Vertical and Horizontal Healing

My last post, "Life without Hope," was full of unrelieved despair for the world, leavened only by the quiet resignation to impermanence of Anglican poet and divine George Herbert, reminding us, yet again, that "only a sweet and virtuous soul" can transcend the ravages of time and mortality--much as the Buddha, in the "five remembrances" (i.e. that we are of the nature to get sick, grow old, die, and lose everything we love) concludes that "my actions are my only true possessions."

As Gaian Buddhist philosopher and activist Joanna Macy has often suggested, despair for our planet cannot and should not be suppressed, but rather it needs to be acknowledged, embraced, and worked through, as a path to healing and empowerment. This is not easy, but I would like to share one formulation I have come up with that may help in this ongoing process.

Our culture as a whole suffers from a fragmentation that is both vertical and horizontal. By "vertical" I refer to the personal axis of body, mind, and spirit. Ever since Descartes saved the Catholic church from science and science from the church by developing a dualistic ideology that clearly distinguished res cogitans (the domain of mind, subjectivity, and spirituality) from res extensa (the objective, physical domain, subject to scientific investigation and manipulation, and beginning with our own bodies), this vertical dissociation--of our bodies from our minds, and of our minds from our spirits--has become completely embedded in our mainstream culture. We are encouraged to view our bodies as objects, like our cars, getting them tuned up by exercises, decorated by make-up or tattoos, and repaired by physicians and surgeons. In short, we go to the gym for our bodies, the school or college for our minds, and the church or synagogue for our spirits--as if these were separate, disconnected entities.

Likewise, we are dissociated, largely by design, in the Horizontal realm: our selves are dissociated from our communities, and our communities from Gaia--the larger matrix of their existence. This is "by design" because this dissociation of self, community, and nature serves the interests of Glomart (my coinage for the money-based Global Market Economy). Glomart gains--that is, sells more products and services--to the exact extent it can turn us into isolated consumers, alienated from our communities (so that, for example, we need to buy our own lawnmower, rather than borrowing our neighbor's). And likewise, it thrives when our communities of whatever sort--our schools and colleges, our corporations, our cities and states--are insulated from the adverse ecological consequences of their habits of consumption. In short, Glomart seeks, by its single mandate (the profit motive), to turn citizens into consumers, communities into markets, and our living planet into "resources" devoid of any value until they are transformed into commodities for sale. As a consequence we are dissociated both vertically and horizontally.

My friends and acquaintances, as well as the many people I read regularly, fall broadly into two broad (and often mutually exclusive) categories: those who are focused predominantly on Vertical healing (i.e. reintegration of body, mind, and spirit), through such disciplines as yoga, tai chi, and meditation, and those who are focused predominantly on Horizontal healing (through social and environmental activism). While there is some overlap, these two types of people are largely distinct: many of my Buddhist friends, massage therapists, and other "cultural creatives" are so caught up in their own and others' spiritual (vertical) healing that they give little thought to getting involved in larger social or environmental issues, as they sip their bottled water and drive their SUVs to "Hot Yoga" classes (burning who knows how much coal for the convenience of sweating profusely). Conversely, many of my social activist friends, both "lefties" and environmentalists, are so passionately involved in righting social and environmental wrongs, exposing the evil-doers, and rallying to shake their fists at the oppressors and polluters, that they ignore their inner development altogether, succumbing to chronic rage, bitterness, and burn-out.

However, we need both--Vertical and Horizontal healing--in order to bring about any possible spontaneous remission of the Cancer of the Earth. Is it possible to integrate them? It is indeed, but no one ever said it would be easy. We must strive to emulate the role models who have managed this integration of Vertical and Horizontal healing most effectively: people like Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, Thich Nhat Hanh, the Dalai Lama, Aung San Soo Kyi of Burma, and Wangari Maathai of Kenya.

This brings me back to my recurrent fantasy. Imagine setting up Dharma Gaia circles, open to people of all faith traditions, which are dedicated to just such an integration of Vertical and Horizontal healing. The core practice would be, of course, my Dharma Gaia mantra, which moves on a roughly diagonal axis from the embrace of body/self (Breathe, Observe, Let Go) to mind/community (Be well, Do Good Work, Keep in Touch) to spirit/Gaia (Learn, Teach, Heal, Create). The idea would be to create groups that begin with this meditation, then go on to do shared readings, and conclude with a discussion of outreach strategies. I plan, this fall, to start a prototype of such a meditation/reading/action group at the community college where I work. I probably won't call it "Dharma Gaia," however--I live in an overwhelmingly Christian state, and this "heathen" terminology would frighten away most, if not all, of my students. So instead, I'll simply call it something like "Interfaith Healing Meditation and Reading Group," and our first reading will not be "environmental" at all, but rather, it will be Karen Armstrong's newest (and easiest) book Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life, in which she finds common ground in the practice of compassion among all the religions of the world, and especially the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam). Call it Skillful Means...My goal, if it is to be authentic, must not be to make everyone "see like me, feel like me, and be like me"--but rather to help them, within the context of their own religious culture and background, and according to their own knowledge and skills, to become a healing agent on our planet.

Life without Hope

This morning, I was watching clips from a 1936 Russian film called "The Girlfriends" (Podrugi) with a score by Shostakovich. The film, a typical propaganda piece, features three young girls and a boy who get caught up in the chaos of World War I and the revolution. At the beginning, however, they are working at an American-owned rubber factory, when the oppressed workers call a strike. The children, desperate for any income at all, make an unsuccessful attempt to sing at a beer hall frequented by the workers and are booted out, but later, aided by a quirky old guy who befriends them, work their way back in, where they sing a beautiful and touching revolutionary anthem called "Tormented by a Lack of Freedom," when they are joined by all the men at the tavern. I looked up a translation to the lyrics to this anthem, which are filled with hope and defiance as they sing of a martyred leader:

"Like you, we may simply become

The soil for the new people,

Or a terrifying prophecy of the new,

Imminent and heroic days..."

Later, Shostakovich ironically incorporates this anthem, as a kind of dirge, in his Eighth Quartet, where it is both surrounded and interrupted by a terrifying, percussive three-chord sequence that immediately would recall, for the audience, the feared "knock on the door" during the Stalinist Terror.

Watching this clip, and thinking about these children in that dark time, and the hope and defiance they manifested for a better future, coupled with Shostakovich's later, bitterly ironic reflection on this early hope in the Eighth Quartet, I was also reminded of a comment made by one of my students at Hampton University several years ago, who remarked, about her enslaved ancestors, that "We are living our ancestors' dreams today."

And so we are--most of us in the middle classes and in the affluent North, anyway--who live in a globally interconnected world where we take computers, the Internet, cellphones, fast food, mobility, freedom, security, and general affluence for granted in ways that none of our ancestors could have dreamed.

And yet...we are also teetering on the brink of an incremental global apocalypse that will eclipse all previous catastrophes by a large margin--one where there is no escape at all--driven by three huge, interrelated terminal crises:

• our collapsing, debt-ridden global market economy, which is only the most visible symptom of...
• the inexorable peak and decline of the fossil-fuel based net energy upon which that global market economy is entirely dependent.
• a simultaneous global ecological collapse, driven above all by irreversible climate change from global heating, coupled with overpopulation, pollution, collapsing fisheries worldwide, depleted groundwater, the collapse of bee populations for pollination, deforestation, desertification, etc.

Anyone who takes a hard look at these current realities has little reason to harbor any hope for the future at all. Especially since our political systems, both here and throughout the world, have been hopelessly hijacked and corrupted--bought and sold--by large multinational corporations and their front groups like the Koch Brothers-funded "Tea Party" movement in the US, who, through the strident, hate-filled demagogues they sponsor on Fox News and Clear Channel radio, have stirred the TV-addled lumpen-proletariat into a frenzy of hatred and "patriotic" paranoia, thereby electing a fanatical congress who will destroy our government altogether before they allow it to raise the taxes of the super-rich or enact legislation protecting the environment or serving the public interest. The only branch of government they will leave untouched is, of course, the Pentagon, the CIA, and the Military-Industrial complex, who will go about their business as usual, committing mass murder, torturing suspects in secret prisons, and sending drones out to terrorize Afghan villages that refuse to bow to the Karzai puppet-regime they have set up.

Where is all this headed? Nowhere, fast: a corporate-dominated mass media that maintains the illusion of democracy, by creating bread-and-circus elections and creating a consensual "reality" that bears little relation to anything real; meanwhile, well below the artificially generated, corporate-sponsored radar screen of public awareness, a corporate feeding frenzy on resources worldwide will wipe out any and all environmental protection. The Arctic ocean, Atlantic and Pacific will be open to offshore drilling, while oil shale fields, commercial fishing, hydrofracking for natural gas, mountaintop removal mining, and deforestation proceed without constraint; meanwhile, unemployment, foreclosures, homelessness, and general desperation will proliferate, along with crime, drugs, and random violence, while the middle and upper classes barricade themselves within gated communities--all prey, however, to rapidly rising fuel and food prices, layoffs, and more foreclosures...and anyone who attempts to mobilize the poor and destitute against the rich and well-protected will be ferreted out by internet surveillance and cellphone tapping, and be quietly spirited away and eliminated by paramilitary goon squads. Finally, we will face, worldwide, the grim specter of shrinking islands of fiercely defended affluence in the midst of a turbulent sea of random violence, despair, madness, starvation, disease, and chaos, while the climate gets steadily hotter, drier, and more turbulent, going into a self-accelerating feedback loop.

This is a future I would not wish on my worst enemy, yet it is the future we have created for our own children and grandchildren. And while I used to harbor a residual optimism that somehow a rapidly proliferating Gaia movement could somehow turn all this around before it is too late, that optimism has now vanished, particularly in light of this toxic, corporate-funded, neofascist "Tea Party" phenomenon, that is bringing out the worst in everyone: greed, willful ignorance, hatred, denial, and despair.

All of which, as always, begs the question: while our planet is going to hell, what is a Gaian Buddhist to do? My short answer is the same as it ever was:

Breathe, Observe, Let Go.

Be well, Do good work, Keep in touch.

Learn, Teach, Heal, and Create.

The slightly longer answer is this:

"Form is emptiness, emptiness is form. Form is no other than emptiness, emptiness is no other than form. The same goes for feelings, perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness..."

Breathing in, I take on my own, and everyone else's vast suffering, both now and in the future (and the past as well.)

Breathing out, I send forth friendliness, compassion, joy, and equanimity to myself and to all other living beings: my family, friends, students, total strangers, those who annoy me, those I despise, and every living, breathing being on the planet and throughout the universe.

(Repeat as often as necessary)

And let us remember--the Present is all there is--ever. The future is a mental formation only, and everything, including our body, our society, and our planet, is impermanent. The important thing, always, is to cultivate wisdom and compassion in the present moment, and then to take care of everyone and everything, and abandon no one and nothing...

As the English poet and Anglican divine George Herbert, a true Bodhisattva, once put it:

Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright,

The bridal of the earth and sky;

The dew shall weep thy fall to-night,

For thou must die.

Sweet rose, whose hue angry and brave

Bids the rash gazer wipe his eye;

Thy root is ever in its grave,

And thou must die.

Sweet spring, full of sweet days and roses,

A box where sweets compacted lie;

My music shows ye have your closes,

And all must die.

Only a sweet and virtuous soul,

Like season'd timber, never gives;

But though the whole world turn to coal,

Then chiefly lives.

Two Homilies

A number of years ago, I wrote a piece for my Humanities students, which I still use, called "The Four Paths to the Sacred." In it I made the case that all the religious and spiritual traditions on the planet could be classified according to the four directions:

1. SOUTH--The Path of Learning (Ancient and Indigenous religious traditions, involving their own culturally specific mythologies and traditions)
2. EAST--The Path of Teaching (Far Eastern religious traditions, involving ramifying lineages of teachers and students of the Dharma).
3. WEST--The Path of Healing (The Abrahamic religions--Judaism, Christianity, and Islam--all positing one Creator God, and involving themes of redemption and healing played out through their sacred history).
4. NORTH--The Path of Creating (The modern, secular traditions that emphasize human reason, freedom, and creativity--from the European Renaissance to the present).

I concluded with the view that our best bet, in this time of global crisis and the need for global healing, would be simultaneously to nurture our own chosen spiritual orientation, while remaining open to, and learning from, the wisdom available from all four paths, worldwide. The Buddha speaks of 84,000 Dharma doors--and of course "84,000" is simply a metaphor for an infinite number. The point is, of course, that good Dharma teachings can be found in all four of these paths--in every spiritual tradition on the planet. (This view has also been embraced and promoted by many modern-day Bodhisattvas, such as the Dalai Lama and Thich Nhat Hanh.)

Pursuant to this, I would like to share two short Dharma teachings from the Western Path of Healing and the Northern Path of Creating. The first is from a Seventh Century English nun, St. Hilda, a talented, spiritually accomplished woman who founded the magnificent Whitby Abbey in north Yorkshire as a joint monastery for both monks and nuns. While on a walk through the Yorkshire countryside several years ago, my wife and I came upon a tiny village, almost a ghost town, called Ellerburn, and there we found an ancient roadside chapel, smelling of mildew, which was dedicated to St. Hilda. At the front was a slate tablet inscribed with a short homily from St Hilda, which provides some basic instruction to novice monks and nuns. Here it is:

A Homily of St. Hilda

Trade with the gifts God has given you.

Bend your minds to holy learning

that you may escape the fretting moths of littleness of mind

that would wear out your souls.

Brace your wills to actions

that they may not be the spoils of weak desires.

Train your hearts and lips to song

which gives courage to the soul

Being buffeted by trials,

learn to laugh.

Being reproved,

give thanks.

Having failed,

determine to succeed.

This is pure, 200 proof Dharma--aside from the obligatory Western reference to God, it could as easily have been written by Pema Chodron as by St. Hilda.

The other piece is from Walt Whitman's introduction to the 1855 version of Leaves of Grass--a wonderful, visionary example of the Path of Creating--the Sacred as the autonomous self--which characterized the Romantic movement in both Europe and America:

This is what you shall do

by Walt Whitman

"This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body."

Amen to both Hilda and Walt!

Edgar's "Mustardseed" sermon.

In recent years, I have been mulling over an idea for a novel, which, given my habitual inability to stay focused on a long-term project, may never come to pass. The idea features a protagonist by the name of Edgar Markham, who is my alter-ego, (named after the character Edgar in King Lear), a Buddhist practitioner who--as fossil fuels become exhausted and our industrial society collapses into chaos, fanaticism, predatory violence, and resource wars--creates a grassroots mass spiritual movement, known as Dharma Gaia, based on the propagation of his (and my own) Dharma Gaia mantra:

Breathe, Observe, Let Go

Be well, Do good work, Keep in touch

Learn, Teach, Heal, Create.

Soon enough, however, Edgar realizes that if he promotes himself as yet another Buddhist teacher, he will reach only Buddhists and others, such as yoga and tai chi practitioners, who are already well-educated "cultural creatives," sympathetic to Far Eastern wisdom traditions, and that these, at least in America, are a vast minority, while most ordinary people continue to be seduced, especially in times of growing stress, by huge megachurches promoting a toxic, hateful brand of narrow-minded, intolerant right-wing fundamentalist Christianity. Unless Edgar can break through to such people, his movement will remain a fringe phenomenon, invisible to the media and hence incapable of creating any kind of healing cultural shift toward Gaian consciousness--that is, awareness of ourselves as part of a planetary community of life, in which "whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly."

Edgar therefore undertakes a radical solution. Knowing that no fundamentalist Christians would ever pay any attention to a self-proclaimed Buddhist, and embracing the line from his namesake in King Lear, "Edgar I Nothing Am,"--a radical realization of emptiness--Edgar abandons his outward identity altogether, leaves his few remaining possessions behind, and becomes "Tom the Preacher," a Christian missionary wandering from one church to another, preaching the Gospel. At the megachurch of one Brother Randolph Masterson, Edgar (i.e. Tom) gains permission to address the congregation, giving them a sermon on the Parable of the Mustard Seed (Mark 4:30-32; Matt 13:31-32; Lk 18-19). Here is what he says:

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Our text for today is from Mark, but it also has versions in Matthew and Luke. It is the Parable of the Mustard Seed, and it goes as follows:

Whereunto shall we liken the Kingdom of God?...It is like a grain of mustard seed, which, when it is sown in the earth, is less than all the seeds that be in the earth:

But when it is sown, it groweth up and becometh greater than all herbs, and shooteth out great branches, so that the fowls of the air may lodge under it.

Now then, most of you who are gardeners know quite well that mustard seeds do not grow into large plants or trees which shelter birds. Mustard is a weed, which grows quickly, goes to seed, and proliferates in bright sunlight, close to the ground. So why did Jesus choose this particular simile for the Kingdom of God? Nothing, after all, could be more humble and commonplace than mustard plants. Was Jesus ignorant of basic botany? Not likely, since He lived in an agricultural society, where most farmers were familiar with mustard plants, and most likely regarded them as weeds to be removed, rather than anything of value.

Some will say that mustard greens, when cooked, add a nice, tangy flavor to foods, and that mustard seeds, when ground or spread, add the same tangy flavor, in more concentrated form, to other dishes. So maybe Jesus is referring to the Kingdom of God as adding a certain zest to our food?

(Laughter)

In which case, what about the birds of the air? Where do they come in? Many theologians have come up with dramatically different interpretations of this parable, all struggling with the obvious contradiction between what Jesus says about mustard seeds, and what anyone who has a garden already knows. Others claim that Jesus was doing a parody of the conventional, lofty Cedar of Lebanon metaphor for the divinity, so show his readers that the Kingdom of God is ubiquitous, all around them, if they would open their eyes.

So here is one more attempt at interpreting this parable, from yet another gardener.

Mustard is a weed, which means that it quickly colonizes disturbed ground, and needs a lot of sunlight in order to grow. It is frequently used as a green manure, because it is a legume, meaning that it fixes nitrogen from the air, in symbiosis with rhizomes on the roots, and its roots also draw up valuable minerals, such a phosphorus, from beneath the topsoil. And of course, it can be eaten and provide good nutrition, as well as that tangy flavor. For all these reasons, mustard is a good example of the manifold blessings that God provides us, that we generally don't even notice or take for granted.

So while mustard cannot, of itself, provide shelter for birds, it nevertheless creates the ecological linkages between air, topsoil, and mineral substrate, that heals and rebuilds damaged topsoil, and creates the preconditions for larger plants and trees to flourish in succession. So in his short parable, Jesus is giving us all a lesson in ecology: Mustard seeds, which we are likely to regard as weeds, have an integral role in God's Kingdom, which is right here around us on Earth, as well as in Heaven, for the action of the mustard plant quite literally unites Heaven (the air) with Earth (the topsoil and minerals). And these larger plants, in turn, provide shelter for birds, who in turn disperse their seeds. In the natural world, as in the Kingdom of God, everything works for the benefit of itself and for everything else as well--whether they know it or not.

For this reason, from a deep reading of the Parable of the Mustard Seed, we may deduce a principle, a precept, and a practice:

The Principle was well articulated by the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a devout Baptist preacher, when he said, "We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly."

--Just as the Mustard Seed creates the conditions, indirectly, for the shelter that the larger plants that grow in the topsoil it creates provide for the birds (who in turn disseminate their seeds).

And it also, of course, reinforces the Precept--the Great Commandment--which Jesus derived from this basic principle of interconnectedness: "Love God with all your heart, soul, and mind, and that which is like unto it: Love your neighbor as yourself."

So I am going to conclude today by sharing with you all a Practice, by which you, like a mustard seed, can help heal our land and bring to fruition the Kingdom of God, right here on Earth.

Please pay close attention.

1. BREATHE. As you draw breath and focus on it, reflect on the Holy Spirit that God breathed into Adam when He created him. Feel that same Holy Spirit within you, connecting you to all of God's creation.
2. OBSERVE. Open your eyes, and see, as Jesus taught us, that the Kingdom of God is everywhere around us, for those with eyes to see.
3. LET GO. Let go of your fears, your anxieties, and your hatreds--even of your own self-preoccupied thoughts, and rest within the Peace of God that passeth all understanding.
4. BE WELL. Take good care of your own body, for it is the Tabernacle of the Lord.
5. DO GOOD WORK. To get over any reluctance to do what you know you should do, simply say "Thy Will be Done." Then do your own part in realizing the Kingdom of God.
6. KEEP IN TOUCH. Just as the mustard seed grows into a plant that draws nutrients from both Earth and Heaven, and makes them available to other plants, be ready at all times to reach out to all others--to express your love of God in your love of your neighbor.
7. LEARN. Read the Scriptures prayerfully every day, and regard everyone you meet as a potential teacher, that you may "till" your own mistakes into the ground of your experience, as fertilizer for growing closer to God.
8. TEACH. Do not put your candle under a bushel. What you have learned, share with others, just as the Mustard Seed creates topsoil for the benefit of all other life.
9. HEAL. Our mission as Christians is to follow in the steps of Jesus of healing the sick, and healing as well the sickness of our society--just as the Mustard Seed restores damaged topsoil.
10. CREATE. Just as God created us all, let us use our own creative gifts, whatever they may be, to create the Kingdom of God, just as the mustard seed creates the conditions within large plants and trees can flourish, offering shelter to the birds.

May the Peace of God which passeth all understanding keep your hearts and mind through Jesus Christ Our Lord.

Amen.

--After delivering this sermon, Edgar plants Mustardseed Fellowships within each church he visits, to plant their own gardens, teach gardening skills to their faith community, reach out to the poor and needy, and practice (what they call) the Mustardseed Injunctions to stay on track.

Wouldn't it be nice??

A single blue robin's egg

Lately, my wife and I have been faced with a minor dilemma with our hanging Fuchsia plant on our open front porch. The dilemma is simply that a local robin has chosen this plant as an ideal site to build her nest, and all of our efforts to dissuade her from this agenda have been in vain--including removing the nest-in-progress altogether and dumping it on the ground, and flooding it with water when we watered it.

Fuchsias need lots of water--they are rainforest plants, which require the equivalent of monsoon rains in order to flourish. So we were concerned--and still are concerned--that the robin would abandon its nest, once it saw how frequently it was threatened with a flood of water and with humans passing by regularly. But our efforts at discouraging this particular robin couple were in vain--they patiently built a new nest anyway. We did, however, move the plant across the porch, farther from the front door, so it would be disturbed less frequently. We believed--again in vain--that if we moved it, the robin would be frustrated and think it disappeared, and would go find a new nest site.

Not so: this morning when I went out to check it, I peered into the hanging pot and saw a single blue robin's egg in the middle of the nest!

At that point, my growing frustration transformed into something a lot closer to what Pema Chodron terms "original bodhichitta"--that is our innate capacity for empathy, love, and awe. So I went out with my 3/4 gallon plastic milk jug and carefully watered the Fuchsia, this time being careful not to let the water level go above the nest. The robin had assisted in this effort, building the floor of the new nest just above the soil (supported by the chopsticks that Ann had stuck in the pot to discourage birds from building nests!)

A single blue robin's egg is a deeply moving sight: the miracle of life, like a dewdrop reflecting the clear blue sky. I still worry that the robin couple will abandon their nest because of its proximity to meddlesome humans with watering jugs, but we will do our best to do right by both the Fuchsia and the robins, so that they can stay and raise their baby. We have no choice.

May these robins, parents and baby, know happiness and the root of happiness, be free from suffering, know the transcendent joy of flight, and the equanimity of knowing they are safe from danger! "Everything that lives is holy." --William Blake.

Beyond Nationalism

"Al vero filosofo ogni terreno e patria" --Giordano Bruno.

("For the true philosopher, every land is his country.")

"The world is my country, all mankind are my brethren, and to do good is my religion."

--Thomas Paine

"Everything that lives is holy." --William Blake.

Bruno, Paine, and Blake are all historical role models for me; all are what I like to call "proto-Gaians"--that is, people who, though they lived long before our present global crisis necessitated Gaian consciousness, were already there--aware of themselves as citizens of a planet, in which the Sacred is imminent in all life, human and otherwise, and aware, above all, that reason--clear and critical thinking--is the only known antidote to ignorance, superstition, and prejudice. As Blake also said, "Truth cannot be spoken so as to be understood, and not believed."

I mention this because, here in the USA, toxic nationalism, which most call "patriotism," is currently undergoing an upsurge, as Republicans position themselves as the true (white, Christian) "Americans" poised to "take back our country" from the "furriner" (i.e. negro) Obama, while Obama himself has recently stooped to toxic nationalism himself in exulting in the murder of Osama Bin Laden as "justice"--though extrajudicial murder for revenge has no rational relationship to justice whatsoever.

It is, perhaps, an interesting archetypal sign of the times that in the latest installments of the Superman comics, Superman, that Herculean icon of messianic Americanism ("Truth, Justice, and the American Way") has renounced his American citizenship in disgust (signifying, symbolically, that the American Way no longer has anything much to do with either truth or justice.) Another indication of the subconscious revolt of popular culture to this new, blatantly militaristic "Americanism" may be the enormous popularity of the recent blockbuster film "Avatar," a kind of Gaian fantasy romance, in which the US Marines--or a fictional facsimile thereof--become, not the good guys, but the bad guys, blowing up the very Tree of Life itself and wasting a whole planet and its peace-loving indigenous people in pursuit of a priceless mineral resource called, appropriately, "unobtainium."

But still, for now, the Corporate Party--that is, the Republicans--are firmly in control, and are using the full resources of the corporate media to brainwash the average American people into this new, militaristic, America-against-the-world toxic nationalism--so that several of my neighbors, including the two immediately adjacent to the north, now fly big American flags all the time. I am on good terms with these neighbors, who are ordinary, simple folk, getting through life, and addicted to television like most of the other ordinary, simple folk--but we maintain these neighborly relations in large part by never going anywhere near politics in our occasional chit-chat.

But I want no part of this nationalism, at all--so I continue to sport a license plate that says "GAIAN" along with bumper stickers to help other drivers interpret what to them is a strange, and possibly (perish the thought!) homosexual reference: "Celebrate Diversity;" "Loving Kindness is my Religion"--the Dalai Lama; "Buy Fresh, Buy Local;" "Earth;" and "Green is Good." That, and I wear an Earth lapel pin, as a subtly ironic commentary on the proliferation of flag lapel pins.

But do I dare get any more explicit than this about my upward shift of loyalty to the whole planet and all of life? I live, after all, in a military-dominated community where people strongly identify with "the Flag" and "Our Boys" who are "fighting for freedom" in the Middle East. And as my father, in his gently sardonic wisdom, used to say, "If you want to be a martyr, don't be surprised if you are a martyr."

It has to do with what Ken Wilber refers to as levels of awareness; there is no point in trying to get people at one level of awareness (i.e. identification with nation and religion) to see things from a higher level of awareness (i.e. identification with the planet, and with the Sacred as manifested in all religions and all life), unless they have reached a kind of crisis in their own inner development, where they are ready to do so. Otherwise, they will simply feel threatened, and see you as an enemy, whether of "America" or of "God." It is possible, indeed, that my two neighbors displayed their big flags precisely because they felt unconsciously threatened by my bright red car with its "anti-American" (i.e. Gaian) bumper-stickers.

So my best approach is to treat all such people with loving kindness, compassion, shared joy, and equanimity--just as I would have others treat me. For--levels of awareness notwithstanding--we are all, as Jack Kerouac said in his wonderful mantra, "Equally empty, equally to be loved, and equally a coming Buddha." If they ask about my license plate or bumper stickers, I will tell them, as patiently and compassionately as ever, what they mean. If not, I won't mention it.

Osama, Obama, and the Dalai Lama

Over the last few days, we have all witnessed a rather appalling spectacle of media-induced mass schadenfreude, as television-addled Americans cheered and gloated over the murder of the unarmed Osama Bin Laden by US special forces in Pakistan. But the worst insult of all came with the headline from the LA times: that the Dalai Lama had justified this murder. Well--not quite. What the Dalai Lama actually said was the following:


"Forgiveness doesn't mean forget what happened. … If something is serious and it is necessary to take counter-measures, you have to take counter-measures."

This is, at best, the DL's effort to remain diplomatically above the fray--not to justify a gangster-style hit job. There is a big "if'" here.

"But what about 9-11" people will say, if I object to this murder.

There are two answers to this.

First let us assume (though it has never been proven) that Osama Bin Laden was the mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks. If so, and if he was unarmed, he could easily have been captured and brought to justice, like any other criminal--presented with evidence, and given the opportunity to defend himself. This would not have appeased the testosterone-crazed multitudes in our degraded country, but it would have preserved something far more valuable: the rule of law, and the principle of due process. Instead, Obama (and all those who are cheering for him) lowered himself to the same level as the terrorists, by opting for an extrajudicial murder--something every terrorist longs to do to his enemies, real or imagined.

The Dalai Lama's response--that sometimes countermeasures are necessary--is absolutely true, but only in those instances where violence is the last possible resort to prevent further violence against one's own--like defending one's wife and children against an armed and murderous marauder invading the house. But in this case, Osama was minding his own business, and we were the armed and murderous marauders--not he.

My second response is more to the point, however: What ABOUT 9/11? Much as our government and corporate media maintain a common front of silence and denial about it, there is no getting around the fact that the official story of 9/11--that the Twin Towers and Building 7 collapsed as a consequence of the impact and resulting fires from the jet crashes--simply does not hold any water, scientifically. It violates both laws of thermodynamics, egregiously.

For example, we are told (again and again) that the Twin Towers underwent a "pancake collapse" in which the weight and force of the collapsing upper stories created a chain reaction that brought down all the others at freefall rate (without encountering any resistance at all from the intact 60-80 floors beneath them, nor the 47 steel girders that were specifically designed to support the structure as a whole. ) If so, where ARE all these collapsing stories? Look at this photo:

What do you see here? I see no upper floors at all crushing those beneath them (which is not surprising, since those lower floors had always supported them before. What I do see is something a lot more like a Roman Candle--a sequence of powerful explosions, symmetrically pulverizing the building, floor by floor, and blowing the debris upward and outward as it falls. This is no gravitational collapse, but a controlled demolition.

And there is, besides, a peer-reviewed scientific study by Dr. Niels Harrit of the University of Copenhagen and eight equally qualified colleagues, all with Ph.D.s in chemical physics, that found direct evidence of iron microspheres and particles of unexploded nanothermite in the dust from the immediately surrounding area: all prima facie evidence of controlled demolition. For further evidence and information on the real story of 9/11, the best source I know of is that of Architects and Engineers for 9/11 truth

In short, you can now count me among the growing multitudes who simply no longer believe the official story--and therefore have no reason to believe that Osama Bin Laden had anything to do with the horrors of that day.

In which case, what Americans and all their media outlets are celebrating with such noxious fervor is simply a gangster-style murder of a man who, while far from innocent (since he apparently was the mastermind behind the attack on the USS Cole and the African embassy bombings), was nevertheless entitled to the same rights to due process, under a just legal order, as you or me or anyone else.

And this is why I no longer even like to call myself an American, but rather a Gaian--that is, a citizen of the world, like my role model Thomas Paine, who originally coined the concept of "The United States of America," but whose legacy of enlightened democracy and justice we have now abandoned, in favor of brute force and bread and circuses. As Paine himself once put it, "The world is my country; all mankind are my brethren; and to do good is my religion." The Dalai Lama himself could scarcely have said it better!