Why I’m Not Angry

Thoughts on discrimination, race, and compassion in light of recent events

I think we have many people hurting and trying to be available to them is maybe the best that I can offer. So in response to how I’m coping, I am feeling sad, deeply so. I do not feel any anger or frustration but I feel it from many of my connections and so I am taking in their suffering, letting them be heard.

I see myself in George Floyd as a person who listens to the authorities and I see myself in the police as I have discrimination in my heart. As I don’t identify with a particular race I think it leaves me floating in the liminal space in social conversation. I can feel, in my deepest being, that I am those police, the murdered, the inflamed, and the oppressor. And I see that causes are not singular nor are they conveniently caused only by the action before it nor due to a single group; instead all of us are connected to every action that happens in a way that is foreign to our intuition and desire for an easy answer. We are like a vast ocean and we create waves where we cannot see them nor our role in them, so it follows that we have helped create each and every wave, even if we are unaware of doing so. So in the same way, we are also strangely responsible for everyone involved in the most recent events without separation, without preference, without discrimination. So I am feeling deeply connected to the vast unknowable conditions, those seen and unseen that have led up to this event which includes even the chirping of birds outside my window, even looking at the seemingly harmless way we discriminate between an apple over a pear. Discrimination cuts through the heart of every being.

I have sat with friends watching the videos in meditation and shed tears for George Floyd, those employed policemen, those acting as nonviolent and violent protestors, as well as those acting as looters and condemners of the looters.

I say this with the greatest sensitivity and humility that I cannot know the mind of Chauvin and so it follows that I cannot know if he was motivated by racial differences, and it’s perhaps a moot question since many have decided that the conclusion is obvious. My heart will not allow me to come to a solid conclusion, but what I know for sure is that discrimination was present.

Before I started meditating regularly I killed 100’s of mosquitos, smashing away their lives without a sliver of emotion or thought other than relief. After meditating on no-self and interbeing, I began to realize that the self is a mental fabrication and spawns the illusion of separateness. A few months ago, there was a mosquito buzzing near my face and my hand raised instantly with murderous intent, I almost instantly started crying when I saw my own discrimination, how I had falsely separated myself from the mosquito. Following my meditation practice, I saw that I was not separate from the mosquito and I felt my connection with this being. I had created an image in my head of it as essentially bad “other” that shouldn’t exist, this was discrimination. I could also see that discrimination occurred to ensure that my ego didn’t suffer. I could see that I didn’t know that my actions which stemmed from an innocent intention to not want to suffer meant the suffering and death of countless other beings.

In the same way, I am more convinced that Chauvin was under the same illusion of a separate self, and the gap that was created between himself and George Floyd allowed him to place his knee on George Floyd’s neck for 7+ minutes. If he had thought of George as a part of him, that George was also suffering from the unbearable light of being, Chauvin could not act in this way. He would act from a place of compassion while still doing his job.

So I also sit with this sadness and not anger or frustration because I see this convincing illusion of separation within myself and I see it in those creating allyships, Black Lives Matter, and any effort that relies on reifying groups into dualities; privileged and not privileged, murdered and not murdered, good and bad, or any of the three complexes of inferiority, equality, or superiority. Because of their attempts to settle reality this way so they can act, risks realizing the deepest nature of reality and so, therefore, end up extending the cycle. You cannot make a white person’s experience that mutually excludes having a black experience or a black person’s experience that mutually excludes having a white experience, because reality is not separate in this way, the myth of mutual exclusion is a product of the discriminating mind, not reality. We are one root, with many branches, and we often mistake the branches for distinct unrelated roots. We cannot draw a line between the suffering of blacks, whites, or others for that matter. Beings suffer endlessly and neither “whites” nor “blacks” are excluded from that, and neither has a copyright on special types of suffering which “privilege” often tries to point out. Only in our mind can we construct these clean worlds of this and that, so we suffer from our own minds. We are not suffering “life” we are suffering from our constructions of it.

When you resist what is there right now, pain multiplies itself into suffering. — Sadhguru

For me, I see life simply playing itself out and it’s much bigger than our small concepts of race, justice, or equality; because these setups require duality that posits a separated good guy and a bad guy, it requires us to prefer one person or groups suffering over another. It requires us to pigeon hole or fragment life for the setup, it requires us to feel separated when we are never at any point separate. So we suffer from the perception that we are not connected and are truly separate. Knowing that our belief in separateness causes further discrimination and from discrimination arises conflict, I cannot use discrimination to fight discrimination, it would be dishonest to my own heart. Yet we still must try to remove discrimination from our own hearts and the hearts of others. Because the alternative strategy of using a policy or the threat of violence to enforce people to be polite to each other will result in a repressed society where things “look equal” but in our deepest of hearts, we will know that we still feel a deep sense of separateness. We will know we hadn’t done the work of changing our own hearts, changing our way of looking. We can see that change requires the changing of hearts and minds or xin 心 (heartmind) and this is not as simple as a policy. From this perspective and that of non-duality traditions, trying to be an anti-racist or buying into a perpetrator-victim narrative is going after a consequence of changing the heart, instead, we need people to feel at home in the world in a way that doesn’t rely on slicing the world into good and evil. This is cultivated by first looking deeply at your own suffering with full acceptance and in this case, we can use racism or fear of racism as a signal that we need to look more deeply.

“It’s easier to put on a pair of shoes than to wrap the earth in leather.” — Chogyam Trungpa

We are often trying to make the world bend to our will. We say, “If only the world was wrapped in leather, then it wouldn’t be so painful to walk around barefoot”. So we try to avoid pain and seek pleasure everywhere we go, we set up our homes this way and we become extremely sensitive wherever we don’t see leather. So we scream at the world asking it to be wrapped in leather, but it doesn’t wield, it is too busy “worlding”. And we become angry, bitter, and resentful at the world and find something or someone outside of ourselves to place the blame. When we find our object of blame, which is really an image in our head at this point, we deepen our belief that it’s the source of our pain. The world becomes a place to confirm our beliefs, with these rose coloured glasses, we see our enemy everywhere causing all of our pain. We say I didn’t have a good home situation and that’s why I’m like this. Then we create a community of people who relate to this and we deepen our separateness between the people with good homes and without good homes. We falsely amplify the differences and this gives us a sense of security paired with a deep sense of lack, and the suffering becomes deeper and deeper and we demand that the world give us the leather we asked for and anything other then that causes us more suffering.

We falsely infer that the world outside is the source of our pain and not our own minds and this is the fatal mistake.

When we realise this setup is a false one we see that beneath our anger there is a basic tenderness that emerges because of our suffering and not in spite of it. We begin to see that the people that are close to us, strangers, and even our so-called enemies are also imprisoned by this. This arouses not anger but sadness and through sadness a basic tenderness. When we are tender, the whole world can touch us and we feel we can take on almost anything. We begin to see that suffering is a prerequisite to being at home in the world, not something to be avoided. So we see that we have to suffer in order to wake up.

If we are willing to accept the challenge of looking deeply, we will become an anti-racist without trying to force it. Without making ourselves small. Because we will have awakened to the fact that racism and the fear of racism is just another expression of our feeling of separateness and that separateness was a temporary solution to protect us from suffering, which was ultimately protecting us from a broken heart.

Looking deeply at our own suffering is not easy, and perhaps it’s easier to play the helper or victim. But when it becomes obvious that this will not end the cycle, you see that you have to sit with yourself as a piece of life and it might be scarier than any violent protest you’ve ever been to or any killing you’ve ever watched. Because you’ve set up your identity and defined yourself so tightly as a white, cisgender, vegetarian, privileged, ally, or a black, female, activist, not privileged, who only dates x type of people, that you will have to feel the pain of watching all of this fall apart before your eyes. Because to be a piece of life is to be boundless and to interpenetrate everything that exists. So you’ll see that you never really knew yourself, that you weren’t looking at yourself directly but instead just a 2-dimensional picture of yourself. Then you start to see that you are a stream of contradictions, but yet those contradictions show you that you are still discriminating but closer to the mark. Over time you’ll find out that you are just a piece of life unfolding and then you see the vital link; you’ll see that the first person you ever discriminated against was yourself. And from here, you created a world of pain and separateness, as an attempt to rid yourself of pain.

“Stop acting so small. You are the universe in ecstatic motion.” — Rumi

In this process of looking deeply, you will find an unconditional connection to others like never before. And you will be unable to pin yourself down to a definition or mental image, as has become popular, and neither will you be able to do it to others.

This might be considered a privileged view as I do not have a thick or any particular view or feeling that I belong and identify to any particular identity group (racial or otherwise) more or less and don’t claim to be identified with any of the groups involved on the grounds of race or class (though others may racialise or pick a side for me, which I also understand). My skin appears brown and my hair is curly, that much I can see, but that has not compelled this heartmind to see those with the same attributes as closer to me than those without it. I see where racism comes from so I can relate to it and see why others connect with it so deeply. I see myself as unknowable and ever-changing. It as if when I speak, I am at the same time the speaker and the audience, eager to hear what comes out. I do not need to define myself in terms of gender, sexuality, race, or politics, because I see that I contain multitudes. Just like you.

As a child without a solid identity moving from family to family, I took up and put down dozens of identities, and after looking deeply and seeing the facade that strung them together, I can now feel no preference or one-sided resonance over the victim or the perpetrator in terms of race and yet I connect with the pain of identifying oneself so deeply with race. My situation is due to countless conditions that we can call karma, and it’s outside of my ability to see directly.

This reminds me of a koan by Huineng, a zen master, who was being chased down by someone who saw themselves as separate from Huineng and who had murderous intent. Huineng said

“Without thinking good or evil, in this very moment, what is your Original Face?”

If you look deeply into this question, you will see how you are connected to all beings from beginningless time. If you consider yourself to be black, then you might see that to be black is to be made up of nothing but non-black elements. To be white is to be made up of nothing but non-white elements, to be the police, is to be made up of nothing but non-police elements. As Thich Nhat Hanh has said so beautifully, everything is interpenetrated and the karmic traces of our ancestors exist within us. And not our simple idea of genetic ancestors, but consider that the ancestors of a flower are the sun, the air, the water, human hands, soil, and animals, and if we keep going we see that it contains the whole cosmos. Undivided without a second. And it is our shared karma that continues to thrust us forward.

It is clear that our shared karma means we are connected. So if it is anyone’s fault, it is everyone’s fault despite how our discriminating minds tend to connect things using narrative. I can feel this unknowing in my body and so it is the same for others, so how can we place the blame anywhere without also pointing to ourselves?

So how can we blame the protestors acting violently or the cop acting ignorantly? I cannot rest in either place, so I rest in not knowing while also resting in seeing clearly that I am responsible.

So knowing this, I can try to hold the space for all of the anger, hopelessness, sadness, indignation, perceived separateness, and want for justice that I feel from others and be there for those who feel defeated, triggered, and hopeless. At least, that’s what I tell myself. And maybe this is my version of justice, my version of non-discrimination.

I know that for some, this will not provide any solace and I have been several times noted that I may be helping the “oppressor”. This saddens me and I sometimes feel the urge to take a side, but most times, at least for now, I remain tethered in this liminal place, meditating on our times, sitting for a moment with anyone passing by, looking deeply seeing that in each of you, there I am, and in me, there you are. I am you and you are me. All of your flames and all of your hopes.

….I imagine what it must be like to be 100,000 years old and have seen countless societies rise and fall, all with good intentions to liberate themselves from the unbearable lightness of being, and I wonder what I would feel about the situation and what I might consider doing. Until then, I’ll just keep trying to sit with my feelings and other people. If this brings even a moment of reflection, that is enough.