The New Normal

The best and worst of times.

If a person is born into bondage and is never exposed to anything other than bondage, they won’t know they are in bondage. Instead, they will accept their condition as ordinary. Only one who has become set free will be able to look back into the time when they were imprisoned and know the difference. 

But this escape to emancipation presumes the person desires something better. “Something better” will remain a rational illusion. This hope will never get out of that box unless the person accepts the possibility, however small, that the vision may have an element of worth and be reasonably likely. Having a sense of being normal is a two-edged sword: It may provide a sense of communion with others in the same condition, but it does not hold out a carrot for a better way.

Plato’s Cave (e.g., The Allegory of the Cave) is a story from Book VII in the Greek philosopher masterpiece The Republic, written in 517 BCE. The cave allegory tells of prisoners, chained since childhood, in a position within a cave so they can see nothing except shadows of themselves projected onto the cave wall in front of them. Consequently, the prisoners have no sense of anything other than the shadowy illusions before them and come to think of the shadows as their normal world-view. 

Few escape to learn the truth and when confronted with the difference between reality and falsehood, the few choose their ordinary falsehood—to which they have grown accustomed—over what is real, yet foreign. A key point in the story is that people prefer old norms over new ones, even when the new is real. 

While written 2,537 years ago, this story resonates with the convictions of “fake news” of today and echos the principle of a psychological back-fire effect. Nothing is more powerful than belief, even when such belief is false, which says much about attempting to persuade those away from false convictions. They will harden their convictions in the face of evidence to the contrary. Human nature changes little over the span of time. Tightly held beliefs “Trump” the hand of truth nearly every time.

That is indeed a thorny conundrum, particularly when the very thought of ordinary is becoming abnormal. Such is the case today when everything ordinarily considered to be normal has been turned on its head. One of the few advantages of being old is a perspective that comes with the passage of time and changing circumstances. If you live long enough, you’ll have lived through a range of conditions that provides a frame of reference that is lacking without tenure, and that gives you a memory of the way things could be, but aren’t.

Without expressing a cliche, the times in which we are living are unlike any within my lifetime. And I am not alone in that observation. Our times are an admixture of the best, and the worst, much like Charles Dickens wrote of in his Tale Of Two Cities: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” On the one hand, we are advancing so fast that the technology we create is obsolete as soon as it comes off the line. On the other hand, we seem to be unraveling as a human society even faster.

A while ago, a political commentary appeared in the Huffington Post, that contained the following: “What used to be the lunatic fringe is now called the House of Representatives. And what used to be at least controversial is now the mainstream.” 

In just a flash of yesterdays, has emerged a man as the most powerful leader of the Western World. This would have seemed impossible only a short time ago. No longer. Now an entire political party champions a man who is an acknowledged pathological liar, peddler of vile racism, a misogynist, cheerleader of xenophobic ravings, and sneering trampler of those who disagrees with him, not to mention our most fundamental American values.

The mood of the American public is, to put it in superlative terms, explosive. And, from a particular perspective, understandable when we consider how dysfunctional our cherished government has become. Time after time, our elected officials have danced to a drummer of self-serving greed with little, if any, responsiveness to the wishes of the constituents who elected them. Now we almost expect another week (or day) of “normal” chaos, violence, and behavior that used to be routinely unacceptable. And to add insult to injury, our elected officials are experts at one thing only: Nothing. And in consideration of such a state, it would be delusional to not expect anarchy. The new normal of today has become the abnormal of yesterday. And if it is true (and it is) that our tomorrows are the result of thoughts and actions taken today, it is terrifying what tomorrow will bring.

Irrational exuberance and the tradition of silence.

“Dogma” is the thorn in our collective side. It is always heated,

exuberant, and close-minded. The message of dogma is one of self-righteousness and is based on obdurate and unyielding ideologies. My way or the highway is becoming a really big problem, around the world today. The “unmasked” champions are convinced that the COVID-19 virus will somehow know they are the good guys and steer clear to attack just their opposers—the bad guys. 

Opposing sides are so dug in it seems impossible to win hearts and minds, even among those who cling to hair-brain ideologies (e.g., think QAnon, for example). Rationality matters little to dogmatic holders. All dogma is based on conceptual thinking—impacted points of view arising from a perceived beautiful, rational perspective (at least in the eye of the ideologist). A contrary ideologist sees this perceived beauty as sheer ugliness. So long as dogma reigns, no reconciliation is possible and both opposing forces become irrationally exuberant.

In sharing the dharma, some have said, “You’re closed-minded to my perspectives but are asking me to join you in your close-mindedness.” There is a difference between Zen and other perspectives. The tradition of Zen is a silent tradition and is fundamentally rooted in a transcendent position, which reaches “across time and space,” not favoring one position or the other. From that platform, you might say that Zen is being closed-minded to being close-minded.

The most revered figure following the Buddha was Nagarjuna who is best known for his doctrine of two truths. The essence of his teaching is that we have no choice except to employ conventional means, which are admittedly delusional, to ultimately destroy delusion. By using words (conventional abstractions: conditioned phenomena) the goal is to go beyond words to find ultimate truth. 

The famous Diamond Sutra, held in high regard by Zen advocates, teaches this point, saying:

“All conditioned phenomena
Are like dreams, illusions, bubbles, or shadows;
Like drops of dew or flashes of lightning;
Thusly should they be contemplated.”

The identity we value (self-image, the imagined “I”) lives within the illusion of what we ordinarily regard as mind―the manifestations, which emerge from our true mind. According to Chán Master Sheng Yen, (Complete Enlightenment—Zen Comments on the Sutra of Complete Enlightenment)

“… there cannot be a self (e.g., ego) that is free from all obstructions. If there is a sense of self, then there are also obstructions. There cannot be obstructions without a self to create and experience them, because the self is an obstruction.”

Rationality came out of the European Age of Enlightenment as a solution to religious dogma, but it has become a different form of dogma. I am not suggesting that we return to religious dogma. Dogma of any kind is what happens when we close our minds to suchness—to things as they are. Rather than swing from one dogma to another, or one set of illusions to another, what we need to do is dump all dogma and illusions and rid ourselves of bias, and delusion. That is the thrust of Zen. It is about seeing clearly; seeing things as they are rather than how we imagine they ought to be. Zen is about balance, integration, and harmony, and is opposed to imbalance, disintegration, and chaos. 

Zen Master Huang Po spoke eloquently about the difference between conceptual ideologies and ultimate truth. He said, “If he (an ordinary man) should behold the glorious sight of all the Buddhas coming to welcome him, surrounded by every kind of gorgeous manifestations, he would feel no desire to approach them. If he should behold all sorts of horrific forms surrounding him, he would experience no terror. He would just be himself, oblivious of conceptual thought and one with the Absolute. He would have attained the state of unconditional being. This then is the fundamental principle.” (The Zen Teachings of Huang Po—On The transmission of Mind). 

Yes, Zen is dogmatic, but the target of dogma is dogma.

Laws and Order?

Law and Order?

In 1970 Alvin Toffler wrote and published Future Shock, a book many considered to have caused a paradigm shift in how we think about and react to an unfolding future, particularly a future that speeds up and disrupts fixed societal standards. He followed with The Third Wave and Powershift: Knowledge, Wealth and Violence at the Edge of the 21st Century in which he further delineated the plight of those who resist inevitable change. 

His solution? People who learned to ride the waves of change would be most likely to survive and do well. And those who didn’t adapt would be drowned by those waves of change.

Toffler was unusually prescient and precisely defined the turbulence of the present day. The short takeaway of Toffler’s thesis is this: We humans resist effervescent conditions that disrupt the status quo and thus cling to fixed standards, even when such measures may have never existed. Or if they did exist, we tend to imbue them with inflated and idealized values. In short, we don’t embrace change and end up trying to bulwark thin air. Furthermore, when such changes wash away set standards, we yearn for the “good old days” when law and order prevailed and seemed to ensure stability.

Another ancient sage by the name of Lao Tzu said this in chapter 57 of the Tao Te Ching:
Therefore the holy man says: I practice non-assertion and the people reform themselves. I love quietude, and the people of themselves become righteous. I use no diplomacy, and the people of themselves become rich. I have no desire, and the people of themselves remain simple.”

Some years earlier, Alan Watts came to mainstream attention with his book The Wisdom of Insecurity. He therein observed that our lust for stability was grossly out of kilter since nothing in the phenomenal, mortal world is stable⎯all is changing each and every moment, and to cling to the idea of stability was a sure-fire prescription for suffering and failure. I offer these two summations for a reason that is particularly germane today, and what it should tell us about the value of fixed standards, otherwise known as “laws.”

We, humans, are creatures of habit, and once we have made decisions, we are reluctant to admit the error of our ways. That peculiar habit has a name and a well-founded pedigreed in psychological terms. It is known as a “confirmation bias,” which means we are much more inclined to seek confirmation of our preconceived ideas than to seek the truth. While it may be understandable and even desirable to live with laws, it is likewise a problem when we try to box in change. It can’t be done, since no measures, or set of laws, can ever counter continuous change. So what to do?

The Buddha offered the perfect solution, which he called “upaya,” a Sanskrit word that translates as “expedient means,” where justice is built into the premise of change. Instead of inflexible laws, upaya is flexible guidelines that allow for the nature of change. Upaya is rooted in the inherent wisdom of all of mankind, whereas the desire for inflexible standards is rooted in the opposite incorrect thought⎯Because we are by nature immoral, the lack of laws will result in anarchy, thus we must have a crutch to compensate for our lack. Ultimately this issue boils down to what we think of one another: An extremely critical issue when wrestling with matters such as racism or xenophobia. Are we naturally moral? Or naturally immoral?

“The more restrictions and prohibitions are in the empire, the poorer grow the people. The more weapons the people have, the more troubled is the state. The more mandates and laws are enacted, the more there will be thieves and robbers.

Given the vector in the world today it is high time we reconsider how we understand one another, and rethink how we relate. This may seem like a risky venture but how much greater is the risk of the direction in which we are now heading?