We wanted to celebrate the power of the people, and the uniqueness of this movement. It was also curated so as to be accessible to outsiders just learning about #WhatsHappeningInMyanmar
“10 Ways to Resist a Military Regime” .@ThetHtarThet1 and I collaborated on this series. We wanted to celebrate the power of the people, and the uniqueness of this movement. It was also curated so as to be accessible to outsiders just learning about #WhatsHappeningInMyanmar
We are in the midst of an awakening, a rough transition from the dream of modernity and the emerging reality of its failing, if not wholly false, promises of universal prosperity and abundance.
When I think back over the past couple of decades and ask how was it and when my thinking shifted from imagining it was possible to find the political will to confront climate change to realizing social collapse was far more likely, I can point to a number of inflection points. It’s not quite so easy to assign specific turning points, but there are some events marking the passage toward my current position.
In 2012, Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone published a book called Active Hope. The subtitle was ‘How to Face The Mess We Are In Without Going Crazy.’ Segueing from anti-nuclear activism that began in the 80s, Joanna has spent the past forty years helping people access deep feeling for what is being lost and then to watch a fresh and grounded conviction to act emerge. But seeing that particular book appear was a signal to me that she was acknowledging our intensifying circumstances and the increasing difficulty of not only processing all the emotions associated with the incremental decomposition of nature and culture, but also of realizing a positive outcome of The Great Turning. I wondered when active hope or, if you will, radical hope becomes desperation? If we imagined hope as a regenerative resource, is it inexhaustible? When does active hope become hopium– an intoxicating strategy of pacification, helplessness and rising delusion?
To add some context, Obama’s weak stance and the failure of negotiations at COP 15 in Copenhagen in 2009 were also part of my turning, particularly upon learning that the fossil fuel propaganda campaign was deliberately targeting that event. In 2013, I was also collaborating on a political strategy to promote a carbon tax in the USA, submitting it for critique and confronting the obstacles to that effort. Ultimately, I found that process to be deeply dispiriting.
Not too long after that episode was the Paris Agreement of 2015, when the INDCs, Individual National Declared Contributions (to global decarbonization) were declared voluntary. Of course it would be naive of anyone to imagine nations agreeing to self-generated required contributions and submitting to enforcement, whatever that could mean. But voluntary contributions were also guaranteed to expose the entire effort to be more platitude than action, particularly in the case of the biggest polluters, which of course meant the United States. And it was.
These are moments I’m calling inflection points. They all had antecedents, a series of episodes dropping like grains of sand on one side of a scale until suddenly their accumulation shifts the entire balance away from the probability of avoiding systemic collapse to one of guaranteeing it. Accompanying all of this is a process of letting go of hope, similar to the five stages of grief. But I’d be wary of trying to fit myself into boxes that might be too small. Regardless, that negotiation with all the familiar names is about the ultimate acceptance of endings, the contemplation of mysteries we enter most gingerly.
So here we are. As with grief, the entire process is not one of giving up so much as opening to something new, regardless of its mystery. When do we let go of bargaining? When do we loosen our grip on a false future of endless beginnings or, to put it another way, step outside the law and induced conventions sustaining a false future to expose ourselves to the truth (and terror) of something far less familiar, but which is becoming ever more likely?
And anyway, was that even the future to which we were–or are–clinging? Or was it the past? A past in which the so-called promises of modernity could become ever more inclusive and the fantasy of personal and collective prosperity could continue indefinitely? In those terms, we’ve not been headed into the future at all. Our increasingly desperate grip has always been on the past–the conveniences we enjoy and particularly the ideology of endless growth. The culture war, the current battle of narratives is between those who deny it altogether, those who believe we can manage climate change without really giving up very much, that we can keep most everything we have and still call ourselves ‘sustainable’-and those who believe we must explore and design radically different lifestyles based on a new definition of abundance. What if nature has another agenda entirely?
The real future, if we can stop lying, is so overwhelming we may not fully grasp what is virtually imminent. Thus, we turn our gaze to the past, the recent past, to preserve the fantasy of human omniscience, the fantasy of our unlimited capacity to manage our way through every obstacle, every rising tide, every rapid in the downstream flow of history. Party like it’s 1999! All of this is fueled by vapid pronouncements from the technology sector, the advocates of bioengineering and the offices of politicians bought by fossil fuel interests. In fact, we have no idea precisely what will finally convince us of a collapsing biosphere. But we know the signs are all around us.
Releasing our grip on the future—telling the truth of the moment—is a landmark principle of psycho-logical health—admitting what is—allowing us to deal with ‘reality.’ At the same time, we are also trying to modulate extreme emotional responses, rising solastagia and deepening disorientation, which are negotiated in a specific system of the brain devoted to survival. While we don’t want to trigger impulsive, personally damaging or anti-social behaviors, we do want to retain enough forebrain function to generate positive corrective measures.
We–and by that I mean we in the US–may be a single extreme climate event away from triggering a mass shift in public attitudes about what is on the way (several are already underway), what mass media is still timid (or worse, negligent) about addressing. But this is where we find ourselves wading into a swamp of uncertainty, disagreement and potentially dangerous outcomes that were wholly unanticipated at the beginning. We don’t want panic to become even mildly contagious–like the pandemic. And besides, a significant segment of American culture is already being bombarded with triggering messages generating anti-social behaviors against their own interests, which are also threatening the collective well-being of the nation.
In trying to temper the information flow to avoid elevating mass anxiety, fear or contagious hopelessness, we remain deeply embedded in the territory of complacency. When Greta Thunberg addressed the annual World Economic Forum in Davos in 2019, she said, “I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day, and then I want you to act. I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if our house is on fire. Because it is.”
Meanwhile, managing social behavior, refusing to form a vision of a collective response to the realities upon us or being determined to ‘both sides’ it all is robbing us of the opportunity to convey clearly how fragile our situation really is. Everything matters more than ever if we ever expect to become someone’s ancestor, because everything, the wake-up call and the suffering of the past 18 months, the dislocation, the uncertainty, the disruption of commerce, the loss of stability, the political and economic inequalities, the creative energy and social innovation, the conflicting moralities and the redefinition of community are all just a rehearsal for a rapidly advancing future.
The following is an obscure Facebook post from 2017, written by a nameless founder of the Into The Wild Festival:
And finally the great ancient god of nature, of the wild places, of the muddy-brooks and the golden hills, of the damp forests and the hidden glades, the protector of beasts, of horned and hoofed, he of the wild-lichen eye-brows, musk-eared pungent aromas swelling in through the ether, playing his deep octave of enchantment on his bone flute from beyond the veils, from under the other worlds. He curls his misty eyebrow towards humanity once again, reminding them that their tiny insignificant lives are mere dew-drops on the vast garden of existence. All their self-help seminars and self-important narcissistic endeavors are nothing but the froth of waves under the infinite sun-rays of existence.
You can wash your hands, but you cannot wash away the wild, the mysterious, ravaging ferocious tenacity of the world. You can try to blame it on 5G or 4G or GG. You can create as many concepts as you like, but in the end, nature will rule with wild and ecstatic bloodthirsty longing to take us all home to where we began, the deep dark emptiness where everything arises and begins, time without end. Pan, the original horned god will once again step out of the shadows with his name on the tongues of all beings, pandemic, pandemonium, panic, panacea, all bursting forth like wild flowers yearning to kiss the sky.
In this realm there is no good or bad, high or low, rich or poor, just the wild abandoned expression of life and death forever dancing in the orgasmic Milky Way of existence, radiant in its potential. So, we are nature in our deepest dreaming, before we civilized ourselves into square boxes of ready meals. We are life and death. We are the earth-woven lovers of the wild. We are that radiant mysterious emptiness. We are Pan. We are all people. Listen to the call of all beings deep in the dark of night, at the cusp of dawn or dusk and you will hear your ancient voice forever singing you back home.
We are all Pan, as god, as archetype, as a voice of the irrational. Pan travels deep in our psychic underworld. Nature is Pan, both beautiful and treacherous. By exiling him from our natural terrain, by dislocating or repressing the divine Pan from the pantheon of gods, we are dishonored. We lose ourselves. Eventually we suffer the consequences of that repression in the form of emerging tortuous pathologies.
We are in the midst of an awakening, a rough transition from the dream of modernity and the emerging reality of our failing, if not wholly false, promises of universal prosperity and abundance. That was never really part of the deal and now, with all the Pan-words dancing before us, the true costs are mounting.
How will it all Pan out?
Modernity constantly encroaches upon and threatens to consume decolonial thinking, diversity, extremity, classifying certain people as outlaws, certain thoughts as unsanctioned and presuming to define normality, centrism and the norms of authentic self-expression. This is modernity cannibalizing itself to sanitize culture for the sake of preserving its own ever-narrowing definition.
For a word being thrown around so casually these days, one may wonder what exactly modernity means. It’s certainly everything we might initially assume it is. But let’s tease that apart. It’s been defined as a historical period that could have started as far back as Medieval times. Sometimes it’s regarded as the light arising from the Enlightenment, or even beginning sometime in the 19th century with the industrial revolution.
The most inclusive definition associates modernity with a number of historical developments: nations, languages, industrialization, mercantilism, capitalism, urbanization, mass literacy, mass media, representative government and mainly also a shift from traditional culture, meaning a proliferation of things we do when we’re not entirely focused on survival, and systems of knowledge, to the triumph of rationalism and scientific materialism. One may include a number of positive aspects to modernity such as secular culture, evolutionary thinking, developments in psychology, medicine, philosophy and emancipation. But especially now, we can’t avoid also associating environmental devastation with modernity, which is now undermining the very stability of culture and modernity itself.
A formal definition of modernity, according to Walter Mignolo’s substantial body of work on the subject, should begin with the Renaissance, coinciding with the intention of Western Europe to embark on the imperial project which had several faces and which was rationalized as bringing civilization to the New World, saving the world for Christianity and which then evolved into what we now call capitalism.
However we paint it, Modernity is synonymous with colonialism and thus, racism is inherent to it. Could the modern world look as it does today with the current economic regimes as if no imperial intentions had ever existed, no massive transport of black bodies from Africa to North and South America, no East India Company, no appropriation of native lands, forced and unpaid labor, the imposition of governance and financial obligations? I think not.
Thus, hidden behind the rhetoric of modernity, economic practices dispensed with human lives, and knowledge justified racism and the inferiority of human lives that were naturally considered dispensable.
—The Darker Side of Western Modenity
Dark bodies weren’t granted full humanity. And white bodies rationalized their moral responsibility as social systems, spiritual practices or bodies of knowledge were systematically destroyed. We continue to feel the effects of the colonial mentality 500 years later not only through globalization and neoliberal economics but through the definition of development itself and the division of the world into so-called developed and less developed cultures. The term ‘Third World’ was a French invention.
Colonialism did not advance solely as a mercantile or as an imperial military adventure. It was a religious and cultural force propagated through the cracking of indigenous linguistic code, the imposition of new languages, geographical mapping, religious indoctrination, economic subjugation, wiping out cultural memory, arbitrarily defining territories according to political or economic expediency, destroying centuries of cultural wealth, appropriating land and vast material wealth, creating a domestic class of proxy colonialists who benefited directly from the economic subjugation of their brethren and generating entrenched bureaucracies to sustain the inertia of political systems primarily serving colonial interests.
Colonialism emerged from and as what we know as western civilization, ultimately defining modernity in terms of politics, economics, religion and culture. The imperial project was to extend the definitions of civilization, language, philosophy, politics and economics to the colonized world. That initially included Latin America and Africa, extending into the Islamic world and South Asia. The definition of development itself was determined by the western colonial enterprise and persists to this day as defined by Wall street, the IMF & the World Bank. It’s primary purveyors are government agencies and diplomacy, clearing the way for multinational corporations backed, in case additional persuasion becomes necessary, by military might. Even as the overt manifestations of European imperialism dissolved in the mid-20th century, the American imperial project in the Western Hemisphere over the past 150 years is well known
Perhaps the greatest impact of colonialism was to control knowledge and especially the definition of knowledge. The definition of knowledge codifies the essential power relations between races, genders and cultures and became encoded in languages, beginning with Spanish, Portuguese, German and French, all rooted in Latin, extending more recently in English. Since knowledge and its definition is held primarily in western hands over the past few centuries, the way we think about problems and their solutions also arises from within that codification.
In that respect, the rhetoric of modernity is a pernicious monoculture of ideas to the extent that now modernity has become hostile to culture. Like the cannibalistic psychosis of Wetiko, it creeps into all aspects of life in the form of social media, advertising, mainstream political discourse. Modernity constantly encroaches upon and threatens to consume decolonial thinking, diversity, extremity, classifying certain people as outlaws, certain thoughts as unsanctioned and presuming to define normality, centrism and the norms of authentic self-expression. This is modernity cannibalizing itself to sanitize culture for the sake of preserving its own ever-narrowing definition.
We are also in the midst of an uprising over who gets to set the terms of discourse, who gets to define and preserve the codification of white innocence, superiority and patriarchal economic hegemony into the political and economic rhetoric set forth over the centuries of the colonial enterprise. The latest skirmish in this ongoing war is about the 1619 Project, which, by unearthing real history and bringing its unsavory truths to the forefront of modern awareness, lays bare the principle that white privilege only lives by keeping its own past buried.
White patriarchy has had the floor for 500 years and now the plantation systems are breaking down everywhere. There are popular movements with a different idea rising in virtually every culture now fighting for survival and presenting a rising threat to the owners and guards of the prison without walls and the prisons with walls. Repression and authoritarianism are the last remaining tools of control. Witness the right-wing backlash against Bolivia’s Evo Moralies, Rafael Correa in Ecuador and the rise of Bolsonaro and the jailing of Lulo De Silva in Brazil, not to mention the increasingly desperate and increasingly lawless measures by the white minority in America to retain minority rule.
What was taken centuries ago cannot be recovered. Inasmuch as we identify with and join the shifting communities of rebellion, art, theater, feminism, resurgent indigenous voices, economic cooperation, the recovery of ancient wisdom, we become fugitives from the plantation to construct a new economy. As decoloniality and the critique of modernity becomes more elaborate and encompassing, it is increasingly clear that we will no longer accept the structures of domination on any level of human activity and relationships, most particularly in regard to the natural world.
The signs of backlash are everywhere. Nikole Hannah-Jones being denied tenure by the University of North Carolina School of Journalism. Republicans voting en bloc against a Black women becoming Director of the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice. The refusal of Big Pharma to support generic vaccines being distributed to less affluent countries. The sudden reversal of the NFL to now regard the claims of neurological damage by black former players as equal to those of white players. How much more systemic can you get? These are actions and perspectives which all arise from and reveal the vestiges of the racist colonial mindset.
Reconciliation carries an implication of justice, a balancing of accounts. In this case it’s an honest discovery of others’ suffering while realizing our own mortality, complicity and limitations.
Reconciliation carries an implication of justice, a balancing of accounts. In this case it’s an honest discovery of others’ suffering while realizing our own mortality, complicity and limitations. Reconciliation is a great humbling because intimacy with suffering is also a coming to terms with one’s own death. Most of the time we operate as if we cannot permit the intrusion of death into our view or conduct in life. Denying, misunderstanding or misrepresenting life or death to oneself at some point becomes another miscarriage of justice. This is happening at a cultural level and is an integral part of why we have gone so wrong on our environment.
I seek balance by looking at my assumptions and beliefs, whatever unconsciously corrals, misdirects and exhausts me of wildness, causes me to lose contact with the inexplicable essence of life, the spontaneity and unity of everything and especially my capacity for stillness. Narrow assumptions establish imbalance. They arise from a resistance to breakdown, an illusion of stability and a compulsion to preserve that illusion. In modern culture, instability is regarded as failure; yet ironically, that very stability is itself a distortion of reality. I have set limits on the degree, pace and character of change, all of which may interfere with or rob me of the benefit of failure, vision, connection or satisfaction. It is by failure that I discover balance. No imbalance, no homeostasis; only a brittle, narrow comprehension of complexity.
For more than 18 months I’ve been engaged in a close encounter with a physiological disorder, a rare condition, which coincidentally, like climate change, is 100% fatal if left untreated. It arises in the deepest realms of my physiology, where life itself is produced in its most elemental form. This non-malignant dysfunction is instability personified, inexplicable to the layman, buried in background assumptions about how life is supported. And though it can be understood and explained in modern medical terminology, it cannot be adequately addressed according to these limited terms. They are just concepts, equally applicable to your car or your computer. It has emerged as my personal monster. It cannot be smothered by knowledge, technicalities or reason. There is no certainty or way of turning it into a monument sitting on a shelf. It’s an outlier at the frontier of medicine. It’s marvelous in that respect, transformative, daunting, life threatening and mysterious. Reductionist framing can’t possibly tell the full story.
Likewise, the marvel of climate change can be explained in the same reductionist terms, which don’t—and can’t—plumb the depths of the behavioral dysfunctions, the flawed outlook, the mechanisms of denial at the heart of such a condition, except perhaps by applying the analogy of autoimmunity: we are attacking ourselves, making a seemingly inexorable series of self-destructive decisions. Or worse, life is threatening itself with extinction, promising to change, failing to change, repeating the cycle, carrying immense guilt and then sloughing it off by dissociating. These are the behaviors of an addict. Not all of humanity is addicted, but the addicted are leading the rest of us into the abyss.
The term ‘climate’ should be applied to the context of all life including the social, not solely to atmospheric/oceanic conditions or the many thousands of biological effects. The climate of earth is deteriorating, but this is so in every sense of the term, not merely the weather. If we traced the acceleration of the global warming effect, the loss of ice, the acidifying oceans, the pending collapse of the food chain, the Sixth Great Extinction, all are paralleled by the massive concentration of wealth at the top, the degradation of civil discourse, the corruption of democratic norms, the influence of money in politics, pollution on an unprecedented scale, feudalization of the economy and the degradation of all forms of capital. None of us can breathe. Indeed, deep in the center of the earth economy, the engine of true vitality is being silenced. If we addressed the social and economic context of earth adequately, emissions would likely fall greatly, whereas focusing on driving down emissions alone is clearly not working fast enough.
I’m not an addict, though I surely am complicit. I could (by some sideways logic) relate to COVID-19 as a random invader, an alien agent, a force to be reflexively resisted as if it has no intelligence. We can track its adaptive capacities, disassemble it and understand its transport and replication systems. It has no mind, yet it has intelligence.
Beyond all that, I regard my personal disorder as an expression of consciousness. Which is to say it did not come from nowhere. I cannot extract myself from my environment or, as a Buddhist might say, extract myself from my karma, my spiritual continuum. There are known environmental (karmic?) factors linked to this disorder and perhaps unknown factors as well. I can’t be positive it’s unrelated to one of these. But regardless, it now functions as a self-generating disorder, an error in genetic logic. And since our entanglement with the environment is total, how can I ignore the possibility that not only was an environmental factor involved in my contract with this condition, but that I was complicit by contributing to the creation of that factor?
The dysfunction at the heart of this matter may be considered a corruption of purpose, an aberration, a crossing of elementary signals at an intra-cellular or genetic level. My immune system has turned against me, becoming a termite of my own construction, undermining the foundation of my life. Termites seek life or sustenance without consideration for any other life form or for the integrity of the host. They live as if there’s an endless supply of their prime resource. Does that sound a little too much like the human presence on this planet?
There is no such thing as a termite regulating its appetites to ensure the sustainability of its host. Such an invader would be called a parasite. Given a choice, I would rather be a parasite than a termite. Unlike the virus, the guest in my body is not some alien presence. And my encounter with it is not accidental. It is Being delivering a message to this being. I did not ‘catch’ it at the grocery store. Although, considering the massive overuse of fertilizers, food additives, preservatives, considering nearly everything in most grocery stores is either genetically modified or sprayed by carcinogens, is full of either simple sugar or modified protein, maybe the grocery store has finally caught up with me.
If I were to fully regard this disturbance as an emanation of self rather than as Other, I could regard it as a disturbance in my energy body, a gradual and unconscious—or worse–a careless failure to attend to my personal integrity. Current scientific knowledge may explain some of the mechanisms, but it cannot explain how it came to be and the prevailing treatments are not guaranteed to reverse it.
I have undergone the standard protocols. But again, this doesn’t come close to addressing its true nature. It is buried and then covered over, like ripping out offending weeds in a garden, but not quite extracting the roots, followed by planting new seeds and expecting proper germination. And later, if and when the condition again crawls out of its confinement, we have other measures at the ready to suppress it again. I submitted to a second round of the treatment protocol because blood markers clearly indicated a regression. I gamed out the consequences of failure, the probabilities for dancing again toward the edge of viability, a subtraction from previous estimates of my life expectancy, the extent of interventions necessary to sustain life and the possibility of my body rejecting those interventions, all the way to the ultimate conditions of my demise.
As I delve deeply into the energetic realm, the interactive and potential counter-intentions reflected in successive or persistent manifestations, I am mindful of the different realms of knowledge expressed as its tenacity and my responses to it, continuing to be a drag on my wellbeing. I am reminded of the declarations I made at the time of my original diagnosis, the doorways of consciousness it opened, the fresh awareness, even agency relative to the quiet and not-so-quiet suffering around me every day, the purity of intention necessary to meet this disorder, to re-focus and get on with my life: the continuous inquiry required to unearth what Being is attempting to deliver to me or elicit from me.
I even sensed one of those imperatives was, at least partially, a consuming attention to personal happiness altering processes at the heart of this condition, deep in my bones. Indeed, an imperfect affair of the heart. I’m not fully clear whether the inner messaging is in opposition to this condition or the result of a direct encounter with it. Am I fighting it or becoming friends with myself? Am I reflexively opposing it or becoming more acquainted with its nature? Is this merely the only way I can digest the discord all around me in the world? Have I unwittingly invited this? Most likely, all of the above are true to a degree, as merely approaching the object of inquiry, whether as self or as Other, inevitably changes our view of it. In other words, there’s no such thing as objectivity.
Some of this reflective process is itself a symptom of the human disease, our belief in intellectual primacy, human centrality, the inviolability of science, an infatuation with our reflective capacities, all exercises assuming there isobjectivity. In the ancient world and now as we reactivate and interpret that wisdom, it is said that every culture, to accompany the thinkers and doers, must have its mentors and guides, the ones we call dreamers and mystics, the keepers of gnosis, retainers of the collective raison d’etre, the guardians of tribal history. I envision myself as a product of both, perhaps a flawed hybrid, perhaps entirely presumptuous. But nonetheless, pressing on to my own version of reconciliation.
True reciprocity, or what we could call emergence, is an omni-variant, non-linear dynamic beyond our feeble attempts to determine chronology, origins, directions or destinations.
Reciprocity is a word we could use for the rhizomatic nature of life, or perhaps paradoxically, the social mechanics of earth. We are undeniably entangled in perpetual subliminal conversations and exchange with each other and the natural world. Reciprocity expresses our interdependence, whether conscious or not. The limits of that reciprocal relationship likely extend beyond any rational definition we might rely on. We can see ourselves in a new light, not as a single central species mastering life, but as just one species (the youngest species) sharing a vast web of life. We are learning this the hard way.
Reciprocity, or what might well be called emergence, is an omni-variant, non-linear dynamic beyond our feeble attempts to determine chronology, origins or destinations. Much as we might wish to, or to be tied to the habit of gazing into a rainforest noticing only the layered canopy, the explosion of color, the cacophony of voices or the humidity, we cannot see the whole unless we also notice what is underfoot, buried in the rotting vegetation, the decomposing bodies, the leaf molds, the micro-organisms, the mycelium, the death amidst all that life. In fact, the death is giving rise to life. Without these, there is no rainforest, no reciprocity. Some relationships are visible, some invisible. Everything we are and all we do is part of that entanglement.
In a culture that teaches and so efficiently reinforces separation for so long, we as individuals are reduced to atomized centers of resources to be mined and harvested. We have reached a point at which even our autonomy of thought and action are under threat. It is critical to disengage from the machine of Progress to discover and enact a new way of living closer to the reality of our place in the web of life. We are being called upon by unparalleled change to engage all our faculties, our vision and intuition, the ears and eyes, the sensations we have forgotten to notice and the capacities we use to listen for foreign and fugitive guidance to recover or discover for the first time the basis of our relations with each other and the more-then-human world.
We have to search our histories, poking around in the ashes, into the sources of imagery, before memory, before place, before blood, before nations, to the tribal, to the bones of our original values, to the individual cells of community where life is incubated and regenerated, where our relationships were not things to cultivate, where we watched each other grow and participated in the lives and transitions of everyone we knew. Somewhere in our past, even if only in our genetic memory, we have all known deprivation, displacement and domination. All is embedded in the epigenetics of the human story. More recently we have come to know the soulless commodification of fellow human beings. We have moved beyond some or all of these to be where we are and to carry that knowing with us. That is the common legacy of our time.
The lifestyle I enjoy was built on the contributions of a billion partners, both human and non-human. For 200 years, capitalism has depended on the establishment of unequal relationships, hierarchies of privilege among all those partners. The unraveling we see around us is the legacy of that inequality, including the racism perpetuating them. We have all become complicit along the way, with colonialism and slavery, with those hierarchies of privilege, with entitlement and subjugation. We are the benefactors of exploitation and violence and we live in a nation built upon that violence and which continues to thrive on the suffering of others every day.
The bill is coming due. I have a deep grief, emptiness and sickening feeling as I ponder all of this. But feeling guilty is also a perversion, an inversion of victimhood. It can be immobilizing, but it’s time to put it away and name and claim a different way.
I’ve been in a rage since before the financial collapse of 2008. Well, actually, a good deal longer than that. Perhaps since Bush v Gore. OK, let’s say I was tuned into the truth about Bill Clinton before it became patently obvious: a neoliberal excuse-maker, prevaricator, manipulator, triangulator, blah, blah, blah. There was a reason he was called “slick Willie.” I’m not even mentioning Vietnam, Nixon, Kissinger, and the thieves and sociopaths of the GOP operating ever since the early 80s, 9/11, the Patriot Act, the Iraq War.
Plenty of reasons to be in a rage. But never mind. If I just picked 2008 as a base, it was the bailout and Obama’s (or should I say Eric Holder’s) failure to stand up for the rule of law by never prosecuting or even stepping on the toes of the financial elites. Not one. That was when “too big to fail,” was unveiled. An amazing piece of PR. Now we’re pondering whether humanity is too big to fail. Spoiler alert: nope.
Over the past 10 years, this rage alternately morphed into despair, denial, resignation and dropout about the climate issue as we’ve witnessed one failure after another, one milquetoast policy after another and terminal prevarication. I even had some words for Obama (2012) about his pursuit of America’s endless foreign wars:
your words fall
like an avalanche of dry bones
once resounding against the sky
now empty echoing in our foundations
once the sinuous awakening curvatures
of smothered and gasping values
now falling into an abyss
of conflict and easy temptation
stunted flowers becoming bitter fruit
they fall away from your stunned mouth
knitting together only shame and excuses
for all the death they foretell
I couldn’t have said so at the time, but about 2014, I reached the end of my rope when I went to congress to lobby for a carbon tax. If that’s not enough to pull the rug out from under any remaining spark of inspiration one might have, nothing is. It is and always was Kabuki, steeped in an august veneer of propriety, sanctimonious deliberation, the worship of barnacle-encrusted tradition, self-serving appropriation of mythology and rhetorical sleight of tongue. Dishonesty, thy name is Congress.
For a good while now we’ve been able to name the entire criminal gang, the ones most responsible for our predicament. We know what they knew and when they knew it. We know their tactics. We know who sold out humanity for profit, who has lied, deliberately and expertly clouded the issue and mounted massive misinformation campaigns. We know their henchmen and how they obstructed popular sentiment, cherry-picked and distorted climate data, attacked experts, threw faux experts into our path, sentenced billions of earth’s most vulnerable beings to deluge, displacement, deprivation and death. All expendable. The greatest crimes against humanity, bar none. The Holocaust times 10,000. Species-suicide promulgated by sociopaths. Not one of them has been seen or is ever likely to be seen in the familiar orange jumpsuit.
But then, parallel to the rage, coexisting in strange symbiotic temperance, is my denial, my rage about having to be angry about any of this in the first place and my cynical desire to run in the opposite direction and live a life of careless oblivion—which at times gets the better of me. Resignation. And why shouldn’t it? I’m entitled to do that simply based on the fact that I’ve already lived most of my life, a simple life as it is now. I’m not wealthy enough to afford a real high emission lifestyle. Well, except air travel. There’s that. At the same time, living that smaller footprint life, I remain complicit.
Even though my personal mitigating measures are so miniscule as to not even register on a lifetime scorecard, I fall back into my cultural upbringing commanding me to repair the world (tikkun olam), even though not making any mitigating gestures makes about as much negative difference as any positive difference I could measure by making such gestures. Perhaps these are the terms of a new post-activism. But post-activism cannot make promises. It can only expand to define the problem. And even that is a risky proposition. The dilemma lingers—believing we can individually make a difference, which allows us to feel good–without really making any real difference whatsoever?
Which brings me closer to the present moment. Having realized some years ago we are heading toward, or have already passed, critical tipping points guaranteeing the worst climate impacts and having exhausted my taste for barking up the same old trees and being painfully aware, despite all the promise of zero-emission technology (which was not catching up to fossil fuels fast enough until the appearance of COVID), of the nature and power of the fossil fuel lobby and the sociopaths of Wall Street driving the economic machine inexorably killing us, I stumbled upon Deep Adaptation, which doesn’t quibble about our remaining chances to throw any serious wrenches into the gears of Business As Usual or place false hope in persuasion by rational argument.
Instead, Deep Adaptation names the Anthropocene as already an era of failure, a colossal crashing to earth. It could also be named the era of The Planet Striking Back. Unfortunately, our dithering miscalculations now threaten human viability. On some world which remains foreign to me, it may suffice to burrow deeper into Buddhist practice to discover non-confrontational or non-aggressive ways to address these issues, and they may well exist, but most of the time I lean more toward channeling rage into creative pursuits–and this is not a time to drop out. Fortunately, a significant cadre separating itself from the homo sapiens death cult realizes the only sensible response to climate impacts we’ve been failing to forestall for 40 years is by utterly re-shaping the ethos of human presence.
Not that Deep Adaptation is a pioneering idea in this respect. There are collapse-aware people all over the world, still massively outnumbered by the oblivious, but nevertheless creating new institutions, small and large-scale adaptive and resilient communities everywhere and propagating new thought. Technology provides the means to accelerate these ideas as never before. Unfortunately, it also provides the same benefit to counter-narratives. But while those local actions and personal transformative ideologies are taking hold, the mass resistance and uprising necessary to slow down the carbon emission juggernaut had never fully made itself known until the twin conditions of the pandemic and mass resistance to systemic racism became the means to realize in a new way how one condition is all conditions and that justice for some cannot be separated from justice for all.
Rather than an invading alien, Covid-19 has proved to be the monster under the bed, a goblin from our past and a message from the future, humanity’s zombie rejected Other. We are impossibly entangled with the biological world, having corrupted ecological codes to such a degree the system is coming back upon us. Covid has put us on pause, mirroring our failure, hubris, ignorance, arrogance and the inequality on which they all depend. And how do we respond? Reflexively, automatically, identically to the medical approach, pitting humans against all invasive organisms, the easy way, the only way we know: War! Demanding a reinforcement of human centrality and control.
‘All we know’ is a perfect example of how our responses to problems perpetuate the problem: War against the virus (social distancing and other measures) followed by a popular uprising against the measures taken to defeat the virus. To view the virus in this way is bring us even closer to the next pandemic…or at least a perpetuation of this one. We have no idea how to do with-nessing, stepping all the way back from our imagined control and being with, quietly enough, even if only for a moment, to realize we are the source of our deepening agonies and that the conventional model of responding is only making things worse. These are moments when resignation overtakes me.
There can be no real distinction between the geological phenomenon we’re promulgating and the broad socio-political drama unfolding daily. We have become the monster under our own bed.
I am compelled to mention the Anthropocene in the very first sentence of this little essay. It may not generate the most inspiring response, but it does crystallize the zeitgeist. This so-called era of peak hubris, of humans becoming a geological force, could perhaps be more accurately understood as earth giving birth to its own destroyer. There can be no real distinction between the geological phenomenon we’re promulgating and the broad socio-political drama unfolding daily. We have become the monster under our own bed.
In a certain sector of Buddhist philosophy, there are six realms (or dominant states) of being. The most extreme is a destructive and insular consciousness called hell beings. Even more than the animal realm or the hungry ghosts, their actions are crude, tribal, instinctual and entitled, in extreme cases arising from a profound emotional poverty and driven by an unrelenting anger and perpetual thirst for validation and satisfaction. No effort—or capacity—exists to navigate a world full of threatening uncertainties and unknowns.
Hell beings are most likely to be reactive and aggressive, most likely to resort to lies and violence if they cannot get their way. They will be offended and belligerent in the presence of symbols reminding them of what they most despise: generosity, patience, tolerance, mutual dependency and respect, any act of consideration for others except their own tribe. In the current case, they comfort themselves with a self-serving mix of spiritual materialism, ego, righteousness and religious dogma.
What we witnessed in Washington, DC on January 6 were hell beings driven not only by the drumbeat of the President’s lies, but also, let’s be honest, by a decades-long counterinsurgency against the New Deal, the middle class, organized labor, the flattening of the income curve and a tax system that rewarded labor instead of wealth. The counterinsurgency started with Reagan and has since driven a gradual starvation of government services, wage-stagnation, a massive upward transfer of wealth, the cynical global ‘race to the bottom,’ hollowing out the domestic industrial base, attacks on voting rights, regressive taxation, undermining the social safety net, attacks on labor unions, pensions and other benefits, the gig economy, attacks on public education and much more. Basically, the shredding of the American Dream: the neoliberal ‘austerity’ economy.
Before you assume I’m just finger-pointing and complaining about them from my lofty perch of meditative equipoise, let me say that those of us on this side of the issue ought to take a serious look in the mirror before we settle back into our cozy intellectual caves, because every realm of being in the Mahayana is equally delusional, just not all in the same way. It will take all of us to craft a viable future out of this fragile moment. No complacency allowed. No one can claim immunity to this cannibalistic virus.
Those of us to the left of hell beings embody the sin of pride and a presumed higher (dismissive) calling. We are driven by our own sophisticated brand of confusion, a hunger for achievement and peak experience. Most of us have the good fortune of education, material security, employment and the prospect of a personally satisfying future, even within the general unraveling underway. But we are also blinded by our own narrow views, our own brand of madness: we may have escaped the forces eroding the living standard of the many, but we are directly culpable for taking advantage of it. We enjoy comforts derived from ecological devastation and economic oppression. Most of us are self-satisfied and just as prone to self-righteousness as the Christian soldiers marching off to war.
So, let’s be clear. Despite the blanket of opportunistic lies exploiting and driving hell beings, those of us in the ‘reality-based’ community are driven by our own particular forms of short-sighted delusion which include blindness to our common condition with the hell beings.
The counterinsurgency, recruiting from legions of disillusioned and dispossessed, is now inching toward its fascist apotheosis. While exploiting and unleashing America’s deep current of virulent racism, the oldest play in the fascist playbook, a post-truth politics has cleaved the nation. The most ardent followers live in a universe more of wishful thinking than fact. For them, values are whatever Trump/Mercer/Sinclair/Newsmax/Fox says they are. Permanent war is coming home. And for the plutocrats, race war is immensely preferable to class war.
For decades, we’ve been moving ever deeper into a polarized wasteland of conflicting values…or no values at all. Covid-19 has been highlighting some of these issues, but in the US, the primary battleground pits federal aimlessness, incompetence and outright cruelty, driven by an ethical monoculture worshipping personal sovereignty without responsibility, willing to sacrifice the benefit of the many for the one, against an emerging ethical permaculture in which our relations derive from diverse ecologies, co-exist in nourishing mutuality, individual and social permeability and a deconstruction of divisive binaries.
We are testing the proposition that authentic human development must include a commitment beyond the personal. And vice versa, government is the reciprocation of a collective commitment to unlocking and benefiting the potential of the one. By this measure, social, spiritual and economic development in America is stunted, even regressing. Inter-being and inter-beauty are our most worthy objectives. But for now, waking up from our own version of a destructive and self-defeating virus, we find ourselves locked in combat with those whose sole objective is to protect and enhance enclaves of personal and group sovereignty at the expense of the many…and the one.
We’ve been flirting quite seriously for the past four years with the manufacture of consent for a domestic war. If we don’t confront and upset that narrative, redefine subjective and objective responsibility (restoring the rule of law) and demonstrate how personal and collective sovereignty can enhance each other, and quickly, not by rhetoric but by creative policy and organic initiatives at every scale, we most certainly will fall into a new and predictable barbarism.
After yesterday, I’m inclined to reorganize the atoms of Donald Trump, to return them to their original form as earth, composting his nutrients, if there were any, to regenerate new beginnings? Would that be part of the natural order of things?
Let’s take a short drive through the pedagogy of destruction.
Death is the natural order of things. We’re not so sure about the recycling of consciousness, but the body always meets its end. The natural order rightly includes the redistribution of the energies represented as a body returning to its origin. But typically, we not only remain aloof from death, but then we embalm, preserve and isolate bodies from their rightful place as earth. If this isn’t the most extreme symbol of a bizarre attachment to life and detachment from death, I don’t know what is.
Sentience terminates. Everything is recycled. Every configuration of life is returned to earth in a reorganized form. We might even say there’s really no such thing as death, only a redistribution of the atoms.
After yesterday, I’m inclined to reorganize the atoms of Donald Trump, to return them to their original form as earth, composting his nutrients, if there were any, to regenerate new beginnings. Would that be part of the natural order of things? Might I say I was conducting a controlled burn? Preserving something much larger by selective destruction? Would it be OK to, you know, push the inevitable impermanence of DJT, if I received permission from Gaia herself?
My belly is aroused, my heart becomes full, the breath in me expands at the contemplation of this sacred venture and ancient voices and forces from the borderlands of consciousness descend upon my crown to inform and align my internal energies to this task. The earth rumbles, the rivers tumble and the mountains rejoice.
I could harness the powers of earth herself to disperse the alien energies of Donald Trump, to terminate the queen-alien inspiring and giving life to creatures now invading and taking over the bodies and minds of the community of life, sucking as much of it as possible into a vortex of slow demise, driving destruction not as parasites in symbiosis, in mutuality with the host, allowing each other to live, but more like termites or soldier ants inexorably destroying their own home, only to move on to another.
As an alternative view, there is James Baldwin, who wrote in his book, The Fire Next Time, that those who hate cling to their hate out of desperation to avoid feeling what will replace it. When hate is gone, the only thing left is pain. And for decades, sociopathic and opportunistic politicians have been stoking that hate to avoid addressing the consequences of their own policies from rising to the surface.
But for now, yes, Trump is the queen of the soldier ants. Except in this case, there’s no other home awaiting him or his organized battalions after he finishes with this one.
The Trolley Problem is a well-known classic (and sadistic) psychology experiment presenting a dilemma. Assume there is a trolly running out of control with no possibility of being stopped. It is heading for a switching point at which it may continue on one of two tracks. On one track a single person is tied down. On the alternate track there are five people tied down to the track. You are the switchman. You can decide which track the trolly will take.
Assuming death will surely ensue, which track do you choose? We can have a long and complicated conversation about the judgment required in this case by providing details about exactly who is on the tracks. That conversation can take us on a circuitous path to making a difficult but relatively ethical choice. We could conjure circumstances to justify choosing either track. We might sacrifice the one for the benefit of the many. Likewise, we might sacrifice the many for the benefit of the few, or even the one.
The trolley is our lives, our nation, the earth itself. Suppose Donald Trump, the alien queen soldier ant, is tied to one of these tracks. He is, after all, the one who has reliably and consistently made the choice to benefit the one at the expense of the many. Now, you have the choice to save the larger community by sacrificing the leader of this invasive species. Could this act be considered part of the natural order, an ecosystem restoring itself to homeostasis?
What wisdom might emerge? What clarity might suddenly awaken? What possibilities might appear upon shutting forever the eyes of this force of death, corruption and dismemberment of the global body politic, rearranging his atoms and retuning them to the earth? If I had the choice, I know which track that train would take. What about you?
When I am hauled before the court to answer for this act of accelerating the natural order, what would be my defense? What could I claim to be restoring? Is this merely an elaborate rationalization for murder or a revelation of how the natural order really operates?
Isn’t murder without prejudice a common occurrence in the natural world every second of every day? Is humanity a part of that natural order or is we not? Would ending oppression, exploitation, incarceration, marginalization and other casual mayhems visited upon innocents, not to mention the biosphere, be sufficient justification for enacting a natural regime of normal murder? Or does my prejudice change everything? What is the moral choice here?
On what grounds do we even call the natural order violent, anyway? How anthropocentic is that!? Could it even be said that I killed him if his stream of consciousness was not destroyed, but instead lives on in the memory of his legions of soldier ants? On what basis could any court—imagining itself superior to and separate from Natural Order– even presume to be an arbiter of what constitutes natural?
Could religious freedom be my defense? Yes! My defense would be that I was performing a religious ritual, a sacred act of merciful reconciliation upon the land, a revival ceremony of restorative justice. Yes, that would be my defense—religious freedom! Take that, Mike pence! Take that, you wedding bakers! I was directed influenced by the heart of Gaia. Mine is an act of creative destruction. I am a wrathful priest of restoration, death’s messenger, guided by the invincible goddesses of love, generosity and faith, carefully choosing my prey on behalf of the great ecosystem and for the benefit of all beings. Yeah! That’s what I am!
At the heart of extremist Christianity is an absolutist belief that all events are choreographed by the Hand of God. So it’s not a stretch to go from believing in God’s Plan to the belief in intentional coordination of a Hidden Hand behind phenomena that don’t conform to one’s view of God’s Plan.
Ted Cruz and eleven other senators plan to object to the electoral vote count on January 6 when Congress convenes to certify the election of Joe Biden. Like Josh Hawley of Missouri, they are lying about the election and are declaring a need for a commission to review vote counts in at least six states. The fact that they have no evidence to support such an inquiry and the fact that it’s a political stunt doomed to fail has no bearing on their intentions. But then, why should it, since this sort of Kabuki has been the go-to strategy of Republicans ever since the Clinton administration. The question is, will the persistent declaration of fraud in the face of 60 failed lawsuits and zero evidence presented in court be enough to recruit further media attention and establish a patina of plausibility through this display of spaghetti-throwing?
As we well know, an increasingly outrageous deluge of conspiracy theories has accompanied the post-election rantings of MAGA world. There is a curious connection between the exercise of faith among religious conservatives and the rise of conspiracy theories and the explosion of believers in them. Think about it. At the heart of extremist Christianity is an absolute belief that all events are choreographed by the Hand of God. So it’s not a stretch to go from believing in God’s Plan to the belief in the intentional coordination of a Hidden Hand behind phenomena that obstruct God’s Plan. As they would have it, a Supreme Being is in control. Unlike the secular crowd who insist on boring ever more deeply into events to discover a natural interdependence which can then be manipulated by humans, to religious conservatives it is God alone placing all positive and negative events before us. It’s out of our hands. Science is a useless distraction.
Some events, however, are beyond the pale, so negative, born of such evil design they could only be attributed to the devil–such as Biden winning the election. The presumption of a Hidden Hand producing negative events contrary to God’s agenda for Christian control of America and the world is not new. There’s a convenient confluence between hammering away at the Big Lie and the operating principle of the Hidden Hand. We could go back to the suicide of Vince Foster, which brought endless hours of right-wing talk radio promoting the conspiracy theory that Foster was murdered and the Clintons were behind it. More recently, the Seth Rich murder was turned into another case of the Hidden Hand. The attack on the American Embassy in Benghazi was another fruitful opportunity for the GOP to ferret out the Hidden Hand of Hilary Clinton, even though multiple investigations could not wring any truth from the Big Lie that it was all Hilary’s fault. The same thing happened with Hilary’s emails. Republicans were able to recruit the invaluable assistance of the NYT late in the 2016 campaign to promote the narrative that Hilary’s Hand was behind security breaches of her email server.
Today, the symbiosis between Trump and the Christian right has amplified conspiracy theories to extreme levels. His natural and twisted character-based inclination, which has nothing to do with faith, to blame all failures, shortcomings or inadequacies on someone else, his incessant and deeply held narcissist (and atheistic) belief in his own infallibility provide a natural affinity to the zero-sum religious universe of opposing forces in which God and the Devil are in an apocalyptic gladiatorial embrace. And better yet, Trump thirsts for combat with the secular crowd.
In an attempt to make sense of wild and unpredictable events beyond normal control or expectation, to heal the profoundly painful prospect of having to live with such an incomprehensible setback, the unanticipated outcome must be declared the work of dark forces. The extremity of any actual conspiracy theory is a reflection of the presumed level of control preceding the negative event, which is a direct affront to the White God Himself. God was, after all, on their side. How could He have failed?? What evil could possibly have upended His Plan? Hugo Chavez working with Maduro, China, Dominion Voting Systems, the Chief Justice of the USSC and the pedophile Democrats to change the vote counts? That must be it. Sure.
The fact that there were 71 million people signing up for this program is not a count of the religious right who are willing to foment violent overthrow of the Constitution. But it is an account of the gullibility and the effect of a core group who have been masterful at flouting and dismissing secular reality and scientific materialism, which is their true long-term objective. To stand before this well-funded, skilled and relentless march of fascist Christian Nationalism armed only with the weapons of logic and science will never be enough. Yet these are the weapons Democrats continue to deploy.
What we need most now is the determination to prosecute, starting with Hair Fuhrer. Wield all the legal tools at hand to meet and name sedition, obstruction, extortion, child abuse, negligent homicide, money laundering, lying, tax evasion and bribery. And baby, it’s a target-rich environment.
It is so painful that now, given the helplessness of it all, whatever humor there may once have been in the infinite variety of human foibles is subsumed by the poignancy and terror, the desperation and bewildered hatred at the heart of mass delusion.
One of the things meditation can be is a discovery of what about us doesn’t change and releasing identification with everything else, freeing oneself of all obstacles to becoming anything other than vast space. This means dis-identifying with form: sensation, feeling, structure, any imperatives including body, time, desires, mental journeys, memory, gender…even meditation itself. For me, that especially includes impatience. To whatever degree I may approach such a condition, the practice becomes non-meditation. Non-meditation is the essence of Dzogchen.
Gazing is an auxiliary practice of expansion, the elimination of distraction and finding what I have come to call integrity. Exploring what integrity means is to approach wholeness not only mentally, but also to explore its physical components. Coming into full stature in the practice of gazing is to embody a physical architecture of integrity, which is not separate from the integrity of mind. Opening to compassion is the point. Approaching integrity of the body is to create space for breath, rising into a connecting and expansive heart-space, expanding into fullness.
Premature dis-identification with feeling or ignoring the presence of unresolved conflict (by-passing) will always get in the way of the integrity we seek. The presence of strong feelings will hinder the longer-term clarification process. There are plenty of ways to work with feeling, but however one addresses that process during or in post-meditation, it will benefit quality of life and practice. Ignoring incomplete emotional clearing will obstruct the benefits of time spent in practice. Not that practice must be interrupted or delayed, just that a short and long-term emotional clearing process belongs as a part of practice. Either succumbing to by-passing or imagining the emotional work ceases at some point is a form of delusion and will undermine our capacity to inhabit our full stature and reap the benefits of sustained and careful attention to the full expression of integrity.
Assuming the emotional and physical architecture of integrity becomes a natural platform and a capacity to cultivate compassion, from which we may even sense the massive field of human karma, from those closest to us to the most remote strangers. Becoming permeable to and connecting with karma that is not our own, to witness and hold it without being affected or thrown off balance, remaining on one’s perch, as it were, is only sustainable if it’s based on authentic compassion, which is itself an intrinsic quality of integrity. This is the achitecture of freedom.
From this stance, Bodhicitta and Compassion become identical. They can only come from full integrity anyway. Not immobile or rigid, merely steadfast. From this platform of integrity, compassion and bodhicitta become one as they are expressions of the same thing: the mind of enlightenment.
Gazing into the ocean of human karma, the delusions overtaking a large portion of humanity become manifestly clear. In the grip of delusion, so many are stuck, trapped in an uninterrupted and tortuous cycle of wandering, being whiplashed back and forth between the first two Noble Truths, the truth of suffering and the root of suffering. It is so painful that now, given the helplessness of it all, whatever humor there may once have been in the infinite variety of human foibles is subsumed by the poignancy and terror, the desperation and bewildering hatred at the heart of mass delusion.
Take Trump himself for a moment. His delusion has always been apparent. And if one could momentarily set aside the wreckage left by his personal delusion, the naked and lost nature of this profoundly damaged being, he could even become an object of pity. But at some point, not only have his delusional transgressions become criminal as the relative legal world would define them, but he has dragged many millions into his orbit of self-serving chaos. How is this possible?
I think of Trump followers as those whose lives were already being lived at the edge of delusion. Inside their anxiety, resentment, victimhood and self-pity was a simmering anger with no socially sanctioned outlet. For Trump himself, seeing none of the familiar limits that most others see, the outlet has always been to push the envelope of propriety with a combination of entitlement and victimhood perpetually skirting the edges of lawlessness. Why, after all, shouldn’t he have whatever he wants? And anyway, who’s going to stop him? Who has the nerve to stand up against his audacity?
The American Dream has not been working for his people. For them, it crashed long ago. It was being systematically undermined by the plutocrats, bankers, politicians on the take, CEOs and various other capitalists (AKA sociopaths) in positions of authority. Those whom I regard as deeply lost in this cycle of hunger, resentment and rage were ready for the plucking. Yes, they’ve been exploited and played by the relentless and sophisticated divisive messaging and legislative agenda of the Republican Party for decades while simultaneously being misunderstood and abandoned by the Democrats. All it took was certainty, a certain braggadocio, someone who not only gave voice to their seething anger but who resonated with and could embody their own simplistic, zero-sum view.
From a distance, it’s all profoundly painful. That doesn’t mean I forgive or appease them or don’t resist them, because what they’re doing is trying to draw everyone else into their world while also destroying any alternative to their view, while Trump plants his delusions deeper into their receptive brains, by any means necessary. They cannot be permitted to succeed. But at the same time, the rest of us have to create a world that demonstrates the misguided futility of their quest.
The Leftist reality is more nuanced, less black and white. Of course, it is. And that’s why it’s been under attack for so long. The world view of the Left could never appeal to or alter the mass delusion of Trump world. It’s not selfish enough. There’s even speculation now that direct economic benefits will not break through the Trumpian hive-mind. It’s not a zero-sum vision. What passes for the inner sanctums of the Democratic Party in America may be equally deluded with some of its own toxic certainties, confusion about whiteness, their corporate view. And also similar to the right-wing is their steadfast belief that they are absolutely not deluded. Their submission to neocolonial capitalism is more subtle. The forms of grasping and exploitation are less overt, remaining in constant tension with forces of generosity and mutual dependence. In Trump world, no such tensions exist.
Referring back to personal practice, just because of what it already is, I’m being as deliberate as possible about dissolving every boundary between self and not-self, between external and internal. For brief moments I may skirt the edges of non-duality. In other words, leaping over physicality or presence into what is nothing but space, softening materiality, feels like a recapitulation of the dissolution of death itself. In fact, every instruction, every sitting, every incremental step toward realizing self-knowing Awareness is a practice for the end of life. Every sitting is an encounter with my own death as if my sole concern is noticing the Nature of Mind, noticing all phenomena as the natural emanations of Mind, empty in nature.
This is precisely a rehearsal for the bardo experience. This is the space of death, the journey through the bardos, of being finely tuned to the signs and signals of that journey, not skipping over or impulsively mis-interpreting anything, not being distracted, frightened, grasping, descending into desire, mentally chasing after every shiny object nor being afraid of any appearance that may arise. This is also a metaphor of this American moment. We are traversing the bardos, facing the conditions of our death and next life, defining the terms of a national rebirth.
The act of accessing the three kayas of Vajrayana, empty essence, lucidity and compassionate energy, realizing their inseparability, is also the personal journey into the three bardos happening every time your ass hits the cushion. Well, America’s ass is on the cushion. Our national karma and transition are playing out daily before our eyes. We’re being bombarded by demons, black arts, wrathful deities, apparitions, deniers and false prophets, the viral hallucinations of Trumpism dressed up as public discourse. But let us not be fooled. Let us remain focused and steadfast in our integrity, determined to remain in our dignity and full stature.
One important question continues to poke its nose into my space. We live within the machine, the zombie machine defined by and driven by late-stage capitalism, fundamentalism and whiteness determined to emerge triumphant and unscarred from the death throes of the Enlightenment. The machine has always offered the illusion of control. We may be able to personally or even in ephemeral enclaves or in our brief sitting time reject the machine, believing we can temporarily overcome its influence or live (or imagine we are living) outside its control and we may thoroughly reject the illusion of control. But if we are not also dismantling the machine, pointing out delusion, naming its impotence and offering an alternative, what are we doing? Practicing for our death while watching America meet its demons in this transitional time while standing for the terms of our rebirth is the only game in town.
Spontaneous Presence 