Bureau of Public Secrets

Interesting old blog! Explores lots of things about "Engaged Buddhism":
http://www.bopsecrets.org/

the things I used to find radical...

... I may not find radical any longer.

Not that they have been shown to be false (although that may be the case)
but often they have been superceded
by other possibilities
or extensions of themselves
or they may have, within a collective field
collapsed under the weight of their own inconsistencies

or perhaps, just as likely,
that they contained creative paradoxes
which were as scaffolding
to hold new things

what were once radical
are stabilised

new possibilities are built upon the groundwork

Bring Your Hegemon

Take up space.

Speak loudly.

Assume, rightly, that you will be heard.
Do not excuse yourself when you belch or fart.
Invite only who you want to your party.
Disregard their spouses.
Let yourself be despised.
Carry on anyway.

Eat,
drink,
fuck.
Merry.
Then, 

forget it all

Laugh heartily.
Take, of what is offered.
Give, without reservation.
Never worry.

Betray your best intentions.
Make amends.
Expect no forgiveness.
Remember your own humanity.
Begin again.

Betrayal

Every day, I become a little bit more of a Luddite...
all this techno prowess, in tandem with a super surveillance culture, resurgence of the Right in response to a splintered Left, who at best will claim,
"But we were never unified!"
"What about my struggle?!"
"Check your privilege!"

Yes, yes dear 

I too am that adept identity politician, 

I too have and will proclaim all the above,
I too know the pain of invisibility and invisibilisation...

...I also know the creative genius of subterranean silence,
plans for strategic subversion,
hit hard on the pressure points of a swollen machine.

Take cover.

I bemoan the stakes we currently play,
all unity mistaken for hegemony,
the digging up or declaration of our past or current victimhoods like postmodern excavations,
building our new homes
made up of these cards.

I proclaim,
unbravely,
"enough!"

Listen to this fragile peace.
Dare to dream, my cowardly dreams.
Betray all my friends, and then
leave, just as I came in,
unnoticed.

Friends and Fans

No more friends.
Only fans. Or un-fans.
Why ppl gotta be so un-fanly?

practising...

...part of practice is occasionally not getting it right
as part and parcel
of the "righting" of the work.

fall down,
get up.
try again.
try again.

"Man of Colour" in Australia

My new friend @guantai5 just shared with me some information about some early use of the term "man of colour" in Australia:

In the book Black Founders: The Unknown Story of Australia's First Black Settlers, by Cassandra Pybus, there was mention of a ‘man of colour’ in the Sydney Gazette 1818 – the Black American ex-convict, William Blue...

Interesting that this phrase was in use in Australia 200 years ago.

Also this:"In the mid-nineteenth century these 'black men' were referred to by many names, but the most common racial epithet was 'men of colour' or, to distinguish them from Asians and other non-White races, 'Black Americans', 'Negroes' or 'niggers'. In Australia at least, such terms described anyone who was 'racially' African, be he from Africa, North America or the Caribbean."

Veering, and Chaos Magick

I feel like veering into more overtly esoteric territory, at the same time this is a "coming out of the closet" of a sorts. I choose not to forsake my critical commitment both to social/global justice as well as to the more "lineage-based" expressions of my spiritual/religious convictions (particularly with Buddhism), but I must admit that I have, as late, been more interested in particular metaphors of relationship to power and effecting change that I've adapted from "Chaos Magick".

From a wikipedia entry:
"[Chaos magick] is a school of the modern magical tradition which emphasizes the pragmatic use of belief systems and the creation of new and unorthodox methods."
Perhaps more succinctly, and this is my working and operative assumption and interpretation, I am inspired by the renderings of chaos magick which strategically use the power of belief itself in order to manipulate more interior and exterior realities in conformance with desired outcomes.

In one interpretation of the "pure form" of my motivation, then, this is about access to, or the accessing of power for the sake of itself, with the object and direction of the power being secondary. In other words, the power of belief (elsewhere described as "placebo effect", and scientifically used as a bogey man in order to render invalid certain practices that are unverifiable in their efficacy within a scientific framework to achieve their intended outcomes).

In the case, I am choosing to "politicise" the placebo effect, to harness the power of belief itself, or perhaps more accurately, the "suspension of disbelief" in order to effect a radical change in consciousness within myself and communities I am a part of, in the service of goals (that are to be determined, and that are somewhat separate from this suspension of disbelief... other than a vague sense this this suspension may "open onesself" up to new experience and possibility).

A less overtly "magic" association of this is in the everyday, integrated work of movies: Watching films.

We "rationally" understand many films to be works of fiction, but we may also appreciate that watching a film is a form of induction into a particular form of ritual, whether the film is purposefully fictive, or even documentary. We are inducted into a ritual that involves payment, attendance with friends, a community of "practitioners" (i.e. filmgoers) with whom to later reflect on meaning and substance, and the implications for lives changed or making a difference simply in the knowledge gained in the process.

To put it another way, we may recognise the works of film to be primarily fictive, or, in the case of documentaries, still edited to reflect the perspectives of the filmmaker(s). A film is housed in a contained context which may not have any immediate bearing upon what happens to our material reality when we leave the cinema, yet the ritual experience of watching a film is granted a modicum of both respect and consent from the viewer... We are willing to believe, for the duration of the film, that there are dragons and demons, that the Matrix is a powerful metaphor for the mundanity and listlessness of everyday secular capitalist urban empire, that there are little boys who can see dead people.

We are, contextually bound, yet inducted into a system of art and intrigue, which can "magically" reorient our relationship to the world once the film is over.

That's primarily what I mean by my burgeoning interest in chaos magic...

Frankly, this seems to have been the role of shamanic magic in its particular performative practices and ritualisations. Real healing can emerge out of these, particularly when some of the ritual inductions include actual, intentionally physical co-participation as part of an induction into a shift in consciousness, through, for example, long periods of fasting, or blood letting, or genital subincisions, or ritualised ingestion of semen as male secret, or the terror of being led into cavernous abyss to be taught new communal rites of passage which significantly mark the transition in the young person's life from one phase into new roles of responsibilities.

These rituals are not "mere placebos" in the shifting of the psyche in an orientation to "difference" or "newness" or "innovation". They are, in the language of the times, about magic. This is no more a "placebo effect" in the profound invention of culture and material outcome as a movie is a "placebo effect" that can induce mass hysteria, outrage, tears, or indignation in a captive audience, followed by endless praiseful reviews, or outcries, bannings, excommunications, and so on.

So this post is intended to notice the ways in which I have used an obsession with identity politics to serve particular ends which I am increasingly sensing are not actually best achieved through their particular underlying belief systems (which I broadly describe as Marxist, materialist, and postmodernist).

What if there is a necessary "regression" that I must insist upon in order to gain and sustain a modicum of respect for the work there is to be done, the sustainability that is required of eldership, and the transition away from heroism into the humility of meditative and interpersonal peace-practice?

That is:
To solve the world's problems not only by identifying the problems to be solved, but to begin with a different perspective:
Not that things are "perfect" (in some saccharine, NewAgey sense of the term),
but rather, from a melancholic and aesthetic perspective (admittedly privileged, yet still an emblem of the peace I want to practice):
That the world's "imperfections", our wars, famines, injustices, and so on, are but the weathered forms of "wabi-sabi" that is our ever-evolving plight as a planet, yet a symbol of our simple familiarity as a species... One which orients still toward perfect forms, yet emboldened for presentation by the glitches, the cracks, the inconsistenies across seasons, the variations in utility.

What does it mean to inherit a diverse range of religious, spiritual, political, meditative, cultural and linguistic systems, and to participate in a process of integrating and disseminating them all which is infinitely creative, and which, to add my own personal intention, would be in the service of:

healing, social justice, further seedings and fruitions of creative transformative possibility, for a more sustainable, loving, compassionate and welcoming society, in which existing divisions are both acknowledged, properly engaged with, as well as ultimately seen to be fully illusory from the perspective of mind, heart and gut?

YES: This is the practice of chaos magic, for me

in Art, in Scriptural recitation, in the setting of personal intentions in meditation, in the listening to disparate voices and attending to "whatever arises in the moment", in the willingness to make error and then to be held accountable to these not only by "others", but also from the parts of me which know integrity, dignity. To do "chaos magic" in borrowing/adapting from the language and thoughts and practices and traditions of people from around the world while keeping abreast of the extent to which my co-optations are both respectful and deviant (perhaps both), and to what extent the consequences (however expediently negative) may well serve an outcome more compassionate and in the service of justice than a simply ethnocentric traditionalism could allow.

I am more libertine than I realise, perhaps.

And this is, also, my strategically employed belief system

to elucidate the many points of this essay online,

nothing else.

I am free to abandon the entirety of the above

pretend that nothing, in fact had been written

nothing of substance had, in fact been shared

but perhaps somewhere on this way, a sunday night was well spent in ecstatic flow.

A whole new set of friends (which includes the ones I already have, albeit in fresh and evolving ways of relating).
A whole new set of possibilities.
I "fast" and I notice what it is that I really crave in my body.

In Conversation: Tim Mansfield

My excellent friend Tim Mansfield on the evolution of technology and the resultant/correlated social/cultural/environmental issues.

Climate Change and Death

I wrote this essay about two years ago, when I was thinking of getting it published in Beams and Struts, which has unfortunately since ceased ongoing publication...

Here it is now, with a few edits.

--

Climate Change and Death

Thinking about global warming and climate change.

Thinking about how I want to think about global warming and climate change.

What can I say that has not already been said? What can I write that hasn’t been elsewhere better articulated?

I grew up in urban Singapore; for me, it is important to see that human habitation and the Natural are not two separate things… Sustainability is possible not (only) from “returning” to some more “natural” (read: near subsistence-level) way of life, but also about investing in good urban infrastructure; where we can deliver resources to more people, more effectively.

But it is one thing to be motivated by contentment in the pursuit of "sustainability" in our current ways of living and being, as a species... It is another to be motivated, at this moment in global history, primarily by the avoidance of the seemingly inevitable calamity and catastrophe of anthropogenic climate change (indeed, already calamitous and catastrophic for many Pacific Islander people)…

I am curious about the fear of dramatic, human-induced climate change, the global warming that now threatens the very survival of our species. On “either side” of the debate around climate-change deniers and those who recognise the reality of climate change, I am interested in considering, from a civilizational perspective, the very real possibility of death of the human species.

I think this is one big, unanswered issue, climate-change or otherwise. 

My bias, clearly, in this article, is in an orientation toward viewing the world and the phenomena of human suffering through a Buddhist-lens. 

For the Buddha, it was not the avoidance of old age, sickness, and death, that led to his Enlightenment, but the full confrontation with the inevitability of aging, sickness, and death of the individual. What too, of our global collective, as a species?

Civilizationally, I am not convinced that even the most ardently engaged climate-change philosophers have fully accounted for the possibility that we are encountering, in our Way-of-Life, a civilizational Old Age, a civilizational Sickness, and civilizational Death.

One fear I have about bringing this up is that this train of thought has racist and classist implications. A disproportionately large number of deaths and calamities resulting from our ongoing global climate crisis happen to people from relatively impoverished countries, who may not have the political infrastructure nor the capital to avoid this calamity… “Making peace” with “their” death is hardly the sort of equanimity I am advocating.

This, of course, begs a larger question about the relationship between Buddhist equanimity and global justice... What does liberation from suffering look like? Whose old age, sickness and death is most tended to?

What would it mean to account for all of this? The death of our people, inclusive of and as indicated by the death of our globe’s poorest, the death of our most dispossessed. As an individual, I exist in a precarious bubble of geographic and class privilege, here in Melbourne Australia, and I am not convinced that it is enough to keep organising around climate change as if it is to avoid some impending disaster, when the disaster has already arrived, it is already here. 

As a species, people have already been displaced from their/our homes, from their/our livelihoods. 

Perhaps, as a species, we are already sick.
Perhaps, we are already dying.

What lessons might we learn from apprehending the phenomenon of global climate change in this way?

What is the morality that arises from assuming the inevitability of our extinction?

Need it be nihilistic?

Might it be Buddhistic?

Integral Justice

I have previously written a "A Quick Sketch on Developmental Justice"... part of what I was exploring was multiple forms of justice which account for the multiple ways in which injustice and justice are both enacted and experienced by a diverse range of individuals, communities and societies, including those forms which are both "internally" and "externally" imposed upon any person or group.



I have been exploring this page on "Integral Justice"... feeling inspired:

"Integral Justice provides a holistic and integrated response to the complex and heterogeneous needs of ‘transitional’ or ‘post-conflict’ societies.


Transitional justice emerged as a field in the 1990s. It dealt with the legacy of war crimes and gross human rights violations committed by combattants and dictatorships. Transitional justice conventionally seeks to redress injustice and pursue accountability through truth commissions, trials, or vetting. It also seeks to restore the rule of law. Integral justice builds on transitional justice – but goes a step further to fill its gaps.
Integral justice recognizes that injustice is experienced differently by different people within a society. Injustice is also experienced at several levels, some visible and tangible and some invisible and intangible. Conventional transitional justice respond to the explicit or visible levels, through political, legal and social measures. TJ overlooks the invisible levels, which are often too sensitive to be addressed. This leaves a huge gap for victims and societies.

‘Integral’ justice is a holistic response to these diverse needs of survivors and societies for the injustices associated with war, violence, oppression and tyranny; it makes explicit all that has been implicit and overlooked. Integral justice comprises five deepening dimensions:

* Politico-Legal justice: including truth and reconciliation commissions, trials and reparations.
* Societal justice: including collective reparation, commemoration, education and memorials.
* Cultural justice: including symbolic reparation and revival of cultural meaning and tradition.
* Ecological justice: including healing the fractures between people and their environments.
* Ethical/Spiritual justice: including the revitalization of values, ethics and spiritual meaning.

An integral approach is fundamentally trans-border, trans-cultural and trans-disciplinary. We humans are complex beings. We are not only social or political animals, but also emotional, cultural, psychological, spiritual, natural and physical, creative beings. We have complex and changing needs and evolving levels of consciousness. Integral Justice transcends borders, penetrates and understands cultures, and combines disciplines to provide satisfactory responses to the injustice suffered by victims and the wounds inflicted upon society as a whole. Conventional political and legal measures of transitional justice like trials and truth commissions are more effective if they are built upon the foundations of ethical, ecological and cultural justice."

Not So Bloody Difficult: An Exploration of HIV and viral hepatitis

An dramatically abbreviated version of this is going to be published in my workplace's upcoming "Good Liver" quarterly magazine. A draft exploration covering some of these issues was published on an earlier blogpost of mine here. In my next blog post, I intend to discuss some of the executive decisions that were made around edits, and what that indicates about my own next steps around the work there is to be done in public health and health promotion.

--

Not So Bloody Difficult: An Exploration of HIV and viral hepatitis

Leading up to the largest ever upcoming international conference on HIV/AIDS, called “AIDS 2014”, to be hosted in Melbourne this year in July, it seems a fitting time to offer this piece to consider the similarities and differences between HIV & viral hepatitis, and to apply some of the lessons from a relatively well-resourced Australian HIV sector (compared to hepatitis sector) to address the ever-increasing burden of liver disease largely attributable to living with chronic viral hepatitis.

HIV

HIV stands for Human Immunodeficiency Virus, a virus which attacks our immune system, lowering our white blood cell count and making the person extremely susceptible to otherwise innocuous diseases. When the immune system has been sufficiently enough compromised, the person may be declared to have a syndrome called the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, known as AIDS, which has famously led to too many early deaths from opportunistic infections for too many people in Australia and globally. 

In Australia, HIV is largely transmitted through unprotected anal sex between casual partners of unknown status, particularly between gay men and other men who have sex with men. Fortunately, since there has been greatly improved access to medications, it is these days extremely unlikely that HIV positive people in Australia will ever get AIDS.

Comparing HIV and Viral Hepatitis

HIV was identified about a half a decade sooner than hepatitis C (which was once known as “non-A, non-B” hepatitis). 

Also, there is a “neatness” to HIV and the way it is understood which is not so true for the many forms of viral hepatitis. For example, you either have HIV or you don’t. You are either HIV positive or you are HIV negative. If you have it, you will not clear it, either on your own or with treatment. There is no vaccine. 

On the other hand, there are 5 known types hepatitis viruses: hep A, hep B, hep C, hep D, and hep E. Each of them has different window periods for accurate testing, differing forms of transmission, different courses of treatment, variations on whether they are short-term (“acute”) or long term (“chronic”) which is partially dependent on factors such as age and gender, and different possibilities for clearance as well as reinfection. Some hepatitis viruses can be vaccinated against (hep A & B, which can impact also on D), and others you cannot (hep C and E). 

To complicate things even further, the term “hepatitis” itself is usually used as a shorthand to mean “viral hepatitis”, even though it literally just means “inflammation of the liver” which can be caused by any number of factors, of which viruses are but some. Inflammation of the liver can be caused also by abuse of alcohol and certain other drugs and medications, fatty liver, or our immune system mistakenly attacking our liver. 

From my perspective as a health professional, the dizzying complexity of hepatitis viruses also means an equally dizzying complexity of strategies for working with an extremely diverse range of communities who are affected by hepatitis in Australia. Whereas HIV, in Australia, is primarily endemic in the gay community primarily from unprotected anal sex with casual partners, viral hepatitis affects and is endemic in a much broader range of communities, including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, people who inject or who have ever injected drugs, imprisoned people, many people of Asian, African, and Southern/European-heritage from high prevalence countries, and many young people who inject or do backyard tattoos.

From my own perspective as a community member of Malaysian-Chinese heritage and as a gay man, I have certainly seen a significant amount of hepatitis B in my broader ethnic community as well as HIV in my gay community. The implications of this statement go beyond simple posturings as a health professional seeking to eradicate these viruses on a “population level”. The endemic nature of these viruses in my communities has affected the very evolution of community cultural identity and practice.

In Australia, many gay men have died from AIDS-related illnesses attributable to living with HIV during an era of extreme homophobic stigma and discrimination. Compared to a broader heterosexual community, gay men have literally lost nearly an entire generation of elders, with the consequent loss of cultural adventurism and wisdom. This is even before we consider the impacts that HIV has had on monopolising the resources of gay men not only in terms of cultural production, but for a significant time strictly in a focus on mere survival. The “gay plague”, as HIV was colloquially known, continues to have trickle down effects to this day. For example, for many straight people, the worst fears of unprotected sex, aside from a usual gamut of sexually transmissible infections, would be unwanted pregnancy, and hence, the unpreparedness about bringing forth of new life into this world. For gay men, as an inherited memory from the years of AIDS, our worst fears of unprotected sex have to do with a confrontation with individual and generational death.

With regard to viral hepatitis, we know that liver diseases are implicated in all sorts of individual problems, including those which affect our mental health. In Chinese medicine, the liver organ system is sometimes likened to a “general of an army”, and its associated emotion is anger. Just as every army needs a general, from this perspective, anger is not necessarily seen as an unhealthy emotion; A well-functioning liver is as a healthy “general” who commands and channels anger into its “healthy” forms; for example, in the willingness to both witness and appropriately respond to injustice, or even in the non-violent but stern responses to a misbehaving child. 

The consequent problems of having an unhealthy or damaged liver, including and especially that related to or caused by viral hepatitis, can be the correlated inability to attend to anger. What I have witnessed in those in my community with severe liver health problems from viral hepatitis is sometimes a swinging to and fro between a profound lethargy and an extreme, almost impotent rage, with no direct object of this rage. For so many marginalised communities who bear the disproportionate burden of living with viral hepatitis, the implications of this sort of “unhealthy” anger, or perhaps improperly channelled anger, can of course be disastrous. 

While the scourge of HIV-related stigma, still existent, has at least lost its edge of the illegality or criminality of homosexuality, hepatitis C continues to implicate the people living with it with illegality, criminality. One of the more challenging aspects of this too, in considering the ever-evolving climate of effective curative treatments, is that a significant part of dealing with the stigma of living with, or once living with hepatitis C, is in the individuation of behaviour change (i.e. “I used to inject”, “it is all in the past”, “I was young and foolish with my experimentation”). This differs, for example, from a good number of people living with HIV and in the broader gay community, in that there is less of a denial of the legitimacy of gay sex in itself, with a huge community-led push to decriminalise and destigmatise homosexuality, and to question the pathology of homophobia.

Moving Forward

Jeanne Ellard and Jack Wallace, two researchers from the Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society, have written excellent working definitions of “stigma” and “discrimination”:

Stigma is “characterised by experiences and/or feelings of shame, social exclusion, rejection, blame and adverse social judgements about an individual or group,” while discrimination “involves actions by individuals or institutions to explicitly treat individuals or groups with particular characteristics in an unequal or adverse manner with denying someone employment or access to health care on the basis of [some characteristic or assumed characteristic of these individuals or groups, with] race and sexuality as key examples.”[1]

Elsewhere, Dr. Max Hopwood has written about the ancient Greek origins of the term ‘stigma’, “used to describe the signs that were cut or burnt into a human body to mark a person as someone of unusual or bad moral status. The bears of these stigma-signs were slaves, criminals and traitors, people to be avoided, particularly in public places.”[2]

It is incumbent upon us, given the origins of the term “stigma” and its literal associations with slavery and criminality, that we commit more fully to a program of abolition of the cultural and political environments which “enslave” people to their disease, and which criminalise people for what should be seen as more significantly a health, rather than strictly moral, issue of injecting drugs.

It is striking that, by numbers alone, viral hepatitis affects 17 times more people than HIV, nearly double the number of people with dementia, 10 times the number of people diagnosed annually with breast cancer and prostate cancer combined, and are the leading causes of the fastest increasing and preventable form of cancer in Australia (liver cancer). 

Just as decriminalisation of homosexuality (and sex work) has been highly correlated, locally and internationally, with the proper controlling, lowering and managing of the rates of HIV seroconversion in priority populations, one strategy to address the burden of hepatitis, particularly of hep C, is to speak out against the stigmatisation and criminalisation of drug use, which would include the positive consequences of this for cultures of imprisonment, both in the reduction of drug-related imprisonment, as well as in the ideal inclusion of safe injecting facilities and needle and syringe programs in correctional facilities. 

I offer this piece in order to apply some of the wisdom generated within a relatively well-resourced HIV sector in Australia (compared to working in viral hepatitis) to apply to the ever-increasing burden of chronic viral hepatitis and liver disease among marginalised communities. 

Marginalised communities need not remain marginal; we are repositories not only disease, but also of wisdom, and of possibility.

---

[1] Ellard, J. and Wallace, J., Stigma, Discrimination and Hepatitis B: A review of current research, Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society, La Trobe University: Melbourne (2013), p8-9

[2] Hopwood, M., “Stigma: an overview”, paper presentation at ‘Workshop 19: Equitable access? Acting on structural and organisational discrimination faced by people affected by hepatitis C and HIV’, at Consortium for Social and Policy Research on HIV, Hepatitis C and Related Diseases, 30 May 2007, Cockle Bay, Sydney

Decolonizing Activism; Deactivating Colonialism

solution

Not to solve,
but to dissolve.

Padmasambhava's quote on the search

"If the seeker himself, when sought, cannot be found, thereupon is attained the goal of seeking and also the end of the search itself."
- Padmasambhava

Quirks of language

An overview is an adequate vantage point
An oversight is to miss something.

Reggie Watts

This Man.
no. words.

a quote from "Other Power"

"It is notoriously difficult to give up smoking. Doing so requires persistence and, from a self-power perspective, one can say that what is needed is strong willpower. What actually motivates a person, however, is foresight. It is generally only when a person becomes strongly aware of the future consequences that he does something about the habit. Often this happens too late. If a person does not stop smoking until he has had one lung surgically removed, then we can readily say that he should have stopped earlier. Why didn’t he, and why can he do so now? One might say that it is because his fear is now strengthening his willpower. But what usually happens is actually the reverse: the evidence of surgery has brought home to the person the fact that he is mortal and that he cannot, by the power of self alone, defy natural processes. It is the realization that natural processes are stronger that paradoxically permits the person to do what he could not do before when his self felt more powerful. This is not a case of self-assertion but of self-diminishment; not one of achievement, but of submission.

Moral resolve is like this. A noble person does not do good because of willpower. She does it through a combination of, on the one hand, modesty about self, and, on the other hand, faith in a higher purpose, a higher meaning, in powers more potent than self-will. Such a person is not moral through gritted teeth. She is at ease in goodness.

Buddhism revolves around the idea of refuge. One takes refuge not from a position of strength but from a position that acknowledges weakness. Right-mindedness is self-diminishment plus gratitude for higher guidance and assistance. For a Buddhist, the source of guidance and assistance is the Buddha, the dharma, and the sangha. Since the dharma is the teaching of Buddha and the sangha is the community of Buddha, the core of refuge is the Buddha himself.

Other-power thus came to mean allowing Buddha to work in, on, and for us by reducing our self-estimation, willfulness, ambition, and conceit. The core attitudes here are gratitude and assurance: gratitude for the awakened one who “has-come-to-us” (Japanese, Nyorai; Sanskrit,Tathagata), and assurance that comes from confidence in the power and process that result from our taking refuge therein. From such gratitude the traditional virtues such as generosity, energy, patience, balance, foresight, and morality flow naturally without special effort. From such assurance flows a confidence that takes away the need to grasp at short-term personal gain or be ever vigilant in self-defense. In this way, right-mindedness naturally gives rise to right behavior. It is not a case of achieving morality by will-power as a necessary basis for mental cultivation—such a method is self-defeating and ignores the inherent weakness of the individual. In sutra after sutra, the Buddha tries to combat the folly of conceit. Conceit says, “I can do this; I am a special case; I will not reap the consequences that others reap.” Wisdom says, “I cannot do this by my own power; I am not a special case; I, like all others, am subject to suffering and impermanence; all dharma is non-self.” For one who has such faith, morality is not rule-keeping, it is naturalness."

- David Brazier, from his essay on Tricycle Buddhist quarterly, "Other Power: Why Self-Mastery is Self-Defeating"

Utopia

http://www.sbs.com.au/ondemand/video/259748419676/Utopia

Utopia is a documentary by John Pilger exposing how Aboriginal Australians have been targeted for genocide, and the hideous, ongoing machinations of racist, genocidal colonisation in this country.

"In other Western countries, indigenous people still suffer. But unlike Australia, historical treaties have been signed that begin to recognise their right to self-determination. Australia is the only developed country repeatedly condemned for the abuse of its indigenous people. Now and then, Australian governments talk of Reconciliation, an acceptable idea that hasn't built decent homes or got rid of blindness in children, and malnutrition and Dickensian diseases. It hasn't stopped young people suiciding and it hasn't stopped a land grab that began more than two centuries ago. 

Like Apartheid South Africa, reconciliation is not possible without justice, and this will only happen when the first Australians are offered a genuine treaty that shares this rich country, its land, its resources and opportunities. The benefit then will be mutual. But until we give back their nationhood, we can never claim our own."

- John Pilger, speaking to all non-indigenous people who occupy the stolen lands of Australia