The Shambhala Warrior
The Weapons Are Compassion and Insight
How Does Your Light Shine?
“But insight alone,” he said, “can seem too cool to keep us going. So we need as well the heat of compassion, our openness to the world’s pain. Both weapons or tools are necessary to the Shambhala warrior.” — Joanna Macy
Fifty plus years ago, when the Vietnam War was raging, our culture was filled with protest music and art. Music that seems surprisingly prescient for the world we inhabit today. Three Dog Night wrote, “Shambala”, Ten Years After wrote, “I’d Love to Change the World,” and the lyrics from these songs align more closely with 2025 than the early 1970s.
The insanity of the current world, the re-emergence of far-right authoritarian forces, climate change that threatens the planet, depletion of natural resources and a toxic ‘social media’ environment has the world in a traumatic tailspin. At the same time, it has reignited discussion of “Shambhala” and “The Shambhala Warrior.”
If the least of us is to not only survive the future, but create a future that is sustainable, free and loving, we will need to reclaim the Shambhala Warrior energy that each of us holds and we bring forth The Kingdom of Shambhala.
“The dangers facing us are not fashioned by some satanic deity or by an evil extraterrestrial force or by some immutable preordained fate. These dangers are created by our relationships, our habits, our choices.” –Joanna Macy
These lessons could not be more critical for humans right now. Social media is a dopamine neural jack in our minds. It shows us the world’s pain over and over again, but it does not instruct us on how to use our ‘heat of compassion,’ the twelve centuries old story of The Kingdom of Shambhala.
As Macy states, this Kingdom emerges when humanity seems to be hanging at the frailest of threads.
The weapons are compassion and insight. “Insight into the radical interdependence of all phenomena.”
Seesaws, Zero Sums and Choices
Another song from the late 60s is the Moody Blues’, “Ride My See-Saw.” “My world is spinning around. Everything is lost that I found.” It fits right in with 2025. It is amazing how much of the protest music of the Vietnam era fits in so neatly with our world today.
As the technocrats push to shape our world in their transhumanist vision, using their social media ‘apps,’ they present us with continuous strife and conflict and a total zero-sum game. If I am up, you are down, and vice versa. This simply is not reality in a world that is completely interconnected, where we all exist in the ‘web of life.’
In America, we walk on land that was traveled by a culture that knew these truths. Native Americans were perhaps the closest to Shambhala Warriors for their time. In The Power of Myth with Bill Moyers, Joseph Cambell quotes Chief Seattle1 from 1854 when he questioned how it is even possible for anyone to “buy our land.”
“This we know: All things are connected. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons of the earth. Man did not weave the web of life; he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.” –Chief Seattle (see footnote)
This goes back to a theme that I have been harping on recently. If we are living in a world of walking wounded, of traumatized humans that have not made choices to excavate their pain and trauma, then we are called upon to do our own work and become The Living Christ, the Living Chiron, the healers and the teachers.
Christ healed with his words and his touch, Chiron healed through his own woundedness, which is why he is called The Wounded Healer.
One place to begin is with the Stoics. As far back as the world of the stoics, they realized that life was moving at such a fast pace that, as Heraclitus said: “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.”
One of the sanest things we can do is to no longer give power to the social media “apps” that suck our time and poison our minds with intentional conflict.
The intentional gaslighting is all part of their plan to divide and conquer. If we cling to the wisdom of the stoics and develop our Shambhala Warriors, we can and will defeat the oligarchs.
Your Dash
“All of humanity’s problems,” Blaise Pascal said in 1654, “stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” ― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key
In the famous poem of Linda Ellis, she asks, “…how you spent your dash.”
Yes, daily we are assaulted by the insanity of seeing the United States turned into an autocratic government and subjected to the idiotic ramblings of a syphilitic, malignant narcissist. There is no escape from this toxic ridiculousness.
However, we do not need to be Bodhisattva to spend time quietly in a room alone, nurture our spiritual energy, maintain a stoic mind and advance from shambolic to Shambhala. This is our commitment to our own Shambhala Warrior. The transhuman TECREALISTS do not want us to have a spiritual life.
“The digital view of humanity cannot fit with the vision of James Madison and the framers of the American constitutional order. Utopian revolutionaries have always offered some version of "One must break a few eggs to make some omelets," regardless of the price of actual eggs at the moment. But behind that utopianism is always a theology—and the theology can co-opt almost everything. Christianity can be co-opted by a digital utopianism, but only by silencing Jesus.” –Russell Moore
Shake free of the Musk’s, the Zuckerberg’s and the rest. Stop using their “apps.” Free your mind from their poisonous conflicts. Spend a few minutes every day in quiet. Develop your own sense of what is real and do not allow them to silence your Jesus, your Chiron or your Shambhala Warrior. Allow yourself space to sing Hymns to the silence and get “Oh so close to the One.”
1 Variations of Chief Seattle’s words have been floating over the years. His original speech is shorter than the version Campbell quotes, which comes from a screenplay written in 1971. While the meaning of the web of life and man’s connection to that web are found in the original speech, the other more flowery versions are from the screenplay.