Spontaneous Remission?

"We were talking/About the space between us all/And the people/Who hide themselves behind a wall/of Illusion..." --George Harrison.

Today, I was having lunch with two of my closest friends, Tench  and Michael, and we got into a lively conversation about the seemingly irreversible erosion of democracy into corporate oligarchy, and the apparent futility of any normal political channels for rectifying this situation--whether by mounting grassroots campaigns to elect honest candidates who would actually serve the public interest rather than their corporate sponsors, forming and mobilizing labor unions, or organizing mass demonstrations of popular opposition and protest, or whatever--given the overwhelming power of the corporate media for ignoring or suppressing us completely and brainwashing the general public into mindless consumerism, ignorance, and complacency. Indeed, Michael, taking his cue from Plato, feels that "Hoi Polloi"--the common masses--are hopelessly benighted and easily manipulated by advertising, attack ads, or appeals to boneheaded fundamentalism and patriotic belligerence, and thus could never be awakened to confront the beast of self-serving corporate power and Glomart consumerism directly.

By "Glomart" I refer to the Global Market Economy--that is, the entire global money-based complex (mal)adaptive system of multinational corporations, banks, and captive governments, based on an unquestioned logic of maximization ("More is always better") that has become the Cancer of the Earth, with nothing to lose and everything to gain from plundering the planet and exploiting and/or brainwashing its inhabitants--turning citizens into passive consumers and/or cheap labor, communities into "markets" and nature--all of nature--into commodities for quick sale...and then externalizing the costs of doing business--passing those costs onto the public--as pollution, ravaged landscapes, declining public health, and an atmosphere overloaded with carbon that is slowly cooking us all...

I am not entirely sure, however, that Glomart is invincible.   History has shown, repeatedly, that viral ideas, starting at the grassroots level with a new, self-validating and self-replicating mythology, have the power to undermine powerful empires and transform whole cultures in a remarkably short historical period. Three obvious historical examples are the rise of Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam; others were the power of Confucianism in China to transform chaotic warring states into the most coherent, highly organized, and efficient bureaucracy the world had ever known. Or--more recently--the Scientific Revolution and its power to undermine centuries of entrenched and repressive Medieval superstition and launch the rapidly evolving modern era of industrialization, innovation, and democratic freedoms.  All of these vastly transformative cultural movements occurred in times when communication moved at the glacially slow pace of letters carried on horseback; imagine what could happen today, with the instantaneous global reach of the Internet, if a similar viral idea captured, motivated, and transformed the imaginations of people today, in the way the Cross, the Quran, or the Dharma Wheel did in the past...

Could this happen, given today's vast population, and the torrent of information flowing electronically around the world--and given the sophisticated control of mass media by the ever-watchful guardians of Glomart to make sure no truly subversive idea ever penetrates beyond a small coterie of discontents who mostly talk to each other?  I would say it can, but the viral idea, to succeed, must be sufficiently innocuous to the guardians of the Glomart money machine that by the time they catch wind of its transformative potential, it has already spread beyond their control, and all they can do is scramble to adapt to it.  That, and the viral idea must be of the sort whose beneficial effects are immediately obvious to those who hear it and practice it, so that it quickly self-replicates and spreads to others.  Finally, that viral idea, like any good virus, must attack Glomart where it lives and is most vulnerable. And of course, it must have its own mythology--its own imagery and iconography--to facilitate identification and acceptance.

Here is one possibility. Pass it on.

Where is Glomart most vulnerable?  Very simply, Glomart thrives entirely by their success in parting us from our money--if they cannot get our dollars, corporations will quickly fail. This is why they invest billions in pervasive advertising, everywhere--to ensure that we continue to buy their products and services, for by this alone do they survive, no matter how big and powerful they may be.

We must take our cue from this simple fact: Glomart eats and breathes money, and needs our money as much as we need oxygen. What would happen if we simply withheld that money from them, spending it instead on locally grown and marketed produce and products, whenever we could?  They would try, of course--they are already trying--to mimic local enterprise in order to reclaim the hold they once had on our wallets. We already see this in the fact, for example, that the new Glomart pseudo-cities that are springing up, like Hampton Town Centre, here where I live, are now boasting that they, too, will have "Farmer's Markets" on weekends, to exploit our growing appetite for real food, rather than Glomart-produced junk foods. Naturally, with their cash infusion, these ersatz "farmer's markets" will look more glitzy, and thus attract more customers than real farm markets...

So we need something more than appeals to "buy fresh, buy local" to subvert Glomart domination, however commendable these recent trends may be.

The Revolution may begin in our wallets--seeing every dollar as a vote for either Glomart or Gaia, and voting for Gaia whenever, however, and to whatever degree we can--but in order to gain a foothold, it will have to be rooted more deeply, at the core of our being.  In short, we need some serious mind-training, as the Buddha (and Jesus and St. Francis and Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, and Wangari Maathai knew very well...)

I have launched my own experiment along these lines.  I am teaching my students--all my students--how to meditate, by starting every class with a short Qigong sequence followed by 3 minutes of meditation using a simple 4-step mantra:  Breathe - Observe - Let Go - Abide. Each is correlated with a natural phase of the breathing process: Inhale (Breathe); Pause (Observe); Exhale (Let Go); and Pause (Abide).  It is very easy to learn, does not threaten their belief systems (they don't have to "believe" anything in order to practice), and--most importantly--as they themselves acknowledge, it feels good.

Once they get the hang of this very basic practice, we are moving to the next phase: teaching the Dharma.  First I instruct them to associate these four phases with the cycle of life: Birth and childhood (Breathe); Adulthood (Observe); Old Age (Let Go) and Death (Abide). Next, we correlate these four phases with what Buddhists call the "Four Brahma-Viharas" (Abodes of God) but which I translate and demystify as "the Four Adaptive Attitudes:" Gratitude (Breathe); Compassion (Observe); Joy (Let Go); and Equanimity (Abide). Then I start introducing them to other Dharma teachings from the world's wisdom traditions, such as Chapter 16 of Lao Tzu ("Empty yourself of everything...") so they can see that the Dharma is, indeed, ancient and universal--that it can be found in every religious culture on the planet, in some guise.

The next step, of course, is to teach them, as George Harrison puts it, to "see beyond themselves"--that is, to extend the basic mantra into the Tenfold Dharma Gaia Mantra for self-transformation into a planetary healing agent, by the following:

1. Reclaim the moment:  Breathe, Observe, Let Go (Abide);
2. Reclaim the day: Be well, Do good work, Keep in touch (Abide)
3. Reclaim your life: Learn, Teach, Heal, Create.

Finally, they are instructed to make the connection, in every decision they make, between the health, competence, and resilience of themselves, their communities, and the planet simultaneously.

In this way, ordinary people can be transformed into Dharma practitioners, and Dharma practitioners into Gaians--that is, into agents of Spontaneous Remission of the Cancer of the Earth, seeing themselves in all others and identifying with all of life, in everything they do.

Glomart may never know what hit them...