Dimensionally Barrett

“No Other Land” director Hamdan Ballal.   Photo by Hazem Bader/AFP via Getty Images The Jewish journal The Forward has a follow-up story on co-director of the Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land Hamdan Ballal’s abduction. As the report points out, the only exceptional detail is that the abductee in question has an Academy Award. Otherwise, this is not unusual. That said, I want to share this article because it highlights the daily reality that Palestinians live with in the West Bank, particularly in areas like Masafer Yatta. It also highlights the work of Israeli volunteers who attempt to act as buffers to the violence brought by the settlers, the Israeli Defense Force, and the police. The volunteers come from all around the world to work with the  Center for Jewish Nonviolence. The risk is great since, as in the night when Ballal was arrested, Jewish settlers attacked Jewish volunteers. As I read this article, I couldn’t shake, and still cannot dismiss the sense of madne...

Samantabhadra/Kuntuzangpo In my  previous post , I ended with this: "The absence of fear is the beginning of love." Briefly, and this will be brief: love is not sentiment, nor is it simpering, cloying "I wuv you" emotionality. Love is directly realizing fundamental Being. Each recognizing it in the Other and finding no-self/no-other. There is no "how" to this. Oh, certainly, there are practices like tong-len, meditating on the Beatitudes in the New Testament, reciting prayers and a myriad techniques for training thinking and perhaps developing reflexes to respond with a degree of calm instead of apprehension; but these are only momentary. Is there a switch to a continuous response to events that is only loving? Personally, I am not so sure in one context; in another, is there anything other than love at work? In what could be called the Immediate Context, it often seems that maintaining a continuous, compassionate response to (or better, b...