Joanna Macy: Out of This Darkness a New World Can Arise

Out of this darkness a new world can arise, 

not to be constructed by our minds so much as to 

emerge from our dreams. Even though we cannot

see clearly how it's going to turn out, we are still

called to let the future into our imagination. 

We will never be able to build what we 

have not first cherished in our hearts.

 

- Joanna Macy

 

Thích Nhất Hạnh: Peace Needs To Begin Within Oneself

Everyone knows that peace has to begin

within oneself, but not many people

know how to do it.

 

- Thích Nhất Hạnh 

Pema Chödrön: Unlocking a Softness That Is In Us

It's such a huge help in working with our crazy

mixed-up minds to remember that what we're doing

is unlocking a softness that is in us and letting

it spread. We're letting it blur the sharp corners

of self-criticism and complaint.

 

- Pema Chödrön 

 

Bill McKibben: Rex Tillerson Is Big Oil Personified, The Damage He Can Do Is Immense

This should horrify us all. There is a deep need for us to continue 

to speak to and illuminate the truth of these horrors. ~ Molly

***

Now a fossil fuel executive will run America’s foreign policy, right out 

in the open. Donald Trump gets credit for a kind of barbaric transparency.

‘It’s like appointing Ronald McDonald to run the agriculture department.’ Photograph: Brian Harkin/Getty Images

In one of the futile demonstrations that marked the run-up to the Iraq war, I saw a woman with a sign that read “How Did Our Oil End Up Under Their Sand?” In nine words she managed to sum up a great deal of American foreign policy, back at least as far as the 1953 coup that overthrew Mossadegh in Iran and helped toss the Middle East into its still-boiling cauldron.

If the Senate approves Rex Tillerson after his testimony on Wednesday, they’ll be continuing in that inglorious tradition – in fact, they’ll be taking it to a new height, and cutting out the diplomats who have traditionally played the middleman role.

Rex Tillerson – who has literally spent his entire working life at Exxon – is big oil personified. It’s like appointing Ronald McDonald to run the agriculture department (which is certainly a possibility, since that job is still unfilled).

So in one sense Tillerson’s appointment simply makes formal what has long been clear. But in another way, his announcement is truly novel: the honor (secretaries of state are usually considered the second-most important official in our government) comes after a season of disgrace at the world’s largest oil company, in a moment when the energy business is on the ropes and when its product is causing the greatest crisis the planet has yet faced.

Those three things are linked, of course. The disgrace is the long, slow reveal by investigative reporters that Exxon knew all about climate change as early as the late 1970s. Their scientists were so far ahead of the curve that management was taking precautions and planning strategy a quarter-century ago – building drilling rigs to account for the sea level rise they knew was coming, and plotting to bid for leases in an Arctic they knew would melt.

But instead of telling the rest of us, the investigations revealed their deep involvement in the effort to spread doubt and confusion about climate change. Given the consequences, this is a series of corporate crimes that makes VW’s emissions cheating seem like stealing a candy bar from the 7/11. In a rational world, Congress would be grilling Tillerson about the company’s conduct, not preparing to hand him the country’s plum unelected job. 

But climate change means not just the collapse of the planet’s fundamental systems (after the hottest year ever measured, global sea ice has been charting record lows – literally the world looks different from outer space). It also means that the energy business is in serious trouble. 

Please continue this article here: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jan/11/rex-tillerson-big-oil-trump-cabinet 

Sharon Salzberg: We Can Choose To Transform Our Minds So That They Embody Love

Whatever our religious or spiritual tradition, there is wisdom held here that I believe we humans and our beautiful planet deeply need. There is so much violence and ignorance and harm that arises from the great disconnection that so much of humankind experiences. I also speak to this from the humility, compassion, and wisdom of my own personal experience of knowing both sides - of being asleep and deeply impaired in my connection with myself and others, and of a gradual awakening to the profound experience of interbeing. However, it wasn't until many years ago when I first began to stand still and heal my heart and mind that I even knew how separate, fearful, and disconnected I was. This way of being in the world that was largely rooted in disconnection was what I knew and what was familiar and I was simply ignorant that life could be experienced very differently. Now, and for over 30 years, I have been gradually awakening to the interconnectedness that weaves through us all. I can see the Sacred within myself and within you. This is light years away from the many years I lived in pretense and image management and fear and a great loneliness, the loneliness of separation. Another world is truly possible. And it does indeed begin within each and every one of us. As Thích Nhất Hạnh states, "We are here to awaken from the illusion of our separateness." 

Warmest blessings ~ Molly 

Concepts can rule us in many different ways. When we are caught in the concepts of separation, we suffer distance and alienation. We need to defend ourselves at all times because the world seems very threatening. When we experience a strong idea of separation, immutable self and other, it seems as though there is constantly a great big "other" out there. To bear this danger, we hold ourselves in tense readiness, waiting for every impact...

The legacy of separation impoverishes the spirit. Seeking only to protect ourselves, we cannot genuinely connect with others, we cannot see what needs our love, and we struggle with terrible aloneness. In trying to reach others from the stance of our isolation, we are like weary travelers preparing for a dangerous border crossing, cautiously hoping to reach a new land and make contact, secretly believing it will not be possible.  Veering between fitful hope and underlying insecurity, we have no peace. Imagine the relief of discovering that there is no such border to be crossed! It is only through seeing our fundamental connection with the world that a life of true peace becomes possible.

The ways in which we direct our minds to cultivate this seeing are all-important. This transformation of mind, releasing the burden of concepts, is not just theoretical. These is a path to actualize it. Again and again in his teachings, the Buddha explores love and connectedness. Through meditation and the brahma-viharas he offers us the possibility to radically change our relationship to life.

When we learn to move beyond mistaken concepts and see clearly, we no longer solidify reality. We see waves coming and going, arising and passing. We see that life, composed of this mind and body, is in a state of continual, constant transformation and flux. There is always the possibility of radical change. Every moment - not just poetically or figuratively, but literally - every moment we are dying and being reborn, we and all of life.

Without the rigidity of concepts, the world becomes transparent and illuminated, as though lit from within. With this understanding, the interconnectedness of all that lives becomes very clear. We see that nothing is stagnant and nothing is fully separate, that who we are, what we are, is intimately woven into the nature of life itself. Out of this sense of connection, love and compassion arise...

Love and concern for all are not things some of us are born with and others are not. Rather, they are the results of what we do with our minds. We can choose to transform our minds so that they embody love, or we can allow them to develop habits and false concepts of separation.

- Sharon Salzberg

Excerpted from Lovingkindness: The Revolutionary

Art of Happiness

Arundhati Roy: The Day When Change Will Come

I discovered this profound quote by a courageous, strong, and amazing woman I love, Arundhati Roy, inside the book of another courageous, strong, and amazing woman I love, Naomi Klein, in her latest "This Changes Everything." The wise ones in our midst inspire me and fill me with gratitude. May inspiration and courage be contagious! - Molly

The day capitalism is forced to tolerate non-capitalistic societies in its midst and to acknowledge limits in its quest for domination, the day it is forced to recognize that its supply of raw material will not be endless, is the day when change will come. If there is any hope for the world at all, it does not live in climate-change conference rooms or in cities with tall buildings. It lives low down on the ground, with its arms around the people who go to battle every day to protect their forests, the mountains and their rivers because they know that the forests, the mountains and the rivers protect them.

The first step towards reimagining a world gone terribly wrong would be to stop the annihilation of those who have a different imagination - an imagination that is outside of capitalism as well as communism. An imagination which has an altogether different understanding of what constitutes happiness and fulfillment. To gain this philosophical space, it is necessary to concede some physical space for survival of those who may look like the keepers of our past, but who may really be the guides to our future.

 - Arundhati Roy
 

Charles Eisenstein: The Presence Of the Sacred

The presence of the sacred is like returning to a home that was already there and a truth that has always existed. It can happen when I observe an insect or a plant, hear a symphony of birdsongs or frog calls, feel mud between my toes, gaze upon an object beautifully made, apprehend the impossibly coordinated complexity of a cell or an ecosystem, witness a synchronicity or a symbol of life, watch happy children at play, or am touched by a work of genius. Extraordinary though these experiences are, they are in no sense separate from the rest of life. Indeed, their power comes from the glimpse they give of a realer world, a sacred world that underlies and interpenetrates our own.

What is this "home that was always there," this "truth that has always existed"? It is the truth of the unity or the connectedness of all things, and the feeling is that of participating in something greater than oneself, yet which also is oneself. In ecology, this is the principle of interdependence: that all beings depend for their survival on the web of other beings that surrounds them, ultimately extending out to encompass the entire planet. The extinction of any species diminishes our own wholeness, our own health, our own selves; something of our being is lost.

- Charles Eisenstein

from Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, & Society In the Age of Transition

Just Eight Men Own the Same Wealth As Half the World

I deeply appreciate our youngest son, Matt Murray, for pointing this out to me today. We must completely end and transform economic systems rooted in greed, violence, oppression, death, destruction, and unimaginable suffering to ones which support life, caring, connection, justice, and equality. We must. There is enough abundance on Earth such that no one need be hungry and without the basic necessities of life. We who have so much and who have the capacity to act because our circumstances are not dire must do so. There is huge need to lower our tolerance for the unacceptable, the obscene, the immoral, the injustice that pervades our culture and the world. It is time for new stories which embrace a caring and kind and just world. The time is now. - Molly

Clockwise from top left: Bill Gates, Amancio Ortega Gaona, Warren E. Buffett, Carlos Slim Helú, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Lawrence J. Ellison, Michael R. Bloomberg.CreditNYT; Reuters; Reuters; Reuters; Getty; European Pressphoto Agency; Getty; AP

Eight men own the same wealth as the 3.6 billion people who make up the poorest half of humanity, according to a new report published by Oxfam today to mark the annual meeting of political and business leaders in Davos.

Oxfam’s report, ‘An economy for the 99 percent’, shows that the gap between rich and poor is far greater than had been feared. It details how big business and the super-rich are fuelling the inequality crisis by dodging taxes, driving down wages and using their power to influence politics. It calls for a fundamental change in the way we manage our economies so that they work for all people, and not just a fortunate few. 

New and better data on the distribution of global wealth – particularly in India and China – indicates that the poorest half of the world has less wealth than had been previously thought.  Had this new data been available last year, it would have shown that nine billionaires owned the same wealth as the poorest half of the planet, and not 62, as Oxfam calculated at the time.

Winnie Byanyima, Executive Director of Oxfam International, said: 

“It is obscene for so much wealth to be held in the hands of so few when 1 in 10 people survive on less than $2 a day.  Inequality is trapping hundreds of millions in poverty; it is fracturing our societies and undermining democracy.  

“Across the world, people are being left behind. Their wages are stagnating yet corporate bosses take home million dollar bonuses; their health and education services are cut while corporations and the super-rich dodge their taxes; their voices are ignored as governments sing to the tune of big business and a wealthy elite.”

Oxfam’s report shows how our broken economies are funnelling wealth to a rich elite at the expense of the poorest in society, the majority of whom are women. The richest are accumulating wealth at such an astonishing rate that the world could see its first trillionaire in just 25 years.  To put this figure in perspective – you would need to spend $1 million every day for 2738 years to spend $1 trillion.   

Public anger with inequality is already creating political shockwaves across the globe. Inequality has been cited as a significant factor in the election of Donald Trump in the US, the election of President Duterte in the Philippines, and Brexit in the UK.

Seven out of 10 people live in a country that has seen a rise in inequality in the last 30 years.  Between 1988 and 2011 the incomes of the poorest 10 percent increased by just $65 per person, while the incomes of the richest 1 percent grew by $11,800 per person – 182 times as much. 

Women, who are often employed in low pay sectors, face high levels of discrimination in the work place, and who take on a disproportionate amount of unpaid care work often find themselves at the bottom of the pile.  On current trends it will take 170 years for women to be paid the same as men.

‘An Economy for the 99 percent’ also reveals how big business and the super-rich are fuelling the inequality crisis.  It shows how, in order to maximize returns to their wealthy shareholders, big corporations are dodging taxes, driving down wages for their workers and the prices paid to producers, and investing less in their business.

Please continue this article here: https://www.oxfam.org/en/pressroom/pressreleases/2017-01-16/just-8-men-own-same-wealth-half-world

To Honor Martin Luther King, Jr.

A Few Quotes Reflecting
The Wisdom and Great Heart of a Great Man

Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.

Men often hate each other because they fear each other; they fear each other because they don't know each other; they don't know each other because they can not communicate; they can not communicate because they are separated.

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere... A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life's roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.

A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today - my own government.

We must build dikes of courage to hold back the flood of fear.

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.

Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.

An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all of humanity. 

Rarely do we find men who willingly engage in hard, solid thinking. There is an almost universal quest for easy answers and half baked solutions. Nothing pains some people more than having to think.

Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will.

It is not enough to say we must not wage war. It is necessary to love peace and sacrifice for it.

There comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe nor politic nor popular, but he must take it because his conscience tells him it is right.

We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights and considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

I must continue by faith or it is too great a burden to bear and violence, even in self-defense, creates more problems than it solves. Only a refusal to hate or kill can put an end to the chain of violence in the world and lead us toward a community where men can live together without fear. Our goal is to create a beloved community and this will require a qualitative change in our souls as well as a quantitative change in our lives.

Everybody can be great ... because anybody can serve. You don't have to have a college degree to serve. You don't have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.

True peace is not merely the absence of tension; it is the presence of justice.

We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of Now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy.

The time is always right to do what is right.

I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.