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.

Surrendering from vengeance.

Tit-for-Tat

Quite a while back I wrote of post called, “Surrendering from inflexible positions” and a reader responded with a suggestion that I write about surrendering from vengeance. I didn’t take the advice at the time but given the current state of affairs, with so much at stake, maybe it’s time to track this human tendency through to its logical conclusion. 

I don’t have much wisdom to offer on the topic since the downside seems rather obvious. However, since the dominant forces today seem locked into this pattern of back and forth violence, perhaps the downside isn’t so obvious after all. Antifa and White Supremacy have locked horns with clear political spin. Curiously, Antifa is getting labeled as “radical socialists.” Nothing could be further from the truth, but nowadays political spin outranks truth. 

And then I recently wrote about the findings of Peter Cathcart Wason, the English cognitive psychologist, who discovered that we humans are much more interested in our egoistic desires to protect our preconceived opinions than to seek truth. So maybe vengeance has more to do with covering our vested flanks than anything else. If so, then this post probably won’t succeed in chipping away at that crusty vest. We seem to be slow learners and our collective ignorance leads us all to more suffering.

In one of my books, More Over, I wrote about this idea called kleshas (or afflictions; causes of suffering). The five following kleshas were described by Patanjali at the beginning of Book 2 of the Yoga Sutra (1, 2, 4). So I don’t claim any special knowledge. I just took the time to read because learning about the causes of suffering seemed like a good thing to do. When these kleshas are laid out end-to-end the logic of vengeance can be fathomed.

The first of the kleshas was called ignorance of the true nature of reality (avidya in Sanskrit). However, Patanjali’s perspective here is contrary to Mark Twain’s advice who said: “To succeed in life, you need two things: ignorance and confidence.” Perhaps so, but thus far evidence is lacking.  Then comes misidentification (asmita), attachment (raga), anger following a loss (dvesha), and finally misunderstanding life and death (abhinivesha). Having identified these five, Patanjali makes it simpler yet by saying that all of these five are contained in the first: ignorance of the true nature of reality. 

As a human species, this simplicity seems to be lost since we proceed to go forward with this tit-for-tat practice of violence (otherwise called vengeance). The downside is rather simple when viewed in terms of one person in a relationship with another. If someone strikes you, the immediate response is to strike back. This response leads to their response to a strike back at you, and this unending pattern leads to where we are today: nowhere. The lure to right all wrongs is magnetic and we gnash our teeth struggling to find wisdom for solutions to raging conflicts around the world. The carnage is unquestionably awful but the essential question is this: How does meeting violence with more violence lead to anything other than more responsive violence? 

According to Patanjali, the entire flawed tendency can be reduced down to the first klesha: a misunderstanding of the true nature of reality. The untrue nature of reality is what we have today (and apparently have had all the way back to a beginningless beginning) and that understanding is that every person on earth, and beyond, views him or her self as purely an individual with no meaningful connection. We have a term that fits the bill for this view. It’s called mutual discretion and is the basis of the entirety of human failings.

Just for the sake of consideration, let’s think about the consequences of this view. If I am mutually discrete from you, then I will do as Patanjali suggests and misidentify myself (and you, and all others) as an image, which we call a self-image (otherwise known as ego). The nature of an image is unreal and the nature of the ego is individual self-preservation. And we have an infinite number of ways of preserving a separate self. The number one way is to attach our sense of identity to stuff we like (power, material possessions, other people, ad infinitum) and bulwark ourselves from stuff we dislike. The problem is that stuff doesn’t stand still. It moves and changes, one moment here, gone the next. And with the demise of what we have clung to (or resisted, which has the nasty tendency to find its way to us anyway) comes a sense of loss or precarious identity, self-worth and power. Then we get royally ticked off, blame others for our pain, and strike back at the perceived source of our suffering, thus vengeance.

So if that is the pattern (and who can deny that it is) then what’s the alternative? Simple: That we are not, at the core,  mutually discrete. Feedback loops define our existence  Instead we are essentially united with everything. That, of course, is easy to say and very difficult to experience. Just saying it is not enough. Unity must be experienced to be of any worth, otherwise, it remains a figment of our imagination. The experience of unity is what goes by the handle of transformation or enlightenment: where the sense of being an individual, separate identity melts into an irrevocable unity with everything. And when that happens the image we previously held of ourselves (self-image) evaporates into thin air.

From that point forward vengeance becomes an impossible matter because we realize that striking another, or destroying our world, is the same as destroying ourselves and we come to understand, in a new way, a commandment offered by Jesus when asked which commandment was the greatest. He answered by saying, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. The second is this: Love your neighbor as yourself. There is no commandment greater than these.”

There is just one tiny, yet all-important issue here. All of these: God, soul, mind, neighbor, and self are single, never born, never die, united entity. If this is not so, then the commandment falls apart and we are left with mutual discretion, all of us claiming, with self-righteous indignation, that individually each of us is justified in preserving our egocentric identity and never-ending vengeance continues forever. The arms race never ends, nor does the associated cost in blood and money.

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?

Politics of fear.

I first wrote this post some years ago and reposted it again during the 2016 run-up to the Presidential elections. Since then some conditions have changed significantly—such as the COVID-19 pandemic and a concomitant global economic disaster—and others have not since that first post. From time to time I revisit my posts to see if any have legs that continue to walk. This one does so I’m reposting to remind myself and others of the basic issues at stake.

My primary focus in writing is spiritual, and purists resist the notion of mixing that focus with political commentaries. I’m not a purist but rather of the opinion that if spirituality is of any worth it must integrate with changing conditions otherwise, it will remain a matter of navel-gazing, good for the gazer but not much beyond that. I am committed to sharing the wealth and honoring the responsibility of a Bodhisattva.

So what are the basic issues at stake? In a few words: freedom, liberty, and equal justice. Those are the principles that underpin, not only our republic but are also the principles that all freedom-loving people desire, wherever they live, throughout time and space. Without those principles, it is questionable if any form of spiritual practice can prevail very long. Historically religious and spiritual leaders have been the keepers of moral standards that must guide any ship of state to ensure it steers clear of the rocky shoals. 

So then we come to the matter of before or after. Do spiritual leaders have an obligation to proactively influence captains, crews, and occupants of the ship before it ends up on the shoals? Or must they react only once the ship is wrecked? And what obligation, if any, do the occupants have to the captain, or to the ship? Those are penetrating questions that must be thoughtfully considered. Human history shows examples of both the before and the after, but perhaps the most poignant statement came from Edmund Burke, the 18th century Anglo Irish political philosopher—“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing”.

As you will see from the link provided above, some question remains about the exact wording of that quote and who said it but the spirit is the same. Today good men and women are being bullied and subjugated into cowardice conduct by a man who is incapable of leading the free world, but is talented in divide and conquer. He is a master of instilling fear, not only into the hearts and minds of the occupants of the ship but also the lieutenants who are critical to keeping the ship off the rocky shoals.

Unless you’ve been away on a distant planet, out of communications with people here on earth, you know that awhile ago an equivalent of “deep throat,” from within the Trump administration, warned of the hazards of his leadership. In effect, this amounts to an administrative coup that could very likely make the man even more paranoid than he is already, increasing the hazards instead of the opposite. As of the present moment he holds millions of our citizens' hostage, using them as political pawns in a deadly game of getting his way at the expense of their lives by demanding our economy reopen while the coronavirus still flourishes. 

Years ago another New York Times article appeared written by Tom Edsall—professor of journalism at Columbia University and political commentator writing on events inside and outside of Washington. He grappled with controversial perspectives from a cross-section of social scientists who are researching the matter of “genopolitics”: the premise that we are hard-wired to see life through defined prisms that determine our political perspectives and affiliations. 

His article was inconclusive but ended by saying, “With so much riding on political outcomes—from default on the national debt to an attack on Syria, to attitudes toward climate change—understanding key factors contributing to the thinking of elected officials and voters becomes crucial. Every avenue for understanding human behavior should be on the table: how do we evaluate our goals? How should we judge trade-offs? And just how do we actually make decisions?” I couldn’t agree more with Edsall. Indeed every avenue for understanding human behavior should be on the table, and that takes me to the focus of this post.

So long as we remain ignorant of the fundamental basis of being human, geopolitics or not, will make little difference and I (and many others) will continue to spin our wheels. The only relevant question is this: What is the fundamental basis of being human? And the related question: What happens when we fail to understand this central issue? The answer to that last question is painfully obvious: We continue on with the same failed behavior, dictated by fear, and as always—we fight over differences, to our mutual destruction. 

All of us are riding in the same boat, enlightened together with the unenlightened. There are not two boats, only one, and how we collectively behave determines the outcome of us all. And to the first question, the fundamental basis of being human: Unity. Underneath all is our unity. As wise men and women have noted in the past—when water is subjected to the freeze of negativity, it turns into divided ice crystals. Heat ice with the warmth of unity and it turns back into indivisible water. We are all fundamentally water. After that, nature and nurture can and do shape us into divided conclaves. During this time of isolation from one another we are being forced to see the value of unity. It is essential, as it has always been, but ordinarily it is not as evident.

We are the only animal on earth that has to learn how to be human. Ducks know, without being taught, how to be ducks. The same for every other animal, except us. We have to learn what it means, from the depths of our souls outward what it means to be “good men and women,” and until we do, evil will reign.