You belong here, on this planet!! 😊 What if there’s no better moment than this present moment? With all the wonderful and horrible things going on simultaneously… Right now, we each have the chance to be fully present to options that will make the difference in our tomorrow. From a point far off in the cosmos, our planet is a just speck of dust. But everything we know about our history, the ways we’ve lived and died, all exist here on this one planet with currently 8 billion people and the over 100 billion before us. When we think about the word “here”, it might mean a different place for each of us in terms of a sense of belonging. We all belong on this earth else we wouldn’t be here, that’s my short theory. But to truly feel like we belong, we often seek out other common themes besides ‘one planet’. It’s been a gift to build my weekly Yoga classes with people that feel they belong here, most who identify in the LGBTQ+ community, and primarily fellow gay men 40+ seeking a communal space that’s an alternative to many other traditional spaces. Together, we co-create a healing space that fosters connection from our shared interest in authenticity.
I want to share about 2 movies that I recently saw that helped me feel a sense of belonging in ways that are still somewhat new for me. Two nights ago I went to the screening of an urgently needed documentary “Coexistence my ass!” playing at the Roxie Theatre until 11/25. This film “follows Israeli activist-comedian Noam Shuster Eliassi as she creates a comedy show by the same name. Shot over five tumultuous years, the film traces Noam’s personal, professional, and political journey in tandem with the region’s steady deterioration.
Raised in a bilingual Israeli-Palestinian village — the only intentionally integrated community in the country — Noam grows disillusioned with traditional peace activism. She pivots to stand-up and quickly attracts attention across the Middle East. But as her star rises, everything around her falls apart. With biting satire, Noam pushes her audiences to face difficult truths that aren’t always funny but do remind us that another reality is possible.” – coexistencemyass.com
The takeaway from the film which reinforced my perspectives on much of our history: It’s naive to think that we can speak of peace and coexistence when there is the oppressor and the oppressed. This is like the naive wish for peace that would only come at the expense of silencing, erasing, and genociding the other. If there is imbalance in the structure of a society, like the apartheid state of Israel, it’s not possible to coexist as equals. This is the way America tried to whitewash the forming of our country and avoid fully repairing the harm from 246 years of chattel slavery (See press statement from NAACP). Or the way Canada wished to cover over the genocide of its indigenous people. This is the pattern we’ve been following for years. Political powers work hard to normalize this way of seeing using propaganda, disinformation, and national bullying. It’s been a painful experience, but my own bias and even my own spiritual practices, held me in such a neutral place, that I didn’t understand why it was incorrect to just think people needed to work harder, or needed to see it my way.
I truly held that notion of, why can’t everyone get along? If the game of life has been rigged and the oppressed are already set to lose due to a system of supremacy, then how can I expect that we’ll all just get along and feel equal? I had to get in touch with the privilege that I have, even as a mixed heritage, Jewish gay man. It’s about where and how I grew up that automatically made certain things available while allowing me to ignore other things. With that vantage point, I thought I could measure everyone else’s experience. But to understand that my shoes have held privilege requires me to step out of my comfort zone and be far more understanding than I’d ever known to be. Allowing myself to be humbled with my spiritual practice, versus being applauded for any material metrics that come from the discipline – that’s what helped get me here.
It was inconvenient amidst my close chosen Jewish family to shift from a Zionist perspective, but it’s become the most liberating one to now be an anti-Zionist Jew who recognizes the Jewish value of speaking up for the oppressed, which includes Palestinians (versus the cognitive dissonance I had held of everyone except “the Arabs” – the collective name I was taught to use for all in that region in order to deny Palestinian existence). Being anti-Zionist is the farthest thing from being antisemetic. In fact, I can now align with others who say being Zionist is actually antisemetic! Being anti-Israel isn’t being antisemetic. It’s an act against an apartheid state who has removed itself from the principles of Jewish religion with a political indoctrination born from Christian restorationists and secular, traumatized Jews in the mid-1800’s.
What would co-existence actually look like? First, settler colonialism and fascist systems must stop, be dismantled. Recognition of this harm needs acknowledgement, which would be a very tall order. A new word that came up during my research helped me understand the complexity again. It’s not the story that’s complex, it’s the mindset. I’ve written about cognitive dissonance and about cognitive shortcuts. And now amathia is the word.
Amathia popped up while doing research around why our minds seem to actually prevent us from expanding our knowledge, even by whom we would consider very smart people. This YouTube video helped me understand it best: Socrates on Intelligent stupidity & Amathia // why smart people believe stupid things by Laure’s Digital Musings. I like her pronunciation as a French speaker though the internet says it’s pronounced uh-MA-thee-uh.
“Socrates said of amathia that ‘There is only one good: knowledge, and one evil: ignorance’, where he meant intelligent stupidity or the unwillingness to learn and understand the truth. That’s why smart people believe stupid things and do stupid things. It can be by laziness, because of shame or guilt, or because of the banality of Evil as Hannah Arendt says it about Eichmann, and the German military.” – Laure’s Digital Musings
This is where another lightbulb of understanding turned on. It’s not more knowledge that I needed to think I should invest in gathering for my case, but better skill at inspiring others to discover their ethical and moral lens. Here’s an article from verywellmind.com that summed up what I was feeling about this. It speaks about developing a strong moral compass. A quote in the article: “Moral compasses aren’t fixed constructs—they may change as we face new experiences in life, gain knowledge, or cope with hardships. Therefore, everyone’s moral compass is unique.” — Kristin Wilson, LPC, CCTP. The fact that our moral compass changes based on experience was helpful for my heart to hear. When someone can deny the crimes against humanity for the sake of their safety and for the convenience of their previously held beliefs, it’s deeply reassuring that this can evolve with an expansive view of the matter. A short, conveniently held story can prevent us from holding empathy for the one we less understand. A more full, nuanced story not only expands our view and our hearts, but it creates the actual ground for unity consciousness.
A second film I saw with friends as part of the 29th Arab Film Festival in the SF Bay Area that just finished last weekend, was “The Voice of Hind Rijab” by Director and Writer Kaouther Ben Hania. It was a powerful reenacted story with a mix of some actual audio recordings of the event that highlighted some of the most blatantly criminal moments of the current genocide on Palestinians and Gaza: “January 29, 2024. Red Crescent volunteers receive an emergency call. A 6-year old girl is trapped in a car under fire in Gaza, pleading for rescue. While trying to keep her on the line, they do everything they can to get an ambulance to her. Her name was Hind Rajab.” – arabfilm29.eventive.org Many of us know this story that was shared in the news and IG over this time. It was beyond heartbreaking to hear her little voice asking for help while knowing she wouldn’t make it. While I knew the small parts of this story, the film expanded the understanding of how complicated, frustrating, and corrupt this wartime mentality is. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) shot 335 bullets into the car she was in. Eventually, Hind Rijab was also shot.
How can it be possible to justify the killing of a 6-year old girl trying to be rescued from a car while piled in with dead relatives who had been shot for over 3 hours? What story must be told to dehumanize not only the IDF, but people here in the US who didn’t feel changed by this? Even the story of “that’s just the cost of war” as a way to let us all shrug our shoulders feels disconnected from what we all inherently know. I don’t believe that’s our natural state. I don’t believe we belong to a place that is devoid of having feelings of care for any other living being. But I believe it is the way that our human existence has been shaped over thousands and thousands of years. Is there actually a way out of this? I know that in our hearts, there is another way. We often simply don’t know how to choose coexistence or interdependence even, since the “us versus them” story has been rooted in our evolutionary design. It operates as a sort of wisdom some run with, akin to amathia.
In Yoga, ignorance, known as Vidya in sanskrit, is seeing the unreal as real, seeing the darkness as the light. Having fear of death because we think we are only the body. This is the Asato Ma sloka that is often repeated at the end of Integral Yoga classes and what I chant after the Saturday Hatha Foundations class:
Asato ma sadgamaya
Tamaso ma jyotir gamaya
Mritor ma’amritam gamaya
Lead us from unreal to real
Lead us from darkness to the Light
Lead us from the fear of death to knowledge of immortality
Om Shanti, Shanti, Shanti
This tradition of repeating uplifting mantras/chants/sound vibrations helps develop an energetic alignment with longstanding principles of higher consciousness. They elevate our mind and allow potential to manifest. I feel grateful for these traditions, and the many traditions that bring us together. And these require repetition for transformation of mind and being.
Now that’s one power of tradition. Could we consider that some traditions might be perpetuating harm, and maybe not ones we tend to think of? And certainly, as we know, even within the Yoga traditions there has been great harm due to the teachers. Do we keep doing things because that’s the way they’ve always been done? Or do we question things that create our status quo and stay curious about this journey? Do we become creative and more understanding of how we can raise ourselves and each other up with a renewed vision? These upcoming holidays really trigger my thinking on this as we often fall into what I consider the traps of capitalism, colonialism, and commodification. It’s not necessary to eat turkey which requires over 46 million turkeys to be tortured and slaughtered for essentially entertainment. I’m sorry to say it this way, but it’s just simply not necessary for celebrating the holiday. But I need to step down and accept, this is how we exist right now. And I like to think I’m above all 3 of the traps but I catch myself time and time again because it’s been so conditioned and normalized that I fall into habit-mind with some of my actions.
As Laure shares in her video, it’s not more knowledge that’s needed to get out of amathia. It requires some shift in moral and ethical perspectives. Maybe the understanding of our highest potential can only exist on an astral plane yet to be contacted. Maybe the concept of breaking patterns in order to make better ones leaves us lost in space. But then where do we belong? Now I’m thinking that this IS the path towards universal consciousness! 🙂 We belong in this universe. The vision of shared safety and collective healing doesn’t seem impossible for us, though I won’t say I can imagine it. What I can say and do, is to keep leaning towards it and promote the universal message of kindness and care for each other. I’m not sure how far that will go but far enough is good enough.
Let’s stay connected,
Marc
