Monthly Archives: July 2016

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Not a political essay

This is not a political essay. This is an effort to see beyond what’s happening on the surface and align my intentions with a clearer perspective. I begin with the political only because the moment is so full of the political.

The DNC is over and the expected outcome manifested. Some of it was good, some of it was really inspiring, but taking a moment to reflect on all the rhetoric, it is clear that though there’s a huge difference in the perspective of the two parties, there is not a lot of real understanding in either of them. While I clearly will do all I can to ensure the election of Clinton, given the alternative, I kinda admit to the clothespin analogy the Bernie supporter invoked last night. But let me be clear on that: I don’t really think even Bernie would be that much different.

I know, there are  “yuge”, even VAST, differences, and significant impacts on millions of people, but I’m taking a longer view here. What all of it, including the fascist impulses rampant in our society today, arises from is a profound disconnect that has buried itself in our consciousness so deeply that we are generally unaware of it.

As many of the speakers pounded home in the last few nights, ‘this is about more than party differences, it’s about people’! Yes, it’s about people, how people live and think, this dualistic mindset that insists on breaking everything down into a “battle” that must be “won”. Like Merle Haggard’s “White Line Fever”, it’s a sickness born down deep within our souls.

Beneath all the philosophical and religious views and all our notions of right vs. wrong, there’s this one thing we agree on, and that is that there is such a thing as right and wrong, us and them, good and bad. It’s only in the definitions that we differ, only in the who is what, which usually means “they” are wrong and “we” are right.

And therein lies our essential problem.

Although in Buddhism as a religion there is as much dualism and right vs. wrong as most anywhere else, somehow there’s a core there, somehow the process of meditation itself – and this core is probably to be found in many other places as well, it’s just that Buddhism is where I found it – helps one break through the surface and experience things that make it clear – in a way that words can’t truly express and ideas can’t negate – that this ongoing process that I identify as “me” or “us” is just a point of light in great explosion that has likely been going on forever and will continue forever, because that’s really all there is –forever.

This deeper level of experience (wherever one finds it), replicated and deepened throughout life, tends to snap all this political/social bullshit into some kind of relief. Tends to reveal it all as a transparent, shimmering facade.

Because really, in some way that’s impossible for me to explain or show outside of the experiencing of it, everything is all connected to everything else. Truly. Deeply. All the things we do in denial, or ignorance, or in spite of, this connectedness — all the insanity, the delusion, is the real reason for human suffering and ecosystem destruction, the real reason for all the fucked-uped-ness of this world.

Thus the great, egregious monstrosity that is American Empire and all that entails is built on the foundation of the monstrous way that humans have constructed “civilization” on top of the ruins of billions of lives, and that edifice itself is built on the notion that each individual human is somehow discrete. Separate. Disconnected.

Until we find ways to help everyone heal from that profound disconnect, born in the illusion that “I” am a real, discrete separate individual and what I do only affects me, we will go on making war on ourselves, on the rest of life, and on the entire inanimate cosmos.

Charles Eisenstein lays out this case much better than I, and in a recent essay – Of Horseshoe Crabs and Empathy – makes a brilliant argument that the implications of all this are that our energies are better directed toward the development of love for the world and action at local levels than great political or even environmental battles.

It’s in those experiences of love for the particulars of the world that we know the truth about the whole of the cosmos, he argues, and only in those kinds of “seeing” do we come to understand the connection we have lost. Feeling those losses, rather than following some set of rules or beliefs, is what can motivate and guide us to authentic action.

He says:

If everyone focused their love, care, and commitment on protecting and regenerating their local places, while respecting the local places of others, then a side effect would be the resolution of the climate crisis. If we strove to restore every estuary, every forest, every wetlands, every piece of damaged and desertified land, every coral reef, every lake, and every mountain, not only would most drilling, fracking, and pipelining have to stop, but the biosphere would become far more resilient too.

—- Charles Eisenstein – Of Horseshoe Crabs and Empathy

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The new science story…

Science is weird. In its true form, it can be the most liberating perspective, the most useful tool we humans have yet developed.

But in complicity with big money and big power, it is absolutely the most imprisoning dogma, for it masquerades as objective truth, beyond opinion and question – and in that, abandons its own origins, just as all religions have. Much of what bedevils us in the current world manifestation, the old story of separation, the dualistic delusion the drives us to battle nature and destroy ourselves, can be laid at the foot of this “science as dogma” approach to life, reductionist science as it has been practiced for the past century or so.

But there’s lots of new science out there, mostly not yet being brought into application in any of the aspects of life, such as medicine, which are ostensibly science-based, and certainly not being brought into the  popular realm via media. This new science, in most of the disciplines, undermines and even contradicts much of what we were taught as “science” in school, and it also has deep, deep implications for how we live on the earth, how we take care of ourselves and each other. It provides, for those willing to make the effort to sus it out, a whole new paradigm for human life, a “New Story”, as Charles Eisenstein calls the evolving perspective on our origins and futures.

This new story, and a sketch of the science behind it – complete with links to the sources – is laid out in a most accessible and impactful way in a blog article from Kelly Brogan, MD – Gamechanging Science. She says:

You may not know this yet, but the whole game has changed and we are several decades into the most powerful shift in scientific thinking in the past 300 years. Science, when handled with care, is a process, not a destination.

She introduces some of the ideas of this new science, focusing first on epigenetics and its implications for our notions of disease – she is a practicing psychiatrist and author of A Mind of Your Own – and laying out three “game changers”:

The Microbiome: — The term dysbiosis, used by holistic and integrative practitioners to refer to gut imbalance, of course, actually means “wrong living”. No doubt, our struggles today, stem from a lack of connection to the natural world. It is, in this way, poetic justice that we would only be able to heal our guts, right our relationship to the microbial world through food – nature’s gift, bounty, and language.

Exosomes: — The nail in the coffin of protein-coding-gene-determined-health is a group of tiny bubble-like blobs that influence gene expression. Amazingly similar to viruses in nature, structure, and possibly even function, exosomes are created and received by our bodily cells in order to direct, determine, and react to states of being. — This is being called inter-kingdom crosstalk Once again, food is reframed as so much more than calories and nutrients…it is information.

The power of Belief: — Dr. Candace Pert, the pioneering researcher credited with the discovery of the opiate receptor, has debunked the Cartesian dualism that for hundreds of years has put the mind out of the realm of the body. She also challenged the notion that the mind is something that merely relates to the body. The mind, per her conclusions, is the body.

This is a complex and powerful article, which I would recommend one read entirely before making judgements. It concludes with this amazing statement: “… human experience is the universe manifested at one point. It is the emergent properties of many, infinitely complex and interfacing systems. It is fundamentally sacred, larger than our will, and gently demanding of our humility.”

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Trumpism = More of the Same…

After Nixon defeated McGovern in ’68 or whenever that was, James Taylor said that Nixon won because “he offered the American people a lie, a fairy tale of what life is really like, that America could continue living the way they have been, that our society is valid, that for all practical purposes the point of view of the average American citizen is true, when just the opposite is the case.”

Seems a lot of people still want to believe that lie. People want to believe that individualism, competition, consumption, empire-building, war, reductionist pseudo-science – on and on, are true and valid ways to be a people in the world today, when, as James says, just the opposite it true.

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Breathing thru the pain

My dharma friend Maia Duerr has a beautiful perspective on the recent horrors of hatred and violence rife in our world: it’s all the pain of birthing a new life.

In her July Full Moon newsletter, Maia shared her thoughts and a wonderful new video from India.Arie, “Breathe”, which led me to a good cry that I knew I had been needing! Maia says she believes “we are in the throes of some tremendous birthing process.”

With every bone in my body I believe we are on our way to living into a more awakened way of being with each other and being on the Earth. But we are not there yet. Like any birthing process, the going can get very rough and it would be delusional for me to not recognize that things will likely get ‘worse’ before they get better. Those who are entrapped by fear and ignorance are acting out in ever-more terrifying ways. But always remember this is not the truth of who we are as human beings. 

As some in the #blacklivesmatter movement have pointed out, things are not necessarily worse now, they’re just getting uncovered. What we’re seeing is the karmic fruit of centuries of injustice and a mindless, grasping social and economic order. Maia says, “This brutally honest recognition of “what is,” painful as it may be, is a necessary step toward transformation.”

We can only continue to live our lives if we maintain some kind of confidence that this transformation, this world-wide awakening, is possible and is happening despite our difficulty seeing it.

Maia’s words, and India.Arie’s video, are helping me get through this week.

#blacklivesmatter

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A different perspective on crisis

Charles Eisenstein, my go-to guy for understanding what’s happening in this crazy world, for making sense of it – at least the sense of seeing clearly what the causes and implications of it all are – has written another gem. Whatever he writes about, it seems that he’s able to clarify everything and bring a beautiful, open perspective to the world as he explicates the question at hand.

This one is on ‘Brexit’ – and by extension Trumpism.

He says that the conventional interpretations of the motives of the anti-elitist sentiment as expressed in both these current phenomena are flawed and patronizing to the extreme, blaming it all on the ignorant xenophobia and racist attitudes of the ‘yahoos’. He notes that there are deep and legitimate reasons behind both the anti-EU vote and Trump supporters’ anger.

We don’t agree on what to do, but more and more of us have lost faith in the system and its stewards. When right-wing populists blame our problems on dark-skinned people or immigrants, the response they arouse draws its power from real and justifiable dissatisfaction. Racism is its symptom, not its cause.

It’s the underlying assumptions and attitudes that are creating all of these problems, the ideas that drive people to fear, anger and hatred against someone – who depending on one’s social analysis.

 The right-wing populists incite hatred and anger at the blacks, the immigrants, the Muslims, the gays, the transgender, the “libtards,” etc. The mainstream liberals stir up outrage against the bigots, the nationalists, the contemptible narrow-minded over-entitled “crazy” (a common adjective) climate-change-denying Bible-thumpers. Further left, the critics of neoliberal imperialism follow the same formula by invoking images of heartless corporate executives, greedy bankers, cowardly political elites, and drone-like bureaucrats and technocrats who should surely know better.

Understanding the causes of all this – and then communicating with each other about how to solve it – is the only way our world will come to find a way through all this that leads to a livable world for all.

Charles says the underlying issue is the mindset of modernity, the belief that we as humans are separate and set apart from the rest of life, and from each other.

 …it is part of a mindset that is integral to modernity and has roots going back to the first mass societies. It is fundamentally the mindset of war, in which progress consists in defeating the enemy: weeds or locusts, barbarians or communists; germs or cholesterol; gun nuts or traitors. And that mindset rests on a foundation more basic still: the Story of Separation that holds us as discrete, separate individuals in a world of other, in opposition to random forces and arbitrary events of nature, and in competition with the rest of life. Well-being comes, in this story, through domination and control: glyphosate, antibiotics, GMOs, SSRIs, surveillance systems, border fences, kill lists, prisons, curfews…

–Which pretty much describes most of the nasty stuff going on around us!

It is from this story too that neoliberal capitalism sources its power. It depends on the idealization of competition, encoded in “free markets,” as a law of nature and primary driver of progress; on the sanctity of private property (which is a primal form of domination) and, most of all, on exercising control over others through the creation and enforcement of debt.

At some point, Brexit, Trump, or worse will shake us out of our trance, break our fascination with this world story, and force us to confront the beliefs that underpin it all. Maybe then humanity will embrace the interbeing that is our true home, and we can all live in this world together.

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The value, and point, of practice

One thing I have tried to focus on here is why we practice, whether Buddhist or otherwise, meditation and other mindfulness practices. It’s often a difficult question to answer, and seems to me to be central to the process of offering help for others.

This article is a personal story that gives some very good, solid answers to that question. Primarily we practice to save our lives. And once we experience that, there’s some kind of natural inclination to want to share its benefits with others. If we keep at it a while, we learn lots about ourselves and the way one needs to live in order to stay connected with the meaning that keeps us alive.

This is to me the heart of the article, and the heart of practice:

As soon as I was willing to feel my pain, I regained access to my joy. I regained access to my love, and my boring, mundane life sprang forth in full color. The last day of that sesshin, I asked myself the question “When I am dying, what do I want my last thought to be?” and the answer came right away — gratitude. If I can die being grateful for my life, it will have been a life well lived.