Justice by disaster

A Reuters news agency story dated February 10, 2009 reports that Federal judges have tentatively ordered the release of up to one-third the prison population is the state of California. If implemented, this could result in the release of as many as 57,000 prisoners. The immediate reason for the possible release is that California's prisons are dangerously overcrowded; moreover, the severe budget crisis that has emerged in the early months of this year has led to doubts as to whether the state can continue to pay the high cost of imprisoning approximately 170,000 inmates.

Part of the reason for the severe overcrowding in California's prisons is the policy of giving very long sentences—often life sentences—to repeat offenders. Although some prisons in California have educational and rehabilitational programs for inmates, the number of inmates seeking such programs far exceeds the numbers who can be accommodated. As a result many inmates receive little or no rehabilitative help while in prison. Once released, many prisoners lack the resources to become re-established with honest gainful employment on the outside. As a result California has the highest recidivism rate in the United States; according to a California government fact sheet, 70% of men and 40% of women return to prison after being released. When the state lacks the policy to ensure that all inmates have an opportunity for education or job training, it is almost inevitable to released prisoners will commit further crimes; when the state has a policy of giving very long sentences to repeat offenders, the prisons are sure to become overcrowded and expensive. The entire system is in serious need of reform.

While the situation is worst in California, the difference from other states is only a matter of degree. The United States as a whole leads the world in the percentage of its citizens who are in prison. I have written about this before. It is not only California but all the other states, and indeed the federal government, that must take a serious look at its policies in imprisoning those who have broken laws.

There is no doubt that the economic crisis the world is facing will have terrible consequences for many people—it is probably no exaggeration to say that nearly everyone alive will suffer at least some negative consequences. But not all the consequences of the economic disaster will be bad; some will lead, in odd and unexpected ways, to improvements in human society. Wasteful habits of producing and consuming goods and services are likely to be revised, perhaps helping to heal some of the deep wounds the human race has inflicted on the planet's ecological systems. Another unexpected consequence of the economic downturn could be a return to a more sane and humane set of policies of justice. The overcrowding of California's prisons, and those in most other states, is surely an injustice. The release of prisoners for whatever reason is a correction, even if an unintended correction, to that injustice. And for that we can all rejoice.

Provoked by Mozi

Mozi said: In ancient times, when mankind was first born and before there were any laws or government, it may be said that every man's views of things was different. One man had one view, two men had two views, ten men had ten views—the more men, the more views. Moreover, each man believed that his own views were correct and disapproved those of others, so that people spent their time condemning one another.... Those with strength to spare refused to help out others, those with surplus wealth would let it rot before they would share it, and those with beneficial doctrines to teach would keep them secret and refuse to impart them.

Mozi wrote his essays sometime after the time of Confucius and before the time of Mencius, so sometime during the fifth century BCE. His essays have always intrigued me, because I agree so profoundly with much of what he says and at the same time shrink bank in horror at the implications of the life he advocates.

Mozi is best remembered for advocating a doctrine of universal love. Nothing but harm, he argued, comes of letting one's love be limited to one's own family, or to one's circle of friends, or to one's own country or to people who share one's beliefs and convictions. If one loves one's own nation, he said, then let one love all nations. To do anything less is to fail to be fully human, and to fail to be fully human is to fail to be satisfactory in the eyes of Heaven. The doctrine of universal love was intimately connected in Mozi's thought to his condemnation of aggressive warfare. When strong nations attack weaker nations for the sake of gaining more land, more population, or better markets, they rarely achieve what they seek and instead reap a harvest of bitterness that no sane person would want: death, destruction of property, wasted resources, and a general disruption of trust and confidence that results in an atmosphere of fear and resentment. Of all the unrighteous things a man can do, says Mozi, none is more unrighteous than beginning a war. Of all the incompetent actions a government can perform, none is more incompetent and counterproductive than beginning a war. With all these sentiments I have always found myself in full agreement.

Where Mozi begins to leave me feeling less sympathetic is in his uncompromising condemnation of music and the arts, and ornamented clothing and fancy houses and splendid carriages. My lack of sympathy here is not without complexity. Having been brought up by parents who had a disdain for all manner of luxury and who wore plain and functional clothing and avoided jewelry and drove practical and efficient automobiles and favored modest housing, I find that my own tastes are basically in accord with those of Mozi. Where I feel uncomfortable is in the stridency of his condemnation of all enterprises that are carried our purely for pleasure and enjoyment rather than for more obviously utilitarian and commercial purposes. The denial of the legitimacy of the pursuit of pleasure strikes me as founded on an unnecessarily narrow understanding of human nature. I keep wanting to argue that people do not thrive when they deny themselves aesthetic pursuits, or when they disdain doing things just for fun.

For most of my adult life, I have been attracted to disciplined ways of living that have little room for pursuits deemed frivolous. The spare lifestyle of the Buddhist monk has always been a source of inspiration to me, and I have always admired those who pursue it (especially since I myself have never been able to pursue it). The idea of having just one set of robes, one bowl out of which one eats one meal per day, and no hair or beard to trim and maintain has always struck me as the noblest way of living in the world. Having no reason to look at oneself in the mirror to see how one might appear to others, one could devote all one's time and energy to undistracted pursuit of wisdom and service to others.

While the Buddhist monk has always been at the top of my list of people to admire, a close second place is held by what Max Weber called secular ascetics, that is, people who earn a livelihood by the sweat of their brow and get married and have a family but who studiously avoid all luxuries so that they can devote all their spare time to undistracted pursuit of wisdom and service to others. Quakers, Shakers, Mennonites, Hutterites, and the Amish have always seemed the very noblest of Christians, the closest to succeeding in living a life that Christ (and the Buddha) would surely approve in full. Among these people there is not much music to be found, not much in the way of ornamented clothing (aside from some pretty amazing quiltwork) or luxurious housing and furnishing (except for some of the most beautiful furniture and carpentry that has ever been produced with simple tools and bare hands).

And yet, despite all my admiration for the plain and disciplined life of monks and so-called primitive Quakers, I cannot suppress my own hedonistic appreciation of music well performed, theater skillfully produced, painting and sculpture beautifully executed, clothing attractively sewn and dyed, and buildings well designed and carefully constructed. Even if I would probably not spend my own money to support the production of such things, I cannot deny being deeply grateful to those who do. Unlike Mozi (and quite a few of my fellow Buddhists and Quakers), I cannot regard the pursuit of beauty wasteful and frivolous. When Mozi rails against such things, I shudder.

I find myself wondering whether my love of discipline on the one hand and my love of beauty on the other is just another one of the many unresolved contradictions in my character. Can one condemn war and partiality and frivolity and praise discipline and wisdom and service but still have time for pleasure and fun without falling into self-contradiction and delusion? I think one can. But I may very well be deluded in this (as in so many other things).

Remembering to make sense

When I was younger, I think I had the belief that remembering something was a matter of going into some kind of archive and retrieving information about something from the past. So if I wanted to know what my grandfather said right after the car we were in was hit in an intersection on Silver Avenue as we were on our way to see a baseball game, all I had to do was check the archives and pull that record out and examine it. I'm not sure I actually believed that, but I seem to remember believing something of that kind.

About twenty years ago or so, I witnessed an animated discussion among members of my extended family. They were trying to recall something like who lived in which room of the house they had lived in together in 1935. Each party in the discussion examined the archives, and each pulled out a different record. There was no way of settling the dispute, since no one had access to anything except someone human being's memory. The more the original disputants drew others into the discussion, the more inconsistent memories there were. All avenues to finding a solution were closed. Tempers flared. Voices spoke ever more loudly. Unpleasant expressions began to appear on faces. Whether my memory of the dispute is accurate, my account of it illustrates how conversations tend to go when different people remember things differently and there is no reliable authority to consult to settle whose memory is accurate and whose is at fault.

The dispute accounted above, and dozens of others like it, have inclined me to think of memory not as a passive mental activity of simply receiving images of the past somehow, but rather as an active act of telling stories that make sense of our present experiences. This is not to say that remembering something is deliberating concocting a pure fiction (if there is such a thing as as story that is purely fictitious). It is not like telling a deliberate lie. Rather, it is more like adding a few embellishments and removing a few apparently irrelevant details from a dim and nebulous and mostly incoherent hodgepodge of impressions. It is perhaps a little like solving a jigsaw puzzle. It is more like putting forward a possible solution to a mystery. Telling a story to oneself about the past is not done to deceive anyone, but to make private sense of things that have taken place more recently than the event being recollected. Perhaps instead of saying that I remember something it would be better to say I am making up a story about something in the past that is compatible with the beliefs I hold today.

For the past several months I have been reading the journal of George Fox, the man who is given credit for having founded the movement called the Children of Light, later called the Society of Friends and derisively called the Quakers. Fox's journal was not written as events unfolded. He did not write down his memories of each day at the end of the day. Rather, he dictated his memories of events in his life years after those events had taken place. It is fairly clear to a reader of the journal that Fox, in dictating his journal, was trying to make sense of how the Quaker movement had evolved. He was also trying, perhaps unconsciously, to give legitimacy to a religious movement that had been at the center of a great deal of controversy. Given the large number of quotations of and allusions to biblical passages, it is also obvious that Fox was showing that his story of the Quakers was a continuation of the story of Jesus Christ as told in the gospels and the letters of Paul and other apostles. The stories (for there are more than one version) told in the Bible of the life and teaching and death of Jesus are themselves recorded memories of events that had taken place decades before the memories were written down, and it is pretty clear that they are attempts to show that the story of Israel was still unfolding in a particular way that involved the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth. They are making sense of what might otherwise seem a meaningless and pointlessly brutal death.

George Fox and the authors of the Gospels may have been innocent of the extent to which they were making up stories to make sense of present realities. They may have been naive. They may also have been, to at least some extent, calculating and crafty. Whatever the case may be, taking the stories they told at face value, without taking into account the story-telling nature of what we call memory, would be to participate in a naivety that verges on being inexcusably careless. There is only one way to read memories: carefully, critically and skeptically.

My skepticism about memory (my own and everyone else's) may account for why I prefer to avoid religious doctrines that are based mostly on historical narratives. They feel too much as if someone is trying to sell a particular story and to preclude other accounts. Making one's own story legitimate almost always entails making someone else's story illegitimate. And that usually leads to tempers flaring, voices speaking ever more loudly, and unpleasant expressions beginning to appear on faces. Such things make life unpleasant. Or so it seems to me.

Telling stories about telling stories

“No one has ever been angry at another human being—we're only angry at our story of them.”—Byron Katie

There are things that some people do that tend to make me angry. The list is fairly long—embarrassingly long, in fact. Close to the top of the list is having someone—anyone—try to explain why I do the things I do, why I believe the things I believe, or why I have the attitudes I have. So, for example, if someone were to come along and say “The reason you tend to get angry when people explain what you do is because you have unresolved issues with your mother, who had a tendency to try to explain your behavior,” or “It's not at all surprising that you get angry when someone tries to explain your behavior, given that you have carelessly let yourself become a victim of overweaning pride and thus have the arrogant view of yourself that no one but you can possibly understand how you think.” It is not only relatively unflattering stories that annoy me. Nor is it only stories about me that annoy me. I just don't like it much when people make up stories, even pretty good and probably true stories, about other people's deliberate and unwitting behavior.

Stories, it has to be admitted at the outset, make the world go around. (That is a figure of speech, not intended as a scientific explanation of why the earth moves around the sun or spins on its own axis.) Countries go to war because of stories they make up and then believe. The United States invaded Mexico because of a story that President Polk told about the treacherous intentions of the neighbor to the south. More recently, the United States invaded Iraq because of a story that the Bush administration told about the treacherous intentions of Saddam Hussein. I spent the better part of my childhood, adolescence and young adulthood hearing stories about what a danger Communism posed to American freedom—American freedom itself being a major plot in yet another story that Americans have loved to tell themselves. Economies fall because of stories that people tell and then believe. Economies also recover because of stories that people tell and then believe. Some people prepare for the end of civilization as we know it because of stories they tell.

On a more individual level, people not only get angry at the stories they tell of other people. People also fall in love with the stories they tell of other people. (Narcissists, of course, fall in love with stories they tell about themselves.) People get married, and then divorced, as a result of stories they tell and then believe about other people in their lives. People are hired and fired because of stories that others tell about them. Children are disinherited because of stories their parents believe about them. People are sent to prison because of stories that judges and juries tell themselves about the accused. People are put to death because of stories that people believe about them.

Whether stories are true makes very little difference. What makes things happen is that stories are believed. Stories come true because people tell them and act as if they are true. Good things happen because of stories people believe, and horrible things happen because of stories people believe. Stories do not care what comes of them; stories only demand to be told.

In Buddhist teaching there is a word for the stories people tell to account for what they are experiencing. Buddhists call these stories prapañca. According to Buddhist psychology almost all of us have an obsessive tendency to want to understand what we are experiencing. Rather than simply noticing, for example, that there is an expectation to find a jar of peanut butter in the pantry, followed by a failure to see a jar of peanut butter in the pantry, one makes up a story to explain the mystery of the missing peanut butter. Someone took some peanut butter and then failed to put the peanut butter container back in the pantry; it was probably left open on the countertop and is now filled with ants. Someone used the last of the peanut butter without making sure to add peanut butter to the shopping list. Someone raided the pantry and stole the peanut butter. A team of very clever cockroaches carried the peanut butter jar outside and ate it, glass and all. An errant black hole came through the house and sucked the peanut butter into it. There never was a jar of peanut butter in the pantry, and my delusional belief that there was could very well be an early warning sign of Alzheimer's disease.

A key teaching of Buddhism is that a great deal of the pain, frustration, anger, envy, jealousy, anxiety, depression and expectation we human beings experience is a result of prapañca. We tell stories about nearly everything we experience, and about things we do not experience, and then we suffer because of the stories we have told. The obsessive need to come up with a story is a kind of addiction. Or so the Buddhist story goes. As is the case with most stories, it might have been better had that story never been told.

What would it be like to go through a day without telling any stories? What would it be like just to see sights, hear sounds, smell odors, taste tastes and feel corporeal sensations and stop there, without giving any account of them? What would it be like to hear the stories that others tell and simply observe them, without telling stories about why others tell the stories they tell? It might be interesting to experiment with living a day, or even a few hours of a day, in a narrative-free state of simple observance of sights, sounds, smells, tastes and bodily sensations. It might be interesting to cultivate a habit of catching oneself in the act of telling a story and then to refuse to finish telling the story.

Whether it would be interesting to live without telling stories is something one can never know without trying it. Do you feel like trying it? If so, go ahead and do it. I promise not to tell a story explaining why you decided to try it out—or why you decided that trying it out would be a waste of time.

Wake up and forget

ācakṣva śṛṇu vā tāta nānāśāstrāṇy anekaśaḥ
tathāpi na tava svāsthyaṃ sarvavismaraṇād ṛte

Recite numerous scriptures many times, my child, or listen to them.
Still, you will not be yourself until you forget everything.

This provocative verse (Aṣṭāvakrasaṃhitā XVI.1 ) suggests that all the religious practices one undertakes—listening to sacred texts, reciting them, praying, doing rituals, dutifully keeping commandments and following precepts—are in the final analysis obstacles to the project of being oneself (svāsthyam, literally, being situated in oneself). In other words, all those activities with which you identify, and all the doctrines with which you identify, are in fact concealing your identity from yourself and from everyone else. Those sacred texts and doctrines you study are the most probably the convictions of others. Most of them you never would have thought of on your own. They are not yours. Why take on someone else's self. Let's put it in stark terms. To the extent that you think of yourself as a Catholic, a Protestant, a Quaker, a Jew, a Muslim, rather than thinking of yourself just as you, you are failing to be who you really are.

It is not only a religious identity that conceals who one really is. Any attempt to see oneself as anything with limitations and boundaries is to settle for something incomplete and defective. Seeing yourself as a European American, or an African American, or an Asian American or a native American is to fail to be wholly American. To see yourself as an American is to fail to be wholly a human being. To see oneself as a human being is to settle for being less than just a being. Particularization is deficiency. Why celebrate being incomplete and unwhole?

Being fully who you are is to be aware of your being inextricably connected to everything that is. That kind of awareness is impossible so long as one is focusing only one part of your being, namely, the part with which you identify, the part you ordinarily think of as your self. The self is a persona, a mask, a disguise. It is what you wear when, for whatever reason, you will not or cannot appear as yourself.

The Hebrew prophet Isaiah voices a similar idea:

Don’t remember the former things, neither consider the things of old. Behold, I will do a new thing; now shall it spring forth; shall you not know it? (Isa 43.18–19)

Isaiah portrays God as saying that new things are constantly being created. The universe is in a state of constant renovation and re-creation. To the extent that you become rooted in the past, expecting the patterns of the past to be repeated, you miss getting all the updates and upgrades of the universe that are being presented at each moment. Expect yesterday's agreements and understandings to be in effect today and you may miss out on today's realities.

Remembering former things and considering things of old is behind some of the ugliest and most destructive behavior that human beings indulge in. When I was an undergraduate in Ottawa, I attended a public event in which a representative of the government of Israel debated with a representative of one of the Arab states. It took very little time for the debate to become heated and acrimonious. Each side had a long litany of injustices that they accused the other side of having committed. Before long it was apparent that both sides of this debate were so imprisoned by their memories of former things that they could consider nothing but things of old. Whatever new things might have sprung forth were entirely hidden from the view of these people who had become entrenched in their enmity. That was forty years ago. Turning on the news today and seeing the horrible slaughter of people in the conflict between Israel and the people in Gaza makes it clear that little has changed during the past forty years, and little is likely to change in the future, unless Israelis and Palestinians both wake up to who they truly are by forgetting that they are Israelis and Palestinians, Jews and Muslims and Christians.

It is fascinating to watch (and to participate in) the epidemic of hope that has gripped the United States of America as a result of the election of an African American to the presidency. For this to happen, a great deal of forgetting had to take place. Barack Obama is a deeply inspiring figure on the world stage, precisely because he reminds us all how important it is not to be stuck in remembrances of things past—past inustices, past failures, past successes, past victories for some and the inevitable defeats those victories meant for others. All those recollections that make up our particular social identities and mask our true identity as simple beings (or creatures, if you prefer that language) are to be forgotten as we focus on how we are all dependent on each other, as we remember that if forget our bonds with each other at our peril.

How the presidency of Barack Obama will unfold remains to be seen. I have no idea. But for now I am grateful that the invitation has been extended to all of us to wake up and forget.

Mr Socrates, meet Mr Buddha and Mr Fox

In the mid-1980s I was working as a research assistant for a pair of authors who were writing a textbook on world religions. One of the tasks they assigned to me was to read Max Weber's Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism to see how well his analysis applied to Eastern religions. On a personal level, Weber's book had quite an impact on me in that it made me aware of my own Protestant roots and on how various Protestant doctrines had influenced my heart and mind. I read some of Weber's other materials as well and found myself intrigued by his discussion of prophetic traditions. If memory serves me well, Weber distinguished between prophets who spoke for God (as in the Abrahamic religions) from prophets who spoke for a more impersonal wisdom (as in Buddhism and Confucianism).

As it happened, at the same time I was reading Weber, I was also reading the dialogues of Plato that deal with the trial and death of Socrates. Struck by Socrates's frequent references to his daimon, a kind of inner voice that helped him distinguish right from wrong and was very much at the heart of his notion of the “examined life” that he famously believed was uniquely worth living, I could not help wondering whether he, too, might not be considered a kind of prophet. Most of my friends who were philosophers were not particularly receptive to the idea of Socrates as a wisdom-prophet along the lines of the Buddha or Confucius or Laozi, nor were most of my friends in religious studies. It occurred to me that I was living in an academic culture in which religion is seen as one thing and philosophy is seen as another, that talking of Socrates as a kind of prophet (or the Buddha as a philosopher) was to invite accusations of being terribly confused.

My experience with Quakers also became part of all this thinking about Weber and Socrates. George Fox, who founded the movement of religious seekers who were eventually called Quakers, often spoke of the inward light. Influenced by his reading of the Gospel of John, Fox was convinced that all human beings are capable of being guided directly by the logos—the Word that was with God in the beginning and that was identified with the Christ that existed even before creation. Fox was convinced that there is “that of God” in everyone. Moreover, he was convinced that this bit of God that dwells in all human beings, which he variously called the Inward Light or the Seed, would guide everyone who learned to still the mind, reduce the influence of what we nowadays call the ego, and wait patiently with an open mind and a heart filled with love. Fox's conviction that no one could possibly understand the scriptures without being in touch with the Inward Light that was itself the source of all scriptures, and that one who had access to the Inward Light did not really require the guidance of either scriptures or a professional priesthood or trained theologians, led to numerous confrontations with the religious authorities of his day. He was accused of the blasphemy of thinking that he was Christ, to which he responded that a more accurate statement of his conviction is that everyone is Christ—a response that did not necessarily persuade his accusers that he was innocent of blasphemy.

George Fox said of the Inward Light that it reveals to everyone his or her sinfulness, but that the very Light that shows us our sin is also the Light that shows us the way out of sin. The very awareness that shows us our failures also shows us how to succeed. By following the guidance out of sin or failure, said Fox, anyone can participate in “a certain kind of perfection.” In other words, the Inward Light has the capacity to free all human beings from original sin. Christ can be said to be the savior and redeemer of all human beings in the sense that Christ is but another name for this Inward Light. Salvation through Christ has nothing to do with Jesus dying on the cross as an atonement for the sins of Adam, as is taught in conventional Christianity. Rather, the death on the cross dramatically shows the death of what Paul called the flesh (which corresponds to what we now call the ego) that is necessary if one is to gain access to the healing Inward Light.

As I reflected on the writings of George Fox, I could not help being struck by how similar all his talk of the Inward Light was to Socrates's talk of his daimon. The inner guide that is within all human beings (and I would want to insist further in all sentient beings) is not exactly the same as conscience, although conscience is part of it, nor is it exactly the same as instinct, although instinct is also part of it. The Inward Light (which is also, I would contend, the daimon) guides us in all things, not just in matters of morality. The better one learns to heed this inward light, the less likely one is to fall into counter-productive and destructive patterns of behavior. The people whom we call sages, saints and prophets are those who are good at heeding their inward light most of the time.

While Fox was inclined to identify his daimon with the Word that was God and Christ, my own conditioning is not as influenced by Christian terminology as was Fox's. I am more habituated to thinking of this Inward Light as what East Asian Buddhists eventually called Buddha-nature (fó xìng). (The naughty punster in me likes to think of fóxìng as Foxing, that is, being like George Fox. But I digress.) The older and more soft-headed I become, the less important difference I can detect between the inner Buddha, the inner Christ, and the daimon. All of them, I think, are different terms for living up to our highest potentials.

It was noted above that what Saint Paul called flesh (sarx) people in our times are more inclined to call something like ego or persona. The claim was also made that our ego or persona—our sense of who we are both as individuals and as social beings—blocks the Inward Light. To the extent that I identify myself as Dayāmati Dharmacārin, Richard Hayes, American, Quaker, Buddhist, philosophy professor, male and so forth, I put up an obstacle to the best of myself that could provide valuable guidance through life. This is because one's sense of identity is constructed largely of a series of strategies (or what psychologists often call “defense mechanisms”) for dealing with pain and fear. These mechanisms are like walls. Walls keep us safe, and in so doing they block light. These walls also have the effect of making us feel that the very light they are blocking is one of the enemies against which they are offering protection. There is a sense in which that is true, for one of the things the Inward Light does is to challenge the validity of our sense of identity. This is why early Quakers often said that the Light is horrifying before it is healing. This is why many Buddhists acknowledge that it takes a lifetime to learn how to manifest one's Buddha-nature consistently. The walls of the ego seem to have a capacity to repair themselves almost as quickly as they are breached. That is why one must constantly work at breaching them.

There are numerous tools that human beings have developed for breaching the ego. One that I have come to value is called the enneagram of personality, a typology of nine basic personality types, each with two subtypes. There are many books available on the topic; the one I like best is Don Riso and Russ Hudson's The Wisdom of the Enneagram: The Complete Guide to Psychological and Spiritual Growth for the Nine Personality Types. Riso and Hudson speak of what they call our true self (which corresponds pretty closely to Fox's Inward Light, Socrates's daimon or Zen Buddhism's Buddha-nature), and they see the eighteen personality subtypes as what we send to a task when our true self fails to show up. The basic personality types are nine basic ways of blocking the Inward Light, nine basic ways of sinning, nine basic ways of failing to reach our highest potential—please use the language that your conditioning finds most comfortable.

This is not the place to go into any of the details of how Riso and Hudson employ the enneagram. To find that, one should go to Riso and Hudson's website. While there are those who are dismissive of the enneagram as a tool, I have found over the years that it is one of many effective tools for becoming aware of the effects of my own persona and finding my way past it from time to time. When those moments of successfully breaching the walls of the ego take place (and before those self-repairing walls are reconstructed), the prophets, the sages and the philosophers of the world make more sense. And so do birds and cockroaches and even ordinary human beings.

There is just one further point to make about Inward Light/Buddha Nature/Inner Christ/daimon and that is without gaining access to it, no kind of critical thinking is possible. Critical thinking is impeded by the reactionary force of the ego, which hastens to fortify itself against anything that is not already considered part of the self. The ego has no interest whatseover in learning anything. Even when part of one's sense of one's own identity is that one is curious and scholarly, what usually turns out to be the case is that one craves to “learn” in a slightly new form something that one already believes. This, of course, is not learning at all. The highly trained academic ego operates on the principle that if anything is important, I already know it, and if something comes along that I don't already know, then it is either wrong or trivial. (If you don't believe this, write a PhD someday and defend it in the PhD club. You'll see that most of the questions are designed either to trivialize your work or dismiss it as false. If you don't have time to write a PhD, just join an e-mail discussion group on any topic and venture to say something. Wait a few minutes. You'll be shot down in flames either for saying something stupid or stating the obvious.) In contast to all the reactionary defenses put up by the ego, critical thinking is open and dispassionately awake to whatever is of value and alert to whatever is not. In short, critical thinking is the work of the daimon when it is not being blocked by the strong-armed bodyguards who stand at the door of the ego.

Confession of an indifferent sports observer

Noam Chomsky once observed that professional sports in America have the effect of keeping the minds of American citizens distracted from important issues. The culture of following sports teams and caring about which ones win and which ones lose is part of a larger culture of distraction and superficiality; sports can be part of the phenomenon of what Neal Postman discussed in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business.

I still recall vividly the moment at which I stopped being interested in spectator sport. I was in high school at the time and was attending a home game of my high school's football team. Like everyone else in the stands, I was yelling and screaming and cheering our team to victory. My heart sank every time the home team fumbled or had a pass intercepted, and I became ecstatic every time the home team moved closer to scoring another goal. Quite suddenly I felt as if I were being lifted out of my personality and given a chance to look at myself as an external observer might see me, and I was overwhelmed with how utterly silly it all was. A moment later, as I settled back into feeling as if I were within myself again, I realized I actually did not care at all who won the game. If one side wins, I thought, the other side will lose. No matter what happens, someone will go home disappointed. I stopped cheering. I sat down and watched the rest of the game without caring in the least which team won. I have never cared which team wins a contest since then. Not caring who wins a game makes games pretty dull viewing, so I have spent remarkably little of my adult life watching sporting events. For a while, when I was first in Canada, I watched hockey on television from a detached perspective. It fascinated me. It seemed to me like ballet interrupted by occasional fist fights.

A friend of my parents was taken prisoner by the Germans during the Second World War. He had a German surname and spoke German fluently. It came to his attention that when German-speaking American prisoners of war were returned to the United States, they were carefully cross-examined to see whether they really were Americans or were English-speaking German spies posing as Americans. The rumor was that one way of identifying genuine Americans was to ask them questions about sports. Who played shortstop for the Red Sox? Which teams played in the 1937 World Series? Who held the American League record for stolen bases? My parents' friend hated sports and had no idea what the answers to any of those questions were. He lived the war dreading being interrogated by Americans; he was sure they would conclude he was a spy. That story has always stayed with me; like my parents' friend, I have been confident that I would fail a quiz on sports with drooping colors. I didn't even know who O.J. Simpson was until somebody told me he was already famous as a sports hero before he went on trial as a result of being accused of murdering his wife.

My attitude toward sporting events carries over to my attitude toward wars. I really do not care at all who wins a war. To be more accurate, I don't believe anyone ever wins a war. Wars have plenty of losers, and they are found on all sides of the conflict. They have no winners. Those who believe a war has been, or can be, won suffer from delusions. I have a bumper sticker on my car that reads “You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.” Sports waste time. Wars are much more serious. They waste life and property and resources. Despite the dramatic difference in the magnitude of the disaster involved, sports have much in common with wars. Competitive sports prepare the American psyche for war. It feeds the American tendency to love winners and to see losers as, well, losers. It is difficult to imagine a pacifist society in which football or basketball had more than a handful of fanatical followers. (It is worth recalling that the English word “fan” is a shortened form of the word “fanatic.”

So here comes New Year's Day. I used to hate this holiday more than all others. Everyone I knew was busy watching football games on television. It was for me the loneliest day of the year. Now that I'm a bit older, I have learned to like my own company much better and can easily spend the day reading books, taking walks, enjoying the trees and birds and squirrels or tidying up my desk to make room for the clutter of another year. The clutter always arrives. It's one thing I know I can count on.

Whether you are a sports fanatic or not, I wish you a Happy New Year. May all your favorite teams all win, whoever they are.

Friendship without frontiers

If one takes a look at the outline of the state of New Mexico, where I grew up as a child and now inhabit again as an old man, it is pretty clear that the boundaries of the state were established by some cartographer taking out a straight edge and drawing three straight lines and one jagged line made of straight segments. In a state full of natural geographical features—mountain ranges, river valleys, basins, calderas, deserts and prairies— there is not a single natural boundary dividing New Mexico from its neighboring states of Arizona, Utah, Colorado, Oklahoma, Texas and Chihuahua. Perhaps because of this, early in my childhood I developed the notion that boundaries are mostly artificial, arbitrary and dispensible.

As I made my way through adulthood, my childhood conviction was reinforced at every turn. When I lived in Canada it was obvious that the boundary between Canada and the United States was completely artificial and corresponded to nothing in the world of nature or the world of human cultural geography; and the same could be said of the boundaries between most of the provinces. The same can be said of the boundary between the United States of America and the United States of Mexico. To take any of these boundaries as grounded in anything but the arbitrary decisions of treaty-makers would be folly. An eagle flying high in the air, or a wolf chasing a bison, no doubt has a clear sense of terrain and knows very well what modifications in behavior are required by differences in landscape, but neither eagle nor wolf nor bison has the faintest sense of where one nation begins and another ends. No animal needs a nation. I am convinced that the same is true of human beings. Not only do we not need nations, but we would probably be immeasurably better off without them.

It is not only national boundaries that do more harm than good. All the many boundaries that we human beings make have more pernicious than salubrious consequences. Racial and ethnic categories with their inevitable (and inevitably arbitary) boundaries, religious boundaries, boundaries that divide one social class from another or one level of education from another—all these do little good and considerable harm. And yet human beings seem to take them seriously enough to devise all manner of ways to demonstrate just which side of a boundary they are on. People define themselves as individuals by associating themselves as members of a group by such boundary markers as style of dress and headgear, hairstyle, cosmetics and ornamentation, tattoos, dietary restrictions, sexual taboos, and marital regulations concerning the number of spouses one may have and what gender a spouse must be or what religion a spouse ought to be. The only universal human taboo is that against being oneself in a relaxed and natural way.

In December of every year, I find myself feeling especially heartsick about boundaries. Zen Buddhists separate themselves off from other Buddhists by celebrating the Buddha's enlightenment. Jews celebrate, among other things, their distinctness from other peoples through Chanukkah. Christians celebrate the birth of a man whom they claim to be the only son of God and the sole way to enter God's kingdom, thus making a boundary between themselves and those who hold other equally absurd beliefs. All these boundaries that become manifest in December remind me of the strongest conviction I have, namely, that making boundaries is no way to live on a planet with limited resources and on which success can be achieved only by harmonious cooperation among all peoples and between human beings and all the other species that live here.

If I must have a religion, it is friendship, and friendship by its very nature knows no bounds and has no limits. It is universal or it is not friendship at all. David Gwyn expressed very nicely how I have always thought about friendship:

Friendship is perhaps the most universal (yet least defined) relationship of covenant faith. Friendship disregards religious, ethnic, economic, national, and all other boundaries. It subverts idolatrous concentrations of power and authority.

December, the month of so many fractures and ruptures in the human family, is when I am most deeply aware of how much I value friendship, and of how rare friendship is in a world of sectarianism, denominationalism, factionalism and other manifestations of the will of human beings to doinate and control rather than to love and nurture.

The first day of winter (which for those of us who live in the northern hemisphere took place this year on December 21) marks the time when light begins to gain on darkness. It is in a sense the rebirth of light. Light symbolizes friendship, love, harmony and all those qualities that make life sustainable. This year Chanukkah, the Jewish festival of lights, began on the same day. Christmas comes a few days into the season of renewed light. Being a person whose boundaries are all porous and permeable membranes, I celebrate all these holidays, and the Buddha's enlightenment, in spirit with all my friends, and I take this time of year to give thanks (to whom or what I do not know) that no one anywhere is not within my circle of friends.

Have a subversive Christmas

In David Loy's collection of essays entitled The Great Awakening: A Buddhist Social Theory, there is an essay called “Pave the Planet or Wear Shoes?” Toward the end of that essay, Loy observes that if a religion is a set of views and values and their corresponding practices that plays the greatest role in giving shape to one's daily life, then the principal religion in America is consumerism. When one considers the huge amount of time and money devoted to making Americans crave some product they don't really need, and the amount of time and money Americans spend working for the money to buy those products, shopping for them, protecting them once purchased, storing them and eventually disposing of them, Loy may well be onto something.

I recently assigned Loy's essay to a class in Buddhist philosophy. After saying a little about Loy's work and this particular essay, I broke the class up into small discussion groups and asked them to discuss several questions I had provided for them. One of them was a question about Loy's claim that consumerism is the prevailing religion in today's America. It was interesting to hear students talking about various products they had no idea how they could possibly live without. The products at the top of their list were all things that did not exist ten years ago—products that I have lived without for my entire life and probably will never have a hankering to own. If consumerism is the religion of our day, my students would appear to have taken the catechism classes and had their Confirmation. With only one or two obvious exceptions, most of them are not exactly true believers—most of them seem to reject the ideology of consumerism when it is stated in plain language, and they know it is in some way not cool to be materialistic. But if not believers, they appear to be at least observant practitioners.

The Christmas season is upon us, and it has been evident to many observers ever since I can remember that Christmas in America is much more about the practice of materialism than about anything that opposes, or even questions, it. A few American Christians manage to get worked up over what some of them call a “war on Christmas,” but their main target is not rampant consumerism, but rather merchants and advertisers who prefer to call this time of year “the holiday season” instead of The Christmas Season.

For most of my adult life I have been striving, with only limited success, to ignore the impulse to exchange material gifts and commercial Christmas cards with people I love. I have also struggled with the question of whether it makes sense for someone who does not consider himself a Christian to celebrate Christmas at all, and, if so, to be so resistant to celebrating it as the most holy day in the religion of American Consumerism and so insistent on celebrating as a an important Christian holy day. It is unlikely that I shall resolve any of these issues before my consciousness fizzles out. They are too complex to resolve easily, and frankly not important enough to me to spend much time worrying about.

In the spirit of giving that does not further spread the disease of commercialism and consumerism, my gift of choice this year is an Ubuntu Linux operating system for all my friends who have computers. Everything about Linux in general sits well with me. For one thing, Linux operating systems, and the software that runs on them, are completely open source. That is, they are distributed for free along with the computer code used to build them. There is in principle nothing commercial about a Linux operating system. The only aspect of Linux that can be commercialized is putting together a distribution, which includes the operating system and software packages and a smooth-running installation protocol. Strictly speaking, it is only the installation protocol, and protocols for updating software, that can be sold for profit. There are several commercial distributions.

My reason for specifying Ubuntu Linux is that even the installation protocols are distributed for no cost whatsoever to anyone who requests them. All one has to do is to go to the Ubuntu Linux web page and click on the link entitled Get Ubuntu to begin a download or order a DVD to be sent anywhere in the world free of charge. If one prefers to buy a CD or DVD, that option is available, too. If one wishes to support the Ubuntu movement by making a financial contribution, or by helping to develop or test new products, there are links for all those opportunities as well. Ubuntu is all about community and sharing.

My mother used to intone the mantra “You get what you pay for,” which usually meant that anything that is available at no cost is probably worthless, or close to it. In the case of Ubuntu Linux, nothing could be farther from the truth than that mantra. Ubuntu Linux is very hard to beat as a computer operating system and collection of software programs that will do anything that can be done by commercial programs. Linux rarely crashes; I have experienced two crashes in ten years of using it daily. For a variety of reasons, it is rarely disturbed by viruses; it is, in the first place, constructed so as to be inherently secure, but it is also, unlike Microsoft, a system with few enemies who feel motivated to write destructive viruses to disturb it. Despite viruses for Linux being very rare, there are strong virus protection programs, just in case. In ten years of using Linux, I have never had a virus or Trojan horse or worm. I have lost almost no time to breakdowns or to problems requiring extensive troubleshooting. As the Ubuntu people like to say, Ubuntu Linux “just works.” In contrast to the early days of Linux, using Ubuntu Linux requires very little computer expertise of the user. If one chooses to become expert, there is ample documentation and help available. Almost everything about Ubuntu Linux can be tweaked until one's computer fits one's work habits and aesthetic tastes and quirky personality traits like a glove.

Like most (if not all) Linux distributions, Ubuntu Linux can be loaded on a computer that runs some other operating system. If one chooses to install Linux on a computer that uses some version of Windows, for example, then every time one boots up the computer, one will be presented with a choice to start up either Windows or Linux. When I first installed Linux ten years ago, I installed it alongside Windows. After a couple of years I noticed that I never chose to boot Windows, since everything I could do there I could do better on Linux. Eventually I took Windows off my computer. Since then when I have purchased computers, I have bought them with Ubuntu Linux installed as the sole operating system. My story is a common one.

The bodhisattva who put up the initial funding and organizational genius that makes Ubuntu Linux possible is a man named Mark Shuttleworth. Even if one is not at all interested in trying Ubuntu Linux out, it is interesting and inspiring to read The Ubuntu Story. It is a tale of how life could be if it weren't for individual and collective manifestations of greed, hatred and delusion.

There are alternatives to the religion of consumerism. It is worth considering taking a subversive step or two to undermine consumerism and replace it with humanity and sanity.

Thanksgiving 2008

The last Thursday of November is set aside in the United States as a day for giving thanks to whomever gratitude is to be given. This year I find myself wishing to express gratitude for several features of the nation in which I was born and in which I have once again, after a long absence, taken up residence. In giving thanks for the gifts of the United States, I find it impossible not to give thanks to all the peoples of the planet earth without whom the United States would be meaningless. This year I am feeling particularly grateful for the following:

• E pluribus unum. I am grateful for the diversity of people who have made their homes in the United States and who have enriched the nation through their presence. I value the contributions of the Afghan, Albanian, Algerian, Angolan, Apache, Argentine, Armenian, Assamese, Australian, Austrian, Bangladeshi, Belgian, Bermudan, Bhutanese, Blackfoot, Brazilian, Bulgarian, Burmese, Cambodian, Canadian, Cherokee, Cheyenne, Chickasaw, Chilean, Chinese, Chinook, Chippewa, Choctaw, Colombian, Comanche, Congolese, Corsican, Costa Rican, Cree, Creek, Croatian, Crow, Cuban, Cypriot, Czech, Dakota, Danish, Delaware, Dutch, Ecuadorian, Egyptian, English, Estonian, Ethiopian, Fijian, Finnish, French, Gambian, Georgian, German, Ghanaian, Greek, Guatemalan, Guyanese, Haitian, Hawaiian, Honduran, Hopi, Hungarian, Indian, Indonesian, Inuit, Iranian, Iraqi, Irish, Iroquois, Israeli, Italian, Jamaican, Japanese, Jordanian, Kenyan, Keresian, Kiowa, Korean, Kuwaiti, Lakota, Lao, Latvian, Lenape, Liberian, Libyan, Lithuanian, Luxembourgian, Macedonian, Malaysian, Manchurian, Maltese, Mexican, Mohawk, Mongolian, Moroccan, Nakota, Narragansett, Navajo, New Zealand, Nicaraguan, Nigerian, Ninnuock, Norwegian, Ojibwa, Osage, Ottawa, Pakistani, Paraguayan, Pequot, Peruvian, Philippine, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Rwandan, Salish, Samoan, Saudi, Scottish, Seminole, Seneca, Senegalese, Serbian, Shoshone, Slovak, Slovenian, Somali, South African, Spanish, Sri Lankan, Swedish, Swiss, Syrian, Tanzanian, Tewa, Thai, Tibetan, Tiwa, Towa, Turkish, Ugandan, Ukrainian, Uruguayan, Ute, Uzbek, Venezuelan, Vietnamese, Welsh, Wichita, Yemeni, Zambian, and Zimbabwean peoples, and to the many peoples whose names I have neglected to mention. I value the contributions they have made to the literature, the music, the cuisine, the philosophy, the religion and the wisdom of my home and native land.
• The First Amendment. I am grateful to the framers of the Constitution of the United States, and especially to those who formulated the First Amendment:

  Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

  I cherish the genius of those who saw the value of having a nation without any established religion, a nation in which every resident is free to practice any religion or none without fear of persecution or interference, so long as the practice of a religion does not abridge the rights and freedoms to others to do as their conscience dictates. And since the rights outlined in the First Amendment have been challenged at various times, I am grateful that the Supreme Court of the United States has consistently found against encroachments on these freedoms.
• The Fifteenth, Nineteenth and Twenty-sixth Amendments to the US Constitution. The fifteenth gave the right to vote to all citizens regardless of race; the nineteenth made women eligible to vote; and the twenty-sixth lowered the voting age from twenty-one to eighteen. Had these amendments not been ratified in 1870, 1920 and 1971 respectively, we would probably not be looking forward to the inauguration in January 2009 of the first African-American president. May Obama be the first in a long series of presidents that reflect the diversity of the United States.
• Our North American Neighbors. I am grateful that the country in which I live enjoys a harmonious and peaceful relationship with our immediate neighbors, Canada and Mexico, two countries that I esteem and value in their own right.
• The National Park System. I am grateful for the foresight and wisdom of those who established and who maintain the National Park Service and the US Forest Service. I am grateful that there are still wilderness areas where wildlife can flourish and remain unmolested by the human exploitation of their habitat. The area of the United States in which I feel most at home is the Southwestern region, which is rich in national parks and national forests that help preserve an extraordinary variety of natural habitats and places of astonishing beauty.
• The Twenty-second Amendment of the US Constitution Thanks to the amendment, ratified in 1951, that places a limit on how long one person can serve as president, I shall be among the 80% of the country that will be rejoicing that this will be our last Thanksgiving under the presidency of George W. Bush. It will probably be years before the full reckoning can be made of all the damage his administration has done to his country and to the whole world, and we won't be knowing until a few decades from now how much of that damage will turn out to be irreversible.

After writing these expressions of gratitude, I went back and reread my Thanksgiving message of 2007 and note that I was feeling grateful for almost exactly the same things then. And so I add one further expression of gratitude: I am grateful that all the things I treasured last year have survived one more year to be treasured again this year.

The bright side of economic collapse

When I was in my final semester of high school in 1963 I took a required course in American government. The teacher was a young man who had recently graduated from Harvard with a degree in economics. He was much too smart, and much too liberal, to be teaching in a high school in the suburbs of Denver in which all the brightest kids were Young Republicans, and the more ordinary students were obsessed with winning state championships in football, basketball and track. Most students found him an unbearable nerd. I loved his ability to shake up my limited world view.

One of the biggest grenades this teacher (whose name I am ashamed to have forgotten) lobbed into my Weltanshaaung (a word he taught me) was his insistence that money is not backed up by anything but faith in, well, money itself. A dollar is worth a dollar only because people keep thinking it is worth a dollar. A dollar is a fiction that liberates people from having to trade a bushel of apples for a garden hoe in some bartering transaction. If someone has a bushel of apples, he can sell it to me for a handful of dollars, and then he can buy something he really wants from someone else; he doesn't have to settle for the garden hoe I happen to want to get rid of. But what makes the entire system work is just faith in the system.

This no doubt oversimplified explanation of how money works drove me crazy. I hated the idea that anything could depend on something as fickle and friable as faith. Faith was for religious fanatics who believed in all kinds of spooky realms and unlikely fantasies about the dead being resurrected and everyone's sin being atoned for by the death of one man on a cross two millennia ago. I wanted economics to be built on a more solid foundation. I wanted something tangible, like gold, or at least granite, to be backing up the American dollar. Somehow or other, however, I got used to the idea that money is essentially a fiction that has value only as long as people continue to believe that it does. I never liked this economic reality very much. I just got used to it.

Events of the past few months have reminded me of what I learned about money in my senior year in high school. Not being an economist, I understand nothing about money in sophisticated terms. I see all financial things through the eyes of a child. So what the current economic situation looks like to me is that a bunch of greedy financial people thought they could get very rich indeed by making loans to people who were not likely to be able to pay the loans back. As people around the world began to see how much money was being lent in ways that even faith could not support, faith crumbled. As a result no one has as much money as they used to think they had. And the money they do have will not be nearly as effective in helping them acquire the goods and services they believe they want, because of two things. First, money loses purchasing power as people lose faith in it. And second, when money loses purchasing power, people stop producing the goods and services that they used to provide. So even if people still have money, there won't be as many products to buy with it. For one person to be able to go on a cruise, he has to find a few thousand other people who want, and can afford, the same luxury. When there is no longer a critical mass of people seeking luxury cruises, cruise liners will stop running. All the money one has saved up cannot buy a product or service that has ceased to exist.

There is in all this something that I cannot help thinking is going to end up making the world a much better place. Commodities, even the so-called green products, tend to create conditions that degrade the environment. An ordinary automobile that meets American fuel efficiency standards carrying two passengers consumes about one gallons for every 55 passenger mile. In contrast, an intercity bus uses about one gallon for every 330 passenger miles; a train consumes about one gallon for every 328 passenger-miles; a hybrid automobile carrying three passengers uses about one gallon of fuel per 165 passenger-miles; a commercial jet airplane uses one gallon for every 20 passenger-miles; a cruise ship uses one gallon for every 17 passenger miles. So as the economy tanks, and more people walk or bicycle or take buses or trains, the total amount of fuels consumed will decline dramatically, leading to a reduction in greenhouse gases, and that can only be good for the environment.

Another positive outcome of a failing economy is likely to be a dramatic decline in the production of highly toxic products such as computers, mobile telephones, televisions and other electronic products that no one really needs. Their increasing availability has created terrible waste disposal problems around the world, especially in the poorest countries. As economic factors force people to wean themselves from these instruments, the environment is likely to improve.

Perhaps the best outcome of all of an economy in which faith-based financial instruments have lost their value is that people will one again discover the satisfaction of working for each other instead of for money. Communities based on real human values are likely to re-emerge. An economy in which a person's wealth is measured in terms of how much he can lend a hand to help others and provide their needs could well replace an economy in which wealth is measured in terms of how much one can hoard. An economy based on genuine needs rather than artificially created desires would be a welcome change.

Life is so complex that the only thing one can be sure of is that not much that happens will have been expected and accurately predicted. Perhaps none of the changes that I would welcome will take place. Still, it is no more inherently risky to hope for the best than to have faith in the value of fictitious money.

As civilization winds down

The ancient Chinese had the sensible belief that when unexpected unnatural events occurred, they could be taken as a sign that Heaven was angry and that the government should be overthrown by the people. Comets, eclipses of the moon, calves born with two heads or five legs and prolonged droughts (or serious floods) could all be taken as signs of a need for regime change. (I suppose melting polar ice caps, huge accumulations of plastic junk floating in the middle of the ocean, and the extinction of large numbers of flora and fauna might also qualify.) Native peoples in the Americas often have stories of warning signs of the end of human civilization and impending doom, many of them involving erratic animal behavior.

To me one of the clearest signs that civilization is coming to an end is that old people no longer act their age. When I was a child, old people acted old. They dressed like old people. They sat in rocking chairs. They laughed at the antics of kittens and grandchildren. They recited Biblical passages they had memorized. They wheezed. Their hair was grey, and then white, if they had any at all. Their hands were cold. Women had moustaches. Hardly anyone lived much beyond 70. Old people started to smell funny, and then they got weak and spent most of their time in bed, and then they died. That, it seems to me, is what being old should be like. I do not like the way old people are nowadays.

When I was huffing and puffing (and, yes, wheezing) on an elliptical trainer at the local YMCA yesterday (something my grandfathers never did when they were 63, because in their day the YMCA was an association for young Christian men), I happened to see a news story on the television that the YMCA puts in the gym to help people avoid looking at the beautiful mountains through the huge picture windows as they exercise. The story claimed that the Mexico City government has passed a new policy to give free Viagra to all men over 70. When I saw that, I muttered my favorite prayer: “Oh, for Christ's sake!”

When men get old they don't need to have erections. Not having an erection is not a dysfunction. There is no such thing as erectile dysfunction syndrome. It is just being old. It goes with wheezing and having white hair and needing suspenders because you can't find a belt big enough to go around your waist. It's normal. Like having wrinkles and sagging cheeks and a double chin. That's part of being old. Viagra, Botox and Grecian Formula are signs that people have forgotten that they really should be acting their own age. They are signs that human civilization is coming to an end.

Cell phones and iPods are also signs that human civilization is on its last legs. Earlier this week I was a little late getting home and decided to take a bus rather than walk. As I sat on the bus, I noticed that I was the only passenger who wasn't fiddling with a cell phone or an MP3 player. Everyone else had plastic stoppers in their ears so they could hear the music being played by their iPods. Everyone looked pretty much like a corpse from the neck up: expressionless faces showing no sign of life. The only signs of life were fingers and thumbs frantically and impatiently pecking at tiny keys. Now young people being impatient are showing their age. That's a good sign. But they are not talking to each other or trying to get the attention of the opposite sex or making rude comments about the old men on the bus. That's a very bad sign.

Given what I have seen of what people seem to think civilization is, I will not miss it when it finally falls. I already have a couple of good rocking chairs. And I have a teapot. That's all an old man needs in the way of material possessions. The only thing else he needs is to remember to zip his fly now and then, just in case a visitor comes around.

It tolls for thee

The fruits which your soul lusted after have been lost to you, and all things that were dainty and sumptuous have perished from you, and you will find them no more at all. The merchants of these things, who were made rich by her, will stand far away for the fear of her torment, weeping and mourning; saying, ‘Woe, woe, the great city, she who was dressed in fine linen, purple, and scarlet, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls! For in an hour such great riches are made desolate.’ Every shipmaster, and everyone who sails anywhere, and mariners, and as many as gain their living by sea, stood far away, and cried out as they looked at the smoke of her burning, saying, ‘What is like the great city?’ They cast dust on their heads, and cried, weeping and mourning, saying, ‘Woe, woe, the great city, in which all who had their ships in the sea were made rich by reason of her great wealth!’ For in one hour is she made desolate.

The Revelation to John 18:14–19

The above text from what is commonly called the Book of Revelations is describing the fall of Babylon. To the readers of its day, however, it was not only describing the fall of Babylon, but also predicting the fall of Rome, most probably the fall of the Emperor Nero. For persecuted Jews and Christians to speak directly of the fall of Rome during the height of Roman power would have been so politically provocative as to be suicidal. Speaking of the fall of Rome could only be done by speaking of the fall of another detested enemy of the Jews from a past era. Conjuring up the horrible memories of the Babylonian captivity that a previous generation had suffered was a veiled way of reminding readers of a similar tragedy in the lives of the intended readers.

The generation of readers who suffered persecution during the time of Nero eventually slipped into history. The text written for them, the Apocalypse (or Revelation) to John, survived. In a sense it outlived its urgency. Its survival raises an interesting question to later generations who inherit it as a piece of presumably inspired canonical scripture.

As many interpreters of texts from the past have pointed out, there is no single meaning to a text. The meaning the text had for its author(s) is one meaning—it may well be a meaning that no later generation can fully recover. Its original meaning can be compared to a mathematical asymptote; it is a limit that can be approached but never quite reached. But the meaning of a text is by no means limited to the meaning it had for its original author or authors. Layers of meaning are constantly being added as circumstances change. This is why there can never be a definitive or final understanding of a living text. Texts are dynamic and forever shifting from one generation to another, and from one interpreter to another within a generation, and from one decade to another in the life of a single interpreter. With all those cautions in mind, let me play at finding meaning in the above passage from The Apocalypse to John.

First, it would be a mistake, I think, to read the text from the point of view of the authors. After all, they were not writing the text for themselves, but for their intended audience. In the case of the text under discussion, it was no doubt meant to give some kind of comfort to those who were being subjugated by an overwhelming power. It was meant to be read by those who were being left out of the wealth and comfort and luxury—the dainty and sumptuous being enjoyed by the wealthy and powerful.

To put the issues into the terms of today's society, the text was being written not to comfort the elected politicians and the prosperous executives of international corporations and those who lived on inherited wealth made by their ancestors, but to comfort those people whose land has been taken from them and those who have been enslaved and those who must beg, or work at substandard wages, to eke out a living for themselves and their families. It is a text of comfort to, among others, Native Americans, African Americans, Latinos and immigrants whose countries have been devastated by wars the Americans in positions of political and economic power have visited upon them

If John's Apocalypse has the purpose today of bringing comfort to the counterparts of the disenfranchised Jews and Christians experiencing neglect or subjugation during the time of the Roman empire, what is its meaning for the counterparts of the Romans? What is its purpose for the likes of wealthy and powerful men such as George W. Bush, John McCain, John Kerry, Rush Limbaugh, Warren Buffet, Oprah Winfrey and T. Boone Pickens? It could mean something like this:

The day is fast arriving when the “fruits which your soul lusted after have been lost to you, and all things that were dainty and sumptuous have perished from you, and you will find them no more at all.” And not only will you be mourning the loss of all that used to comfort you, but so will those merchants who became prosperous by catering to you in your hours of self-indulgence. Prepare for torment, weeping and mourning.

The text is not an invitation to be smug and self-satisfied with one's prosperity. It is not a text of congratulations to the wealthy and powerful for having God on their side.

Reading the text through a mind conditioned by Buddhist teachings, I am inclined to see the text as a reminder that all conditioned things are impermanent, and those who have become addicted to impermanent things are in for suffering, probably much sooner than they think.

The sunset was beautiful tonight. It did not last. The waxing moon is shining through my window. Whose is it?

Thanksgiving Day 1963

As I watched tears streaming down the faces of black and white people in Chicago just as they heard the long-awaited announcement that Barack Obama had been declared as the elected president of the United States, a personal memory that had been festering for forty-five years came to the surface.

The memory was of a bitter cold Thanksgiving Day in 1963. On that day I had made plans to go with a friend of mine to a good restaurant in Beloit, Wisconsin, the town in which my friend and I were both freshman at Beloit College. When we got to the restaurant, the maître d'hôtel pulled me aside and quietly informed me that my friend could not be seated in the reastaurant, because his presence would offend the other guests. My friend was a black student from Kenya. The feeling that came over me on that occasion was one of a deep shame for the country in which I had been born—a country in which I had lived my entire life listening to many, perhaps most, of my white friends making insulting comments about Negroes (as Africans and African Americans were then often called when people were trying to be polite), and about Jews and about Asians and about Mexicans (as Americans with Spanish surnames were usually called in those days). My family's culture was deeply at odds with the tone of racism that permeated America in the days of my youth. The prevalent cultural values of my home and native land were embarrassing to me, filled me with shame, made me angry and plunged me into despair. In 1963 I never dreamed I would live to see the day when an African American would be elected president of the United States. Therefore, like hundreds of millions of other people around the world, I wept with joy when the announcement was made last night.

There was not much to feel thankful about on Thanksgiving Day 1963. Just six days earlier, John F. Kennedy had been assassinated in Dallas. And Kennedy's presidency had been an ordeal for many of us who believed in peace and disarmament and who were alarmed by what Eisenhower had dubbed the Military Industrial Complex. Kennedy's presidency was not necessarily the beginning of America's tragic transition from a nation to an imperialistic power, but it accelerated us along that trajectory. The Kennedy years plunged us deeper into an unrealistic paranoia about the putative evils of Communism and Socialism and into a patriotic conviction that somehow America had an obligation to make the world free. The Kennedy years had been, with only a few exceptional moments, mostly unpleasant to people with my convictions. The brutality of the way that unhappy presidency ended only puncuated the tragedy that the United States had become.

The election of Barack Obama feels to me as though a curse has been lifted. It is as though an evil spell has been broken—a spell that was cast during the 1960 presidential campaign, a campaign in which there were no positive options in the race for president, a campaign in which the Americans were presented with having to choose the lesser of two evils: John Kennedy or Richard Nixon. That curse of having to choose the lesser of two evils has been with this country ever since. With the exception of the candidacy and presidency of Jimmy Carter, the American people have not been offered a wise and insightful and capable presidential candidate by either of the two most powerful political parties. For the past eight years the American people, and the entire world, have suffered under the policies of a man who quickly secured for himself the distinction of being the most disastrously destructive president the country has ever had.

In the interest of honesty I must confess that Obama was at the bottom of my list of preferences for a Democratic candidate. Early in the race I supported Dennis Kucinich. Then I settled for John Edwards. Then I supported Hillary Clinton. When only Obama was left, I reluctantly supported him, despite strong temptations to vote for the Green Party candidate, 100% of whose policies I could enthusiastically endorse. Obama's foreign policy makes me nervous; it is far too militant for my tastes. He is not nearly socialist enough for me. He believes in the death penalty. He does not endorse strong gun control. He does not favor same-sex marriage. I cannot imagine him dismantling our nuclear arsenal or closing all American military bases on foreign soil. On most issues that matter most to me, he is too far to the right, and in matters on which we agree I do not see him as a president who will push hard enough to achieve good results quickly. But for all that, he is, to my mind, not simply the lesser of two evils. He is the first presidential candidate since Carter for whom I have felt I was casting my vote for him and not just against his opponent. (Again, to be honest, I have voted for a presiential candidate only twice in my life. The 2004 election was the first one in which, at the tender age of 59, after thirty-six years of residing in Canada, I cast a vote for anyone for any office in an American election. In that election I voted for the lesser of two evils.)

On Thanksgiving Day 2008, I will celebrate the prospects of finally seeing a black family in the White House.

Preparing America for Democracy

Like everyone else in the world, I am waiting to see what the results will be of the 2008 elections in the United States of America, elections that the media never tire of reminding us are historic. I cannot help hoping the way the elections were conducted this year will soon be history—something we tell our grandchildren about someday but that we never again have to experience.

When I voted, there were six candidates for president on the ballot, three of whom I had never heard of. Of the three I had heard of, all were clamoring for some kind of change. Clearly America loves to see itself as a nation that is ready for change. Here is one change I am ready for: I am ready for democracy to come to America. I do not think that will happen until a few other changes are made. Here is a short list of those changes:

• No more paid political advertisements! Every newspaper, television and radio station should be required to donate an equal amount of time and space to every political party fielding a candidate. If that arrangement would be too onerous on the media, then let the government compensate all the media outlets for the time or space used. What is essential is that every citizen be given a chance to hear what every candidate has to say and that no candidate be advantaged by having access to a large amount of money or disadvantaged by a lack of money. Ideas and principles should determine elections, not money.
• Voting should be done on a holiday. Elections should take place either on a weekend, or election day should be declared a federal holiday, a day on which no one, except for operations considered vital for maintaining an orderly society, is required to work or to lose pay for not working. Again, if the expense of paying workers for a holiday is too burdensome for corporations and small businesses, the government should provide funds. The point is that no one should miss the opportunity to vote because of fear of losing wages, missing a class and being punished for failure to show up for work or class.
• Child care should be provided for voters with children. There is no reason a single parent should miss an opportunity to vote because of having children to mind. A parent should be able to spend a modest amount of time standing in line and voting without worrying about his or her children. The expense of qualified child care at voting sites should be provided by the government.
• All voting should be done on paper ballots and counted manually. There is no reason people need to know the results of an election on election day itself. Newly elected officials do not take office until about ten weeks after election day. If it takes three weeks to tabulate the results, nothing is lost. Manual counting of paper ballots is much less likely to be tampered with than any form of electronic counting of ballots cast on electronic voting machines or marked on paper ballots and then scanned.
• All federal elections should be scrutinized by United Nations observers. This is routine in fledgling democracies and in areas of the world where there is a history of corruption and fraud. If Americans prove that they are capable of holding free and fair elections, then the scrutiny could be relaxed in years to come.
• Automated telephone calls should be banned. This ban should be put in place not only during election season. No one should ever be put in a position of answering a telephone and having to listen to a recorded message. Recorded messages are dehumanizing.

These recommendations hardly exhaust the changes that must be done in order to pave the way for a meaningful democracy in the United States, but they would be a start. (In a previous posting I recommended that no person be allowed to vote until he or she has passed the same citizenship test that naturalized citizens are required to take. So far this recommendation has been ignored.) If this blog has any readers, and if any of those readers have further ideas, please post further suggestions as comments to this posting.

Now I am ready to watch the farce of this year's election unfold.

Clearness process

This past week I underwent what is known in Quaker circles as a clearness committee. A clearness committee is a group of elders, usually chosen by the person seeking clarity on some issue, who meet with a person seeking to clarify his or her thoughts and feelings about some spiritual matter of importance. If, for example, a Friend feels led to undertake some project or pursue a course of action, but is not entirely sure whether the leading stems from an abiding conviction or a transitory whim, the Friend may request that a clearness committee be formed. It is customary for a person to seek a clearness committee when seeking membership in a particular meeting. (The only way to become a Quaker is to become a member of local meeting that has been authorized to admit new members.) The clearness committee I had this past week was to examine my request to be made of a member of the Albuquerque Monthly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends.

My situation was complicated by the fact that I am a dharmachari in the Western Buddhist Order and that I wish to remain one. This meant that I first had to contact my mentors in the Western Buddhist Order to determine how they would feel about my being a Quaker and whether they would see my becoming a Quaker as a repudiation of Buddhism in general or of the Western Buddhist Order in particular. The principal issue to be explored there was whether I myself experience any kind of conflict between my Buddhist convictions and practices and my Quaker convictions and practice. I do not. Asked whether I can even imagine anything coming up that would feel like a conflict in my mind, I respond that I cannot.

The next step was to meet with a Quaker clearness committee to explore whether the Albuquerque Society of Friends sees any obstacles to my being both a practicing Buddhist and a convinced Quaker. The four elders with whom I met could see none. They recommended, therefore, that my application for membership be approved by the meeting as a whole. If no one has any serious objections, their recommendation will be followed.

Both to those who know something about the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order and to those who know something about the history of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), it might come as a surprise that my intentions were approved by both organizations. Historically, the WBO has discouraged dual membership, and people have been advised to choose whether they wish to be part of the FWBO or part of some other Buddhist organization; serving two masters has not been seen as practicable. In the FWBO it has generally been assumed that it is entirely impossible to go effectively for refuge to the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha while also practicing a non-Buddhist path such as Hinduism, Christianity, Judaism or Islam. The Quakers, it is well known, were originally a Christian reform movement, deeply convinced that Catholics, Anglicans, Presbyterians and Puritans had all corrupted the original teachings of Jesus Christ and had failed to follow Christ's example; their task was to return to a pure and uncorrupted form of Christianity. Being a faithful follower of Christ did not, for early Quakers, entail going for refuge to the Buddha. So one might well ask how a Quaker can be a Buddhist and how a Buddhist can be a Quaker. The answer is that things change. When people are open to change, they need not become stuck in patterns of belief and practice that were considered essential in the past.

In my own case, the Quaker meeting to which I applied for membership is part of the minority of Quakers that are universalist liberals and who feel free to draw inspiration from any and all spiritual traditions. One is every bit as likely to hear a liberal Friend quoting the Dhammapada, Gandhi, Laozi, Rumi or Walt Whitman as to hear quotations from the Bible or George Fox or Martin Luther King, Jr. Indeed, it is not at all uncommon to hear liberal Friends confess that they never read the Bible and find the Bible off putting, confusing and counterproductive. Liberal Quakers are a now a minority within the Society of Friends. The majority of Quakers are evangelical Christians with a rather aggressive missionary agenda. The largest concentration of Quakers in the world is in Kenya, a country in which American evangelical Quakers have been particularly active during the past several decades. It is close to a certainty that a Buddhist applying for membership in an evangelical Quaker meeting would be rejected.

How have liberal Quakers strayed so far from the roots of their Christocentric spiritual ancestors? The key to understanding this lies in remembering what George Fox and the first Quakers meant by being a disciple of Jesus Christ. They certainly did not mean being Biblical literalists. On the contrary, one of the most often quoted verses from the Bible in early Quaker testimony was "The spirit gives life, but letter killeth." George Fox was chided by priests and theologians of his day who pointed out that he could read neither Hebrew nor Greek. He responded by saying that all human beings participate in the “inward light,” that was the spirit that gave rise to the words in written scripture. We can all gain access to the source of all scriptures if we learn to still our minds, open our hearts and listen carefully to the still small voice that guided the prophets and Jesus Christ and the desert fathers. That same still small voice has spoken to people throughout history in all parts of the world. It need not speak in the same way to all people.

If one begins with the conviction that it is possible to understand the Bible only if one first listens to the spirit that resides in all people in all places, it is a short step to realizing that it is not necessary to understand the Bible at all. All one need understand (or try to understand) is the spirit that manifests in thoughts, dreams, imagination, fantasy, creativity, prayer and meditation, that inspires poets and revolutionaries and visionaries and gives stability to elders and caution to conservatives. Yes, one might find some passages in the Bible that agree with one's voice, but one may just as well find some passages in the writings of Zhuangzi, Nagarjuna or Sangharakshita that are congruent with the leadings of the inner spirit. No scriptural tradition is privileged. No scriptural tradition, and indeed nothing that any human being has said, is without potential spiritual value. No scripture will speak to everyone. No scripture will speak to no one. No one will find no guidance from somewhere.

There is, of course, a potential danger in openness, and especially in an uncritical and naive openness. The typical human mind conjures up quite a few half-baked whims and crackpot delusions in the course of an average day. Not every dream is significant; not every fantasy is as insightful as the sermon on the mount, or the words of the Dhammapada, or the poetry of Walt Whitman. Everyone needs a good editor. A good poet is one who does not publish her poorly crafted poems. A good photographer is one who never shows his bad photographs. A good visionary is one who does not share her every wild idea.

Who is the editor who helps a free spirit sort genuine leadings of the inward light from delusional enthusiasm? That what friends are for. It is not a good idea to embark on an open-ended, open-minded, open-hearted search for truths without the companionship of carefully chosen good friends. It is perhaps no accident that the two organizations through which I ply my spiritual trade are the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order (FWBO) and the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers). Without all these Friends, I would surely be, in the language of George Fox, “mazed in notions, gadding abroad from the truth and liable to disorderly walking.”

I wish thee clarity in thy seeking.

Meeting for worship for business

The author of a comment on a previous posting reported that he had heard that Quakers do not believe in voting, because they believe that God decides all things. This observation puzzled me, and I responded that Quakers tend to be quite engaged in the political process. Only later did it occur to me that what the author of the comment had been referring to was Quaker meetings for business, not to political elections. He was quite right in noting that in Quaker meetings for business within the Quaker organization, there is no voting. There is no voting, because there are no motions made during a meeting for business. There is nothing to vote on. This no doubt sounds mysterious to those who have never attended a Quaker meeting for business (more properly called a meeting for worship with attention to business). In what follows I shall try to describe how Quakers conduct business within their monthly meetings for business within the Society of Friends.

In meetings I have attended, the custom is for the clerk of the meeting to set an agenda of items to be discussed and decided. Agenda items are suggested to the clerk throughout the month and so arise from the concerns of members and attenders of the meeting for worship. The agenda of a business meeting is usually posted before the meeting so that those who attend the business meeting have an idea of what is going to be discussed. Like every other Quaker meeting for worship, the meeting for worship with attention to business begins in silence. Friends typically take advantage of the silence to settle their minds and, as far as it is possible, to leave prejudices aside so as to consider each concern with an unbiased mind. After several minutes of silence, the clerk will introduce an item on the agenda, perhaps inviting the Friend who submitted the concern to express the nature of his or her concern. Once the subject has been introduced, Friends again enter into silence to consider the concern. As they are moved to speak to the issue, Friends will rise to express their insights into the matter under discussion. Usually no record is kept of any of these expressions of insight. Eventually, after as much discussion as seems sufficient, the clerk of the meeting will “try a minute.” That is, the clerk will try to summarize what the collective will of the meeting is. To put the matter as Quakers usually put it, the clerk tries to express where the spirit has led the members of the meeting. Either the clerk or a recording clerk will write this minute down and then read it aloud. If the minute as formulated by the clerk or recording clerk seems to have captured the spirit of the meeting, the members will approve the minute. If any Friend feels the minute has not adequately expressed the sense of the discussion, recommendations will be made to alter the minute in some way. The approved minute is then recorded in the archives of the Meeting.

Perhaps needless to say, there is not always consensus on an issue. A Friend may disagree with where the spirit has led the rest of the Meeting. If so, that Friend will discern whether he or she feels a strong need to stand in the way of the decision expressed in the minute. If the Friend stands in the way, the minute is not acted upon. It is acted upon only if there is approval of everyone at the meeting for business. It is rare for a Friend to stand in the way of a spirit-led decision. Occasionally a Friend will ask that it be recorded in the minute that he or she dissented from the decision but has decided to stand aside rather than blocking the decided action.

A Quaker meeting for business is quite different from a meeting run according to Roberts Rules of Order. The minutes approved rarely mention the name of anyone involved in proposing the concern or in discussing it. Only if a Friend requests that his or her name be recorded as dissenting from the rest of the Meeting will any specific name be recorded.

The kinds of issues typically discussed at a Quaker meeting for worship for business can be quite varied. Someone who has been attending the meeting for some time may ask for membership. An attender or member may ask to be married in the care of the Meeting. The Meeting may decide whether to send a letter to the local newspaper on some social or political issue, or whether to make a financial donation to some charity. It may decide to form a policy on whether to allow same-sex couples to be married under the care of the Meeting.

The Quaker way of making decisions takes a good deal of time and therefore seems inefficient to some. It would probably not work very well for a group larger than a few hundred people to make decisions in the spirit-led way. It would be difficult to run a nation by Quaker business procedures. So when it comes to being citizens of a nation, most Quakers vote for candidates to public offices along with everyone else. If the candidates elected decide to do something that individual Quakers find highly objectionable (such as deciding to go to war), then individual Quakers will make their own decisions about, for example, whether to refuse to pay taxes and to go to prison instead. Quakers have a long history of choosing to go to prison on matters of conscience. Such decisions are made by individuals after considerable reflection, prayer and consultation with other Friends. About such decisions more will be said later.

My own experience with Quaker meetings for worship business has been enriched in recent years as a result of my serving as recording clerk at the Albuquerque Monthly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends. Serving in this capacity has taught me a good deal about listening carefully and without judgment. Listening carefully has in turn taught me something about speaking and writing more carefully.