saw them being tortured without doubt, if they were to be hung in front of me I would probably feel a lot. Power does have a funny way of dehumanizing people so it's a challange, but I don't see it as a good or bad thing now, and I'm not so bothered.

"A sound man's heart is not shut within itself
But is open to other people's hearts:
I find good people good,
And I find bad people good
If I am good enough;
I trust men of their word,
And I trust liars
If I am true enough;
I feel the hear-beats of others
Above my own
If I am enough of a father,
Enough of a son"

This is where I would like to be. This is the state of mind that would give me the confidence that I was doing the right thing, not nurturing a self-image of a 'good man' but just feeling the weight of other's hearts as heavier than my own.

I am very very far from it at the moment, and although I have a clear dialogue between my mind my heart and my soul, something that has really come on recently, I have been empathising with people here less and less and less.

Today we were at a demonstration, and I was holding up a placard in Hebrew that said "Jewish National Fund, Hands off the lands of the al Oukbi tribe" - Nouri, the elder of a Bedouin tribe in the Negev desert, inside Israel, has been fighting singlehandedly against the Israeli State for years and years and has run up fine after legal expense after court case and is severely in debt, defending the land of the tribe. Usually the State goes and steals the lands of the Bedouin without a fuss because the Bedouin didn't ever see the need to register the land with the Ottoman Empire or the British Empire, but in this case the tribe did have the deeds from teh Ottoman Empire, the British mandate and the early Israeli state. And still the Jewish National Fund has stolen the lands and is ploughing them up.

http://www.dukium.org/

One of the Bedouin elders read my placard, and let water out of his eyes, just like that. Very quietly, so quietly that it took me a few seconds to notice. But my reaction wasn't compassion and empathy, it was surprise/shock. This must have been down to prejudice and ego getting in the way of the spirit of compassion, I had classified him as a hard old man of the desert and was surprised at the tears. Why should I be surprised? This man had been struggling with authority for a long time and was old enough to have seen his community thrive as it should, old enough to have gone through what Nouri was doing now and fought the Israeli State for a while, old enough to have experienced racism, old enough to know what this all means to the children, old enough to really feel the tradgedy, and to know it. If there was a westerner my age that was letting a silent tear go because his village was under threat in Yorkshire and they had no runing water and little access to food let alone medicine education and playgrounds, employment and decent shelter, that their land was being ploughed up by the businessmen in London and their neighbour's village had been demolished and voluntarily re-built 22 times over 60 years, that their ancestral land was being given over from supporting a community of over 90,000 to being given to 60 single family ranches. It's a hearbreaking life, and I was unaware, or at least I wasn't present with this, trying to bustle up to the other activists and get the message accross to the Israeli public in a measured and effective way like it was a bit of a game, like I was pushing an agenda. David Edwards is absolutely right for me, that showing compassion and awareness/understanding in these situations can change the world, where was my compassion? How had I lost this? Was this not the very thing that had driven me out to the protest? Probably not, it was probably more like my need to feel that I'm doing something while I'm here rather than my compassion.

This lack of connection, lack of presence was quite unsettling. I had a good snippet of a conversation in the taxi on the way back with the BBC documentary maker that had also been in a wheelchair for 5 months following a bike accident and went to a primary school just next to mine in London, Ravenscourt Park(went there until I was 5). He also made a film about the Ananda Marga Yoga groups in Manchester, which I quite like, but didn't know about their infighting in India "all life is an expression of one infinite loving consciousness/beba nam kevalam" - maybe, funny kind of love sometimes but possibly.

Then I was challenged about my ego by Angela and it was starting to click.

Where had my compassion gone? How has it that my ego has been operating so obviously without me seeing it? How had I been tricking myself all this time (indeed, what am I still tricking myself of, a hell of a lot I guess)?

So this is beautiful now, in a sublime state of emptiness, of space, of choice. It's too late now and I'm going to bed but tomorrow, the next day, the day after that and that I have the choice between ego and compassion, between self and love. I'll probably find that the dichotomy isn't that simple and deconstruct it again and go around on the merrigoround again, but each time you do a circle you can get a bit closer to the centre, you can stay aware of the circle that you're going in rather than think you're going along a straight line, you can bring in more to your life than before, you can choose. But I only have one choice in life really, and that's attitude. Do I train my mind to work for what's best for others, what's best for those close to me? What's best for those I've never met the other side of the world? What's best for the Whole? What's best for the good and the nasty tykes irrespective? Or do I just join the masses plugged into iPods and TVs and drugs and cool/ego and pleasure and revert to the illusion that I'm making choices but actually just coast along doing whatever's best for me until I reconnected again with the earth and my opportunity is gone and this magical and mortal life that was given to me is ended in trajic loneliness cynicism deep depression and misery?

Did I seriously think that was a choice?

We can choose to ignore this and we really have been trained to do so, sometimes it's difficult starting to be aware of this stuff and sometimes we need personal suffering to connect with this side of life, I certainly did, and I'm just sending out my feelers, still frightened and awed by the beauty majesty mystery and depth of love, compassion and the spirit - it's really tempting to hang on to your ego. But when I get the rare moment of just embracing this, you don't need to choose, it's a higher level, you just do, and you love it, and it's obvious, and it's natural and it's goooooooood :)

OK so that paints quite a simplistic picture, but you can make life simple. I'm not ready for that yet and want at the moment to just do as much as I can, which probably means giving up on some of the purity of the love, which needs space to grow in that activism doesn't afford as much as doing the occasional bit of 'spiritually engaged social/loving action' - which probably reaches farther in the way that it spirals out, like Mother Teresa(I think - check google) said "small acts done with great love will change the world" But I'm young and not egoless and wont be satisfied until I've tried the avenue of 'more is better' for a bit, which comes with more complex choices where you need to value truth over love to a certain degree.

Truth is something I could definitely get better at, get a more nuanced view of the world, bear witness and listen hard, be more honest, report things in a less dramatic and subjective (egoful) way....

Anyway, truth be told, I'm off to bed :) xxxx (in case it wasn't obvious, I LOVE YOU!)