Dear Friends,
I spent July 4th weekend in Wyoming in a little town in which I used to live called Jackson. Every Fourth there is a parade which inevitably is just a chain of vintage cars driving five MPH tossing candy at kids who line the road. This year one of the floats was a political inspired float. Many people decided to protest the float by turning their backs on it. This got me thinking about how we choose to show our beliefs and how that energy affects the way we live as well as the world in which we live. In Buddhism there is a word that describes the root of all conflict and aggression; this word is Shenpa. We have conditioned ourselves to have a reaction and or label/opinion about just about anything in our lives. It's easy to identify your Shenpa. The next time something happens that you don't like, really try and feel the emotions and thoughts that are running through your body and where their actual root is.
To bring it back, what I was feeling from the crowd was a dislike for everything for which this float stood. The people on the float felt alienated and anger towards the people turning their backs to them. But in the end they were just people like the ones in the crowd, people who simply had a different view of the world. We are all entitled to our own views just as we are entitled to protest, but when communications between two idealisms is limited to a "turning of the back," we have broken our communication; we have simply told these people that we don't like them. We can blame this on the Shenpa, but as a human race our job is to learn from our tendencies in order to have a better understanding of each other. Little incidences like this may or may not lead to a war we see on CNN, but it creates a war within. In my opinion, there is no difference between us and that which we create. So why not create peace?
P.S. Don't forget to vote.
Joshua Scott Onysko Founder & CEO Pangea Organics