418: Making and Unmaking the World

We make the world, and unmake that which doesn’t serve, by our everyday actions and inactions, our intentional taking care and our turning away. What does it take to have the courage, humility and compassion to attend as fully as we can to the world, to step towards a world we want to live in?

This week’s conversation is hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.

Episode Overview
00:00 Welcome to Turning Towards Life
02:49 The Joy of Coaching and Community
07:08 Understanding the Shambhala Warrior
12:17 Interconnectedness and Community Resilience
17:08 Humility in Compassionate Action
23:12 The Complexity of Truth and Instant Gratification
28:46 The Call to Action and Hope

Here’s our source for this week:

Joanna Macy: The Shambhala Warrior

Now the time comes when great courage is required of the Shambhala warriors, moral courage and physical courage. That is because they’re going right into the heart of the barbarian’s power to dismantle their power and dismantle their weapons, weapons in every sense of the word. As they make their way into the pits and citadels where the armaments are made, so are they also entering the corridors of power where decisions are made.

Now, heed this. The Shambhala warriors know these weapons can be dismantled. That is because they are manomaya, an old word that means “mind-made.” Made by the human mind, they can be unmade by the human mind. The dangers facing us are not fashioned by some satanic deity or by an evil extraterrestrial force or by some immutable preordained fate. These dangers are created by our relationships, our habits, our choices.

“So now is the time,” said Chogyal Rinpoche, “for the Shambhala warriors to go into training.”

“How do they train?” I asked.

“They train in the use of two implements or tools.”

“What are they?” I asked, and he held up his hands the way the lamas hold the ritual objects, the dorje and bell, in the great monastic dances of his people.

“One,” he said, “is compassion. The other is insight into the radical interdependence of all phenomena. You need both,” he said. “You need compassion because it provides the fuel to move you out where you need to be in order to do what you need to do. It means not being afraid of the suffering of your world. That tool is very hot. By itself it is so hot it can burn you out. So you need the other tool, the insight that reveals the interbeing of all that is. When that dawns in you then you know that this is not a battle between good people and bad people but that the line between good and evil runs through the landscape of every human heart. And you know that we are so interwoven that even our smallest acts have repercussions that ripple through the web of life, beyond our capacity to discern. But that knowing is kind of cool. It can seem at times a bit abstract. That’s why you need the heat of real passion.”

From One Earth Sangha

Photo by Daniele Levis Pelusi on Unsplash

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Turning Towards Life, a week-by-week conversation inviting us deeply into our lives, is a live 30 minute conversation hosted by Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace.  Find us on FaceBook to join in the lively conversation on this episode. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website, and you can also watch and listen on Instagram, YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Amazon Music and Spotify.

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