Trump On The Tracks

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!

The Hidden Hand

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.

Delusion

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.

The Awakened Embodied Self

This is the imperative of evolving spirituality, realizing Sufism’s unity of fanaa and baqaa & of Buddhism’s Two Truths, to be here and everywhere at all times, to simultaneously be emptiness and embodiment.

Anyone inquiring into the meaning and process of spiritual awakening undoubtedly encounters conflicting ideas about consciousness. Where does “I” come from and where does “I” reside? Western psychology and religion are deeply concerned with defining and preserving the Self as a separate and fixed entity with (or in) an eternal soul, while eastern religions deny any absolute reality of a separate identity. What’s a seeker to do?

When sitting to meditate, one of the first instructions we receive is to become aware of the living process. In some traditions, we are guided to bring attention to the breath and gradually to the physical sensations that come and go from moment to moment. We can dwell on these sensations for extended periods, but an essential practice of meditation is to focus on one thing while developing the capacity to notice everything else that arises in the background. 

A second level of this process is to notice how—and how easily–our attention is distracted from the singular focus we started with. This noticing and the repeated return to the original point of attention is the development of presence. A third iteration of attention is to notice the different feelings that arise in the course of being distracted and returning to our original intention. Do we have judgments about ourselves for leaving? Do we have expectations about how we return and how long we ‘should’ be able to maintain the original state? Are we trying to achieve something?

A fourth iteration might be to ask who (or what) is the one meditating and who is the one presumably not meditating while being distracted. In asking these questions, one enters the territory of distinguishing between Self and Not-self, the psychological (ego) self and the (super-ego) witness. From here it’s a short linguistic shift in attention to a witness that is itself a non-entity. In fact, unwinding this thread of consciousness to its logical conclusion would require we investigate who is witnessing the witness, realizing that a further iteration of witness arises as soon as we establish an awareness of the immediate one. Tracing the witness all the way back to its origins is what, according to Robert Thurman, Buddha himself did on the way to his own awakening.

What is found when we go ever deeper into the layered constructs of cognitive awareness? Nothing? No self? In Buddhism, what is found at the root of the ever-elusive identification of the witness, is emptiness. Emptiness completely undermines any notion that there’s objective existence of anything. The appearance of everything is dependent on something else, a precedent. When investigating the existence of the precedent, one inevitably realizes there is no single independent source of anything.

We also create otherness internally in relation to “self” when we identify with unworthiness. We are also confused about who or what is the Self—is it a container of all the internal voices we may hear at any given moment? Is it a core truth, an identity around which all these voices orbit incessantly? If the former, then who is the witness, the part to whom critics address their assessment, their directives and imperatives?  If the latter, then what is their true role and value?

God is an infinite sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.  

 —The Book of the Twenty-four Philosophers (12thC)

Reducing the complexity of the human psyche to a bit of spiritual geometry casts some light on the concept of Self, defined by behavioral therapy, which, unlike an entity with no fixed center and no boundary, implies a more actively engaged and focused energy. Self has been described as the equivalent of ‘flow,’ a ‘sense of deep concentration without distracting thought, a lack of concern with reward; confidence, mastery and well-being.’ Sounds just like being embodied in the moment.

The term “self-leadership,” carries connotations of action, forethought and calculation. But wait. Wasn’t self just described as being completely in the moment, merging with phenomena without analytical preconception–or planning? What does the term “leadership” mean? Is the self still? Is it in motion? Is it an expansive boundary-less playful state of mindfulness? Or is it a kind of executive identifying and bringing various voices and intentions to heel, establishing and re-drawing its boundaries to expand its domain of influence, micro-surgically distinguishing itself from the masks of persistent sub-personalities?

What is the source of its energies? Is it a still point distinct from the surrounding disharmony? Or is it a primary organizing principle–a magnetic north, for a being negotiating its way through Being?  Is it even distinct from “I” at all? These questions are addressed by suggesting it is not a matter of determining whether self is an active center or an expansive, more passive presence. Like light, self is neither wave nor particle, but both, or either one, like the famous double-slit experiment of 1801, depending on who is looking and when, constantly transmuting from one to the other depending on the conditions of the moment. 

According to Coleman Barks, the Arabic words fanaa and baqaa are used by Sufis to describe the intersection of the human with the divine, a ‘constant and profound interplay full of paradox and movement, breathing in and out of every soul.’ These are seemingly opposing forces; or perhaps more accurately, the yin and yang of consciousness, the particle and wave of light; forces influencing our sense of connection to ourselves, to each other and all that is. 

Fanaa is the impulse to surrender, allowing oneself to become ‘annihilated, as if disintegrating into a vast magnificent sky, dying in order to become one with the infinite.’ Not unlike non-dual presence, the extinction of self, fanaa is the ultimate expansion, the dissolution of every boundary, every circumference. Mind-lessness. Paradoxically, this is also the highest form of concentration at the pinnacle of Buddhist ati-yoga, The Great Perfection itself. This is the ultimate devotion, realizing the truth of emptiness.

Baqaa, on the other hand, literally means permanency or embodiment. Perhaps the word discipline more precisely approaches its practical expression; the intention to be here, as opposed to being everywhere else but here. Not dissolving or shrinking from the mundane, but exploring its deepest nature, focusing one’s energies completely in the service of being exactly what we are. ‘Baqaa is the relative truth of appearance, the undeniable materiality of existence. Instead of melting into that whole sky, one aspires to nothing more than becoming one of the stars in it, experiencing the nature of one’s unique place in the sky’ or one’s place here on earth. 

True baqaa is also the fruit of a lifetime of devotion. This is where the attributes of self fully rise in dignity and durability. This is the self of Richard Schwartz’s familiar C-words of Internal Family Systems (confidence, creativity, calm, curiosity, compassion, clarity, confidence, courage) the self that becomes a mirror of clarity and purpose in every act, connected to and relating from its own ever evolving essence. Baqaa is the realization and containment of a refined skill. The pinnacle of progress on the incremental spiritual path.

The more discipline we exercise in discovering self and the more time we spend there, the closer we come to the invitations of fanaa, the ability to rest in our own essence, and increasingly to connect to the essence in others as well. And even beyond that, to the essence of all that is. Full realization.

We become, as Barks says, “the dreamer streaming into the loving nowhere of night.” This Self, the one that can live simultaneously in both fanaa and baqaa, is the self that is both particle and wave, both completely here and simultaneously nowhere, constantly transmuting appearance and emptiness into a continuously shifting torus of space. At the pinnacle of Tibetan ati-yoga practice, this is The Great Perfection, living beyond both samsara and nirvana, dissolving the Two Truths into One. This is not a Self that cannot be found, merely one which is not fixed, which cannot be pinned to either the relative or absolute. More by choice than by accident, one flows back and forth, as Barks puts it, between “visionary radiance” and the “level calm of ordinary sight.” 

These are the terms of awakening arising from the Sufi mystical tradition of Islam. This is the imperative of evolving spirituality, to realize the unity of Buddhism’s Two Truths, to be here and everywhere at all times, to simultaneously be emptiness and embodiment, to live in single-pointed awareness/aliveness within vast and timeless space, or at least available to transmute one’s capacities to the requirements of the moment, to seek both refuge in the specific and in the general, to slip the bondage, delusion and suffering of dualistic mind…and to live from a bottomless and source-less joy at any moment.

The Root of Happiness

Bodhicitta is a way of connecting to other lives, of saying we are nothing without that connection and that our connection to each other is deeper than we can ever truly know.

Bodhicitta is a way of connecting to other lives, of saying we are nothing without that connection and that our connection to each other is deeper than we can ever truly know.

Four years ago, we were suddenly dropped into an alien landscape, akin to the toxic atmosphere of an alien metropolis. All plans, intentions, contemplations, associations and actions were transposed into the era of Trump.  Was this a dream, or was I waking into a nightmare?  The landscape was familiar, but somehow different, no longer safe. Everything, values, lifestyle, morality and an ever-fragile peace, balanced on a knife-edge.

I went through the motions of normalcy, repeating familiar patterns of activity. Yet nothing was familiar anymore. Everything seemed to require a little more intention, a little more clarity to become real. Insofar as I could become absorbed, focusing on something compelling or becoming temporarily lost, I was happy. But upon emergence from that condition, drifting back to the larger awareness, I was reminded in the next breath of a less stable and more threatening world, not merely in a physical sense, but in a deep moral sense. As we know, that condition has gotten much worse beyond whatever I might have imagined four years ago. Grief remains just below the surface. Happiness–true equanimity–has become much more elusive. 

There are those who would surely have said then, “Welcome to reality, dude!” As if not much had really changed. After all, we’d been on this trajectory toward dissolution for a long time, they might say. And I would have agreed. But no, with the election of Trump, dissolution went geometric. Ever since, we have amplified the suffering of the many for the sake of the happiness of a few. The great irony of that electoral decision made by so many is the belief that they would be spared the consequences of the agenda they had just endorsed with their vote.

Which brings me to ponder happiness itself. We might well ask what that was or how those who regarded Trump as a threat multiplier of unknown proportion would know it when they saw it. In truth, however, when it comes to happiness, all of us fall into the same category. Those who voted for Trump would have been mostly unhappy for a long time (never mind how they might have defined happiness), though if I ever suspected they might have seen that Trump could not (nor was he inclined to) resurrect the American Dream for them in the way they most desired or believed was possible. Or, if he had made a serious attempt, it would have come at great cost to the cohesion of the nation (as it is now), not to mention our international stature, all of which happened anyway.

More precisely, I think about how I think about happiness–because the answer to that question has a lot to do with whether I am happy or not. The intention to be happy is innate to many decisions every day; but what does happiness now mean as the era of Trump has taken so many significant and profoundly disturbing turns? We’d better know what it is, because we’re gonna have to work harder for it.

Dharma regards everyday happiness as transient since it’s entirely based on a dualistic view. Happiness is defined as the absence of suffering, but for there to be happiness at all, there must be something we call suffering. Happiness may be a benefit we wish for others by our aspiration and our action.  We may wish everyday happiness for everyone, as if the satisfaction of having “enough” is sufficient, even if it’s temporary. Beyond that, we wish for a release from the cyclic behaviors that drive us to seek happiness in ways that are not satisfying…or may even damaging to ourselves or others.

The metaphysical perch from which we view happiness is bodhicitta, a comprehensive compassionate view. We want to enjoy the relative happiness that flows from realizing the Four Noble Truths: the universality of suffering and the fact that there is a (Eightfold) path through suffering. We extend that wish to those who are experiencing the suffering of pain and the suffering of change. We extend these wishes to those closest to us and can also extend it to everyone in general.

Beyond our immediate circle, there are those to whom we do not feel close. We may feel neutral or even indifferent, but we can extend a wish for happiness to them. There are still others with whom we have a negative history and residual negative emotion. It’s more complicated to erase negative emotions completely, to extend a genuine wish of happiness to such a person because negative feelings don’t just dissolve upon request.

To transform negative emotions into unequivocal, refreshing, clear and unlimited positive regard is not trivial. Not is it an act of mere will. It is a deliberative process, sometimes a sharp reality check requiring that we go beyond what we merely wish to be true to true forgiveness and compassion– for ourselves as well as for another. At the heart of those judgments about others, I am likely to find a judgment about myself, which may itself arise from a painful incident buried in the past. It is only in looking at the origins of those judgments, at the emotional anchors and core beliefs that hold them, that they can be seen for what they so often are: self-cherishing stories, baseless assumptions, limited beliefs. 

I’ve practiced this with romantic partners, family members, a former spouse, a former supervisor, co-workers and even former friends. Admitting the deep attachment we have to our judgments about others is often slow and careful (not to mention uncomfortable) work, especially if we believe we have been personally wronged. But working through the resentment or anger to an authentic clarity is possible.

We can form honest intentions about others that we disliked at one time. Yet some measure of animus might creep back. One might manage an authentic wish for a moment but find it difficult to remain in that clarity for an extended period. It’s unsettling to realize that if I was standing in front of someone I disliked, transmitting an honest wish for their happiness, they might get the idea that I liked them.  Kinda like the way the Dalai Lama refers to the Chinese: my friend, the enemy. Could I do that face to face with a Trump supporter, a racist neo-Nazi?  They might think we could be friends, which would present even more challenging circumstances. With certain people, I’m not so sure I could tolerate that. We simply resist letting go of the hardened ways we see certain people. This gets tricky, doesn’t it? But neither does it mean I have to agree with or condone the views of any random Trump supporter.

Shantideva famously said that there is no such thing as happiness in samsara. He was referring to a previous statement he made about happiness in which he declared that the only true happiness derives from completely renouncing self-cherishing. Any wish for happiness or action toward happiness based on self-cherishing (What about ME??) would be dishonest, illusory and ultimately futile. Everyday happiness is a product of causes and conditions, meaning it is bound by time and therefore impermanent. Shantideva is saying that any such happiness is not true happiness. From the absolute perspective, anything that arises from causes and conditions has no intrinsic reality. No matter how much we avoid suffering and no matter how successful we are, the entire charade is a product of the fundamental mistake of believing in the existence of our separate identity. Removing ourselves from that view, suddenly neither happiness nor suffering have ever existed.

Of course, this is an idea that runs directly counter to our sensory experience. But again, neither our perceptions nor emotions have ever had independent (permanent) existence. Yet, neither are they non-existent! We are left with a perfectly clear choice to continue cultivating the bodhicitta of compassion that doesn’t take sides–which is to say, no matter how we voted, we are all equal in our lifelong dance with suffering and change.

If letting go of judgments seems difficult, it’s likely because those judgments reinforce our sense of a separate identity There is no need to deny the reality of our feelings and emotions so long as we don’t get hung up believing that there is any true substance to them…or, for that matter, to the feeler. By continuously reinforcing separation, every “self,” becomes a unique pattern of inattention to the larger reality in which it lives.

We can hold the great paradox of the truth of appearances while still being mindful of their ultimate non-existence. True compassion, without making any distinctions about who deserves it or not, views all emotion, happiness and suffering as equal in nature, arising from a trance-like belief in the reality of opposites. We can still be happy…realizing that suffering will inevitably be a part of that relative happiness.

Taking this view into the practice of aspiration or active bodhicitta, we can project our compassionate intentions knowing that to fully overcome self-cherishing may be out of reach–at least in this lifetime. For now, we simply do the best we can.

A supremely spacious clarity is a prerequisite for accessing the source of happiness. From that source, happiness becomes a view as vast as space, an uninterrupted flow of sensation and feeling without attachment, an expanding, unimpeded, infinitely inclusive condition of holding all that is. Everything is included: all events (including the assemblage of events that is Donald Trump), all sensation and all emotion. No need to deny anything. On the contrary, everything can be used to energize our view in every moment. If that condition of possibility can be formed, arising unimpeded according to one’s capacity, then anything can arise in that space. 

Does such a condition exist outside of ego-consciousness? What is “happiness” not arising as an object of intention? Do we call it happiness at all? If happiness can exist as something other than an object of “my” intention, then who is the “I” that is forming the wish?

Contemplating the supreme spacious quality found at the root of happiness, I do not create or wish happiness for myself. I don’t wish for the happiness of a single separate identity, “me,” to become just another passing object of attention. I seek happiness with no object, which is to say a wish of happiness for all others. Resting in the root of that happiness itself, arising spontaneously without intention from a dynamic spacious nature, being “uncreated,” as it were, it becomes entirely natural to extend it to all others.

I project a wish that others will also connect to that root. Inherent to such a wish is the knowledge that we are all connected by and as the root of happiness. We are not simply connected separately to some ineffable source of happiness. Our connection to each other is that source. The nature of happiness is identical to the true nature of everything; we can’t separate the source of happiness from the source of compassion, from the source of loving kindness or joy. They are all inseparable from each other.

Our work is more than the formation of wishes. It is the active removal of all obstacles to a connection to the source of happiness. Believing we are ever separated from the root of happiness or, for that matter, from any of the Four Immeasurables is the obstacle to overcome. In the non-dual view, since there is no such thing as happiness (or suffering), connecting to the root of happiness, already pure, goes to the heart of the Mahayana view. True happiness and compassion arise in natural abundance from the same timeless and ineffable source: the realization of emptiness.

The nature of happiness becomes known as appearance imbued with the truth of emptiness in which the very idea of happiness itself has no true existence. In every time, even as Trumpism mutates into post-Presidential threats yet unknown, that is precisely why it holds unlimited potential.

One Full Breath

Maybe I could see it if I had eyes on the side of my head instead of looking straight, as if I’m a fish, perpetually suspicious about the possibility of water—as if I once knew of it but have forgotten. That is, if I, a fish, believed in existence.

Dawn is breaking. Lurking in my awareness for a long time–at least intermittently—is a perpetual presence lying just outside my field of vision. Try as I might, I cannot bring it wholly into view. Perhaps it’s an illusion, but regardless, it’s elusive, yet it also feels like something central to all understanding. Maybe I could see it if I had eyes on the side of my head instead of looking straight forward, as if I’m a fish, perpetually suspicious about the possibility of water—as if I once knew of it but have forgotten—still sensing its centrality to my existence. That is, if I, a fish, believed in existence.

My adventures in Buddhist philosophy and subsequent experiences, not merely the intellectual exercise nor any cognitive machinations, but by direct experience, have taken me all the way to the realization of water. Yet in the routine experience of relativity, I revert to a suspicion, which is accompanied by an annoying sense of inadequacy, that such clarity—enlightened clarity—is never as accessible as I might wish. This is surely a common phenomenon.

Today I noticed an essential truth housed in a familiar book passage. I recalled its past impact, this time it had no impact. It was as if my mind had closed and was no longer open to being impacted, or of having my current spell broken, not even for a moment, to permit what was once a possibility that my energy would change, that I could enter a spacious and unadorned frame of reference, that I could be lifted out of the all-too-familiar quagmire of routine discursive thought for even a moment.

It seemed that what were once anchors of a self-regulated, light-hearted, even somewhat innocent demeanor had been rendered inert, remote and inaccessible, almost completely foreign. And in their place is a frustrated, anxious, edgy, too easily angered, limited and defended, even fragile presence, helplessly attempting to regain some agency in a universe whose laws quickly undermine every presumption of agency. 

I might have called this the bardo of everyday life, this forgetting, but my temptation to also name it the bardo of death is because I suspect the sensations are nearly identical, of being lost, drifting in a sea of semi-cognition, dreams with no sensations, no handholds, no anchors, no primary orientation whatsoever, being no-body, as if I will forever drift, uncertain if I wish to or am even capable of either surrendering to the dream or waking from it. Except now, the dreamscape abides whichever way I go.

I wonder if I’m merely experiencing aging, slipping across some threshold into a permanently shrunken space where the inventory of available brain cells has diminished. I don’t seem to be able to transcend, to free myself from these limitations. Until this:

I settled and began gazing, a deliberate and progressive meditative process, eyes wide open, into the heart of Being, expanding, loosening the anchors of the physical body, a condition in which the boundaries between self and object, seer and seen, flicker and dissolve like a mirage, like a dying flame. For a moment, I am free of my story. I breathe and rise to my full stature. 

Gazing into the moment…as the moment gazes into you…the comforting stability of it, its fleeting nature and unlimited potential, the opportunity for wisdom to arrive, for benefit to arise for all beings, that is the nature, the whole (he)art of the gaze. It is not a condition of a single being gazing from or at or even with anything. Gazing is (potentially) a non-dual state, the formless form of Being, the perpetual condition of Being seeing through its own eyes. Gazing is more than looking or sensing or feeling. It is more than hearing or touching or interacting in any finite way with any thing. Gazing is taking a full breath of now. It is all things now, being now, creating now, living and dying now, absent any desire or agenda whatsoever.

Outside of meditation itself, in post-meditation, the presence of gazing may also partake of the ferment of ideas in the teeming bazaar of this time, the fertile turbulence of the evolutionary marketplace at the crossroads of this moment. Aren’t we all desperately gazing into this moment to comprehend, to extract the meaning and succulence of these increasingly desperate times? Take one full breath of this! Rise to your full stature and realize the world is gazing back at you.

Being is gazing back at your being, with no expectations, no demands, no promises, no guarantees, with no past and no future to destroy or create. We are all making the world in this moment, gazing into the future, becoming messengers to the future, rising to fullness as vital nodes in the web of life, sensing the energetics of the whole, a promise we make to ourselves as we fully breathe into the present. 

This is what the future is asking of us now, to take a full breath of this moment. Each of us, in our personal conflicts, lifelong journeys, unresolved questions, resolutions, accomplishments large or small, is called to be a messenger, an ancestor, a gift to the future. Regardless of our karma, whatever our success or failings, we are guides, changing the course of history, bending the moral arc of the universe toward justice.  That’s all we have. That’s all we’ve ever had and all we will ever have. 

Accepting the fullness of one’s own karma may not be such an easy thing, because to do so you have to tell yourself the truth. But if ever there was a moment to breath fully into life, into this long-awaited transition, this re-opening of possibility, this moment to reflect and dedicate ourselves to the task ahead, this is it. Gaze into it; and may the Being of Samanthabadra, the consciousness of all Buddhas; of Manjushri, the wisdom of all Buddhas; of Chenrezig, the compassion of all Buddhas, the nature of Being itself, hiding in plain sight, be the guidance you wish for and deserve. Take a full breath and give everything to it.

Gratitude to Rudolph Bauer for sparking this content. See his article, “Gazing as Dzogchen.”

Love and Grief

Grief is a way of loving what has slipped from view. Love is a way of grieving what has not yet done so. They need each other in order to be themselves.     

 —Stephen Jenkinson

The appearance of COVID has changed everything. We’ve wandered from independence, personal protection and material support to broken food supply chains and communal support. Jobs disappeared while we were trying to integrate new rules and practices into thoroughly disrupted lives. Accurate information was and continues to be muddied by politics. There is a vast gulf between the promise of a vaccine (magical thinking?) and practical everyday precautions.

An unprecedented uprising for racial justice re-appeared nationally and globally. We continue to swim in deeply uncertain times in which political and social institutions are under attack, hopelessness courses like a deadly undercurrent with cynicism, opportunism and nihilism jumping on for the ride. The path that got us here is washed out and there’s no going back. Yet a powerful new solidarity has also appeared, providing compelling fuel for birthing a new national story. As Valarie Kaur likes to say, we are in transition: “Breath and push.”  Yet, out of shock and loss and even out of revolutionary optimism, what opportunities are we missing, and what is suddenly available?

Realizing we are not going back to a familiar normal, we await the arrival of the new. There is deep deprogramming underway as the unconscious gives up its secrets, bringing hidden motivations and desires to the surface in a tumultuous display of community-building and compassion, yet also extremism, fear, tribalism and aggression. This is a moment of extreme neural reprogramming. We can decide what we want and create it as we awaken to the pervasive messaging of white plutocratic dominion, the transfiguration of culture and a global push toward humane alternatives. This self-awareness is emerging as critical moments of choice to relinquish assumptions and to transform worldviews as we kneel and bow in this bardo of becoming. 

We’re not at all sure who we will become and many are determined to cloak the present in anything resembling the familiar. Yet some of the outlines of a different world are coming into view. How will we sustain ourselves spiritually, socially, materially and according to what values? Where or what is our refuge? Are we to resign to the political theater emanating from the centers of power? Are we to be ruled by fear and paranoia? Is there a pathway to confidence in a threatening world heading for collapse? Most of all, orienting to the grief of this time is a central challenge.

What of this grief—this persistent presence? It is not solely part of the apparition of ‘me.’ Whatever grief I feel is not strictly ‘mine’. It is a collective condition. It’s not a manifestation of the primacy or imagined indelibility of a solitary ‘me.’ It’s the elemental nature of being at this moment. I do not stand alone at the top of the pyramid of my life. I stand within. We are not the containers of our lives; we are the contained in the ongoing unstoppable process of living and dying that has always existed and never stopped.

Standing at the threshold of the Anthropocene, my outlook is not of fullness and promise. I am more aware of the losses, of being among those whose mistakes, hubris and arrogance, entitlement and recklessness have brought our progeny to the most dangerous moment of human history. The future is already lost.

The persistence of COVID is changing our outlook and personal practices; how we maintain a level of equanimity and easy connection with others. I am already rendered fragile by a personal health condition. Call it a pre-existing condition. Yet such fragility—and the shifting feeling that comes with it–is not weakness. It is the virtue of being affected, of still being able to feel at all. It is a form of strength in which mutability, resilience and adaptation form a capacity to bend without breaking. In the cracks of what decreases me lie what increases me.

Then there is the sense of a great unwinding—or, more accurately, unraveling–an exhaustion of neo-liberal economics and the accompanying desperation of its priesthood (and remarkably oblivious entitlement) who have brought us to the brink of extinction. How could anyone look upon this—even if it’s largely unconsciously—without noticing the suffering and dislocation nearly everywhere?

99 Names of God-Chinese.

Parallel to the ongoing nature of COVID, the progression and demands of the personal condition are also very uncertain. There are no clear signs of resolution, no hints as to my personal longevity nor any probability of recovery. Restoring and sustaining meaning is my primary focus. Generally, in this atmosphere of official denial, the severity of the infection being downplayed, the most sensible path to recovery is rejected. Clinging more desperately to the past and continuing to isolate from the world in its response, the centers of power in America are shutting their eyes to the inevitable. We sit on an edge of anxiety and resolve. There is so much more at stake now than ever before.

Even so, in the enveloping pall of personal loneliness and perpetual fragility, how can self-sustaining practices adapt to these circumstances? I rarely acknowledge my own fragility. I cover it and compensate. But it’s always there. Where shall I go for equanimity? Shifting away from what has worked in the past is not an answer. Turning to heart-based practice, noticing the appearance of grasping, despair and isolation, not retreating or succumbing, choosing a path of passion, recovering spontaneity and taking refuge in unity and dignity is the path of the present just as it has been in the past. Only now, our resolve must be even greater.

My personal awareness of loss and the general compassion I feel for others are parallel processes. What I have personally lost–a measure of freedom, a measure of abandon, the luxury of mindlessness, living with only an abstract comprehension of mortality and an incomplete and muddled notion of agency leave no residue of regret. They give way to a renewed and acute sense of the massive inertia of culture, the durability of systems of power, of being only one outlaw among a massive cadre who see the task ahead.

Having the curtain removed between the abstraction of death and the reality of its approach is not a loss. It has been more of a gain. I have gained focus and resolve. I am creating time even as an expansive future is diminished. A bottomless reservoir of gratitude has been tapped. An appreciation for the smallest gifts prevails. I have re-localized, attending to the minutiae of thought and interaction. This is not loss.

The full meaning of reciprocity with the natural world appears as we realize our subordinate place in the biosphere. The presence of extinction and the prospect of personal death luck among us. I am connected more closely to the experience everyone, if they’re lucky, will have sooner or later, the past and future omnipresent on the bumpy ride of now. Yet the recurring awareness of endings is also a source of energy; an enveloping presence of finality reviving appreciation for this world, the impulse to discover what more can be done, to grieve what has been lost, to love life as it is, beyond approval, beyond promises or expectations.

If there is a core of any sustained grief, it would be a sense of my own limitations.  It is the younger generations who’ve been robbed of their future, not me. My grief and love is for them and for the impossibly complex, incomparable beauty and perpetual emergence of life of which I am only a tiny nested part. Grief has not diminished me. I expand into it as a part of the perpetual astonishment of existence. What emerges is productive action. I am enveloped in life, reaching my arms around its every dimension. 

Zombie America

America is under racist assault. It has been this way for centuries—as though a cult of the undead, the empty dispossessed can only see the world in one way—Us vs Them. Purposeful demolition is the foremost objective of the undead—led by the First Family of Destruction. The zombie ideologues now get their news from the Family, its enablers, sycophants and its media amplifiers. There’s no more capacity for the undead to change than there is for a jellyfish to float against the currents. Yes, the undead are the jellyfish of the logo-sphere and they carrying a nasty sting. 

There’s no aspiration, no value, no commitment or connection to the collective, only to a their narrow view of entitlement.  There’s been no event, no sacred passage, no period of trial or transition, no foundation for their actions other than domination, jealousy, greed, anger and vengeance. There’s been no transition, no developmental progress, no entrée into a wiser way of seeing based in reality instead of wish-fulfillment.

Traditional initiation crosses a threshold to join the continuous stream of birthing and dying, with all the triumph and adversity, love and suffering in between. Emerging successfully from an initiation would mean walking with our feet on the ground and our heads in the clouds (not the reverse), holding a natural connection with our selves, others and with the land. 

Traditional cultures whose initiations were integral to the continuity of their communities prescribed these rites on the cusp of adulthood. They require a separation, a death, an awakening to essence (or soul), a time of rebirth and a return. An initiation is a second birth, having grown up dependent on family and community, the initiate is prepared to establish a separate life, to be guided by a core vision and to live out a full investment in the community according to that vision. 

Initiation is also a rooting experience, a gesture of coming home in the body-mind of the initiate. The body of the initiate is infused with the land and the spirits of the land. They become One.  This is the indigenous experience of initiation. Imagining a shred of anything similar in the American racist zombie cult is a laughable fantasy. We are diminished by all of it—for 400 years. We, as a nation, have been the undead, lost. Sadly, on the issue of race, we are as homeless as the ones sleeping in doorways.

I am of a people who, historically, had no land. The cultural lore is of temporary residence and history has tragically proven the validity of that outlook. We were not nomads, unless you count wandering in the desert for 40 years after escaping slavery in Egypt. That was the original initiation of the Jewish people. As the story goes, we received not only land after the struggle, but a rebirth in that land blessed by the God of that land. True or not, the history of the Jewish people has been one of being landless—until the establishment of the State of Israel. Overlooking the injustice of that creation for the moment (and all the suffering it has unleashed), that land remains the State of Israel in the hearts of many Jews whether they live there or not. 

Even so, tracing my own roots in the Jewish diaspora over the last 150 years, I can say I’m a citizen of America. I could even say I own land or I might trace my life in America for four generations, but I do not have a place in the same sense in which I describe it above. Rural Americans do; urban/suburban Americans don’t. As Stephen Jenkinson has said, we have learned to make do with portable gods. I personally have by conventional definition been a nomad. The deeper yearning to be of a place remains. 

My advantage, my privilege, is that I was not ripped from my ancestral home and transported against my will to this land. And beyond the mass kidnapping and enslavement, the American tradition of making others landless in the course of claiming this land continues to this day. This ideology is, under Trump particularly, delivered every day by the occupying force of police and ICE whose job it has become to enforce the message: you do not belong here. You have no claim to this place. It is ours and will never be yours. 

My personal bond connecting my history and cultural memory to Israel has been severed by the racist apartheid policies of that government. But in my adopted home, zombie white supremacy, an increasingly visible, dangerous and aggressive segment of this nation of white European immigrants, staking a claim to this land above anyone else, is now with rising brutality resuscitating and delivering a murderous message of ownership with a knee to the neck, further severing my bond to this land in the process.

Looking at the American republic, dangling as it is now between the life and death, the racist undead, led by the foremost zombie of our time, Donald Trump, remind us of an incomplete national initiation. There is nothing about Trump to suggest any history of formative, let alone transformative development, no true home, allegiance to anything or any distraction from singleminded and empty devotion to personal gain. And likewise, his most ardent followers feel entitled to demand and accept nothing less than unobstructed freedom of their personal choices without much suggestion of a commitment to anything other than that freedom–such as the common interest. 

America’s initiation on the issue of race is entering the encounter-with-death phase. Trump’s zombie cult, the uninitiated, reflect to the rest of us how severed we are from our ancestor’s bones. America is still way behind the curve of truly becoming Emma Lazarus’s home to the many. It’s primarily a home to the few whose dominance depends on successfully claiming—and selling—the idea of America as their exclusive home. The message delivered to communities of color are that they are temporary residents with shallow roots at best, at constant risk of being attacked, marginalized, incarcerated, exploited, oppressed, exported, discarded and finally, if necessary, killed. America is now being dragged into the mud of history by the undead. The world looks on in horror.

The racist undead have never been alive in the sense of recognizing interdependence as a primal reality of existence. Nor do they recognize or consider themselves beholden to any resident spirits. Even their god is homeless. Grounding to a place and to all people is not embedded in modern American culture; thus, no common vision exists of what it means to live in the full flower of diversity we represent. Our roots are too shallow; our gods are foreign. We are driven by the ideology of self-interest. And if Trump’s ascendance is any indication, the zombies are winning.

What is so disturbing and ironic in these times is that those who claim to be Most American, the ones claiming ownership and to being the ‘true’ keepers of the only legitimate version of America, the ones lugging automatic weapons into statehouses, to polling places and into the street proclaiming their ‘freedom,’ the ones acting least like they believe in the promise of this nation, have the least invested in making sure all people share and contribute to the struggle of thriving together, most likely because it is they themselves who have been hollowed out and discarded by the America they claim to love. They are our zombie chickens coming home to roost, leaning into the nihilism of the chief zombie, Donald Trump.

Solidarity, Somatics and Psychosis

The classic design of the vessels transporting the kidnapped, the brutalized and dispossessed, the colonized masses brought from Africa to the New World, endures to this day in the forms and structures of patriarchal capitalism: social stratification, marginalization, income inequality, racism, limited or blocked access to the means of acquiring wealth, property, equal justice or the general benefits of living your own dreams. White people may still enjoy the freshening breezes of the upper deck, but the metaphor still applies to nearly all of us today. It is only a matter of degree.

Yet even in the darkness, the impossibly close quarters and squalor of the lower decks, the light of freedom and joy never died. Dislocation does not extinguish the longing for home, burning to this day in the literature, art, music and poetry of the oppressed. It is in these ceremonial forms of breathing together that solidarity is affirmed. That yearning comes to life in the reverence for the journey, the longing to recover the sacred, to resolve the diaspora with the free and full habitation of a transformed body in a new land, even if that land only exists as an aspiration in the hearts of the wanderers. 

Four hundred years later, it is not only the ones who bore the lash who still cry out for home. Neoliberal economics, by commodification, relentless extraction and by the absence of any loyalty to genuine community and because it refuses to regard the earth as anything other than untapped economic potential, renders all of us landless on the new plantation just as it does in the foreign territories, occupied, re-colonized and subjugated by the weapons of finance and law. If those fail, force is applied.

These conditions, specifically the hierarchies of privilege, the tightening grip on the lash, the systemic racism and the use of money as a bludgeon, the predatory financial order and all the other inequities accompanying its regime, remind us that we can lose anything at any time. And indeed, since our relation to earth is much more than merely to a potential source of revenue, everything is being taken from us, incrementally, every day. Manifest destiny operates upon the collective body now just as it did in centuries past upon the territories of the indigenous.

Modernity is a rationalization of the wild. It is a leveling. Anyone noncompliant; anyone who dances, breaks the rules, bends time, looks beyond the borders, meets with other bodies, dwells outside the boundaries of sanctioned connection, imbibes the nectars of the sacred, seeks wisdom from forbidden sources, cries out for justice or draws outside the lines may be indulged with limited tolerance. Some will be infiltrated, criminalized, surveilled, tracked, deported, bludgeoned, jailed or killed. The rest, at least figuratively, become fugitives.

These and others like them, the restless, underserved, disenfranchised and denied, the ones living outside today’s inverted definitions of “freedom,” and “opportunity,” the ones discarded by the “free market” are the ones deserving of our solidarity. But they’re not the only ones being damaged by the paradigm of dominance and exclusion. However the systems of power continue the privatization and destruction of the commons is our disenfranchisement in real time. 

The Freudian definition of psychotherapy is that in exploring and expanding the psyche we reclaim territory. Our wounds back us into corners and make us small. Our addictions limit our capacity for outreach and connection. All the consciousness work we do is to reclaim territory, to halt the narrowing and to expand our view. Modernity rounds the edges and flattens consciousness, narrowing focus to channel and facilitate the pursuit of illusory solitary happiness. Bayo Akomolafe calls it gentrification. When we open psychic territory, we push past the limits of convention. We enter the wilds, tearing through the fences of what we know. We recover expansion and breath.

As David Abram reminds us, the original meaning of psyche was about breath, the wind or spirit of life. When we (re) occupy the wilds, we are learning to breath again, to fully inhale the spirit of life and the common territory of choice and possibility we all inhabit. Sitting and breathing is the most elementary practice of contemplative traditions. In doing so, we typically only think of ourselves, our solitary and separate bodies and the spirit, or psyche, of our existence. We inhale, filling the self, partaking of the esprit, the ruach, the motivating energy of being, momentarily narrowing our focus to this body, this consciousness, this moment, cyclically relinquishing the territory of awareness we just claimed, releasing into the non-dual self, into the unity of all consciousness, eliminating all boundaries and expanding to occupy all the territory we abandon in our pursuit of Self. We infuse ourselves with psyche. 

Psychosis names an abnormal state of the psyche, a condition of separation from the essence of being. We become lost to the potential of cyclical expansion and contraction of spirit embedded not only in the simple movement of air, interacting with the flow of breath essential to language. The expression of sound, the original musical intonation of nature, the stops and starts, the shapes of the throat, lips and tongue are rooted in the original sounds and symbols of our relational self. They were orienting, defined community, interspecies dynamics and expressed the ebb and flow of interdependencies upon which group survival depends. To become, over millennia, progressively separated from and to lose all sense of relationship between language and natural world, to permit indigenous languages and their ways of knowing the world to be lost is a mark of the deepening journey into mass psychosis. 

We lose our breath until we can’t breathe at all.

Breaking free of the mass psychosis is not simply a matter of breathing or language. It’s a much deeper process of conspiring to access and know our bodies in relation to earth in a different way. The energetics of reductionism, scientific materialism and neoclassical economics drive a widening gulf between humans and nature, from the full-bodied, erotic conversations between humans and the seasonal textures and interactive exchange of wisdom held in sacred sounds and labels of obscure and unique mind-states for which there may be no equivalent in any other language.

Recovering indigenous history is more than recovering stories. Embodiment includes discovering the architecture of authentic freedom, sharing the history of our bodies, exploring the interpenetration of culture and somatics, coming to our full stature, bringing the diaspora home to place and community, recovering belonging, power and perspective, connecting with ancestral voices bending time and preserving the libraries of wisdom contained in disappearing languages.

As Alnoor Lada declared in a recent issue of Kosmos Journal, solidarity is a direct erosion of the structures of oppression, the powers anchoring domination. Reclaiming the past informs the possibility of changing the present. Acting from a different set of values, breathing together, healing from the mass psychosis by breathing with our ancestors, redefining our identities, reconnecting to deities rendered remote and quiescent is a direct affront to the forces of economic dislocation that would erase the past and reframe history as the solitary pursuit of self-interest.

Things I Can No Longer Do #1

There is nothing further left for me in data-heavy climate tracts. I have to turn away now. I don’t want to know—at least not in the cognitive sense of knowing–because I already know.

I’ve reached the end of the line. There is nothing left for me in the latest morning-after mainstream media. I have to turn away. Yes, I’m fascinated, but I don’t really want to know—at least not in the cognitive sense of knowing–because I already know. I can’t even activate the part of my brain necessary to process an argument or anything purporting to be reasonable or logical or scientific, trying to convince…anyone… that this or that event is “directly related to climate change.” Nothing but futility and dissonance arise in the very first paragraph of such material. Where does anyone still get the idea that this does any good? Who still clings to the notion that deniers or ‘low information voters’ can be convinced otherwise? Who still imagines this particular event will constitute the critical nugget for some fence-sitter out there? Do such persons even exist? 

Popular treatment of climate issues has become performative journalism, going through the motions in service to a dying ritual of “providing a public service.” Who can stand this anymore? Numbness invariably accompanies reading such stories. They are space-fillers. As long as their vocabularies include the specialized terminologies of science, divorced from every somatic signal, gesture or sense-making faculty connecting us to the natural world, they no longer serve a purpose. There is no longer any refuge in being right. I have become a fugitive from this form of engagement. That fugitivity, as Bayo Akomolafe would say, is the definition of post-activism.

What is the root of a belief in continuing the activist debate? It’s the same dualistic ethic with centuries of baggage accompanying our estrangement from the natural world. The paradox of language is that resorting to reason as a way of propagating the conclusion that we humans have lost our way is part of the disease itself. As has become so clear in recent years, the way we react to the problem is often part of the problem. Reinforcing binaries is itself a form of distancing from our direct experience of the more-than-human world, reinforcing the dissociation at the heart of our headlong advance toward extinction.

What is more disturbing is remembering when I myself might have used words in that way, using (limited) tools of persuasion at my disposal, imperfectly, earnestly and mindlessly. But the very act of switching into that mode of communication is a betrayal. Sure, we all communicate in this way. Yes, we regularly appeal to reason and rationality, brandishing logic, evidence and data in our communications. Yet, at the end of this long trail of tears and deepening anguish, with humanity coming face to face with the self-destructive nature of our values and behavior, and mostly not comprehending, even with yet another book by the most erudite and passionate spokesperson appearing on behalf of coming to our senses, these efforts are now ringing dreadfully false and futile because, as someone living closer to my gut, the tears are already just below the surface anyway. And that feeling never goes away.  

I can view photos, arresting, disruptive, body-shaking invasions, images without any words at all, the ones that break through the most recent fragile emotional repair, images like the surgically tortured, dissected and harvested tar sands landscapes of Alberta, Chris Jordan’s photos of plastic-filled corpses of sea birds on Midway Island or the solitary orangutan fighting a bulldozer in a Sumatran rainforest or the Amazonian fires or rivers of ice-melt surging to the sea in Greenland, grayed and lifeless coral reefs or the abandoned tarpits of Ecuador. These images belong to me….and I belong to them.

Who would dare publish nothing but photos of the most recent evidence of distorted human values and behavior? Where will we find pictures of the California firestorms with no story? The pictures of the orange sky above the Golden Gate Bridge spoke louder than any words ever could, as would typhoon devastation, denuded glacial moraines, bulldozed rainforest, dry riverbeds, open-pit lithium mines or the translucent shells of deep-sea mollusks that can no longer find sufficient accessible calcium.

Yes, I can still look at (some) graphs. But I already know what they say. Just save me from the words. That part of my brain is already exhausted. I can speak to you from my body. There I can wander with the desperate migrations of species, dream with the giants of the seas. I can listen to the land, soar with the last endangered condor searching for home. Just don’t ask me to process the words any more. It’s like eating cardboard and expecting to be nourished.