Of Malas, Mantras, and Meditation

Western Buddhists, like myself, are often a bit perplexed about what aspects of Buddhist practice to adopt as essential, as opposed to mere cultural trappings.  Most western Buddhists, for example, do not wear robes, carry begging bowls, or engage in practices such as repeated prostrations, for the simple reason that such seeming self-abasement, while common in Asian cultures, goes against the grain of the default western concepts of autonomous identity and self-respect with which we have been raised. So what is essential and what is incidental to practice? Everyone has an opinion on this, of course, and we are free to practice what we will.  But one practice I have found useful, while many of my friends are content to do without it, is to use a Mala in my formal meditation practice.

The Mala, the Indo-Tibetan Buddhist "rosary," consists of exactly 108 beads, which the practitioner uses as something like training wheels for meditation--to keep the mind on track, keep it from getting distracted by the ever-present random thoughts that arise unbidden to consciousness. The number 108 has any number of symbolic and numerological meanings, which you may, if you wish, read all about here.  108 is, for example, the product of 9 X 12, both numbers rich in numerological significance in cultures worldwide. Consider, for example, the 9 Dragons in Chinese mythology, as the number of perfection and power, or the 12 signs of the Zodiac--and so on.

There are, of course, many ways to use these beads; one of the most common is to use it for the repetition of a mantra. I confess, however, to a certain residual skepticism about mantra practice: if it is in Sanskrit, and you do not reflect upon the meaning, but simply believe in the magical efficacy of the Sanskrit words, what is the difference between this and other forms of magical thinking, such as the insistence, by the Catholic Church, that the Mass be conducted in Latin, or the Greek Orthodox use of a special form of Katharevousa Greek, used nowhere else, for their masses?

Christian mantras, of course, have their own baggage--whether "Hail Mary" or the Doxology, or "Kyrie Eleison," or the prayer of Jesus (i.e. "The Lord's Prayer, as commonly known). They all commit a person to one belief system, as do Muslim mantras like "Allahu Akbar..." Yet Jesus himself seemed very skeptical of mantras--he heaps scorn on those who "use vain repetitions" and make a public exhibition of their prayer.

That notwithstanding, I have no problem with those who enjoy chanting mantras, whether in Sanskrit, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Tibetan, or whatever...the practice is harmless enough.  My own preference, however, is for my own language--English--simply because these are words I understand, and that therefore have no magical significance attached to them. They simply mean what they say--to me. This also seems more approachable for the vast majority of people who have no interest in appropriating a culture other than their own as an appendage to their identity.

Accordingly, I have come up with a mantra in my own (or anyone else's) native tongue, entirely unrelated to anyone's creed, yet fully compatible with anyone's spiritual practice. And this morning, I discovered a way of integrating this mantra with the magic number 108, so that one could practice it with a mala.  So I start with four basic injunctions--four verb phrases-- one for each full breath (and bead on the mala), which I then repeat three times over three larger, meta-injunctions, for a total of twelve breaths.

Here are the (easily memorized) core injunctions, on each breath:

1. "Breathe"
2. "Observe"
3. "Let Go"
4.  "Abide."

These reflect, of course, any number of sacred tetrads: the Four Brahmaviharas, or limitless qualities (Benevolence, Compassion, Joy, Equanimity);  the four stages of life (birth/childhood, youth, maturity, and old age/death); the four directions, four classical elements, or four seasons.  But then I repeat this series three times, on the following schema:

Contemplate:

Breathe, Observe, Let Go, Abide.

Practice:

Breathing, Observing, Letting Go, Abiding.

Vow: 

to Breathe, to Observe, to Let Go, to Abide.

Here is how it works.  When we contemplate these injunctions, we simply reflect on their value and importance, based on all we have read and been taught.  For example, we remind ourselves that breathing connects us to the Earth, the Sun, and all other life, and thus promotes benevolence and gratitude; that observing--just looking deeply, with gentleness, receptivity, and insight, at all around us and all the thoughts and feelings that flow through our minds, is a healthy alternative to getting caught up in them, either in attachment or in revulsion. And we remind ourselves that letting go of attachments and aversions will follow our observing them closely and recognizing their inherent emptiness and impermanence--and that this letting go brings a quiet joy; and that abiding--just being here now, without mental perturbations, empty of self-clinging, and at one with all, is the goal of our practice--whether we call this equanimity, alaya, samadhi, nirvana, or "the peace which passeth all understanding."

Having thus contemplated the value of these essential injunctions with each breath, we move to our second cycle, which is to practice them, letting go of all distractions in order to fully inhabit and experience our breathing, observing, letting go, and abiding. (This is why I use the participles--"breathing..." in this phase, after the imperative form--"breathe" which is more appropriate when contemplating the instructions of our teachers.)

Finally, while the first major injunction ("contemplate") connects us with our spiritual heritage and hence with the past--what our teachers have taught us--and the second ("practice") connects us to the present moment, the third major injunction ("vow") encourages us to renew our commitment to the practice in the future as well. We use the infinitive form ("to breathe") to emphasize this forward-looking aspect of a vow.

As with any mantra, if you simply repeat these words by rote, they will be useless.  Therefore, we should not "say" the words "contemplate, practice, vow" but rather embed them in our minds as behind-the-scenes injunctions for each four breaths in turn. And while we may begin by saying (aloud or to ourselves) the various forms of the core verbs "breathe, observe, let go, and abide" we should not get caught up in rote repetition here either. Rather, we can use these words as windows, to look through at what we are actually doing. And once we get the hang of it, we can drop these verbs as well and "just do it." (Training wheels, after all, are not intended to be permanent.)

If we repeat this sequence of 12 full breaths (4 X 3) nine times, we will have used up all the "magical" 108 beads on the mantra (4 X 3 X 9 = 108).  This is, in my experience, a half-hour well spent.

The Four Paths to the Sacred

This is an essay I wrote for my (mostly Christian) students in my Humanities class some 20 years ago, while I was still teaching at Hampton University. It was later adopted as the basis for a service at the Williamsburg Unitarian-Universalist Church, to which my wife and I then belonged. But it is one of my best essays on religion, in my own humble opinion, so I am sharing it here, for others to see if they wish.

The Four Paths to the Sacred

"Everything possible to be believed is an image of Truth."--William Blake

Many people who have been raised in western religious traditions such as Christianity do not quite know how to react when they are first exposed to other religious and spiritual traditions from around the world, and particularly indigenous and far-eastern traditions.

In this essay, I would therefore like to propose a model for understanding other religious traditions in a way that allows us to recognize the both the similarities and the differences between others’ traditions and ours, without feeling as if we have to choose between them or decide who’s “right” and who’s “wrong.”  Rather, the model is intended to show how all religious traditions, despite their major differences in style, beliefs, rituals, metaphors, and emphasis, nevertheless point to the same basic, intuitive truths of human experience.

The model takes the form of a Solar Cross (a circle bisected vertically and horizontally by a cross), in which, at the center, is a point we can call, simply, “the sacred.” The four arms of the cross all move from the periphery to the center in accordance with the four directions—north, east, south, and west.  Each arm may be seen to represent one of the four basic paths to the sacred, onto which all the major religious traditions of the world can be mapped.  For the sake of simplicity, I will call these the Path of Learning (S); The Path of Teaching (E); The Path of Healing (W); and the Path of Creating (N). They correspond, roughly, to the subject matter of each volume of Joseph Campbell’s four-part study of the world’s mythic traditions, The Masks of God—“primitive,” oriental, occidental, and creative. Like Campbell, I will describe them in the order in which they historically arose.

1.        The Path of Learning (South): The Sacred in Nature and Tradition

This is the oldest path to the sacred of all, the path of our most ancient ancestors, north, south, east, and west, but since humanity itself evolved in the south—in Africa—and since the tropical areas of the world still retain many surviving instances of this ancient approach to the sacred, we may, for convenience, associate this path with the South.

I call this “the path of learning” because the indigenous cultures that embody this path to the sacred all transmit their knowledge orally, from one generation to the next.  These teachings vary dramatically from one indigenous culture to the next, for they are embedded in the mythologies which reflect each culture’s distinct collective experience with the landscapes within which they had their livelihood. But despite these differences, these indigenous belief systems all share common traits:

●      A belief that the sacred is immanent in the natural world, which is indistinguishable from the spiritual world;

●      Close ties of kinship;

●      Rituals of communion with ancestors and nature spirits or deities;

●      A complex mythology that embeds the sustaining ethical values of the culture, communicated through story-telling, music, and ritual performances.

●      Shamans, or magician/healer figures, male or female, who mediate between the visible and invisible worlds, and who are regarded with awe and respect by the rest of the community.

This most ancient and venerable path to the sacred, like all others, has both elements of profound wisdom and characteristic pathologies.  The wisdom inherent in this path consists, in my view, in their awareness of all life as sacred, the social and ecological wisdom embedded in the myths, and the primacy of community and sharing. The pathologies include a strong tendency toward superstition or magical thinking, and thus, vulnerability to manipulation by unscrupulous shamans or by opportunists from the outside. The other pathology lies in the fact that these traditions are culture-specific—there is no distinction between “religion” and “culture,” and therefore people who grow up in such cultures often perceive all other cultures as enemies or aliens. This inability to assimilate the “other” has led, historically, to constant warfare or parasitic theft between different indigenous cultures, and a consequent inability to unite effectively against a common threat to their livelihoods.

2.        The Path of Teaching (East): The Sacred as Oneness

This path, associated with the Orient, probably arose at the same time as the beginnings of literacy, around 2000 BCE. It arose separately, in both China and India, from indigenous roots, as Hindu and Taoist wisdom traditions, and then these two paths merged in Buddhism.  I call it the “Path of Teaching” because the common theme of Hindu, Taoist, and Buddhist approaches to spiritual understanding lies in the primacy of the teacher-student relationship. The great foundational sages of this Eastern path—such as Patanjali, Lao Tzu, and Gautama the Buddha—all were pre-eminently teachers of the Way to direct realization of Oneness—the basic, liberating, and paradoxical awareness summed up in the Hindu Upanishads as “That art thou.”  Each (along with many others) founded a ramifying lineage of transmission of wisdom from teacher to student, and this accumulated wisdom is recorded and disseminated in written texts—the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Baghavad Gita, the Tao Te Ching, and the Buddhist Sutras.

Unlike the orally transmitted, culture-specific teachings of the indigenous  Path of Learning, these text-based wisdom traditions could readily be transmitted from one culture to another, as, for example, Bodhidharma did in bringing the Buddhist sutras from India to China. Thus Buddhism was (as far as I am aware) the first spiritual tradition that could be transmitted intact from one culture to another.

One important aspect of the subtle and far-reaching wisdom of this Eastern path can be summed up in the first line of the Tao Te Ching: “The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao.” That is, the map is not the territory, and the name is not the thing named. Inherent in all these Far-Eastern teachings is this liberating recognition that words are inadequate to describe this liberating apprehension of Oneness which is the common goal of all these paths—it can only be experienced through direct contemplation and practice.  This awareness also makes these traditions remarkably tolerant of one another: there has never been a holy war, for example, between Buddhists and Taoists, even though both sects have coexisted in China for many centuries. Many (or even most) Chinese consider themselves both Buddhist and Taoist—and Confucian as well! Likewise, India has a long and venerable tradition of tolerance for religious diversity.

The pathology inherent in Eastern traditions is a strong tendency toward passivity and withdrawal from the world—all of these traditions rely heavily upon monastic isolation, where seekers can study with their teachers and pursue enlightenment without distractions.  This has historically made adherents to Hindu, Taoist, and Buddhist traditions tolerant of, or even complicit in, the social status quo, and reluctant to engage the outer world of political and social injustice, other than, perhaps, to offer food, shelter, and teachings to those who happen to pass by.

3.        The Path of Healing (West): The Sacred as the One God.

This is the path with which most of us, here in the west, are already familiar: the path that begins, historically, with the direct experience of the foundational Hebrew prophet Abraham—the experience of the One True God, creator of Heaven and Earth, of all that is seen and unseen, whom the Hebrews called JHVH, the Muslims call Allah, and whom we routinely refer to, and relate to, as “God.”  Unlike the Eastern traditions, the Western experience of God, starting with Abraham, and passing directly on through Christianity and Islam alike, is an experience not of Oneness, but of Relationship, as recorded both historically and eternally in the Bible (and/or the Qur’an, the Book of Mormon, etc.)

I refer to this as the Path of Healing because the common theme of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, despite their considerable differences, is the theme of Redemption, or reconciliation between an erring, sinful, or fallen humanity and the wrathful but loving God who both created and later redeems him. In the Jewish tradition, this redemption is accomplished through their sacred history as God’s Chosen people, and through the promise of a Messiah or deliverer. In Christianity, the redemption is accomplished, of course, through the death and resurrection of Jesus. And in Islam, it is accomplished through the prophecy of Muhammed, as embodied in the Qur’an, wherein they believe that God’s will is revealed in its full final form.

The wisdom of these three “religions of the Book” is of course likewise deep and multifaceted. It lies above all, in my view, in the recognition that, as Jesus pointed out, the love of God is inseparable from love of neighbor and from love of self. Each presupposes the others.  This fundamental experience of the Sacred as the love of God and of neighbor alike lies at the root of the vigorous social activism which characterizes all three monotheistic paths—the common urge to heal the human community, and to minister to the needs of others.

The pathology of this path, in my view, lies in the strong tendency of all three traditions toward intolerance, particularly of one another.  All three are built on doctrines that basically divide the world into two categories: God’s people (that is, us) and the others (them). Those who lie outside of the sacramental community are variously viewed as (1) benighted savages awaiting conversion; or (2) enemies of God and/or instruments of the Devil. They all, according to this logic, must therefore be either converted or annihilated. The result of this common tendency in western theistic traditions toward intolerance of others has been all of the horrors which have afflicted our history over the past millenium—holy wars, schisms, crusades, jihads, slavery, genocide, and colonialism.

4.        The Path of Creating (North): The Sacred as the Autonomous Self

This fourth and most recent path is still, by and large, a work in progress. It is the North’s distinctive contribution to enlightenment through free inquiry, experimentation, discovery, and innovation, in both science and the arts. It is rooted in Classical Greece and European Renaissance, but it was codified in the latter years of the Eighteenth Century, with the epochal claim that “all men are created equal,” and that we all have a common “right” to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It blossomed in the Nineteenth Century through the Romantic Movement—the recognition of the Sacred as inhering in the unique experience of the autonomous self, irrespective of communal religious traditions, as expressed in Romantic poetry, fiction, and art. This “creative” approach to spiritual discovery continues into the Twentieth Century with the Modernists such as Yeats, Joyce, T.S. Eliot, the Harlem Renaissance, and well into the Sixties and Seventies, with the blossoming of the Counterculture and the so-called “New Age” movement. Because it is still a work in progress, it is difficult to draw generalizations about this multifaceted movement. But its features are becoming clear—it is global in scope, multicultural, vigorously creative and innovative, fast-paced, and exciting to be caught up in.

Its pathologies, of course, are equally apparent and dramatic: alienation; greed and narcissism; cultural fragmentation; breakdown of family, community, and societal bonds; violence and drug addiction; and widespread ignorance of, or indifference to, the greatest common threat of our time—our ongoing destruction of the only living planet we’ll ever know.

Therefore, our collective hope, as I see it, lies in embracing not just one but all of these four paths to the sacred simultaneously, since the strengths of each balance the weaknesses of others. From our indigenous ancestors, we can learn, once again, that the living Earth and all its inhabitants, along with the diverse indigenous cultures and their ways of knowing, are sacred and to be respected, not simply exploited for short-term personal gain. Our Eastern traditions can teach us the elusive, but indispensable techniques of breathing,  observing, and letting go--and all of the allied practices that heal and reintegrate body, mind, and spirit—in order to directly apprehend the Sacred in ourselves, all others, and all life. From our own Western root traditions—Jewish, Christian, and Islamic—we may draw renewed strength and resolve to heal our communities, stepping out of our own self-absorption, our SUVs, our gated communities, to follow the path of Jesus and the prophets in healing the sick and feeding the hungry—and from our own humanistic traditions of free inquiry, bold experimentation, and the inalienable rights of free expression, we may acquire once again the courage to create a just and sustainable future.

The Grammatical Creed

"I do not accept creeds. Truth remains truth. It is the colored lenses of the self that reflect it in various colors."--Guru Nanak

According to a hagiography that I once received from the Sikhs, who trace their origin, or at least inspiration, to a 14th Century holy man named Guru Nanak, the above statement was his response when he traveled to Mecca where he was invited by Muslim clerics to declare himself as a Muslim, on account of their shared monotheistic beliefs. His refusal of creeds has always rung true with me.

Christians, who equate "faith" with "belief" and seldom pause to question this identification, generally are required, at the beginning of every service, to recite some form of the Apostles' Creed, the profession of faith first agreed upon by the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD, convened by the Emperor Constantine to resolve the often vicious ideological disputes among various Christian factions, and thereby establish a mandatory ideology for what soon became the state religion of the Roman empire. The original Nicene Creed was later abbreviated as the Apostles' Creed, which lays out the accepted narrative of Christian beliefs. Here is the version from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer:

I believe in God the Father Almighty,

Maker of heaven and earth:

And in Jesus Christ his only begotten Son our Lord,

Who was conceived by the Holy Ghost,

Born of the Virgin Mary,

Suffered under Pontius Pilate,

Was crucified, dead, and buried:

He descended into hell;

The third day he rose again from the dead;

He ascended into heaven,

And sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty;

From thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.

I believe in the Holy Ghost;

The holy Catholic Church;

The Communion of Saints;

The Forgiveness of sins;

The Resurrection of the body,

And the Life everlasting.

Amen.

But why should I--or anyone else, for that matter--believe any of this? Even in this stripped down form, the Creed is full of question-begging claims that make no rational sense.

For example, what do they mean by "only begotten son"--or as the original Nicene Creed insists, "Begotten, not made"? But what living being, from bacteria right up to us, is "made" rather than "begotten"? None that I know. Are we not all "sons (or daughters) of God," since God made both Heaven and Earth, and is our "Father"?

Why must I believe that when Jesus died, he went downstairs to Hell (presumably to release those inmates who happened to be Hebrews with the right belief system but who had the misfortune to have been born and died before he lived) then came back to life, only to "ascend into Heaven"--like what, a rocket? A balloon?  And where is "Heaven" anyway?  Why should any rational person "believe" this mythology?

Other questions are equally baffling and equally silly.  "Sitting on the Right Hand of the Father"--like Charley McCarthy?  And what is meant by "the resurrection of the body" since simple common sense observations tell us that bodies rot and deteriorate and are eventually absorbed into their physical and biological matrix. Where would this "resurrected body" come from, anyway?

But enough said. This creed, repeated mindlessly in various forms by Christians worldwide, is arrant nonsense, which no one with a functioning brain should take seriously. It has no ethical teachings whatsoever; it completely ignores the core teachings of Jesus, acknowledging only that he was born "of a virgin" and died "under Pontius Pilate." The first is mythology; the latter, history, as far as we know.

Buddhism, fortunately, has no creeds whatsoever. Instead, practicing Buddhists often recite the "Three Jewels"--taking refuge in the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha--but even these are broad concepts, subject to multiple interpretations, and there is no requirement to "believe" in them--in fact, the Buddha's last injunction to his disciples was to "be a light unto yourself"--or as Bob Dylan might have put it, "don't follow leaders; watch parking meters."

So just for the fun of it, I've come up with my own Creed, which I call the Grammatical Creed. Here it is:

I am.

Thou art.

He, She, or It is.

We are.

You are.

They are.

Simple, eh? Here is how one might unpack it.

"I am."  This was not only God's response to Moses from the Burning Bush in Exodus. It is also the core of mystery for all of us--our own subjectivity--the fact that there seems to be somebody home, behind my eyes, looking out on the world. Buddhist doctrine ultimately denies the existence of the separate self, but this perspective, even if it is delusional, makes sense to our experience inside this body.

"Thou art."  I deliberately use the archaic Second Person Singular, because of the equally amazing fact that when two people look at each other or talk to each other, they reciprocally acknowledge each other's existence and personhood, as well as their own, yet nobody else knows anything at all about this interaction. Inherent in this is the mystery of communication, of empathy, of compassion.

"He, She, or It is." From my direct experience of "I" and my reciprocal experience of "thou" I can therefore deduce that every living being out there likewise has its own subjectivity. The love we develop for each other can therefore, with some effort, be extended to all other beings--whose existence is no less important to them than ours is to us.  But what about "it," you ask. Does a rock, a river, or a mountain, a lump of coal, or a star have any subjectivity? Maybe, maybe not. But they have properties, which we are bound to respect, for if we do not consider the consequences of our decisions about the material world, we pay for it. When we pump out or dig up and burn fossil fuels, we heat our atmosphere and could destroy ourselves, along with all other complex multicellular life, in which case we will have to get used to being bacteria again… So if compassion comes from acknowledging Thee, Him, and Her, as we acknowledge Me, wisdom comes from taking care of It. Hence the wonderful injunction of Lao Tzu: "Take care of everyone, and abandon no one. Take care of everything, and abandon nothing."

"We are." Now comes the important part. These also happen to be the first two words of Martin Luther King's magnificent summary of the Dharma as a guiding principle: "We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly."  In other words, we all reciprocally depend on each other, both locally and globally, both human and nonhuman.

"You are."  Equally important, any community, which is often in competition with rival communities for resources or otherwise, must ultimately recognize that the "other's" collective claim to identity, value, and respect is as valid as our own. Herein lies an end to all forms of prejudice and bigotry, whether religious, ethnic, nationalistic, or cultural…for communication, respect, and diplomacy are essential to a peaceful and prosperous community, nation, and planet.

"They are." This statement encodes the essential lesson of the Parable of the Good Samaritan: that even those we scorn as "other"--those against whom we define ourselves, the ones we don't talk to, the ones we love to scorn, are still part of the "inescapable network of mutuality" on which we all depend. And for me, that even includes pathological racists, right wing Republicans, born-again Christian ideologues, Muslim fanatics, Jewish hyper-Zionists, Rush Limbaugh-loving rednecks in Hummers with gun racks, and so forth. As Jesus said, "Love your enemies; bless them that curse you…"  This is, of course, the most difficult injunction of all to practice, but it is essential nevertheless. For if our circle of compassion leaves anyone or anything out, it is of no value at all.

It may seem strange that after ridiculing Christian articles of faith, I should end by quoting Jesus. But my disdain for mindless ideological rigidity is entirely consistent with my lifelong reverence for Jesus--not as the "Only Begotten Son of God" (whatever THAT means) but as a Buddha, a fully awakened being, who in that respect could be called an avatar of God, just like Krishna or the Buddha.

Vandana Shiva on "The Year of the Soil"

Vandana Shiva, the Indian scientist and activist, is one of the finest Gaian Bodhisattvas alive today. Here is a piece on her response to The Year of the Soil

Gaia Schmaia

Ever since I first encountered James Lovelock's Gaia Theory in 1980, where it was featured in the 1980 edition of Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Catalog, I have been enamored--some might even say obsessed--by the Gaia concept (as first formulated by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis), despite the fact that it has been ridiculed by scientists, sharply criticized by philosophers, largely ignored by the public and the mass media, condemned as heresy by Christians, and uncritically embraced and mythologized, much to its progenitors' dismay, by marginal California neopagans and mush-brained New-Agers. It has even been adopted as the name for one of those mass virtual reality games on the Internet, mostly for children, but having nothing at all to do with its original meaning, and even less with the deeper implications.

The Gaia concept has, to be sure, a few able defenders in philosophy, such as Mary Midgley, who sees it (as I always have) as "the next big idea." But my early hopes that the Gaia concept would be widely embraced by the global environmental movement and the intellectual avante garde, leading to a global transformation of cultural consciousness, have come to naught--in fact, many of my friends in the movement have never even heard of it, and could not care less. So why my persistent and almost obsessive adherence to these four letters--to Gaia?

My short answer is this: we still need a name for ourselves, a shared identification that crosses all national and cultural boundaries, and that refers to our true home--the only living planet we will ever know.  We still need a basis of identification that transcends the obsolete "man vs. nature" dichotomy of the Industrial Revolution, and that embodies humanity-within-nature as a single system. And "Gaia" is the only viable candidate for such a concept. "Earth" means "dirt," which is mostly how we have treated the planet hitherto. "The World" is too vague and anthropocentric--it comes from the Anglo-Saxon word "Werald" meaning "age of man" and is often used as a synonym for the entire universe (as in the French equivalent, "Le Monde").  "Gaia," however, is feminine, not neuter--like the names of the nation-states to which most of us give our primarily allegiance--"America" "Canada" "Russia" "China" and so forth. Yet Gaia is more real than any of these shifting cultural constructs. Like the names of the other planets, it is mythic in reference. But if a dead planet can be named after a mythic figure--like Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune--why can't a living, far-from-equilibrium planet like our own likewise have a deeply resonant mythic name? What are we afraid of? Having to admit that we are raping our own mother??

And so I am, and will always be, a Gaian.  Names matter, for they constitute the basis of our identification. And my short definition of this identification, this label, is one whose first allegiance is to the fabric of life on Earth. All other allegiances are secondary to this one. The nice thing about this identification also is that it is the only identity label I know that excludes absolutely no one nor any other living being on the planet. If there is any non-Gaian life, we don't yet know of it, and may never. So being a Gaian means identifying with all living beings. One can, with no contradiction, be a Gaian Buddhist (as I am), a Gaian Christian (like Wangari Maathai and Pope Francis, whether he knows it or not), a Gaian Jew (like Evan Eisenberg or the "Green Rabbis"), a Gaian Muslim, Hindu, Atheist, Agnostic, or whatever...for Gaianity does not require nor preclude any religious belief system, any more than it does any national identification.

Imagine, moreover, what the effect would be if more and more people self-identified as Gaians! This in itself could trigger a quiet revolution, a subversion and transformation of Glomart, the Spontaneous Remission of the Cancer of the Earth. It is worth a try, and as long as I draw breath, I will continue to promulgate Gaianity--Gaian consciousness--in whatever ways I can.

Visions and Revisions

The following is directly copied from a response I recently sent to my friend Al Markowitz, after he sent me a link to an excellent article on Truthout:

Robert W. McChesney: "Capitalism as we know it has got to go."

My response was as follows:

Thank you for sharing this excellent article, Al. McChesney has many astute insights that are well worth discussing and disseminating.

My problem has always been with terminology--a view McChesney shares, in part.  Both the words "capitalism" and "socialism" are 19th Century concepts that tend to carry a lot of baggage and beg questions;  they are connotatively loaded, value-laden terms which people define in vastly different ways, but adherents of each tend to project all of their worst nightmares on to those who identify with the opposing term. Thus, for many supporters of socialism, a "capitalist" is by definition a heartless, greedy, corrupt, money-grubbing swine, whether he is the CEO of Monsanto or the owner of a local microbrewery; conversely, for many on the right, anyone who calls himself a "socialist" is secretly plotting a brutal Stalinist dictatorship. The terms themselves, that is, engender fear and polarization.

This is partly why I invented the alternative term "Glomart" to characterize the Global Market Economy--that is, the multinational corporate oligarchy that has hijacked our governments and mass media alike, and that has everything to gain and nothing to lose from plundering the planet and externalizing all costs of doing business, by polluting air, water, and topsoil, fabricating "patriotic" pretexts for resource wars, and exploiting cheap labor in a pernicious "race to the bottom." Glomart is basically a global monopoly game--the playing out of an unregulated, zero-sum money game on a finite system, wherein the only possible outcome is that one set of players (the 1 percent--or even 0.1 percent) end up owning everything, and everyone else has nothing, and is in chronic debt to the "winners" for their houses and hotels. This also, of course, leads inevitably to ecological collapse, and a corresponding disintegration of the social fabric into a violent and desperate Hell on Earth, with shrinking enclaves of fiercely defended wealth in a sea of chaos, starvation, and violence.

Can this apocalyptic Glomart juggernaut be stopped? I'm not sure. In my darker moments, I see no more capacity for the restraint of human greed in the aggregate than I do for maggots in a feeding frenzy. The corporations and their captive nation states will consume and compete for the dwindling resources of our dying planet with ever-increasing ruthlessness until nothing is left and the whole system collapses into chaos. 

But in my more hopeful moments, I can visualize a rapid dissemination, at the grassroots, of what I broadly call "Gaian consciousness" undermining Glomart by subverting and redirecting its primary life-support system--money--through the choices we each make about where our money goes, and for what. (That is why they spend billions in advertising everywhere we look. They need us to buy what they sell). 

 What would happen if a meme went viral on the internet, encouraging and enabling people to assume responsibility for the social and ecological consequences of their spending decisions ("Good Buy"), their livelihoods ("Good Work") and their social activism and engagement ("Good Will")--especially if the latter involved mass Satyagraha campaigns of nonviolent noncooperation with evil, speaking truth to power, and building self-reliant local community economies? In other words, what if public consciousness were raised, big time, about making a choice, in every dollar they spend, earn, or invest, and in every activity in which they engage, between supporting Glomart or supporting Gaia?

That is my dream, in a nutshell--and it takes the threefold form, at the grassroots level, of growing gardens, growing community, and growing awareness. (I like catchy slogans, as they are useful mnemonics for rapidly spreading transformative ideas). The key concepts, or memes in need of dissemination, are as follows:

1. Glomart vs. Gaia: 
1. The realization that the Order of Money--Glomart--is utterly incompatible with the Order of Nature--Gaia. Money is nothing but arithmetic--an abstract, zero-sum transform of information about the relative market value of commodities. And inherent in this arithmetical money game is the basic production rule that requires maximization of profits at any cost--More is always Better.
2. Gaia, conversely, refers to the Order of Nature, a positive-sum symbiotic network of organisms that depend on sunlight and sustain topsoil, air, and water, where optimality is the defining value--Enough is enough.
2. The Quiet Revolution: A global, grassroots movement of Gaians, predicated on three broad themes:
1. Good Buy--assuming responsibility for the social and ecological consequences of every dollar we spend or invest.
2. Good Work--assuming responsibility for the social and ecological consequences of our livelihoods. Becoming local gardeners, cooperatives, and entrepreneurs, to create alternatives to Glomart-produced commodities and services.
3. Good Will--Taking care of everyone and everything, and abandoning no one and nothing. Mindful, strategic, and relentless social engagement based on Satyagraha principles:
1. Self-Reliance (Swaraj)
2. Speaking Truth to Power (Satya)
3. Nonviolent Noncooperation with Evil (Ahimsa)

Vertical and Horizontal Healing

"Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets."

--Matthew 22: 35-40.

Thus sayeth Jesus, whom Christians worship as "the Lord," but whom I, following the Dalai Lama, simply honor as a Buddha--a fully awakened being whom I revere as the greatest of Dharma teachers, along with Gautama Siddhartha the Buddha, Lao Tzu, and a few others. 

He is answering the challenging question from a local scribe or lawyer, "Which is the greatest commandment of the (Hebrew) Law?" and his response is simply to quote two isolated passages from the Torah--Deuteronomy 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18. His genius is to equate them: "And the second is like unto it."  In other words, loving God is inseparable from loving one's neighbor, just as loving one's neighbor is inseparable from loving oneself.  And therein, according to the Master, "hang all the law and the prophets." In other words, he is implying that Wisdom (loving God) and Compassion (loving our neighbors as ourselves) are two sides of the same coin. And all the rest is commentary. 

In Luke's version of the story, the Lawyer then challenges him with the $35 question: "Who is my neighbor??" In other words, where do we draw the boundaries of the Sacramental Community--who is in and who is out? Who is "us"--the so-called "people of God"--and who is "them"?

Jesus responds--typically--by telling an ironic story: the Parable of the Good Samaritan. But who were the Samaritans? They were the "other guys"--the folks the Israelites loved to hate (and vice versa). They lived--remarkably enough--in the area that we know today as the West Bank. 

So the Samaritans--or as we might call them today, the Palestinians--were the folks who lived on the other side of the tracks--or of the wall, as the case may be. In fact, the Disciples had just been thrown out of a Samaritan village, and were already smoldering in resentment at these lowly scum. So Jesus' parable could not have arisen at a more propitious moment--what the Buddha called "Skillful Means."

The story, of course, is quite familiar already: a traveler to Jericho is waylaid by highwaymen, robbed, and beaten. As he lies there bleeding, several of his fellow Israelites--a priest and a Levite--happen by as he moans and cries for help. Both cross the road--to the other side, to avoid him. After all, like the highwaymen themselves, scam artists were common on the remote mountain roads of the time--people who would pretend to be hurt and then rob you blind-- so the priest and the Levite were not taking any risks, and they hurried along, not looking back.  And then a Samaritan came along. In all likelihood, the battered traveler didn't even bother crying out for help--after all, he and the Samaritan were enemies--their peoples hated and despised one another as infidels.

We'll let Jesus tell the rest:

"When he saw him, he was moved with compassion, came to him, and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. He set him on his own animal, and brought him to an inn, and took care of him. On the next day, when he departed, he took out two denarii, and gave them to the host, and said to him, 'Take care of him. Whatever you spend beyond that, I will repay you when I return.' Now which of these three do you think seemed to be a neighbour to him who fell among the robbers?"

The answer, of course, is obvious. The loathed Samaritan--the guy we love to hate--was the only one of the three passersby whose compassion overrode any fear or mistrust that he might have encountered a scam artist, and who took the man in, brought him to an inn, dressed his wounds,  and even promised to reimburse the host in full for getting him home safely. 

The implications are equally obvious: to the question, "Who is my neighbor?"--that is, what are the boundaries of the Sacramental Community--Jesus was saying something radical for our time as well as his own: "Ain't no boundaries."

As we face the horrific crises of our time--anthropogenic climate destabilization, despoiling of our land, air, and water by greedy corporations, religious and ethnic hatreds coming to a boil, whether in Iraq, Ukraine, Gaza, or St. Louis, and so on, we need to keep this majestic teaching of Jesus close to our hearts--Loving God = Loving our neighbor as ourself--whoever that neighbor might be.

But how do we get there from here?  While Jesus tells us, unequivocally, what we need to do, the Buddha and the traditions he spawned on the other side of the Eurasian landmass give us a wide range of practical approaches to how to do it--how to grow ourselves, that is, into people like the Good Samaritan--people who know how to put love ahead of fear, and do what needs to be done.

It comes down, in my view, to integrating Vertical and Horizontal healing.

"Vertical Healing" refers to all the arts of "loving God"--which Hindus classify as the Way of Devotion (Bakhti Yoga), the Way of (intellectual) Contemplation (Jnana Yoga), the Way of Selfless Service (Karma Yoga) and the "Royal Way" (Raja Yoga) of direct attainment through the eightfold Yogic path--Yama, Niyama, Asana, Pranayama, Pratyahara, Dharana, Dhyana, and Samadhi (or integrative realization of Oneness).

Other traditions, of course, have other formulations of this path of self-purification, but they all strongly overlap. They all involve the vertical integration of Body, Mind, and Spirit.

"Horizontal Healing," then refers to political activism--that is, to all ongoing efforts to bring peace and justice to our communities, our nations, and our planet--including, but not limited to, agitation for human rights, labor activism, environmental advocacy, nonviolent civil disobedience, and so on.

The problem is, the practitioners of vertical and horizontal healing are mostly very different people, who are at times scornful of the other. Vertical practitioners--whether Yogins, Tai Chi masters, Catholic priests, or scholars, often get so caught up in their head trips (or body-mind integration disciplines) that they look down on those who get caught up in worldly pursuits. Similarly, social and political activists are often so driven, so obsessed, and so chronically angry at the evils of the world that they are contemptuous of anyone who wastes his or her time meditating or chanting mantras.

Yet--as Jesus knew--vertical and horizontal healing are inseparable. You cannot truly love God--in any cultural permutation of that idea--without loving your neighbor as yourself--all your neighbors, including the animals and plants on which we all depend for our survival. And we cannot truly bring peace, justice, and environmental healing to our planet without first--or simultaneously--realizing inner peace, equanimity, compassion, and joy within ourselves. As Lao Tzu put it--

What is firmly established cannot be uprooted.
What is firmly grasped cannot slip away.
It will be honoured from generation to generation.

Cultivate Virtue in yourself,
And Virtue will be real.
Cultivate it in the family,
And Virtue will abound.
Cultivate it in the village,
And Virtue will grow.
Cultivate it in the nation,
And Virtue will be abundant.
Cultivate it in the universe,
And Virtue will be everywhere...

So healing our families, communities, and planet must begin by cultivating virtue in ourselves. Here is an easy formula to remember:

THE GOAL:

Health-Competence-Resilience.
Body-Mind-Spirit, 
Self-Community-Planet. 

THE PATH:

Breathe, Observe, Let Go
Be well, Do good work, Keep in touch,
Learn, teach, heal, and create.