The vulnerability that connects us

 Thich Nath Hanh is dead,

Though in his view nothing can die. No coming - no going.

As we have no essence, no intrinsic I, we are all interacting beings. 

The German sociologist Hartmut Rosa is not a Buddhist but uses the word resonance  to describe the interaction not just with other human beings but with nature and the society around us. 

In an interview he says; Resonance means becoming vulnerable and losing control. 

That's what happened to Thich Nhat Hanh the last years. He lost control and was for sure vulnerable as a result of a cerebral hemorrhage. 

But he was well treated by his students, nuns and monks and the burial was attended by so many people in Vietnam where he lived his last years,

His view is that he will live on in the people who met him and was influenced by him and his book or talks in Youtube.

Rosa is an atheist and thinks capitalism and the forever increasing economic system is the biggest obstacle for us. That makes is see nature as something other than us. We don't resonance with it. And we see other people as competitors. 

That causes things like burnouts in people and climate change.

Rosa writes; 

I believe that at the heart of it, we are driven by the idea that through increasing scope and reach we can improve the quality of our relating to the world. The desire to increase our physical, material and social range is driven by the hope that we can find the right place for us, that we meet the people we really want to live with, the job that actually satisfies us, the religion or worldview which is truly ours, the books that actually talk to us and the music that speaks to us, etc. Thus, in the end, we hope, we will arrive at a form of life that turns the world into a living, breathing, speaking, responsive, “enchanted” world. Alas, as I have tried to point out, instead of arriving there, we end up turning the business of increasing our scope and horizon of the available, attainable and accessible and collecting resources into an end in itself, into an endless, escalatory cycle which permanently erodes its own basis and thus leads nowhere.





The cure for this, according to Rosa, is resonance and for that requires some self-transcendence. To really meet someone may not lead to harmony, we may not agree about everything. But we may response. 

If we are short of time and tries to go faster and faster resonance will be diminished.
As Jacques Tati Showed in his films. 




 








 

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