Consciousness and Culture — Gibrán Rivera

All About The Heart

Thomas Friedman launched a recent column reminding us that automation will define the future:

Software has started writing poetry, sports stories and business news. IBM’s Watson is co-writing pop hits. Uber has begun deploying self-driving taxis on real city streets and, last month, Amazon delivered its first package by drone to a customer in rural England.

He also reminds us that there is nothing that competes with the human heart. It is only the heart that can can love, have compassion and dream. He reminds us that only humans can build deep relationships of trust.

Gibran RiveraJanuary 18, 201762-92

Your Image Of God

I’m a believer. Not the uptight fundamentalist type. I’m well over the idea of God as an old man in the skies waving a magic wand. But I believe. I have a cosmology that helps me to live into the infinite vastness of this great mystery.

I imagine a tantric dance between what is quiet, perfect and still and what is full, unfolding manifestation. What we might call the “ground of being” and what we might call “evolution.”

Gibran RiveraJanuary 6, 201762-92

2016 Mattered

There is a narrative out there that 2016 was the worst year ever. Not only did we lose beloved icons ranging from Prince to Carrie Fisher, but the United States just handed the Nuclear Codes to the least qualified individual ever to hold the Presidency. And this is without talking about his white supremacist tendencies!

I am the last person to deny the very real implications that our political choices will have on very real people.

At the same time I find it important to agree with Charles Nevin’s recent opinion in the NY Times. We have done much, much worse.

Gibran RiveraDecember 31, 201662-92Comment

Addicted to Outrage

Tim Ferriss shared Daniel Ketchell’s Medium piece breaking down our current media environment. It is an excellent exposition of the way a relatively neutral or even positive story is funnelled towards negativity and outrage. It’s really worth checking out.

Gibran RiveraDecember 27, 201662-92

Coming Home

I've been quiet during this ominous week. Even when we still thought Hilary was going to win I found myself walking the city streets and murmuring to myself - "this is not good, and I don't know what to do." Little did I know how much worse it was about to get.

Gibran RiveraNovember 14, 201662-92Comment

Glenn Beck is a Person

Glenn Beck is not on Fox anymore. Many of us don’t hear from him as much. But his media empire is growing. I remember when he was front and center in the imagination of the progressive movement. He was the embodiment of evil. The mouthpiece of the right. I heard more about him than from him. And what I heard was all bad.

Gibran RiveraSeptember 20, 201662-92

The Six Hour Work Day

n the US it is common to make fun of the French and their unions, their strikes and their 35 hour work weeks. It is easy to forget that the unions are indeed “the folks who brought you the weekend.” I was excited to read Sweden is introducing the six hour work day.

Our relationship to work is all wrong. It is by now a cliché to say that too many of us live to work instead of work to live. But it is true. We have left our children to be taken care of by iPads, and we have limited our own lives to an idea of “productivity” that has simply come up short. Too many of us are not happy.

Gibran RiveraAugust 24, 201662-92Comment

Your Own Myth

I watched Hercules last night. The terrible B movie starring “The Rock.” Don’t ask me how I ended up here. I sat through the annoyance of cliché after cliché. It wasn’t until the movie was done that I got some value from it. Samantha, my wife, who finds something to appreciate in everything, was the one to point it out.

Gibran RiveraAugust 23, 201662-92Comment

HOMEGOING

I had a bout of insomnia last night. And so it was in the middle of the night that I finished reading Yaa Gyasi’s heartbreakingly beautiful book, Homegoing. It must have been three in the morning, tears streaming down my face as my aching soul connected to the plight the ancestors, and to their benevolence.

Gibran RiveraAugust 19, 201662-92

VICTIMHOOD CULTURE

As a person of color I have experienced direct and explicit aggression as well as significant forms of exclusion. I also experience plenty of microaggressions. As a man who has been culturally conditioned by patriarchy, I have also been the perpetrator of explicit and implicit aggressions. I have been hurt and I have hurt others.

It is unfortunate that we have structured a society in which the power embedded in relationships of race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, exclusion and privilege define so much of our human experience.

Gibran RiveraAugust 18, 201662-92Comment