Sending Love to all.
Today I’m happy to bring you another of this series of videos I recorded a couple months ago in the forest we live on the edge of.
This video is another invitation into a deep exploration of ever-available peace.
One key clarification on this video: There is a point in the video where I say something like, “I don’t condemn this inter-religious violence/war.” I should’ve gone more into this in the video because this is quite a radical statement to make. To be clear, I absolutely implore our species to move beyond all forms of violence and war. I would love to give this gift to our grandchildren. I believe this is one of the most worthy North Stars we can aim for.
With that said, what I meant in the video is that I am not any sort of final judge who can make absolute condemnations or demonizing proclamations about others. “Judge not lest ye be judged.” “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?” I feel that when we place ourselves as the ‘final judge,’ we tend to perpetuate war-consciousness through demonization, self-righteousness, and shadow-projection. We are involved in a collective karmic unfoldment that has aeons of (violent) momentum; it is not surprising that many people and groups get swept up in this confusion and insanity. It seems we all do, to varying degrees, and I have compassion for all. I view our planet as something like a children’s hospital, with all of us being wounded kids in adult bodies — and all being confused and ill on various levels. This view opens compassion rather than ‘absolute condemnation.’ It seems to me that only through universal compassion—and withdrawing shadow-projections—will our species truly be able to end war-consciousness and break the age-old karmic curses that afflict us.
“If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Here are some quotes from the video to give you a sense of the medicine:
“There is no wrong emotion. There is no wrong sensation. Human life can be very painful. I’d imagine we’ve all felt that pain. We are living on a planet that has been steeped in war and many forms of violence and abuse for millennia. Most of our ancestors were traumatized in one form or another, and that pain and the momentum of those karmic inheritances lives in our bones, lives in our cells. And we are presently being invited—I would suggest there’s an ever-present invitation—to begin to reverse those millennia of momentum through awareness.”
“We place our fulfillment and our dreams, our aspiration of healing or awakening, on some ever-receding horizon. We often do this unconsciously. We don’t realize the degree to which we’re carrying this deep unconscious resistance to the present moment and a deep, often unconscious belief that the present moment is not enough as it is.”
“If you really start to deeply internalize that there is no wrong emotion, there is no wrong sensation—however this wholeness of now is showing up—that’s it. That is the ocean. That is freedom in a profound sense, expressing itself as whatever it happens to look like.”
“If you go deeply, deeply into impermanence as a moment-to-moment reality, you start to see that experience itself literally never stops changing. You’ve never seen this moment before. The room you’re in has never looked precisely this way to you. Different details have never been in that precise configuration.”
“You’re locked into a story that you’re having a shitty day, meanwhile an infinite mystery of richness is exploding forth all around you at all times. You have the option always to redirect attention away from that little pity-party story and redirect it toward freshness. Go to immediate experience as a mysterious wellspring of bizarreness, strangeness, and bask in the weirdness.”
“When you rest as pure awareness, you can discover a level of repose, of neutrality, of all-embracing light. Life starts to feel more like, ‘Whoa, I don’t even know what I am. I don’t know what any of this is — but it’s juicy, it’s effulgent, it’s luscious, it’s rich.’ Life is doing itself. No maintenance required.”
“I’ve been there. Trust me, I’ve wallowed in the mud plenty, had my child heart shattered in this lifetime. So I’m there with you, and I feel sincere and honest compassion for what you’re going through. If you’re going through something really hard, insofar as it’s possible for you, allow even the most difficult sensations to be seen with tenderness.”
Human Care & Tenderness,Jordan
P.S. One more thing: I added this passage to my post from a couple days ago on ending drama in life and relationships. Wanted to share it with all of you, as it may be clarifying:
In essence, the key to ending drama in life and relationships is to end it within yourself. Cease to be at war with reality. See no enemies. Discover spaciousness.
“It takes two to tango”: In any relationship, if you become non-reactive and cease to add fuel to the fire, the fire of drama ceases. A person cannot fight with air, with space.
Now, this can be a delicate dance because setting boundaries is also important sometimes—but it’s possible to learn to set boundaries in a clear, firm, non-dramatic way. If a person in your life habitually disrespects or abuses you, I recommend distancing yourself from that person, or cutting them out altogether.
Ending drama within yourself does not mean you can never take a stand in life, but when you do, it comes from a different place—rooted not in war-consciousness but in a transcendent-and-all-inclusive Love that foundationally sees no being as an enemy. You increasingly come from universal compassion.
If you feel called deeper, consider Simple Freedom or our Brotherhood.
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