On Iran, Revolutions and the Lioness breaking the Evil
What is happening in Iran is a mixture of many streams of energies. Reducing it down to “this is about …” kind of statement can only support blindness to all the other integral aspects of it that does not fit into the statement. A strong and major stream that takes my attention is OTHERIZATION as a habit of thought and as a lens to understand the world. The stream has very strong cultural roots in Iran. It was a major influence in shaping the previous revolution where the King and his family were the “other” evil, yet when the other was erased, a new other appeared in the throne of the evil.
The habit is so strong, that in the past week some of my own friends in social media have stated that: “if you are not joining us in sharing videos and slogans you are a traitor to your people. Those who are silent are traitors etc…” These are the type of people who highly identify as being against the dictatorship and the previous revolution, yet, they actually share the same thought pattern that shaped the previous revolutions. Once I heard from a wise one that, if you pay close attention, the victim and the victor have much more things in common than they would like to believe so.
A true revolution would be to change the otherizing thought pattern in order to step out of the destructive / violent loop. That would need an expansion of our attention to include the inner side of the reality, to our perception, our own thinking habits and how they shape our reality. There is a beautiful poem by Molana Rumi: Lion is not the one who breaks through the lines of the enemy. A true lion knows how to break itself. Farsi has no masculine / feminine version of the names, so it also means the lioness.
This does not mean that there are no other streams shaping the story of Iran, including a constellation of mafia-like families misusing Islam as a tool to benefit from political / economical power. The question is, how and from which source within yourself you choose to engage with that partial reality, which might be mirroring an internal dynamic of the culture and the collective consciousness?
If you are at war with the dictatorship FROM the same thought pattern that creates the dictatorship in the first place, the result is the continuation of the stream of dictatorship. You may appear to be standing, proudly and heroically, on the opposite side of the dictator, yet in reality you are both collaborating in creating two opposite banks for the same stream of violence, otherization, evilization, power-over dynamic, ignorance… to continue flowing.
