The Brotherhood
By Ethan Indigo Smith
The value of all that you know and all that you’ve been taught can be quickly be outweighed and forgot by your belief in and support for manmade national, racial, religious and cultural institutions.
All wars root themselves in a bed of belief in and support for institutions and in contrast the hatred for of stigmatization of individuals within varying alternative institutions. All zealotry and loyalty begins in the feeling of being involved in an institutional family. People are convinced that they are part of an institutional family, an institution that presents itself as immortal.
In Tibet and the region Buddhist lamas are known to reincarnate and return to their monasteries variously proving they are toddler reincarnates and the Dalai Lama is found through reincarnation tests. To the profoundly compassionate Buddhists heritage and family lineage is unimportant next to the compassionate brotherhood, at the monastery or wherever. Seeking to solve suffering with compassion is much more important than any other community, more important than your family, your friends, your neighborhood, your state, your country and whatever institution you might put before compassion.
The Buddha posited love and into four parts; love of self, love of others, love for the happiness of others and love for all beings in equanimity. You cannot love others without love of self and you cannot love at the higher level unless you love at the level preceding it. Loving compassion is true wisdom and the brotherhood of man is the only family one should be loyal to. All else is tribal impulses played by controlling institutions.
The institutional apparatuses and apparitions which seek to inspire your enlistment are bogus. There is only the brotherhood of man.
You can see the disturbances caused by people within themselves and outside of themselves when their love is covered up by beliefs in alternatives to the brotherhood of man. Some people hate themselves, most people hate other people and many people hate the happiness of others and some people just hate everything. Loving compassion elevates all whereas hatred of others, used by institutions, degrades all.
Our love, which can be equated to childlike innocence, gets covered up by traditions and training mechanisms, often through instigation of feelings of guilt. We do not lose our love it simply gets covered up by ignorance. We tend to think of ignorance as lack of knowledge, however normally ignorance stems from being full of incorrect ideas and misguided beliefs. Ignorance is usually full not empty. Let go of your pride for your family and country and whatever institution gained your loyalty and share love for humanity.
Calculate which stage of love your heart stops at and push forward through the installed ignorance with a flaming sword of a peaceful warrior. In Tibet and India the flaming sword signifies the weapon of the mind, yielded by the heart. The flaming sword cuts through layers of ignorance, through the training and institutionally supportive traditions layered on us. The flaming sword cuts away the extraneous and superfluous ignorance preventing us from loving ourselves, others, the happiness of others all things equally. Let go of your beliefs and false pride, grab your flaming sword and be a peaceful warrior.
If not now, when? If not for Tibet, then who? Stop make believing.
