Sharing Shambhala, Part II, November 18, 2021

While there’s so much feeling of different opinions and polarization, in fact the fundamentals are so similar, in many ways. The appreciation for people having different paths, sadness about divisions.

It’s a good sign that people, regardless of their viewpoint, can have some respect for each other. That’s absolutely the ground that would be needed to sustain a functional community. If that’s possible to do, you would need that. And there’s some evidence that it’s there.

Sometimes on the ground level, people can be okay with each other, but somehow the top things can’t be worked out, structurally. And I think that’s one of the challenges that we have.

We carry a lot of baggage from the past of what we think things should be like. And even if we can sort of intellectually know that we can’t recreate that as past, I think that nevertheless, it’s still a very big baggage that we’re carrying that is very difficult to let go genuinely.

How to have some kind of truth and reconciliation process that would go back decades and would somehow be safe. And I feel like we probably don’t have the expertise, even within Shambhala international global. But how to talk about the shadow side of the brilliant, you know, cheerful toasting people after their events, and Ki Ki So So and all of that. And there was a shadow side. And unfortunately for me, all I see now is the shadow side—I almost can’t see the brilliance.

It seems like the first thing we need to do is establish, what is our current procedure? If something were to arise now, what are we doing? I know there’s the new Care and Conduct that’s been written, but not everybody has fully digested and adopted and signed up to and all that. At least, we haven’t completely done that process yet.

And so I feel like it would be nice to if there was something that could be done going back, but that step one is to make sure we’re really solid on the present, and processes for going forward, so that we can actually—I don’t know if you can use the word guarantee, but at least promote a safe and secure situation going forward, and have some basis for that rather than just being words.

We have a lot of teachers in Shambhala who are trying to raise the level of teaching and understanding right now. And a lot of that’s independent, it’s not from Shambhala global, and a lot of it’s just really good. I think there are a lot of teachers out there who are implicitly trusted.

Is there a situation where the Sakyong could become implicitly trusted? If he would speak to the community and get familiar with the community? You know, I can imagine it would take a couple of years, but is that a possibility? Trust?