Politics, culture and love

A student asked Zen Master Seung Sahn: "What is love?" Seung Sahn answered: "What is love?" The student was silent. Seung Sahn said: "You ask me. I ask you. This is love."

Why are we alive? What is our job in this world?

How can we keep this question open? I think this is the basis for political action that embraces both the personal, everyday level and the macro-political. Perhaps the first most radical act is to listen--to the voices in our head and to the voices of others, regardless of where they are on the political spectrum. Then compassion and action may arise by itself. Can we ignore the forces that bring about massive suffering to billions of people around the world? Do we ignore the suffering that we ourselves cause others (and ourselves) in our daily lives? Sometimes we use one to implicitly justify the other.

I am no paragon for listening to others or to myself; I think it is a path and not one that relies on purity or non-purity or political correctness or dogma. All we have to do is listen (and when we don't, to try again and again). One message of the Buddha, paraphrased of course, is "Suffering Is Optional." What does that mean?

Are there issues that cannot be resolved this way? Perhaps all of them--people have various interests and the world has no obligation to us to fulfill them. This is often why we suffer (paraphrase of Marshall Sahlins). But listening is a start.

 

Quotes I like:

If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution!--Emma Goldman

Men make their own history but they do not make it under conditions of their own choosing but under circumstances directly transmitted from the past.--Marx, 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (this was from memory; I will check it to make sure)

Enjoy your symptom!--Slavoj Zizek