💬 "National Trauma – Now What?"

Host: Dan Harris
Guest: Jon Kabat-Zinn, Professor, University of Massachusetts Medical School
Category: Society & Culture | 💬 Opinion

Podcast’s Essential Bites:

[3:05] “I wasn't that surprised [about the storming of the US Capitol]. I mean, I've been concerned about those kinds of possibilities for quite some time, [….] because from what I can observe, Trump is living in an alternate reality and he has managed to bring millions of people into that alternate reality. So then it's a question of which bubble do you want to live in if you live in the bubble that the election was stolen, even if it's an outright lie. When millions and millions of people believe that, then we've got a problem on our hands that's far bigger than one individual or even one assault done on federal property.”

[19:04] “[Y]ou saw what happened with the National Guard and all these other […] units out there of the military and the police [on] Black Lives Matter Plaza […]. Where was any of that with the attack on the Capitol […]? There are huge asymmetries here in the response. What is that about? We have to ask that question. That's a profound meditative question. What are these asymmetries? Why is it this way for this group of people and not that way for the other people? Do they somehow have more rights than regular citizens?”

[20:41] “[T]he fact that the demographic of the United States is changing in this period of 10 or 15 years where white people will no longer be the majority in the United States of America [makes] a lot of people feel like they are taking our country away. […] So there are certain conversations that we need to have that don't go very well when everybody's in some kind of bubble where they don't even hear, […] your reality. They only live in their reality. We're living in our reality. They can't talk to each other anymore.”

[25:16] “I kind of remind myself that the only person that's going to suffer from my anger is me. That's like driving your car with the brake on to just run up your anger quotient. But if you can be aware of that anger, then you can channel that anger as a certain kind of creative energy.”

[26:44] “[W]e should talk some about how the law is going to have to deal with what just happened [on Jan. 6, 2021], because if there are no consequences for that invasion and the sedition behind it […] then that feeds more greed, hatred and delusion. […] [We have to] enforce the laws that we have.”

[44:59] “[T]he real challenge is how can we collectively deal with this and elect people to really maybe ask the deep questions about Democracy 2.0? Maybe democracy needs an upgrade. If it's this fragile, maybe George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and Madison and all those people, they do a great job for 1776, but maybe in 2021 after the horrors of 2020, we need to have an upgrade of some kind, Democracy 2.0 or 3.0, and who knows what that is.”

[54:30] “I really see meditation practice as a radical act of sanity waking up. It's […] not it's not a luxury. It's an absolute necessity in this moment of time. And it's a radical act of sanity to stop and drop into the present moment and to not believe your thoughts. I mean, I had a bumper sticker once that said, Don't believe everything you think. I've come around to thinking maybe it should have said, Don't believe anything you think, unless you hold it in awareness first and ask deep questions about its validity. Because the awareness itself is much more discerning than usually the thinking, the cognitive function that we come up with.”

[55:24] “I really feel like it's up to us that maybe [Jan. 6, 2021| was a wake up call for a lot of people. But a lot of us have woken up a long time ago and it's like, OK, now what? And […] I feel like [….] we have the repertoire, we have all the ingredients. But we need to in some sense care enough to do it and what makes us care? Suffering. When the suffering becomes too overwhelming, then we start to look around for liberation from suffering.”

Rating: 🍎🍎🍎🍎

🎙️ Full Episode: Apple | Spotify
🕰️ 1 hr 3 min | 🗓️ 01/08/2021
✅ Time saved: 1 hr 1 min

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