The Compassion Revolution

  I have been meditating regularly for about ten years now. I have attended and facilitated meditation groups and retreats, in various places in Europe, North America, and Asia, in different (mostly Buddhist-inspired) traditions. I feel very fortunate to have had the opportunity to do so and have experienced great benefits from this practice. However, one thing has kept bothering me all those years. The Buddha claims – and I deeply believe – that his teaching can liberate all beings, yet when I join meditation groups, I often see myself surrounded by rather socially privileged people (just like myself 1 ). W hy does (Buddhist-inspired) meditation in the West seem to attract mainly an academically educated, 2 (upper) middle class audience? Is meditation not relevant for other social groups, or is there something else at play here? (I will focus on class privilege in this article. Gender and white privilege fall beyond its scope. I believe others  to be far better qualified th...

I am bringing new life to my old blog. I am revamping it to bring it more in line with the evolution my thinking and being has undergone over in recent years. The past two and a half years I have been living and volunteering in Sadhana Forest , a sustainable reforestation community in Auroville , South India. Now it seems to me that I might be moving on from there in the near future, so it is a time to reassess where I have been headed and where I want to go. I will try to lay out a road map in this post. My journey Alert: change ahead! I have done many things in my life: I have been a bartender and a dj, a magazine editor, a student representative. I have lived in a Buddhist monastery and was a high school teacher for a brief while. The past years I lived in a hut in a forest, cooked lots of free vegan food for people, looked after abandoned and injured cows, planted trees, did not play any competitive games and used bucket showers and compost toilets (without toilet paper...

Puigdemont, Trump, Wilders, Le Pen, Francken… Namen die weinigen de afgelopen maanden onberoerd lieten. In tijden van steeds verregaandere globalisering en migratie grijpen velen terug op de natiestaat als hun houvast. Toch denk ik dat nationalisme geen oplossing kan bieden voor de problemen waar de wereld vandaag voor staat, integendeel. Het is tijd om het voorbijgestreefde ideaal van de natiestaat achter ons te laten en volop te bouwen aan grensoverstijgend burgerschap. Eugène Delacroix - La liberté guidant le peuple (1830) Bekend romantisch schilderij dat de Franse revolutie verheerlijkt Even wat geschiedenis. De natiestaat is, aldus Wikipedia , een ‘staat die politieke eenheid verbindt met culturele eenheid.’ De natiestaat zoals we die vandaag kennen is een uitvinding van de 19 de eeuw en is de opvolger van de kleurrijke verzameling van Rijken, Koninkrijken en Keizerrijken die onze geschiedenis zo lang tekende. De natiestaat wordt gekenmerkt door een sterk gecentraliseerd...