What Do I Stand For - No Matter What?

    We live in wildly tumultuous, perilous times, even the very fortunate living in the relative safety & sanity of Canada. The war in Palestine / Israel, like all conflicts, demands infinitely more than knowing how to defeat 'the enemy.' The level of thinking which builds & sustains colonial empires, multi-national corporations, & billionaires; also estroys the air, water, land, plant & animal species, human relationships, quality of life; & promotes conflict & war. This reptilian 'rape, pillage & plunder' mentality favors only the short-sighted ultra-rich & puppet politicians. Jem Bendell PhD https://batgap.com/jem-bendell/
    Sadly, we've been conditioned to at least partially believe the 'American dream' sales pitch: owning stuff IS happiness. Otherwise, we're repeatedly told that life is supposed to be meaningless. Immediately after 9/11, then US President George W. Bush told New Yorkers, "go show those terrorists what we're made of - and shop!"
    But Einstein suggested we NEED a qualitatively higher level of intelligence THAN the one that got us into this mess. 

     The current Palestinian / Israeli war provides a pressing opportunity to decide WHICH MENTALITY we take - the old reptilian 'eye for an eye' reaction - OR - our evolved wise loving nurturing intelligence. 

    "The personal experience of suffering unites us with other people: it is the dynamo that generates compassion, which, by its nature, is transpersonal." Dean Rolston

    Below Jack Kornfield - former Buddhist monk, beloved meditation teacher, retired clinical psychologist, parent, husband & senior citizen - reminding us of our true nature & what we stand for (transcribed from his EXCELLENT 61min YouTube video bottom of page) :

    “From Yuval Harari, one of our great thinkers & historians,
    ‘For right now, most Israelis are psychologically incapable, at this moment, of empathizing with the Palestinians. The mind is filled to the brim with our own pain, and no space is left to even acknowledge the pain of others. And most Palestinians are in a similar situation. Their minds too are so filled with pain and loss that they cannot see our pain. But outsiders like you, who are not themselves immersed in pain, should make an effort to empathize with all suffering humans, rather than lazily seeing only one side of this terrible reality. It is the job of outsiders to help maintain a space for peace. We here in Israel and Palestine deposit this peaceful space with you, because we cannot hold it right now. Take good care of it, for us, so that one day, when the pains begin to heal, Israelis and Palestinians and you too might inhabit the space of peace together.'

    If you go into certain Zen temples in Japan or elsewhere, there’s this weird thing, they have little, low doors. We find them in Tibetan temples too, & other places. You have to bow to go into the temple. You can’t stride in. You actually have to lower yourself, with a certain sense of reverence & humility. And often by the gates of the temple are (statues of) the demons, that represent all that keep us from that place of peace & stillness. And you have to pass through them & acknowledge them. You can’t just ignore them. They’re part of the price of admission: to face the demons, to bow low. And then when you enter, you’re invited into a timeless reality. In Zen they say, ‘This is the reality of who you were, before your parents were born.’ That’s one of the great koans: ‘Show me, tell me, who were you before your parents were born?’
    There’s a liberation amidst birth & death, joy & sorrow, war & peace, that is beyond it all. And this is the sacred openness of love & awareness itself. And you know this. You know this as sure as you know your own name – even if you forget it – you do know that there is something bigger & majestic & timeless. And this is the opening to the cosmic dance.
    Remember the famous poem by Thich Nhat Hanh, ‘Call Me by My True Names’?

'I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones,
my legs as thin as bamboo sticks,
and I am the arms merchant, selling deadly weapons to Uganda.

I am the twelve-year-old girl, refugee on a small boat,
who throws herself into the ocean after being raped by a sea pirate,
and I am the pirate, my heart not yet capable of seeing and loving.

I am a member of the politburo, with plenty of power in my hands,
and I am the man who has to pay his "debt of blood" to, my people,
dying slowly in a forced labor camp.'

    I am them all. I am the joys & the sorrows. I am born again & again. This is the cosmic dance. And from this perspective, fear & ignorance & hate are seen in the vast ocean of love & understanding because we are part of creation unfolding itself. And if you take a Bodhisattva vow, as I’ve done, ‘O nobly born,’ it reminds you, ‘may you remember this freedom, and may you commit yourself, o nobly born, to alleviate the ignorance and suffering and fear in beings, the suffering of beings wherever you are.’ And then you say, ‘How long?’ As long as it takes.

    So this is a shift of consciousness for refuge. This is the timeless refuge. ‘Who is your enemy?’ it says in the Buddhist texts. ‘Mind is your enemy. No one can harm you more than your own mind untamed, filled with greed, fear, confusion & ignorance. Who is your friend? Mind is your friend. No one can help you. Even the most loving parents & friends, as much as your own mind, tamed & trained & filled with goodness.’ So then you sense the outer refuge and the sacred refuge and it becomes your refuge inside.

    What else is a refuge for us in these times? Ethics, virtue, whatever language you want to give it, morality. Here from a Buddhist text that I love:

    ‘Others will be cruel. We shall not be cruel. Thus we shall incline our hearts. Others will kill beings. We shall not kill beings. Thus we shall incline our hearts. Others will be violent. We shall not be violent. Thus we shall incline our hearts. Others will take what is not given and steal. We will abstain from taking what is not ours. Thus we shall incline our hearts. Others will speak falsely. We will abstain from false speech and speak that which is true. Thus we will train our hearts. Others will be envious. We shall not be envious but respectful of all others. Thus we shall incline our hearts. Others will be fraudulent. We will be honest. Thus we will train our hearts. Others will be arrogant. We shall be open-minded with humility. Thus we will train our hearts. Others will be harsh without compassion. We will be established in compassion. Thus should we incline our hearts.’

    That’s a really powerful call isn’t it? To say no matter what happens, what is your refuge? What do you stand for, no matter what? Integrity, honesty, non-harming, respect, and in it there’s so much truth & mercy, because it knows that ‘hatred never ends by hatred, but by love alone is healed.’
    And you look at Palestine and Israel, and it’s one traumatized people traumatizing another traumatized people from the displacement of the Palestinians and the Holocaust. And we may weep, and stand with others, and understand the cycles of trauma, and see with the eyes of wisdom, tenderness, and tears, and courage.
    Like Longfellow who says,
    ‘If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we would see sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.’
    A deep forgiveness, allowing the heart to break, and opening to this dance of joy & sorrow that is given to you, it is who you are, is who we are. 

    And I think of these lines from Ellen Bass in her poem, ‘If You Knew,’
‘What would people look like
if we could see them as they really are
soaked in honey, stung and swollen,
reckless, pinned against time?’
    How could we not see, with the eyes of love, everybody?

    So what supports you in living your values? Reflect for a moment, and sense what it feels like to stand up for what matters. Others will do other things, we shall not.”

Jack Kornfield on the Heart of Refuge - Heart Wisdom Ep. 211
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6EUrmcffnYg&t=19s

 

Control, Chaos and our Hemispheres

     Clinicians love to cure - definitively fix - the sick, the broken. And many of us, at least when we feel broken, want to be fixed-up once & for all! We all dearly love 'agency,' the sense of control, the ability to reach out, grab & hold onto what we want, and push away what we don't want.
     At some level, we realize that this idea of perfect control over our life & environment is wishful thinking, based on an a childishly unrealistic, simplistic, mechanistic, reductionist model. Life's complexity extends well beyond our comprehension, never mind control.
    However, we dread the idea of being overwhelmed by chaos - being helplessly out of control as our world crumbles around us. So to create some sense of agency, we tend to restrict our attention to manipulating whatever we can. But with this narrowed focus, many of us forget about or even become averse to the big picture that includes the most meaningful dimensions of life that cannot be controlled or even be put into words!
    Our current Western society tends to overuse the perspective of our left hemispheres, and at best ignores, at worse ridicules & actively suppresses the perspective of our right hemispheres.
    This lack of balance causes serious conflicts: rigid partisanship (political, religious, ecological, ethnic, racial, gender, economic, and even academic / educational: 'hard' sciences vs 'soft' sciences & arts) instead of harmonious tolerance, balance & collaboration. It seriously impacts the education of even our health-care professionals: http://healthyhealers.blogspot.com/2012/02/control-and-liminality.html
     Extreme positions eg towards control, often produce unintended, undesired results eg chaos.

     Iain McGilchrist spent 20 years researching & documenting the neurological basis & Western cultural rationale for a healthy balance between the two hemispheres, perhaps summarized in Reinhold Niebuhr's 'serenity prayer':
          Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change;
          courage to change the things I can;
          and wisdom to know the difference.

     “Attention is not just receptive, but actively creative of the world we inhabit. How we attend makes all the difference to the world we experience. And nowadays in the West we generally attend in a rather unusual way: governed by the narrowly focused, target-driven left hemisphere of the brain.

     Forget everything you thought you knew about the difference between the hemispheres, because it will be largely wrong. It is not what each hemisphere does – they are both involved in everything – but how it does it, that matters. And the prime difference between the brain hemispheres is the manner in which they attend. For reasons of survival we need one hemisphere (in humans & many animals, the left) to pay narrow attention to detail, to grab hold of things we need, while the other, the right, keeps an eye out for everything else. The result is that one hemisphere is good at utilizing the world, the other better at understanding it.
     Absent, present, detached, engaged, alienated, empathic, broad or narrow, sustained or piecemeal, attention has the power to alter whatever it meets. The play of attention can both create and destroy, but it never leaves its object unchanged. How you attend to something – or don’t attend to it – matters a very great deal.
     Because of the way we prioritise the left hemisphere’s take on the world, we have ceased to appreciate the meaning of continuity & flow, instead prioritising discrete chunks of experience we call things. This has serious consequences for how we see our selves as human beings and our relationship with the wider world. … the world in which we live in the West is shaped by a set of beliefs about reality which we know from experience, and feel intuitively, to be almost certainly false. Though the consequences of this are widely deplored, we seem strangely powerless to resist it. We are as if in a trance, whistling a happy tune as we sleepwalk towards the abyss."
     Iain McGilchrist. “The Master and his Emissary. The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World.” Yale University Press, 2019. (An exceptionally worthwhile read IMHO)

     “It’s just not compatible with the left hemisphere’s view that there could be anything wrong with itself. It has a polished, perfectionist view of what it’s doing. It’s therefore very unwilling to accept the contrary argument. As a society I would say, I believe we exemplify this mentality in our world. 
     In a nice piece of research ... they sent questionnaires to over two thousand executives to see how much they knew about their own industries. Managers in the advertising industry were 90% confident they were correct, but were actually wrong 61% of the time; people in IT 95% confident they were correct, only 20% were right; 99% of them overestimated their success. This is the world we’re now living in. 
     Now how did we get trapped in this worldview of the left hemisphere, which is that of the static, the fixed, the certain, the isolated, in competition with others, a detached, unempathic, unflowing world, which has only one value – that of utility? As opposed to a world in which things are seen as seamlessly interconnected, flowing, never certain, constantly changing, but with which we have a relationship of care. 
     How did we get into this trap? I think there are briefly a few reasons: one is that it gives us power, it makes us powerful, and that is hugely seductive. This is the hemisphere about getting. The left hemisphere controls the right hand with which we grasp; it controls the bits of language (not all of language) the bits with which we define things and pin them down, and say we’ve grasped them – so it’s the grasping part us. That makes us powerful but it’s version of the world is also extremely simple. It’s that it’s made out of bits which can be understood, and then we’ve got there. And all the bits that don’t fit with that are sheared off from the model. And so it’s possible at the end of the day to go, ‘I’ve explained everything,’ because actually you’ve only explained the things you’ve allowed into your model. Another thing is that it’s what I call ‘the Berlusconi of the brain,’ because it’s the one that controls the media. It’s the one that actually does the talking and constructs the arguments, so it’s a piece of cake for it to make its points, whereas it’s quite difficult for the right hemisphere to express things that are subtle, often contradictory and implicit. And I think the fourth reason, at the moment, why we are trapped in this is because we’ve evolved a world out there which reflects the left hemisphere’s world inside. So all around us we have the rigid, lifeless, fixed, represented world which is that of the left hemisphere.”
       Iain McGilchrist @ Schumacher College: Things Are Not What They Seem
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXiHStLfjP0
 
      “… we know intuitively that there is a dimension of ourselves and of nature which eludes us because it is too close, too general, and too all-embracing to be singled out as a particular object. This dimension is the ground of all the astonishing forms and experiences of which we are aware. Because we are aware, it cannot be unconscious, although we are not conscious of it – as an external thing. Thus we can give it a name but cannot make any definitive statement about it … 
     Our only way of apprehending it is by watching the processes and patterns of nature, and by the meditative discipline of allowing our minds to become quiet, so as to have vivid awareness of ‘what is’ without verbal comment.

     … seen as a whole, the universe is a harmony or symbiosis of patterns which cannot exist without each other. However, when it is looked at section by section we find conflict.
                       ‘for the world is a shen vessel 
                        and cannot be forced.’
     ‘Shen’ presents problems for the translator... I take it to mean that innate intelligence (or li) of each organism in particular, and of the universe as a whole, which is beyond the reach of calculation."
       Alan Watts. “Tao. The Watercourse Way.” Pantheon Books, 1975.

'Shen'

False Certainty

Rick Archer : “There are so many people in this world who are so sure of their position, their beliefs, whatever, and of course so many wars have been fought over that mentality – many of them in the name of religion.”

Mooji : “It’s actually because they are not sure. They’re not sure, that’s why they try to appear so sure. They’re not sure.” 

Rick Archer : “They’re desperately defending their doubt.” 

Mooji : “Yeh, if you’re sure about something, there’s a great relaxation in you, a very great openness. When you really can say that you are clear and certain about it, you reach a place of stillness. And you cannot be moving in some line of aggression towards any being. There’s a stillness in that.” 

Rick Archer : “And in that stillness, you’re very comfortable with paradox. You don’t take a polar position and adhere to it, you can actually embrace two contradictory concepts or positions."

Mooji : “Of course, because ultimately you can only do this because you have transcended concepts. You see their limitations. You see their usefulness. And you know that what is, is not shaped by any concepts. The concept is secondary. Only one who is really moved beyond the dependency on any concept is free with all expressions and any concept.”

     More on "Certainty": http://www.johnlovas.com/2012/03/certainty.html

Above transcribed from the interview below:

The Birth of Dualism in the West

     “For the West, however, the possibility of such an egoless return to a state of soul antecedent to the birth of individuality has long since passed away; and the first important stage in the branching off can be seen to have occurred in that very part of the nuclear Near East where the earliest god-kings and their courts had been for centuries ritually entombed: mainly Sumer, where a new sense of the separation of the spheres of god and man began to be represented in myth and ritual about 2350 B.C. The king, then, was no longer a god, but a servant of the god, his Tenant Farmer, supervisor of the race of human slaves created to serve the gods with unremitting toil. And no longer identity, but relationship, was the paramount concern. Man had been made not to be God but to know, honor, and serve him; so that even the king, who, according to the earlier mythological view, had been the chief embodiment of divinity on earth, was now but a priest offering sacrifice in tendance to One above – not a god returning himself in sacrifice to Himself.
     In the course of the following centuries, the new sense of separation led to a counter-yearning for return – not to identity, for such was no longer possible of conception (creator and creature were not the same), but to the presence and vision of the forfeited god. Hence the new mythology brought forth, in due time, a development away from the earlier static view of returning cycles. A progressive, temporally oriented mythology arose, of a creation, once and for all, at the beginning of time, a subsequent fall, and a work of restoration, still in progress. The world no longer was to be known as a mere showing in time of the paradigms of eternity, but as a field of unprecedented cosmic conflict between two powers, one light and one dark.”

       Joseph Campbell. “The Masks of God: Oriental Mythology.” Viking Compass Edition, NY, 1962.