I consider myself to be rich in one respect: having crossed paths with and learned from extraordinary teachers. There is one who impacted me the most. I transcribed one of his talks which inspires me to this day and probably will continue to the day I leave this world. I take it out and read it every once in awhile. I love this part in particular which blows me away every time. This is his response to a question about our responsibility to “have an impact” on the state of the world.

“It’s huge. The balance of the experiment that we’re a part of, the balance of this human life that we’re a part of. This undecided experiment that we’re a part of, the balance is very delicate…It’s hard to picture that this whole experiment could be so subtlely balanced but it is. And we can affect that balance…And 50 people…can affect the nature of the experiment. I know that you don’t really want to hear that because that might mean that the next time you were meditating and talking to yourself, you were fucking over 50 million people in some other part of the world, it wouldn’t be such a beautiful experience to talk to yourself while you’re meditating…not only is it possible, but I’m telling you that’s a fact that I know from my personal experience absolutely without a shadow of a doubt…that we in our dealing with each other, in our dealings with the living things round us, in our dealings with ourselves, we become finer, the motion of particles on different levels change around us and they’re not so limited as that they can’t disseminate into wherever the depressions are. So all your good vibes go around, they travel around the earth looking to even things out wherever there’s depression, they fill it in. Like water running across, they fill it in. Phantasmagorical, but it happens to be so. We have two possibilities here, we can become aware of what’s happening around us, we can be aware of what’s happening in other countries, in other places, in other cultures. We can pay attention and wonder is there any need for me to respond in this situation? Am I called upon to respond in this situation? Does this have something to do with me in terms of the situation? We can do that.

And the other thing we can do is to do whatever it takes to leave the weights of our consciousness behind and elevate, leave the lies and leave the fear, leave the future thinking, the past thinking, and the worrying and the considering of every possible detail, to be safe and careful and we can leave those things behind. Elevate in consciousness, rarefy the vibration so that some of those low points can be filled. What a great job! You’ve got two possibilities all the time to enrich the game of the experiment that we’re in.” JG

Sander O. – here’s another view: some of us feel more comfortable talking about politics with people with whom we can share other things to; even more so with political action. So it’s the reverse of a distraction – its a way of building a coalition.

Perhaps also this: we need some reminders of the things we find valuable, in order to have some sense of the sort of world we want to build. I do anyway. And its one reason why I like seeing the music posts and reading what people have to say, even though I rarely click on the You-Tubes

Apologies for the OT, eg. (and, I guess for violating the ‘don’t tell people what to do in their front rooms’ ethos by opining about this)

In case she happens to be a reader of FDL, big kudos and thanks to my English teacher, Marie Petronchak Parks. She helped a timid bookworm of a girl deal with the taunts of classmates, the difficulties of living in an abusive home, and – through her iron fist and velvet glove manner – gave me the confidence to believe in myself.

Have fun hiking and enjoying nature at her finest!