Tag Archives: war

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Liberation

J. Fred Eden journal of POW liberation in 1945

[This is from a fragment of Daddy’s journal that Mom found after his death. Our friend Harry Yeomans transcribed it for her and provided us with copies. Thanks Harry!]

April 29, 1945

Only rumors. To all outward appearances, this might have been 1944. We heard in the grapevine that the Germans were ready to move – if the Russians came any closer. But we also heard that we were to be evacuated at the same time – as POWs.

Lay in bed listening for rumbles, planes, or air raid sirens and looking for flashes, flares – anything that would indicate that someone or something was coming to get us out of this – state-of-mind, at least!

April 30, 1945

I was too slow getting up and getting dressed this morning and missed roll call. When the rest came in, jabbering about Germans across the road getting ready to leave, I dismissed it as only preparations, but when a long line of guards, women – and officers pulled out, it seemed true. They were at least beginning to leave. After breakfast Sheridan came in with news that G’s had given permission for us to dig foxholes, and that the instructions were on the board.

What did this mean? Who have we to fear? [We] walked over to watch the Krauts leave – the Sgts were digging like mad – like a bunch of moles.

Across the fence all that remained of the Krauts were in confusion, like an anthill when hot water is poured on it. Tiffany’s “girlfriend” (whom he had seen and approached) was striding about in her little boots and trench coat, blond hair flying in the Baltic breeze – a guard came by – amused at all our digging. “Zwei Tage-alles gegangen” – in two days we’ll all be gone!

Strolled back to the barracks – boys from room digging trench. After all, these Krauts might get mad and strafe the place, so I got a Klim can to help dig. About that time there was a terrific explosion – Bombs! – no, it was in the flak-school – demolition! This goes on for hours, accompanied by explosions from the airfield. How that huge building stood, after all the HE around it, defies explanation.

We dig our slit trenches just in time for the biggest blow-up of all – an ammo bldg. “We thought we’d had it!”

Roll call at 1600 was a farce. Several big explosions as Major Steinhauer goes thru the motions of counting.

It’s rumored the counters are all that’s left – with about 40 interpreters. There are still Krauts in towers, but no guards in compound for roll call.

This day is down in my memory as Kraut Panic Day. They have left in a hurry. The refugees from town are loading the Red Cross parcels we have stored at the flak-school. Details went over to help get parcels out. The few guards left are trying to hold them off – not wanting to shoot, but they are pretty determined, grabbing the ones we get.

Hundreds have left Barth, afoot, ahorse, on cycles, by boat – anyway to get out! They are “fleeing in confusion.” All this excitement in contrast to the deadly inactivity of the last weeks is almost too much. The Reds must be a lot closer than Berlin says they are – East of Ankleeve – i.e. about 60 mi.

The last thing I heard before I went to sleep – “When the Krauts turned off the lights the picked up their packs and left.”

I don’t believe it. I’ll have to see it – maybe someday.

May 1

At 0530 I was rudely awakened by a messenger from Al [daddy’s A/C commander and pilot], who I found was in the Volage – waiting to go on guard in the towers! There are Americans patrolling the fence. Americans are in the towers – we are in charge! It’s like being drunk!

At 0030 the Krauts turned it over to Col. Zemke [a famous US pilot, Col. Hubert Zemke was credited with shooting down 28 German planes in air battles] – at any rate, they left it in his hands!

For the first time, we listened to BBC. No mention of us except Reds are at Auklam and Neustrelitz. The bulletin board reported by noon that 1) there was a Russian liason officer in conference with Col. Zemke; 2) that a Russian spearhead was 3 km south of Barth “proceeding slowly up the road.”

We stood at the south-most end of compound. Looking – straining to see first tank. All we could see was all kinds of refugees, forced-labor POWs, etc. coming to this camp.

The Russian liason officer was found to be fictitious, but at 2225, while we were listening to Hit Parade, the Russians did come! Too dark to see anything, but the Tannoy announced it true – 5 minutes later, the Hit Parade was interrupted to announce, “Hitler is dead!” Somebody beat us to it.

Then to top it all off – “Don’t Fence Me In” sung by Lawrence Tibbett was first on Hit Parade.

Boy, what a climax! We are freed men now – after 14 months and 11 days.

May 2

Turns out the “Russian spearhead” that reached here last night was a private with two tommy-guns and a dilapidated truck. But he has been reinforced by several other trucks of Reds.

At 1400 Col. Greening call us out. “The Russian colonel in charge of the advance unit is in Barth now, has ordered us to be ready to walk out of here in six hours. Get everything in readiness. We may not move, but we must be ready.”

There was a mad rush to get packs made, warm clothing on (it was a chill, murky day), blankets rolled, etc.

As we scurried around, there was a wild shouting from N-2 and N-3, and to my – well, amazement – I saw Kriegies tearing down fences, tipping over guard towers, streaming down the roads – running wild.

I stood watching agape for a few minutes – til I recalled the urgency of the need to get my belongings packed.

It seems Colonel Chekov – bandoliers, pistols, and all came riding in to liberate the Kriegies, and finds us still behind barbed wire, so he orders the fences torn down.

“You are freed! Go to town! Tear down the fences! I have come to liberate you!” was the gist of his speech. To keep on the right side, diplomatically, of our allies, Zemke thought it feasible to comply and so gave the orders.

A few minutes later, we heard that there are German packs over at the flak-school, that everybody is going over to get them. That sounded like the very think for packing my stuff if we had walking to do. I grabbed a coat and ran with the crowd toward the school. Hundreds were streaming toward it, other hundreds were streaming back, laden with all kinds of stuff – hats, helmets, packs, jackets, souvenirs of all kinds. One man that I vaguely recognized in the confusion was returning with the prize of all prizes – a genuine, unopened, untouched egg!

The next few minutes I shall never forget! I had supposed, and had often cogitated upon it, that the day of liberation would be a wild, maniacal one, but even in my wildest wanderings, never had I imagined the things that I saw happening at that flak-school.

The school is a huge affair, brick throughout, built and equipped to do credit to an American college. Offices, rooms, and classrooms occupy the first two floors, and the attic floor is used for warehouses. The whole is surrounded by garages or storage houses forming a side street or court around them. This was filled with equipment blown up by the Krauts before they fled.

I have read and seen movies of wild armies looting and mutilating, but I never expected to see Americans in the role. From the time I entered the court til I left sometime later, I saw thousands of at least half-crazed Kriegies breaking windows, kicking in doors, grabbing everything in sight – not particularly needing it, just taking it because it was there for the taking.

I wandered frenziedly from one room to the next – looking at first for “those packs.” Then the necessity for hast gripped me, and I began to half-run through the mazes of equpment in the attic storehouses, through bales of hats, shoes, fur helmets, fur gloves, socks, fatigue clothing – it seemed a nightmare.

Everywhere there were outlandishly garbed men, groveling on the floor amidst the stuff, searching for more prizes to add to piles of stuff already too large to carry.

I wandered through, it seemed, miles of equipment and still no packs. I gave up in despair and went to the second floor. Things weren’t quite so wild there, and I began to quiet down. I found that all I had collected was a dilapidated old German O’seas cap, two bundles of fur-lined flying helmets, and a pair of giant-sized mattens.

In disgust with myselt, I flung away the cap and mittens and gave away one bundle of helmets. The other I kept for the boys to wear on the hike.

In an office I was passing, I noticed a bevy of maps, scattered all over. I glanced through them hurriedly for one of

Barth, but all had this section cut out. I stuck a “fligerkarten” of East Germany in my pocket.

Rushing on, I came across a room with several books on desk – one was a Wehrmacht song book that for some reason I took.

In another place, I came across an English book that I carried for at least an hour. In another building, of which the door had been battered down, scores of fellows were streaming out with service caps and blouses jammed on. In the confusion inside, I saw all kinds of band stuff – bass drums bashed in, horns broken in half – I left. In short, I never found the packs, returned to the barracks. Poop is that we won’t move, but must be ready.

Peacock had been to town, returned with descriptions of a wild, dirty horde of looting, drunken Russians on horses, in carts, in Jerry autos – all hell-bent for election. Some generous American had given him a drink – of green ink.

That evening Shorty and Tiff went into Barth. A Russky gave ‘em a cup of vodka and Kirk came back pretty high, talking a mile-a-minute about the Cossacks – storming through Barth on Jeeps, half-tracks and trucks. By the time we went to bed around 2 a.m., I still didn’t know whether we were free or not. It seemed so peculiar the way the Russians gave orders – for all I knew we are now Russian prisoners.

May 3

Col. Zemke spoke to us at midday to help clear up the situation somewhat. It seems that the first Russian units (Kurds) had orders to evacuate all POWs, internees, forced labor, etc. The Commander gave orders for us to move out. He was pretty drunk too, which helped. Now the new Commissar in Barth had changed the orders. He ordered us to stay here. That if we ran out of food, “I will provide.” In short, he wanted it understood that he was boss and that he meant to be obeyed. Zemke said he sent men to Sweden and to our front lines “three days ago,” that the Russians had notified Moscow, who would notify Washington, who would notify the Eighth Air Force, etc.

“I fully expect to have you flown out of here.”

All of which sounded good – in a way – but which meant exactly zero.

Things have changed a lot around here, though. Kriegies have horses, bicycles, cars, chickens, geese, cows, eggs, meat – in fact, Al got me over to his new quarters (the former German guard barracks) to help him roast a chicken. We topped it off with some macaroni and spaghetti sauce. What a meal!

We’ve had four Red Cross parcels issued this week in a “get ‘em out to the troops to keep from loosing them” policy. So there is beaucoup food.

Zemke’s idea is to keep us strictly in camp. He says Russkies are trigger-happy. That by various means we have had seven men killed so far. But there are plenty who left with the guerrillas, or advance troop, last night. None are taking off today.

May 4

Still plenty of milling around and general confusion. Nobody knows nuthin’! Official announcement that Eisenhower orders all POWs to quote, “Stand by!” unquote. This was a good signal for the guys to leave by droves, disgusted with the situation – with the merry run-around we’re getting after two years of “standing by.” This sure makes Air Marshall Tedder and Gen. Doolittle’s statements look foolish. “Will have you out in 72 hours.” We’ve been counting pretty heavily on that I guess.

Lay out on peninsula watching guys paddling across the inlet to leave for Rostrock, Lubeck, Wismar – or anywhere to get out of here. They say the Limeys are flying them out of Wismar every hour. Also watched Russky hordes – carts, wagons, calvary, kiddy-cars – start toward Zingst. What a wild, mad lot! They don’t travel on gasoline, but on vodka.

There have been four concentration camps found in this area. Some of the truth about these places is blood-chilling. Grown men who weigh 70-80 pounds – living on a slice of bread and bowl of Jerry turnip soup for 6-7 years. Typhus, all kinds of horrible diseases – phew.

And the Krauts expect mercy. Lord, see that they get their just and due punishment.

Manure and maggots knee-deep, live men insensible to the fact that there are dead bodies lying beneath them. A British paratrooper 37 months in dark, in solitary, with only one thought left in his mind – “I wanta go to town.”

They’re dying like flies, can’t be fed, except glucose, can’t walk – uhhhh!

May 5

First part of day much same. General confusion, milling around. War seems about over, with Krauts giving up by droves. At 1615, a Jeep, a Major, a Captain, and S/Sergeant arrive from somewhere.

General Aristoff, local commissar, confers with Col. Zemke. Col. Moss from Gen. Bridges of the 9th Something arrives “to conduct evacuation.” Russians refust to recognize his authority without credentials. Current idea is that we’re waiting for big liberation stunt to be pulled by Marshal Ratakoffsky and “Monty.” Would be quite a deal, but don’t know as how I care to wait – just for the publicity. Lots of things more important to me right now.

Scores more leaving for somewhere. Al says MP’s bringing them back by scores too. So it may not be such a good deal after all.

Guard squadron had fresh meat for supper. Some guys really got a break out of this mix-up, but thousands of us are still where we started – just Kriegies in a little larger compound now.

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A miracle at Standing Rock

Yes, a miracle is what we need, what the world needs. Charles Eisenstein suggests that the miracle could begin at Standing Rock. The miracle of action out of compassion, seeing the Other as oneself, opening one’s heart to the realities of all beings – a miracle of love.

The halting of the Dakota Access Pipeline would be miraculous simply because of the array of powerful ruling interests that are committed to building it. Not only has Energy Transfer Partners (ETP) already spent hundreds of millions of dollars on the pipeline, but a who’s-who of global banks has committed over $10 billion in lines of credit to ETP and other involved entities. Those banks, many of whom are facing financial stress of their own, are counting on the profits from the loans at a time when credit-worthy capital investments are hard to come by. Finally, the United States government has (in its estimation) a geopolitical interest in increasing domestic oil production to reduce the economic power of Russia and the Middle East. To hope to halt the pipeline in the face of such powers is in a certain sense unrealistic.

But, Charles says, things could go differently this time, if we all stay off the warpath, as the elders have advised the Water Protectors to do. “… at Standing Rock, something different is possible. It is not because the Dakota Sioux have finally acquired more guns or money than the pro-pipeline forces. It is because we are ready collectively for a change of heart.”

That’s pretty strong. This is an opening not seen in a long time, and one that could stand as a non-violent model for all the confrontations we’re likely to see over the next four years or so. If the pipeline is re-routed, it establishes a precedent – we can affect even these huge corporate projects if we stay focused, unified and nonviolent.

It will be a victory whether to pipeline is stopped or not: “This has already born fruit: if not for the resolute nonviolence of the resistance, the government would surely have forcefully evicted the Water Protectors by now, justifying violence with violence.”

Each of these invitations onto the warpath also presents an opportunity to defy the enabling narratives of violence and to take a step toward victory without fighting. It is an opportunity to employ what Gandhi called “soul force.” Meeting violence with nonviolence invites the other into nonviolence as well.

Beyond that, this action has the potential to awaken the world:

… when we choose love in the face of enormous temptation to hate, we are issuing a powerful prayer for a world of love. When we refuse to dehumanize in the face of atrocity, we issue a prayer for universal dignity. When thousands of people sacrifice their safety and comfort to protect the water, a powerful prayer issues from their gathering. Some day, in some form, it will be answered.

Charles’ essay is very much worth reading:

Standing Rock: A Change of Heart

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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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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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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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Returning to the Sanity of Our Hunter Gatherer Origins (Pt 1)

Returning to the Sanity of Our Hunter Gatherer Origins (Pt 1).

Humanity has seemingly wandered up a blind canyon.

The process of human evolution, cultural development, and technological advancement seems to have led us to the point where our crowning accomplishment is that we can destroy the earth, and seem hell-bent on doing so. Wars, cruelty, competition and environmental degradation of our own making threaten to destroy human life, if not all life, on the earth.

But what if this whole process has been one of learning the lessons we need to move forward into a more wonderful, beautiful world where the values of compassion and cooperation, sharing and creativity are dominant?

Is it possible to see through the miasma of our current world to a world where humans live together in peace, security, and abundance? The post linked above and parts 2 and 3 of the series present a case for that future, and present at least a glimpse of how it may be possible to get there.

As 2015 begins, it seems we all need to be willing to look at new ideas, new ways of understanding the human condition, and open ourselves to the possibilities that a new vision of human nature – one based on a very old and very successful model of living – can present.

These three essays are an invitation to do that. Do yourself and the future a favor and read them. Give a new way of living a chance in your mind.

As has famously been said, we have only our chains to lose.

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Daddy – and back to Georgia

[This is Chap. 16 in the continuing narrative on My Way-finding. Previous chapters are Pages on this site, and links can be found in the menu to the left of the main entry.]

My daddy had a powerful influence on my life.

He was one of those larger-than-life characters who made an indelible impression on everyone, and he shaped me in ways that I’ve only recently begun to understand, though I’ve now outlived him by over a year. He was a tall, handsome man with a personal warmth and a charismatic speaking style that made him the best preacher I ever heard, though he wasn’t a preacher, he was a journalist.

His father and grandfather had both been Baptist preachers, active in the Georgia Baptist Convention and Mercer University, the Baptist college, but Daddy chose a different pulpit: a small-town weekly newspaper. He was a solid Baptist his whole life, and could fill any pulpit with a wonderful sermon, and he raised all of us to be dutiful Baptists as well. I was pretty much into that role until sometime in high school, and college broke me completely out of it (as I’ve related in earlier posts), but that never really came between us at the emotional level.

For much of my young life, I wanted to be him, but Vietnam – and all of the Vietnam era radicalism that I embraced – came between us in a big way. He had been a navigator on B-24’s in World War II, flying out of England in the storied raids on Hitler’s ball-bearing factories, and I became a war resister.

Well – first I joined the Air Force and became a pilot because I knew that would make him happy. But then I encountered the reality of the petty little empire-building escapade that we called, in our ignorance and arrogance, “the Vietnam War.” I went, despite my reticence, because I thought I really didn’t know what was going on there, going on in the world, going on in the exalted realms of the U.S. political system… so I should give up my foolish notions of knowing that it was all wrong and just go, like all the other people I knew who had gone and either died or come back.

And then I got there and found out it was every bit as depraved and stupid and immoral and deceptive and wrong as I had thought… and so after about nine months of it, I bailed. At least I tried to. I told them I wasn’t that into the war and wanted to be out of the Air Force.

They said, well, yes, but… no. You haven’t really done anything bad, you’ve played by the rules, been a good boy, so there’s no reason we should let you out before your commitment is up. So then I said, okay, fine, then I won’t do anything for you anymore. By then of course, I was back in the states and supposed to be an instructor, teaching guys to go there and do what I did for a year and ten days. (I was in country an extra ten days waiting for them to decide what to do with me, since I had an “administrative action pending”.)

It’s a long story, one I’ve related in my War Journal, which is on my website hoyama.org, but the upshot is, I finally got out. In the process of this, of course, my father and I had some serious, divisive, but inconclusive, discussions. He never really understood, though my mother supported me, and even after it was all over – my discharge, the war, the social debate – we never really talked about it at the level that we should have.

And then he died.

On his 66th birthday, really in the prime of his life, while I was living in Oregon, he went into heart bypass surgery and never regained consciousness. We rushed back to Georgia when they decided he needed the surgery, but he was still on the machine when we arrived, and his heart would never resume its work on its own, so he died as I stood in the intensive care ward watching him breathe and listening to the machines beep.

….

I was totally unprepared for the loss, and it flattened me.

I was pretty much lost in grief for some time, but eventually I repressed most of it and went back to my ignorance and denial. But it dug a hole in me that began to fester. All those unsaid things began to eat away my insides, All the regret and guilt of a lifetime eventually ate away my heart and my gut and replaced them with balls of molten metal.

About a year after Daddy’s death, Giana and Luke and I moved back to Georgia to be with my mom. She had been left pretty much alone when Daddy died, and though she was a strong and independent woman in many ways, the solitary life didn’t suit her. She needed family around, so we came.

Moving back to Georgia, I figured any hope of ever finding a Buddhist group to be part of was over. It was Georgia, the heart of Baptist-land. But I brought my Buddha-rupa, my carving, and set up a low-key altar in my house. I continued to think of myself as a Buddhist and read books about Buddhism.

And those balls of hot iron continued to grow inside me. I continued to descend into depression in longer and deeper spirals. I had never figured out that I needed to meditate on a regular basis. It seemed more like an exotic delicacy to be tasted at random, when in fact it’s as necessary as daily bread. So I suffered, and I visited that suffering on all those around me.

….

And then one day, our friend Claire came home from a weekend in Atlanta and told me about this wonderful thing she had found: a Zen center.

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The end of war

Charles Eisenstein, my recently favorite author, articulates what is essentially, tho not explicitly, a Buddhist approach to the conflicts going on in the world today.

Eisenstein speaks of “interbeing” – a term most prominently used by Thich Nhat Hanh – and the general notion of interconnectedness as understandings that bring us to a new approach to dealing with all the issues that face us. He says:

…people who do evil things are not doing them because they are evil people; that therefore, tactics based on demonizing them are grounded in delusion and may be counterproductive; finally, that such an approach is an expression of the very same mentality of conquest and control that lies at the foundation of our civilization’s depredations.

… Deeply conditioned to view the world in terms of good versus evil, we seek to understand complicated social problems through the simplistic lens of perpetrators and victims. Who is the bad guy? Who can we fight?

He articulates this fully and in a very clear and easily comprehended form in his recent essay “The End of War.”

It challenges me to more fully understand how to bring the Buddhist principles I profess to bear on my own life.

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The illusion of separation

[The Signal Blanket: Danger! By Paul Goble, The Coming of the Iron Horse]

How can we live authentically, fully human, fully divine, following a path of right living, in this world of seemingly insurmountable problems – violence, hatred, degradation, destruction?

The problems in our world today all begin with our mistaken idea that we humans are special, and special in a very special way, special because we are separate from the rest of the natural world, separate from each other. We even divide mind from body within ourselves.

This notion of the discrete, separate, independently existing self is deeply embedded in our culture, including our language, and thus embedded in all our ways of thinking – so much so that it’s difficult to talk about it clearly. It’s even more difficult to get people to think about it clearly.

Just the words “nature” and “environment” seem to imply that this separation is normal, that this is “just the way it is”. We don’t see that these words encode a dualistic world-view, a basic assumption that has grown stronger and stronger as our societies took step after step away from the connections with our intimate nature, beginning with language and symbolic culture and expanding with quantification, agriculture, science, and industry.

I have addressed the issue of separation and connection in an earlier blog post, but this is such a difficult issue to discuss that I think it’s worth a second, mostly new, approach.

Why is the idea of separation important and how is it related to our discussion of living authentically?

First, because we believe ourselves to be discrete, separate, independently existing entities, we see “nature” – all other beings and processes – as “resources” – things for our human use, to be controlled and subjugated for our purposes, and having no essential worth or meaning otherwise. Thus, as this idea has grown in strength and influence over human culture, our impact on the earth has been more and more harmful. Today we callously and arrogantly threaten the very biosphere that supports our life.

Second, because of this idea of separate-ness, we think we can behave in pretty much any way we like towards other humans and not really suffer any consequences. Competition – the whole “every man for himself” ethos – arose out this notion, as did the ideas of possession and property. Which leads pretty quickly to murder, war, torture, genocide, and all the other forms of violence that are endemic today. (Only because we are threatened by some outside power if we don’t do “right” is there reason to do otherwise, so when that belief in an outside power wanes, all kinds of horrors arise.)

Third, this conception of self causes us to misinterpret most of what has come down to us in the spiritual realm. We set ‘God’ outside of matter, outside the very universe, in some realm of ‘other’; earlier humans clearly saw God as in matter, in everything. We misunderstand the idea of animism as meaning that things have a spirit when it really means everything is spirit. We think, or believe, that we have a soul, and this soul is what’s important so we disregard the body. Or else we don’t believe that we have a soul, and thus we live only for the body. Either way, we’re equally lost, because we don’t understand that we are soul, we are spirit. This separation of the sacred from the everyday world again leads us to feel free to exploit that world of matter, that world of “other” to our own ends without regard for our impact; it allows us to set up one version of morality in the spiritual realm and another one for the material.

Fourth, we are unable to have true compassion for others within this dualistic conception of self/other. What passes for compassion in most of our religious or secular conceptions today is a weak notion of what we “should” do – either out of fear of punishment or desire for rewards – in this life or the next – or out of a wish to elevate ourselves in our own eyes and the eyes of our brothers and sisters.

——

All of these various ideas blend and intertwine in our ways of thinking and in our actions individually and collectively, creating a human culture that wreaks untold havoc on itself, on all the other living beings on the planet, and on the very underpinnings of life itself, ruining and despoiling not only the world but each other and ultimately ourselves.

To live authentically in this world, in this human culture, we must find a way to transcend its influence, to slough off the conditioning that tells us we must claw our way to the top of the pile, gathering more and more of the world unto ourselves, insulating ourselves from others and from the world out there with yet more and more comfort, security, pleasure and excess.

The first, essential, step is to see through the illusion.

by

Authentic living in the 21st Century

What is it about human beings?

Beautiful, sensitive, so creative but so destructive…

Our biosphere, that fragile envelope of conditions favorable to life, seems in dire straits. In addition, the economic and social conditions of life foisted on the poor of the world by the rich seem to be growing steadily, alarmingly, worse. Fascism is on the rise, though mostly unrecognized, and the political environment almost everywhere is as threatening and depressing as the physical and social ones.

Yet there are an incredible number of beautiful, creative visions of life blossoming all around, alternative experiments that demonstrate how beautifully we humans are able to live on the planet. Even as the political and corporate structures – really one entity now – grow more authoritarian and life-denying, more and more people wake up to the potential for living in ways that are freeing to people and friendly to the natural systems that sustain us.

What are we to do? How are we to live authentic lives in the midst of the insanity of apparently imminent collapse?

For many years, I have grappled with the contradictions that seem inherent in modern life. My time in the war on Southeast Asia, as a pilot in the U.S. Air Force stationed in DaNang (Viet Nam) and Nakon Phanom (Thailand), which was at once the most horrible and the most wonderful experience of my young life, catapulted me beyond most of the concerns that probably would have dominated my life otherwise, and left me forever unable to accept simple answers, simple solutions, to these contradictions.

Even though at times I have tried to settle into some solid, clearly defined system that laid out the answers, I’ve never been able to stay with those answers. As I begin to move into the autumn years of my life, I want even more to reach some clear understandings, at least for myself, about the priorities of this life. Partly this is a practical need, as I seek to direct the last decades of my life in directions that will make some positive contributions to the world my children and grandchildren will inherit. Partly it is just the need for closure, for some sense of a philosophical story that is satisfactory and complete.

In the next few entries, I am hoping to at least outline something of where I am now in this process.

As this blog has partially described, I have followed the spiritual path of Buddhism for most of my life since the Air Force years, partly because I encountered it in Southeast Asia and partly because it seemed to be a way of thought that meshed with my own deepest intuitions of truth, and I seemed to need something to fill the void in my life after I abandoned my Christian upbringing. My experiences with meditation and the Buddhist teachings over the past 30+ years have profoundly influenced me, and no doubt are the primary filter that I bring to this quest to understand the reality of modern life.

But as I enter into this analysis of the course of our times and try to arrive at some clear distillation of how things seem to me, I am intentionally trying to step outside of those teachings, that perspective, as much as possible.

So, as we welcome this new year full of promise, this year we call 2014, I begin this new phase in my apprenticeship to the idea of emptiness.