This Dark Time is an Opportunity

I received the message below from a friend who belongs to the Shamballa Community (Buddhist). It is so universal and applies so equally to all faiths and traditions, I wanted
to share it with you all. arupa

Here are two brief and beautiful messages that challenge us to regard the current global "dark age" through the eyes of a true Shambhala Warrior. The first is the message the Sakyong sent a few weeks ago to the entire Shambhala Community. It can be found here.

Second: This is a time of profound spiritual opportunity in the world. Everything is completely revealing its impermanent nature. Everything has always been impermanent yet we didn't believe it. Many of us have created very comfortable cocoons. We go so far with the teachings but not further because we're just so comfortable living in America. Many things are falling apart right now that need to fall apart, but that also means that people who haven't received these trainings are going through intense fear. There's political unrest. There's economic unrest. There's a sense of the bottom dropping out environmentally and in other ways. Our teachers say it's a dark age. A dark age is one in which people are not living in right relation and have not roused their inner goodness, confidence and kindness. It is a time when there's been a lot of craving of outer objects to fill that pervasive inner sense of dissatisfaction. It never works. This was a particularly big party that went on for a long time but now it's coming to an end.

As practitioners, we should have the view that that's really a wonderful thing because it takes that level of shock to force us to really think about what is important in our life. What has meaning? How much do we really need? What can we do without? How can we simplify? The training that we've received is really the training that the world needs right now. You know, we will also feel fear. But what will be different is how we meet that fear and how we become a beacon to others. We know the answer to this puzzle which is: if you're looking for "it" outside of yourself, you'll never find it. The Golden Sun, the true source of wealth, is the capacity of your heart, your capacity to care, your capacity to live simply, your capacity to work in community, to be tolerant of others, to see things clearly, to just sit on this good earth and have that be enough.

So we should really connect with this mountain of gold, this mountain of basic goodness, the preciousness of these teachings. In the times ahead we need to be very generous, very kind to people who are scared, very generous to one another. We need to share the gifts that we've received, because the world needs them now more than ever.

We will collectively feel a tsunami wave of wanting to pull back to protect ourselves. It won't just be our normal ordinary anxiety. It will be amplified many, many times. We may feel this enormous urge to pull back from community, to just think about ourselves, and to go to a place of fear. So the bravery of the Shambhala warrior at this time is the courage to extend and be more generous in the face of all information to the contrary. This the perfect time to be alive, the perfect time to be walking the Shambhala Path, and we should never doubt that we've been given the only richness that can ever really sustain us, that can ever sustain this world.