"One abiding theory that emerges from the practice of a radical dharma that presents itself is that you should know this, attend to that, be aware of these things, but you must do them for your liberation, not mine." xvii
"Will we express the promise of and commitment to liberation for all beings, or will we instead continue a hyper-individualized salvation model - the myth of meritocracy - that is the foundation of this country's untruth?" xxv
"In the sentiment of my home community, I may not be where I'm going, but I am grateful that I'm not where I used to be." 5
"To hold queerness as a practice is to be in active radical acceptance of everyone and all things as they are." 42
"I experience a lot of anger, but I'm not involved in activism because I'm pissed off. I'm involved because I want people to be happy. At the same time I admit that I experience anger all the time. And yet, I'm also motivated by trying to love in a way that's authentic and open. I'm struggling to see the nature of anger and to transform that anger into something that's about creating, not destroying." 49
"We have to commit to our own liberation regardless of what happens outside. And paradoxically, that gives way to change happening outside." 53
"There would have been significant woundedness if my mother said that she could not accept me or love me because of my sexuality. I was very fortunate to receive love from a mother who, in that one instant, chose not to commit violence by restricting her love but chose to love more intensely, thereby becoming an agent of my further healing." 67
"Tonglen allows me to enter into a kind of intimacy with my own woundedness and offers me a way to stay connected to my experience. When I am in tune to my discomfort, I am less likely to avoid your discomfort. Or to put it another way: when I am able to show up to my suffering, I can also show up to yours." 71
"Keeping our eyes open, senses alert. You never really know what might happen. This is how I want to learn to want to be free. Not in search for a perfect monastic mountaintop far away from the problems of the world, but on the ready, among the many, singing each other's radical wisdom, waking up to ourselves, our dead, to their hearts and hunger, to their dreams of someday, I believe." 85
"Without inner change, there can be no outer change, without collective change, no change matters." 89
"I have this theory that racism is required in order to keep capitalism in place. There is the form of capitalism that we have - and I'm not mad at trade and exchange and barter and all of that - but cancerous capitalism, hyper-capitalism, parasitic capitalism requires racism in order to keep it in place. It requires division of peoples so that we can have the people that consume, the people that are producing what is being consumed, and, frankly, the people that are consumed." 124
"Anything that takes you out of the system where you are producing something - I don't mean creating, I don't mean the things that nurture you and serve you and are generative for you - but when you drop out of the system and you are not productive, it will have consequences. But those consequences are part of the imagination of this system that says that we have to be producing and we have to be making something happen in order for us to have value, in order to effectively know who we are." 140
"And start identifying with this space of being loved, truly loved, and truly encouraged to be free and having the experience of what that means." 145
"Meditation is not the primary practice for most Buddhists in the world. The thick number of people who practice meditation would be here in the States and in the UK. I think it's not an accident that white convert sanghas are putting such a strong emphasis on non-relational ways of developing their sanghas." 164
"And ultimately, I think for me that's truly the bottom line. What am I doing to benefit myself and others?"173
"Transcendent movements require people to organize around issues beyond what people perceive they are affected by. How to do that? People have to experience their interdependence. To recognize that any limit to your ability to love limits my ability to love. One has to penetrate the truth of interdependence such that I am moved to a place in which I am not doing something for you, but it is actually about me, which is tied to you because there is, in absolute sense, no separation." 199
No comments:
Post a Comment