Shambhala View of Politics: Getting Further Engaged at Wed. Open House Talk on 1/11/17
Open House Talk – Wednesday, January 11, 2017 at 7pm
We would like to warmly invite everyone – from all walks of life – from all political persuasions, to join us for our third discussion about the aftermath of the Presidential election.
We have had two Open House discussions to date about the presidential election and now what. The first focused on the aftermath of a tumultuous campaign which included a extraordinary amount of negativity and degradation of people That there was wide spread hope, fear, blame, depression and concern. Through that and the election itself we could become more cynical about human nature. The Shambhala view of human nature was presented which is that there are incredible positive and rich qualities which human beings posses’ including caring, kindness, wisdom and compassion. This is an important time to remind of ourselves of these qualities and to cultivate them.
Some of the other points touched on included how to recognize the many people who felt left behind over many years now wanted to be heard, that responding to aggression with aggression hasn’t worked for thousands of years and that we really needed to reflect and contemplate about what is happening and what we could take as next steps.
In the second Open House meeting, after a brief review we broke down into small discussions groups of four. Here we contemplated how we were at this point; how did we feel. People then spoke about interesting and provocative feelings on how they viewed the President Elect and the societal situation.
One person spoke about seeing some heartfelt caring by Mr. Trump about the children of un-documented immigrants following his meeting with the Mayor of Chicago. Rahm Emanuel. That led to a discussion about whether Mr. Trump could be trusted and further, whether one could trust him or not that instead of rejection of Mr. Trump could it help to support and cultivate that empathy in him. Another person raised the positive aspect of the situation; when things fall apart is this not an opportunity to shape what arises out of that.
In our third Open House on this topic (Wednesday, January 11, 2017) we will briefly touch in on some of the previous points and spend most of our time further contemplating and discussing the ground of our existing culture and how does one transform a culture – what are the foundational values.
All of these three discussions are laying the ground for looking deeper into where we are as a society and how we can be helpful in going forward.
We have scheduled an Open Space Technology Gathering for Saturday, February 4th in the morning from 9:00-12:00. This is a process where from all those gathered, everyone is invited to place on a board a topic which is important to them to discuss about where we are and aspirations on what it would look like to get further engaged – everyone is invited to participate in the groups they are interested in. For example these topics could include; immigrants, societal injustice, economics/jobs, diversity, politics, vulnerable members /groups of our society, climate change and anything else people are inspired to have a group discussion about. Then we gather back together as a group and learn what was discussed in each of these breakout groups. From that we will talk about next steps.
