It is not just people working in organisations for social development that I feel close to. I have secretly also sympathised with drug addicts and alcoholics. In some weird way, even these so-called dregs of society, have inadvertently landed where they are, as a result of not playing according to society’s rules. Most unfortunately, none of these so-called rebels have been able to really put their energy into any kind of lasting transformation. As usual for a good reason one supposes.
Social reformers, people and others working outside the establishment, all kinds of drop outs, have presumably chosen the route they have, on account mainly of one thing. (I am now referring to genuine individuals and not those who have chosen this kind of work to simply carve out an empire for themselves in the field of conservation or rural work or whatever). They have come into contact with the world in a deeper way than most and it has caused them pain.
Pain can be a great shaper of destinies. Pain can help people to move mountains. Provided it is dealt with in the right way. Unfortunately most of us have a standard reaction to pain and all that causes us distress. We jump into action. “Action” ranges from thinking fast and furiously about the painful situation, to talk, to action. Earthquakes, the Tsunami, various natural and man-made disasters witness a lot of action and genuine human support from all directions. Human beings seem capable of reacting fast to catastrophes. What we are not good at is dealing with chronic situations. Chronic unpleasantness, cruelty, bad behaviour. In short all the things which finally lead to man-made crises.
Social reformers commonly jump into action by girding their loins and going and forming organisations and getting to work on various issues. The junkies jump for their brand of poison be it crack or illicit hooch. Pain is hard to bear. It is hard to stay with. But it is precisely through staying with it, without immediately reacting to it, that we get the strength we need to go deeper into the poison that is destroying our world so as to be able to dissolve it and free ourselves of the trouble. This does not mean, as so many people might suppose that we drop everything and sit in the lotus posture of contemplation. No. It means we carry on with our work, with our duties, with whatever we are doing. And yet, somehow, what it means, is that through it all, that we make time for the necessary contemplation of life.
To be able to deal with the world the way it is, we need a lot of staying power. We need to be able to just watch a problem quietly. We need stillness, not in the sense of being lazy or apathetic but still as in meditation. As in the eye of the storm, as in the heart of true creativity.
Again, there is a reason that we have by and large failed to go as deep as we need to go into the problem. It is not something we learned to do – ever. Nobody taught us how to look, how to listen, or how to deal with our feelings without suppressing them, in order that we might get the best out of our energy without losing it in constantly hiding the way we are. For this reason, precisely because most of us find ourselves on foreign terrain when it comes genuine change, the only thing to do is for each of us to depend on our own resources to find our way as individuals.
It’s a little bit like being lost in a forest, initially alone, so that one has nothing else to go by besides one’s own senses and intelligence. Perhaps when one has ventured far enough in this fashion, we will meet each other in a new space, where each of us will have learned the value of independent thinking and perception from which point onwards we will be able to work together, to cooperate with each other and give ourselves to a common goal without losing our individual essence.
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