I came across this video at the right time, as I’ve been wanting to make a post about what I see happening more and more in society.
What I see happening is that people are retreating to their castles and raising the moat bridge, or circling the wagons, whatever analogy works for you. Heck in modern terms you can even say they are retreating to their safe spaces.
Who is in the castle? everyone that is “us”, my religion, my political side, my country, my race, etc so on and so on in the myriad of ways people categorize themselves and others.
It makes us feel safe and secure, it is natural for humans to feel this way among other people we consider “us”. The flip side is that this also allows us to use ancient wiring to dehumanize the “them”. We can much more easily develop hatred, and justify all sorts of malicious and unskillful behavior, if the “them” is evil, wrong, and not even fully human. You can see where this has lead humanity to just in the past 100 years, let alone our whole history.
What I love about this video from this highly regarded professor, is that while he admits that it would be near impossible for humans to completely gut the “us vs them” dynamic, we are malleable as to who we place in each group.
Metta, a tool given to us by the Buddha, is the PERFECT fix for this, it allows us to practice putting ALL beings in the “us” group.. a lofty goal thats not easy to accomplish, but in my opinion one worth leaning towards. When we have metta for others, we can act more skillfully in the world, not out of a mind of fear , anger, and hatred.
This doesn’t mean we all will hold hands, and bring in utopia, utopia doesn’t exist, never has, and never will. There are real issues to work on, real problems to try and fix, or at least lessen, and our only real chance of doing this is not by breaking up into small groups that won’t talk to each other, but by overcoming our ancient nature, stepping out of our safe spaces, and meeting together to try to work these things out.
This requires discussion, and compromise, something I’ve not really seen much of in this country in my lifetime. This is a time of Chaos, and who knows what the future holds, I just know from my own life experience and Buddhist practice, that I’d rather face that uncertain future with a clear, calm, and peaceful mind, rather then a mind clouded with fear and hatred, nothing good can ever come from that.
Thank you Bhante J, metta is so important!