Everybody arrives at a moment that is a little too steep, when the alarm clock promises only more of the same kind of pain, and they start to fall apart. We’re experiencing this on a cultural level right now. We can’t keep doing what we are doing, but what else can we do? The insights that come out of these difficult places, how do we put those into action? These transformations are at the very heart of how lives and cultures shift and change.
When the Buddha said that the self is empty and interdependent he was also planting the seed for a profound form of socially engaged religious practice, where inner transformation is not separate from social transformation. They can’t happen separately, or it’s a fragmented path. That’s the political piece.
All over the world we see social movements where there’s been revolution, but for the most part the revolution has not taken place yet on an inner level. I think this is one of the things that Buddhism can offer the progressive left who have similar ideals. And the left can offer Buddhism an engaged political practice and a platform on which they can take their insights and put them to work. If they worked together, there could be a different kind of revolution than we have ever seen before.
Sometimes I think the failure of the political left in North America is that, in general, they don’t truly believe a new story is possible. For instance, there’s still so much focus on the individual, but we know from science, we know from Buddhism, and we know from experience that individualism actually isn’t true or even possible—our bodies are literally communities. The myth of the individual is a story at odds with how things really are, and we’ve built a culture around it. No wonder it’s falling apart. I feel like our culture is about to organize a funeral of the imagination. Our stories are atrophying. And they need to; their decay is food for the new ones we so need.