Destruction, Rebirth, and the Gaza Effect
a message from Shambhavi Sarasvati at Kindred 108. We're all kindred here.
Ignorance is not shameful
We’re all born with more or less access to wisdom. That is our natural condition, and there is nothing wrong. Each of us is ignorant to some degree.
Ignorant about what?
Everything from lacking ordinary clarity about what is happening immediately around us to degrees of ignorance about the nature of our existence.
Again, there is nothing wrong with us or damaged about us because we experience some lack of insight or understanding. That’s how we are made.
But then what? What about after we are made?
Adhikāra and bhūmikāra
In my spiritual tradition, the Sanskrit word adhikāra means our innate capacity—what we bring into this life. Our adhikāra is intellectual, emotional, spiritual, creative, and sometimes even mystical.
Bhūmikāra is what we do with our adhikāra—how we develop, nurture, and express our adhikāra.
Any combination of adhikāra and bhūmikāra is possible. We may have low adhikāra in some areas, but we do a lot with that and take advantage of the opportunities we encounter.
We may have high adhikāra in some areas, but we don’t develop that or have the best circumstances to express our adhikāra.
We may have terrible circumstances and still be able to develop and express ourselves in a wonderful way.
There are infinite permutations.
So the question is: Given the spectrum of our capacities, what are we doing with them?
Titan fragility
In the titan cultures, the U.S. being prime among them, many of us have a difficulty with being beginners and with learning.
Our self-worth often depends on projecting a false aura of accomplishment and knowledge even before learning takes place.
All accomplishment requires us to tolerate a high degree of experimentation, ineptitude, and even failure.
All learning involves unlearning or relearning. Many of us find the destructive aspects of learning to be too uncomfortable.
In order to ward off shame, we assert limited forms of knowing as if they were unassailable or ultimate.
We take up the position of the knowers, the definers, and the judges when we actually understand very little.
We refuse to ask the questions and let in the evidence that would reveal our limitations because we are too fragile to host the discomfort of the destruction of our cherished, yet limited concepts.
At the same time, we make actual money and generate cultural capital when we project certainty and adamantly insist on our clear categories and simplified, closed analyses.
The brain plate
I’ve been keenly aware of my own ignorance since I was a very young child.
Back then, I recognized that what I saw in front of my ordinary eyes and could access with my ordinary mind, was extremely limited. I felt very frustrated by this.
I imagined my lack of understanding as a metal plate bisecting my brain. This plate was a metaphorical structure for the feeling of being blocked or cut off from a fuller wisdom.
Now I know that it was not just my mind that was blocked, but all of my senses. And I’ve spent a lifetime trying to remove those blocks with only partial success.
To do even this, you have to be willing to not know, to be wrong, to feel helpless, to question everything and be questioned. The ground you stand on has to be perpetually unstable. You have to assume the impermanence of much of what you now feel certain about.
Most of all, you have to strongly desire clarity and to know your real situation—from the mundane to the most existential.
Refusing genocide
One thing that has become clear to me since October 7, 2023 is that many people are refusing clarity. They don’t want it. They are refusing knowledge in the most abject, obvious ways.
In order to continue refusing the onslaught of clarity and the desperate appeals being made to our minds and hearts, our insistence on our ignorance has to grow that much stronger.
And we have to become more cruel.
Of course I’m talking about Zionists who refuse to learn about the real history of Palestine and Israel or about what is happening today in Gaza.
People have been indoctrinated and lied to, but the tools that would free them are now openly displayed everywhere.
Many Jewish people have gone through radical examinations of their understanding and attachments and have extricated themselves from the cult of Zionism.
However, a larger number of Jewish people and their allies have not. And at this point, this refusal of wisdom is becoming more and more stark with each passing day.
But I’m also talking about those who identify as progressives who still hold onto the idea that Israel is defending itself or is even a viable project.
I’m talking about those who identify as progressives or even radicals, who refuse to deal with the complicity of the Democratic party and most elected Democrats and yes, Democratic socialists, in genocide.
I’m also talking about spiritual teachers and students who issue vague, isolated calls for peace, or who say absolutely nothing, or who have used what is happening in the world as a jumping off point for self-advertisements about their superior understanding or equanimity—code for “I’m too realized to react.”
I wonder if some of you, as I do, feel exhausted and frustrated by the endless, repetitive dissections of Trump and MAGA when the mirror is so rarely turned on ourselves.
Exquisite tenderness
Gaza is not just another genocide. For reasons we will never fully understand, it has become a global mirror that is reflecting the real condition of many colonial countries and our cruel cultures.
Gaza is also a mirror reflecting the possibility of community. And it is revealing more widely our profound yearning to live in societies based on mutual care and kindness.
And yet we often seem to be paralyzed and unable to imagine anything that is not just a reformed continuation of business as usual.
I’ve been re-examining and learning so many things about myself, others, and our world since the first Trump presidency. This process of stripping, deconstruction, and coming into more clarity intensified greatly after October 7th.
I’ve learned a lot of history, explored my relationship to Judaism, experienced new intimacies with people from around the world, felt a lot of pain and grief and loss, and encountered piercing beauty and wonder.
I know I’ve gained capacity and skill as a human being because of my openness to becoming destabilized and ungrounded and to experiencing in a more intimate way some extremely painful realities of our lives together on this planet.
Lately, I’m less moved to speak, but I’m not less moved. I feel full, and I sense something about to be born of this fullness, this exquisite tenderness.
Birth canal
We all feel the destructive quality of this moment in human history. It is also a time of conception and gestation. Things are coming apart and coming together in a new way. But the new has not yet arrived.
Globally, it seems likely that the destruction will intensify. We may need more chaos in order to be forced to re-order our lives.
I do know that the longer we refuse to let ourselves be remade and reborn, the longer we will remain here in this difficult, generative, fierce darkness.
with infinite love,
Shambhavi
Hey friend! I am offering a retreat on Darkness, Destruction, and Generosity in Portland, Oregon from February 12-15th.
We’ll explore:
Teachings on darkness, destruction, and generosity from Trika Shaivism and Dzogchen
Teachings on generosity and the overthrow of oppression
Shiva the Destroyer and fierce Devis
Practices of shunya and destruction from the traditions of Trika Shaivism and Dzogchen
Find out more here.
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