The Sacred Silence and Spiritual Growth

As you've probably already gathered, I'm recovering a few articles from my old journals and posting them here.

This one is from the days studying Shaolin as a white belt in Mexico (2001).


EL SILENCIO SAGRADO Y EL CRECIMIENTO ESPIRITUAL
Pa Si Tai Sergio (Garuda) Guillén

"El silencio de los manifestantes no era ya una simple carencia de voces, sino algo mucho mas profundo. Era la plena realización de una proeza que si es difícil lograr individualmente, lo es aún mucho más colectivamente: la conquista del silencio interior, el único que permite al ser humano establecer comunicación consigo mismo y con su Creador."
Antonio Velasco Piña, Regina.

Recuerdo como si fuera hoy mi primer regalo de silencio consciente. Fue hace siete años, con la visita de Mikistly, hombre de medicina y de conocimiento, guía para ese momento, y hombre igualmente con sus cien mil cosas que resolver y trabajar todavía.

Habíamos reunido un grupo de hombres, con edades entre los 11 y los 50. Un grupo bastante heterogéneo, pero aún así un grupo de seres afines en ese momento, con búsquedas y preocupaciones comunes. Comenzamos a caminar por entre potreros y cercas, y frente a uno que otro toro de mirada desafiante, hasta lo alto de una colina.

El camino estaba rodeado de piedras enormes, de esas que con una sola mirada se sabe que ocultan la historia sagrada, y aún oculta, de aquellos cerros de Iskatzu. Seguramente como anclas que fijan en su lugar el destino de un pueblo que con demasiada frecuencia se olvida de ser digno de sí mismo.

Mikistly propuso que la marcha fuera en silencio. Todos aceptamos la sugerencia, al principio mas como una curiosidad (una "corronguera") que otra cosa. Con el paso del sol, el viento y el ascenso en espiral por los senderos de jinetes, el silencio fue cobrando vida propia. Hasta Javier, que estuvo paralizado por la mirada desafiante de un toro por cerca de veinte minutos, se las agenció para pedir ayuda sin pronunciar palabra.

Al llegar a la cima, el sabor particular de por un lado, no querer soltar ya nunca más este silencio, y por otra parte sentir a flor de piel verdades mucho más elevadas que el cuchicheo habitual de la mente, y querer compartirlas, le dio una doble textura a nuestra experiencia.

Al final del día, Mikistly compartió con nosotros sensación muy personal: "Hoy recibí de nuevo un regalo que había perdido hace mucho tiempo." Al preguntarle a qué se refería, agregó: "Hoy me fue regresado mi silencio."

Con la arrongancia acostumbrada del "domingo siete" me acuerdo como hoy que le respondí "No, pues eso te lo hubiera podido regalar yo hace tiempos, con solo que me hubieras dicho que lo estabas buscando." Recuerdo con cariño que se lo dije pensando en los cuatro años que viví en Canadá, mientras sacaba mi carrera, frecuentemente solo, generalmente abstraído en mis pensamientos aún cuando no estaba solo.

En esos tiempos, no había conocido todavía la diferencia entre la soledad circunstancial "porque no hay de otra" y la soledad que se procura conscientemente para cultivar el alma. Las dos son regalos, pero el grado de consciencia es diferente. También me era desconocida la diferencia entre el silencio interno y consciente, y el silencio somnoliento, de cuando se tiene cerrada la boca, pero por dentro se le sigue echando fardos al lomo de la mente.

--------------------------------

Un salto cuántico, siete años después. Un entrenamiento en el Desierto de los Leones, con quesadillas incluidas. La palabra clave, el recipiente vacío. Un momento para vivir en el presente.

Por supuesto, la mente juegra trampas. El recipiente vacío me alcanzó hasta el tiempo de pelear con los palos. Para entonces, ya mi ego estaba demasiado inquieto por asumir de nuevo las riendas del "changarro".

Si lo miro ahora, tiene como un efecto hasta de viaje astral, el yo Zen se sale del cuerpo, y su lugar pasa a ser ocupado por el burrito de los fardos. Tan ocupado pensando en las tecnicas de Jo de Aikido que no puedo vivir el presente ni mantener la conección con el bastón del Shaolín, y por supuesto, sin hacer ninguna de las cosas bien.

A la subida de la cuesta, pongo un segundo la mano en el hombro de mi tutora, para agradecerle la lección aprendida. Lección más sobre el ego que sobre el palo. Lo cual por supuesto, cierra el ciclo perfectamente, porque al ego hay que darle bastante palo!

En fin, como estamos tan llenos de egos y de proyecciones, la mente no se queda satisfecha con el gesto, tiene que meter una palabra de más, un "gracias". Porque los gestos, para la mente, son demasiado ambiguos y hay que fijarles su interpretación adecuada.

Y de ahí sale la verdadera ofensa contra el alma, la querer editarla, y no confiar en que el alma puede hacerse cargo de sí misma, y que tiene su propio espacio sagrado; el cual podemos tocar mas facilmente si logramos ir más allá de las palabras.

La Condesa, 4 de Abril del 2001.

Affirmations on masculinity and power

So, is masculinity essentially harmful?

In a tacit way, through contradictions between his beliefs, his actions, scars from past humiliations, and his often rampant bigotry, this is pretty much what I learned from my father early in life.

It took much work to reclaim my masculinity as a source of goodness and nurture for myself and others. The change was much harder in form than in substance...

One day, in August of 1999, after a particularly strong session of rebirthing, Francesca, my rebirther confronted me with a strong clarity about the beliefs that were imprinting my relationship to masculinity...

What came out is probably the strongest transformation of my views that I've been able to capture in writing...

Each of these affirmations came out of (and serves as the tantric antidote to) one or more beliefs acquired from my father:

8 Affirmations on Truly Powerful Men

• Truly powerful men enrich the lives of those they come into contact with.

• Truly powerful men give of themselves freely and set powerful boundaries. I forgive my father for teaching me otherwise. He was wrong. He meant well.

• Truly powerful men allow Truth to shine out.

• True Power is Divine Wisdom
  Divine wisdom guides Choice
  Choice brings Responsibility
  Responsibility is Freedom
  Freedom is Power.

• Truly powerful men express themselves including their feelings.

• Truly powerful men see the power in Others.

• Truly powerful men understand that every Person is responsible for their own Wellbeing.

• True power is Love, Love is Invulnerable.

Tarbaca, Costa Rica. August 1999

Midwives Conference

So I came with Jenny yesterday to the Midwifery International Conference in Costa Rica. It was an amazing experience!

Not since my Model Mugging days, half a decade ago, can I recall being in a place so filled with women power. I was able to join them briefly for the icing on the cake, the lecture (but then, you absolutely can't call it a lecture) by Ina May Gaskin about, among other things: the Sphincter Law.

Her wry humor, provocative scholarship and sensitivity are all summed up in one of her opening comments which I particularly enjoyed:

"I wonder how the Dr. who screams 'push, push, push' at a woman in labor (right at her face and probably even spitting a little) would fare if someone walked up to him while he was trying to poop and screamed at his face: 'push, push, push'."

I was only going to be there for lunch and to keep Jenny company for a few minutes, but I absolutely couldn't leave, so drawn was I to the energy and the implications of what was happening.

Prejudice, legal pitfalls, egos and the Costa Rican insular distrust have really hit the midewifery community here and made it difficult for people to work together and trust one another. I hope this event helps open the hearts and strengthen the bonds between all women (and a few of us men) who believe that changing the start of life can help change the quality of every day after that...

Off the kennel

Well, it is D-Day + 1.

Classes ended yesterday, with the atrocious "dog show" assignment of presenting to one another our thesis "findings"...

(even though we haven't had time or focus to research, do fieldwork, reflect, or otherwise come up with any findings)...

I had a big outburst last Friday about this. All the frustration about assignments that don't make sense, lack of thinking about the real educational implications of an assignment, and frustration with institutional learning disabilities, just swelled up and out of my mouth before I could do anything to contain it.

Small mercy! I don't think I could have kept all that bottled up inside, after hearing all that came out of my frustration.

Now, it's the first day of rest. I've spent the first productive hours on my computer fueling the bonnfire of APEP, the national peace studies association that all UPEACE ticos think it's a great idea to create, but most haven't really devoted any time to getting it off the ground.

I interviewed a couple of cleaining ladies, hoping one will turn out okay... and went looking for places that Jenny and I can move to in September.

Along the way, I ran into my grades 4 & 6 math teacher, Mrs. Mata. She looks to be in great shape, retired only last year, and is active in philantropic work. It seems her daughter left her successful engineering career (also) to study environmental management at UNED.

I walk around like I'm missing a part of me. I don't know if it's the effect of the first day outside the overwhelm & mad pace of grad-school-in-1-year, or if I'm just in advance mourning about everyone that will be going away in the coming days...

The cat that Jenny and I are refusing to adopt is outside crying again. And I'm here writing and trying to keep it real.

On democracy "a la tica", and its part in getting us to this dark place (and maybe getting us back out of it)

After a decade of reflection, and six months of mental struggle to bring it into shape, the topic of my thesis now finds itself VIOLENTLY thrust into the spotlight, just as the spotlight fickers and dies, leaving us in a pitch-black scramble to rearrange our lives and ponder "who's to blame?"

I've been hearing words of doom about the imminent (though hopefully temporary) collapse of Costa Rica's power grid for at least the past 3 years. However, I hadn't imagined that, when it came, it would happen as unceremoniously.

According to today's La Nacion, 5 different pieces of equipment in 4 different powerplants failed within a two week period, coinciding with low reservoir levels due to the dry season. The low rainfall affected not only Costa Rica, but also Panama, leading it to cut power exports to Costa Rica a month ago. However, this serves little as an explanation, and more as a mere mechanic's checklist of pieces that gave in under the stress of a tragically flawed institutional reality.

As for me, I trace the origins of the crisis to a number of bridges (metaphorical ones) that people chose to burn along the way as they pulled in different directions while trying to carve the future shape of Costa Rican development.

Some of these bridges were burned before 2000, by the "elephant in the china shop" approach of some hydro developers who felt that, by simply pulling strings in San Jose, they could trample over people's sense of connection to their land, to their communities, and their pragmatic notions about fairness, which plainly required that exploiting local resource should be tied to promoting local prosperity. Many more bridges were burned through the fire of the ICE Combo protests, that gave civil society a sense of purpose, but also offered instant political capital to self-styled crisis entrepreneurs. The greatest irony was that ICE, the very symbol that people went to the streets to defend, found the hard way that it was no longer immune to the Pandora's box of social mobilization, as one after another, its projects also became the object of public outcry.

The problem, however, was not in the questioning, but in the fact that through all that bridge burning, we lost the capacity to listen to one another. And as the listening was lost, so were the spaces where we could come together and agree on what were the important questions that needed asking.

Many calls were raised to participation, but no one stepped up to participate in finding solutions. Others argued that private electricity was a swindle, because the rates were much higher than ICE's internal costs of generating that same energy, however, these were not there to analyze, in the absense of actions to either reduce consumption or find alternative sources, what the cost to consumers would be of either importing electricity or paying for the cost of diesel PLUS the fees to private companies for the emergency use of their diesel generators. To top it all off, the current administration annonced to the world last year its commmitment to turn Costa Rica, by the end of the next decade, into the first country ever to generate 100% of its electricity without fossil fuels, in an impressive display of obliviousness about its own inability to gain support from rural communities to build any more hydro projects, its main source of non-fossil power.

In summary, much of what we're facing in this blackout season is a result of what the 2004 State of the Nation Report referred to as Costa Rica's greatest challenge: its generalized incapacity to reach agreements across society about anything, and particularly about the path it needs to follow to construct its future. The landscape is now complicated by a new threat, the one of resorting to quick fixes when a situation becomes highly politically volatile. As the local saying goes, "stirred-up river, fisherman's gain". In Honduras, after the 1994 blackouts, those fishermen who took home the winfall were the thermal generators, as the country sealed its fate by signing large concessions that brought it, over less than a decade, from a primarily renewable (hydro) fuel mix to a "carb-saturated diet".

Now, more than ever, and sadly under great pressures, Costa Rica needs to make the right decision about the governance of its energy development. The quality of this decision, however, cannot stem from a bottomline/GDP analysis alone (and I'm sure we're going to hear a lot about energy and GDP in the coming days), rather it will depend on how well we take stock of all of the values, as well as the variables, that are at stake.

Through my thesis, Rediscovering democracy: Deliberating environmental insecurities in the Costa Rican power sector, I've set out to explore the potential offered by deliberative democracy, its ability to guide the inclusion of multiple values, and to help us strive to hear each others' concerns openly. Its goal is to help shape a model of environmental governance, taking the example of the power sector, which can help us construct legitimacy, understanding, and the social will to tackle the roots of the problems and to recognize the constraints on our resources, rather than resorting to quick fixes.