To Liberate the Beings of Our Own Mind

 

Looking at the events in Ukraine, Syria, Egypt, Venezuela, and the USA’s meddling in them, I have these observations:  When we are free from literalizing “good and evil” by “taking sides” based on who is the “good guy” and who is the “bad guy,” then we are free to see human conflicts with the same equanimity as the weather events like hurricanes and “super storms.”  Hurricanes are formed when the opposing characteristics of warm and cold air, moist and dry air, and high and low pressure become extreme and polarized leading to the cascading events of a rotating system we call a tropical cyclone.  Lightening storms are caused when the upper atmosphere and the ground become supercharged and polarized with “opposite poles” of positive and negative energy.  A hurricane doesn’t make the high pressure “good” and the low pressure “bad,” and lightening doesn’t make the positive (+) energy “good” and the negative (-) energy “bad.”

  

Likewise, when the warm and cold air or plus and minus energy of the collective consciousness becomes extremely supercharged and polarized it necessitates an emotional storm that manifests in what we call  “violent conflicts” or the super storm called “war.”  If we want to have any influence on the outbreak of conflict and war across the planet, then we must individually do our best to depolarize our collective consciousness, so that the polarities of “us and them” do not become so supercharged that we see ourselves as the “good guys” who must obliterate those “evil bad guys.” 

 

As a Buddhist, we proclaim the Four Broad Vows, and beginning with the vow that no matter how innumerable the many beings are, we will carry them across to liberation.  As Zen master Huineng reminds us in the Platform Sutra of the Sixth Ancestor, these Four Broad Vows are called broad because they are all inclusive in the wisdom that there is nothing that is not the manifestation of our own mind.  So Huineng presented his version of the Four Broad Vows that emphasized this truth of mind:

 

We vow to carry across the unlimited multitude of beings of our own mind,

We vow to cut off the inexhaustible afflictions of our own mind,

We vow to investigate the uncountable Dharma gates of our own mind,

We vow to consummate the unsurpassed Buddha Way of our own mind.

 

 

This means that we have to free the beings of our own mind trapped in the Auschwitz' and Guantanamo's of our own mind and who are polarized in the roles of guards and prisoners in our own mind, before we can liberate the beings in the world from the storms of war.

 

The Zen of Kucinich's "Strength Through Peace"

A diary by WinSmith (short for Winston Smith the protaganist in Orwell's 1984) in the Dalily Kos blog site had a witty attack on Bush and the Republicans that brings up Zen:

When the President Poops, It Is Not Poop
Mon Oct 29, 2007 at 07:50:46 AM PDT

I've come to the conclusion that the radical republican zealots running this country aren't actually the batshit insane sexually frustrated war mongering incompetents that they appear to be.

They're actually Zen Buddhist Eastern Mystics offering us the most profound Enlightenment we could ever hope to acquire. We just can't see it.
[...]
The republicans aren't just the most corrupt, anti-American and disastrous political party to hold power in this country's history. They're also teaching us a valuable lesson in perception:

What we see is not what we see. Poop is not poop.

Reality is simply a construction in our minds. It's whatever we want it to be.

Oh sure, this fact free form of self delusion has gotten hundreds of thousands killed and damaged the entire 200+ year framework of our government.

But it's so mystical, man.
[...]
Because so long as we lie to ourselves inside our own minds, so long as we control our own critical thinking to automatically fall into line like intellectual lemmings, we will never again have to worry about anything at all.

Just wait for our cues.

Let the mouthpieces at Fox simply tell you what the new "truth" is, and PRESTO, it is!!

Think about how wonderful and glorious that state of mind will be!!

We can WIN in Iraq even as the country descends into chaos and disaster. We care about a "culture of life" even as millions of American children are denied healthcare.

But none of that will matter. Because if the president says his poop is not poop, then it is not poop.

It is the Zen Republican Mantra of "truth."

And it will set us all free of worries. Free of our money. Free of our environment. Free of a future.

I thought it was cute, but it does present a misunderstanding of Zen that is every bit as false as the falsehoods of the Republicans that are being criticized.

Another blogger, MarkC, wrote in response:

Could you choose a better analogy?

One of the things I like about Zen is that it is not well suited to denying reality in an "Emperor has no clothes" kind of way. Its denial of conventional reality is not selective -- you can't say "When the president takes a poop, it is no longer a poop" unless you're also saying "when anyone takes a poop, it is not a poop."

Most kinds of Zen are asking you to question the things you believe are objective about reality, but not selectively. It is part of a therapy to realize that the things you think you desire like immense wealth are not really desireable. If the Republicans were really such "Eastern Mystics" they would realize that material goods, profit off of no-bid contracts, and bloody oil windfalls would also not be real, just as their poop is not real. And we'd all be better off for it.

I agreed with MarkC and added the following post to clarify the issue of views of reality and why Zen advocates including the absolute view along with the plain but relative truth view of reality.

You are right, Zen is about truth and love.

Okay, I'm going to be serious here and discuss why the Diarist is insulting Zen,even though he means well.

The false charge of mysticism against Zen is based on a misunderstanding about the polarized mental frames that in fact Zen teaches us to avoid.

When Zen says "reality is not reality" it is not just a mystic's nonsense. It is saying "your mental construct of reality should not be mistaken for actual reality." It is not saying "your mental construct of reality should be replaced by my mental construct of reality. Zen points oat the very interesting awareness that comes from recognizing the function of mental constructs.

In Buddhism there are "three views of reality" which are the false view plus the two truths. The first of the three views of reality are the false views based on imagination. This is the view of reality of the "horn on the rabbit" or the "fur on the turtle." We can imagine this as a fact of reality even though it is not real. This is the false view of reality of George Bush when he imagines WMD in Iraq as a fact.

Then there is the view of reality that is based on relative truth of the present. The sky is blue, the water is wet, the day is warm, the night is dark. These truths are grounded in the relative perceptions of the moment. They are the truths of people everywhere and form the basic aspirations of people. They are the basis of all folk wisdom and common sense. It is when we stray from this relative truth of reality into the false imagination of reality that we get into trouble.

The third view of reality is the absolute view of what is called the mystic experience of no-view. This absolute view can be called the experience of complete unification with reality. It is directly seeing the face of God. There are no words to adequately describe this view of reality, and because there are no adequate words, it is sometimes said, "reality is not reality" in order to drive the mind out of its complacent nesting in words and concepts. This giving up of words is necessary, otherwise, only the relative view of reality is accessible, and a person will never know the awesome joy of the unity of reality.

Without the experience of the view of absolute reality (i.e., the non-experience of the no-view) a person has a very difficult time distinguishing between relative truth view of reality and a false mental construction view of reality. When any person does have a grounding of the relative truth view of reality, it is because they have intuitively touched upon the absolute view of reality within their own mind, even if they are not conscious of having done it.

George Lakoff has presented the concept of framing in a way that helps people understand how the false mental constructions operate in arguments. But it is not just enough to provide an alternative frame or mental construction to counter the Republican false views of reality. The alternative view or frame must be grounded in the relative truth view of reality.

Unfortunately, the Democrats have as hard a time with false views of reality as the Republicans do. The Democrats often don't see the false framing by Republicans, or they share it, and so they argue about small differences within the paradigm, rather than about the paradigm itself. This is how Democratic leadership buys into the false views of reality that justify not impeaching the president, that justify continuing the war funding, that justify building a border wall between the USA and Mexico, etc.

For a good example of challenging the false view of reality that the Republicans and Democrats share in foreign policy look at Dennis Kucinich's campaign for "Strength Through Peace." This is a reframing of the paradigm of foreign policy that shifts from the false view of reality to the relative truth view of reality.

The Republican's false view of reality says that war is peace. The relative truth view of reality says peace is peace, war is war, and it is easy to tell the relative differences. The absolute view of reality says at the bottom, peace and war are relative terms that both come out of the unified state of reality so don't think that you are in a position to judge what is going on until you can tell the false view from relative truth within the context of unified truth.

This Zen view of absolute truth of reality expressed in the phrase "judge not, lest you be judged" is often mistaken as an immoral view. In deed it is not so. To help people find the absolute view of reality it is said, "think neither good or evil, what is your original face?" But once you see your original face (i.e., the face of God) then you will live in the relative truth world and know the difference between hot and cold without the confusion of being judgemental. Then you can tell the difference between real peace and war, without falling prey to the false views and propaganda that would have you support "our peace by taking the war to them" whoever that may be.

When we can see that it is a false peace that is achieved by war as an instrument of foreign policy then we can see the relative truth that says a real peace can only come by giving up war as a tool of foreign policy. You can see the relative truth that war is only useful to achieve peace when it is absolutely defensive for self protection, not for protecting the imagined ephemeral and false "US interests" anywhere around the globe. This is the meaning of Kucinich's very Zen-like "Strength Through Peace" campaign, which like the Zen in martial arts, recognizes that the master of a martial art is the one who doesn't have to use it, much less to threaten to use it, unless the other person attacks first.

Send a letter to the President about Iran

Please join me in signing a letter to President Bush opposing a war with Iran. This can be done at StopWarOnIran.org

You can use the letter that they have written or you can write your own letter, or you canduse their letter as an outling and edit it to suit yourself as I have done.

This is a small thing that only takes a little time but records your voice as a voice against the madman in the White House.

Thanks, Gregory

President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secretary of State Rice, Secretary of Defense Gates, U.N. Secretary-General Ki-moon, Congressional Leaders and media representatives:

You are taking our great nation down the path to war again without the least shred of evidence for your outlandish claims against Iran.

You have seeded the media with false reports of an alleged nuclear threat posed by Iran. You have misled people with your presumed need for the U.S. to take military action. These reports recall your lies about the "Weapons of Mass Destruction" issued before the war on Iraq.

In the lead up to the illegal invasion of Iraq, Mr. President, you and your Administration asserted that Iraq possessed massive stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction and that it was capable of launching an attack - nuclear, chemical and biological - on the U.S. within 45 minutes.
Mr. President, you said that the U.S. had to attack immediately, and could not "wait for the final proof -- the smoking gun -- that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud."

You lied to the American people then about Iraq, and you are doing it again about Iran.

Iran is not a threat to any US interests. Iran has not invaded any other country in over 200 years. I wish I could say the same about my country. I wish I could say that my country never overthrew the legitimate government of Iran and installed a "royal" dictator on a throne against every true value of American democracy.

I add my voice to oppose a new war in the Middle East. I urge an immediate end to your campaign of sanctions, hostility, and falsehood against the people of Iran. I oppose any new U.S. aggression against Iran. Iran can be a good partner in the world if we only treat them with respect and honesty. The USA needs funds for human needs, not for endless war against fake enemies.

Sincerely,

A Low for Charlie Rose

On April 26, 2007, Charlie Rose interviewed General David Petraeus. I have seen some pretty bad interviews by Charlie Rose, but the interview with General Petraeus was the worst in recent memory. The fawning obsequiousness that Rose showed to this Washington-Pentagon mouthpiece who would say anything to get his paycheck was an example of the worst kind of Washington inside the beltway back slapping that passes for journalism. That Rose would not ask a single challenging question nor would he do anything but accept the pablum being offered was so sad to see.

This interview ranks with Dan Rather saying that he would march to any directions the President gave him at the beginning of the war. This is a perfect example of the belly-up cowardice of the major media passed on the presidential propaganda leading up to the war on Iraq without so much as a whisper of doubt. Rose shows he has not learned a single lesson from the four years of war on Iraq.

Charlie Rose clearly was setting up the General with puff questions and made it obvious that Rose accepts 100% the baloney that the Bush administration is saying through their mouthpiece General Petraeus. Charlie Rose should read on the air the short excerpts from the 1933 speech of Major General Smedley D. Butler who wrote a longer version in pamphlet form "War is a Racket". That would do more to inform the American People than ten hours of General Petraeus.

In contrast to Rose's providing a platform for the president's propaganda, the recent program of Bill Moyers Journal titled "Buying the War" on the cheer leading by the media leading up to the war is the story of the journalists like Charlie Rose who aide and abet the lying criminal activity of this villainous president.

The War IS Lost

Harry Reid, US Senate majority leader, is right: the War in Iraq is lost.

"This war is lost, and this surge is not accomplishing anything, as is shown by the extreme violence in Iraq this week."

He's late in coming to the realization, but in this case, better late than never. Also the War in Afghanistan is lost. And based on its flawed conception from the beginning, Bush's whole phony "War on Terrorism" was lost from day one.

Bush's inchoate wars on the world are so bizarre that they can only be grasped under the category of truth is stranger than fiction.

Today's example of the lost war in Iraq is the BBC story Bombs hit Baghdad police station

Two car bombs have exploded at a police station in the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, killing at least 12 people and wounding about 82 others, police say.
The attack took place in the southern, mainly Shia neighbourhood of Bayaa.

The first bomber sped through a checkpoint before exploding his car in front of the station, the other detonated his car at the checkpoint.

So much for Bush's "surge" strategy which is all public relations and no reality check. Yet Bush has the continuing unmitigated insanity to state in the face of the facts that his surge is "meeting expectations". Whose, expectations? It must be the private expectations of his perverted fantasy world, because it is not the expectations he has voiced to the American people that are being met.

There is no basis to believe that the surge strategy of adding 30,000 troops to a lost war is going to turn it into victory. The surge of bombings is winning.

An average of 80-90 Americans die each month. And US personnel have just had their tours extended by another three months.

But, as it has always been since the 2003 invasion, it is the Iraqis who suffer most.

No-one knows the exact figures, but at the end of another week of unspeakable, random carnage, hundreds more Iraqi families are grieving.

There is just no way that a US "surge" of any amount of troops, even 300,000, can "win" this war. Why? Because even if 500,000 troops are inserted into the invasion and occupation of Iraq, it will never defeat the spirit of the people of Iraq for self determination. The most that can ever be accomplished by Bush's war of occupation is to turn Iraq into a prison nation under lock down.

In fact this is exactly the US strategy, as it is building the first prison wall around the Sunni enclave of Adhamiya:

US troops in the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, are building a wall around the Sunni district of Adhamiya, which is surrounded by Shia communities.
The 5km (three-mile) concrete wall is part of a strategy to "break the cycle of sectarian violence", a US military spokesman said.

At least two more walls are on the drawing board demonstrating only that the twisted imaginations of the Bush administration know no bounds.

Why the surge won't work is clearly evidenced in the occupation scenario. The police who must have the support of a sufficient number of Iraqis to be credible simple cannot establish the requisite level of credibility while they are tied to the hip of an invading and occupying army. As the story about bombs hitting the police station clearly describes:

Police stations are often targeted by insurgents who say officers are betraying the country by working alongside government and US-led forces.

The only way to take away the rationale for attacking the police is to remove the US forces from the equation.

This is not occupied Japan with an Emperor who can maintain continuity and cohesion for the people during the rebuilding process. This is not Germany, divided and occupied by four conquering armies and totally devastated and shocked by its own attack on the rest of the world with a population feeling the guilt of its hubris and defeat.

Iraqis did not attack the world. They didn't attack anyone. They have not one iota of a national sense of defeat caused by their own military adventurism that would provide the mitigating factor to accept the humiliation from the presence of an occupying army. There is no point at this stage in discussing what the US might have done to make a transition possible. The US didn't protect the government structure or the public infrastructure and, instead, allowed wide spread looting of every public facility except the Oil Ministry, including hospitals and museums. Under that scenario after May 2003 the US has had no subsequent ability to appear credible by continuing the occupation.

Today, the only realistic and moral plan is to withdraw immediately and leave the Iraqis to be allowed to settle their own affairs. The war against Hussein was won quickly, but on the other hand, by a complete lack of planning and foresight, the war of occupation against the Iraqi people was lost quickly. This war is still lost. Now we owe the Iraqis reparation funds. We do not owe them an occupying army that only prevents reconstruction and reconciliation.

ADDENDUM 4/27/07
Last night I watched "Afghanistan: The Other War" from Frontline/World, and this story clearly demonstrates why the war in Afghanistan is as lost as the war in Iraq. The program is centered about a NATO unit attempting to make friends with a local village. Everything that could go wrong goes wrong. It is a completely updated demonstration of the old army slang SNAFU ("situation normal, all f**ked up").

A Canadian NATO unit comes to the Afghan village Elbak and makes wants to "win the hearts and minds" of the people. They promise to fix 12 generators used for pumping water. Well they couldn't find or buy the parts, such as spark plugs, anywhere and only end up fixing two. Then they set up a medical treatment day and announce it in the area only to have to close the clinic early with people standing in line wating for their children to see the doctors because, as they announce, they have run out of medications.

Then a US Special Forces unit comes into the area without consulting with the NATO unit and pick up a villager as a suspected Taliban. The villages vouch for the man to the Canadian NATO unit that is there to "make friends" and ask them to get the man released, but the NATO sergeant says she has no authority with the US unit. This of course highlights the complete absurdity of having two separate commands in the same area and demonstrates the fundamental inability of the war makers to understand how to "win" a war of occupation against indigenous resistance fighters. Failing any reasonable ability to "win" they have already lost.

Another more fundamental and completely misunderstood element of the war is that the NATO unit came to the village with the goal of working with the village so the people there would "be on our side" in the war. Words fail to describe the compete idiocy of the premise. From Alexander the Great to Ghengis Khan to NATO, thousands of years of history tell the tale of a people who have watched invading armies pass through. These people are smart enough to be "on the side" of the current invading army, whether they are NATO, US Special Forces, or the Taliban. The moronic notion that fixing some generators and giving a day of medical care (even if they were successful, which they weren't) will cause a people "choose a side" is so completely beyond any historical reality check that one wonders how these people waging war were able to travel the thousands of miles to get there in the first place.

Then to top it all off, after several weeks of setting up a temporary fort outside the village, the NATO unit is told to withdraw and go elsewhere completely taking down Camp Martello as if it was never there. The narrator laments the fact that this is now going to leave the village wide open and defenseless to Taliban retaliation for having cooperated with the invading army. One of the military people says what a shame it is that the villages "brought this on themselves" completely transferring the responsibility for their impending doom to the villagers who had no say in the NATO forces coming in the first place and no say in their departure.

The war in Afghanistan is as lost as the war in Iraq because the war makers are completely clueless about what it is that they are doing there and have no workable or reasonable plan for their presence.