The Compassion Revolution

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...

Introduction Two years ago I quit my job. I used to be a high school teacher. I always wanted to be a teacher, because I really loved kids. But soon enough I realised, that loving can be quite hard if you constanly have to judge and evaluate and tell children what to do. Even though I really did my best to teach interesting classes, and much as my students and the school staff told me I was doing a great job, I was left deeply unsatisfied of the job. I realised I just wanted to give unconditional love and acceptance, and did not want to be caught up in the constraints of the system. And so I started longing to live in a community life again. I had lived in community before – I used to be an intern in Plum Village , a Buddhist monastery in the south of France – and I realised that was the only time in my life where I felt real unconditional love and acceptance. In community, we can just be ourselves, and just love each other for who we are, without having to worry about complying ...

Gisteren bekende één van mijn beste vriendinnen mij dat ze als kind seksueel misbruikt is geweest. In navolging van de opschudding rond Harvey Weinstein kwamen vrouwen over heel de wereld met hun verhalen over aanranding naar buiten en het ziet ernaar uit dat we met Bart De Pauw nu ook onze eigen Harvey Weinstein hebben. Het voelt zowaar als het begin van een revolutie. Echter, dit is slechts het begin. Als we echt naar een duurzame verandering willen, dan moeten wij als mannen ook grondig nadenken over hoe we omgaan met seksualiteit en intimiteit. Wat is echte intimiteit? En wat staat haar in de weg? Ik geef toe, ook ik heb vrouwen niet altijd respectvol behandeld. Vanaf ik mijn puberteit kwam, en zeker in mijn studententijd, maakte mijn (mannelijke) omgeving mij duidelijk dat ik vooral zoveel mogelijk moest ‘scoren’, en als ik dat niet deed, was ik een seut of een loser. Dezelfde boodschap kreeg ik mee uit liedjes (lees: Amerikaanse hiphop), reclame en Hollywoodfilms. De geda...

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...

This post goes together with this photo album . Tuk-tuks at New Delhi main railway station India is a country of extremes. It is often described as a ‘sensory overload’. You can find the richest palaces standing right next to the poorest slums. One would expect this rising world power to be a little more organized, but I found it to be not much more than a third world country, and a quite overcrowded one for that matter. It is dirty and chaotic. Rules do not seem to exist and neither does hygiene. Anything can be bargained for, traffic is mad, you can find people sleeping and animals roaming anywhere, trains and buses are overcrowded, sexual harassment omnipresent and everyone – all one billion Indians – just throws his or her garbage on the ground. Travelling through this vast country it is very hard not to see the very extreme and often squalid conditions under which these people have to live, not to mention the effects of climate change, which are slowly turning this c...

The saddest thing about alle these terror attacks, maybe even sadder than all the suffering caused, is you get used to them. The second saddest thing though, is that everyone seems to forget what a terror attack really is. A terror attack is not just some random act of violence committed by some crazy Muslim, because – you know – that is what crazy Muslims do. Terrorism is the use of “indiscriminate violence […] in order to achieve a political, religious or ideological aim” (thank you Wikipedia ), in this case the aim being stopping us from fighting ISIS. It is very important to remember this, for two reasons. First of all, if we forget to mention this, we feed the idea that crazy Muslims commit random acts of violence, because that is just what they do (thank you Western media for your objectivity). Second, and most important, is that, although everyone is ready to condemn the terror attacks themselves, nobody seems to be questioning our involvement in the Syrian and Iraqi civil w...

(This essay is a slightly altered version of a previous post in Dutch) Education is a wonderful thing. Almost all of our children worldwide [1] receive the opportunity to go to school and to develop themselves and learn skills that will enrich their lives and provide for their future. As wonderful as this may seem, on the other hand, our day to day reality is often much less flowery. Many kids do not like to go to school at all. It is a considerable source of stress for many of them. This is a pity. Mankind has achieved such a level of development that children get to have 6, 12 or even more years of their life completely devoted to their own personal growth, but somehow this does not seem to make them any happier. We have this grand opportunity, but ever so often it seems to turn into a drag. Whatever happened? Are our kids merely ungrateful, or is there something else going on here? And how can we make our education more fulfilling for our children? My story Do the tra...