Knowing right from wrong?

The essential question.

I originally posted this years ago, but we have short memories so re-posting may not be a bad thing. The current political environment almost demands a review. 

Do you? Know right from wrong? That’s a moral question, not one of legality. As we well know, we have a leader, who might be complying with the letter of the law (and fleecing his sheep to their detriment), yet undermines the intent of the law. 

In a court of law, we are told that not knowing the law is no excuse for breaking one that we may not even know exists. Worse yet is when we do know, but manipulate the system for your own enrichment, at the expense of the sheep. Even when the law is known, it may be consciously broken, allegedly for reasons considered to be valid. And what do we mean by valid? For a higher good that transcends the strict definition of legal compliance? For reasons of making a judgment call that may violate a conscious awareness of our internal criteria, but nevertheless “may” have a desirable outcome? What sort of definition might we hold of “desirable?”

A person may choose to live by the spirit of that law instead of the letter of the law, which of course, presumes the person is aware of whatever difference may exist between the spirit (or intent) and the letter (strict compliance). 

Then we need to consider prescience: the capacity to project into the future, outcomes that will occur as the result of judgments and actions taken previously. Can anyone know the ultimate effects? Obviously not (unless they are an inside trader). Then comes a much deeper question: Is there any benefit to outcomes that turn out to be not what we intended, but rather are what we consider to be wrong? Or might unlawful results lead to further right outcomes? That is the essential question!

Knowing right from wrong is a highly complex moral dilemma that must begin by examining that essential issue. Parents must wrestle with that issue every moment of every day and, most times, end up rolling the dice and hoping that their decisions result is the right things for their children. 

Politicians (at least ones with a conscience—an oxymoron?) are challenged routinely with making choices without thorough consideration or prescience, and more times than not, wrong results come from allegedly right decisions. For whom? Their benefactors? Themselves (at the expense of their constituents)?

Family members likewise are forced by the nature of a constantly changing world to choose between what they believe to be right, but often turn out in wrong ways. Are parents doing their children favors by never allowing them to struggle with the challenges of life to cope as adults? Or by overly protecting them and serving as surrogate moralists, once they have grown to the age of emancipation? 

Do we choose to construct walls between what we want the world to be and what it is? And do we then take the next step of letting our loved ones know that we only want to be fed a constant diet of nice words and deeds, forgetting that by employing their culpability and compliance, it forces them into conscious liars? Do we ever extract our benefit out of the hides of those we recruit, all so that we may live a life of delusion and division between what we wish and what is? And then, do we have the willingness to admit obvious wrongdoing with the forethought that by owning up, our egos will burn with a furious fire that creates in us the discomfort of admitting we used others for our benefit at their expense? 

Does anyone actually embrace what they consider to be wrong, suspecting that there will be a positive outcome? Or isn’t it true that we become strong in places that are broken, and by struggling to overcome our brokenness, we are made stronger yet? Few there are who enjoy being with someone who is always on guard, never vulnerable, and has all the answers. Life breaks us all, vulnerable or not, but beauty can come from brokenness, making us yet more beautiful than before.

It is probably true that few, if any, ever set out to do wrong, knowingly. And it is without any doubt that by facing our deepest fears, we learn to live with fear and make it our greatest friend and teacher.

“Ide-prison-ology”

Rearranging priorities.

It’s time to add a new word to our contemporary vernacular. The addition is a simple adjustment to the word “ideology,” that reflects where our culture has arrived—in a prison of opposition with no legal appeal for release. 

We already have similar words  that approximate this new word, such as “Mexican standoff” or “logjam.” But the essence of this new word is only glancingly similar to those words. What the new word captures, sums up our current state of irreconcilability: a state of cultural and political “my way or the highway” stagnation where nothing gets done. 

The principle of compromise appears to be lost in the ash heap of time, and this state of mind is not limited to any one country. It is a global phenomenon that results in a preoccupation with the insignificant at the expense of the significant.

There is so much confusion occurring at the same time it is nearly impossible to arrange priorities. Even if we could, wait ten minutes and the entire deck gets reshuffled and we simply cease to think of what’s important and what’s not. Instead, we have fallen back into a time when legalism was abhorred by moral giants such as Jesus and The Buddha, both of whom fought to rectify the problem by pointing out what the laws of the time needed as a substratum—the spirit of the law. 

That focus has been lost as well, thus the need to establish this new word by recognizing what ought to be obvious but is not: We have fallen prey to dogmatic, inflexible positions of opposition where nobody but the rich and powerful—who rig the system to their advantage, perhaps by design, to keep us all confused and distracted by what is happening behind the scene with what is happening in front of the scene—too much of insignificance to enable us to notice matters of ultimate importance.

The question is, why is this happening? That’s a hydra-headed challenge but maybe it is simply a matter of too much comfort by the few at the cost of the many. Money and power are two factors not easily shared. Possessiveness is a stickler and the more a person has the more they seem to want. Maybe what we all need to do (and I’d suggest we begin from the top and work our way down) is go and live in places that aren’t so comfortable, where concern for your life is the common coin. There is nothing quite so transforming as your own experience of suffering. When you are starving, a single slice of bread becomes a feast and the ideology of the whole loaf or none at all descends into la-la-land, right where it belongs.

We have become imprisoned into camps of opposing ideas and values with no escape. It is long past time for us to realize such behavior is shooting everyone in the foot. Life always seems to follow the path we noticed in the Marines: Bad stuff flows downstream, never upstream. The tide needs to turn, and soon.

The Power of Deception.

A couple of days ago, The Family Research Council’s Values Voter Summit was convened at the Omni Shoreham Hotel in Washington, DC. The President of the Family Research Council (Tony Perkins) introduced the keynote speaker, Vice President Mike Pence, and said of him: He understands himself as “a Christian, a conservative and a Republican,” in that order.

Yet Pence’s speech was as far away from the essential nature of genuine Christianity as one might be. His chosen venue has been designated as an “anti-LGBT hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center, and what he said affirmed that assessment. 

If you wanted to sum up the speech into a nutshell it would be, look how great we are under Trump—chest-thumping and ideological superiority (e.g., us, the white-hats against them: the black-hats). 

Nothing about his speech promoted unity and caring for our fellow man but instead promoted the opposite. Following a panel titled “How Gender Ideology Harms Children,” which included Dr. Michelle Cretella from the American College of Pediatricians, (also designated an ultra-right-wing quasi-religious hate group), Pence echoed the panel’s perspective that those who define themselves as LGBT are just sick individuals who are determined to break God’s intentions. They are sinful and need to change their ways. 

According to the Family Research Council’s website, the Values Voter Summit was created in 2006 to “provide a forum to help inform and mobilize citizens across America to preserve the bedrock values of traditional marriage, religious liberty, the sanctity of life and limited government that make our nation strong.” 

Cretella has been excoriated by The Society for Adolescent Health and Medicine (SAHM) with a response, titled: “I’m a Pediatrician. How Transgender Ideology Has Infiltrated My Field and Produced Large-Scale Child Abuse,” saying that Cretella pushes a perspective of “political and ideological agendas not based on science and facts.”  I would add further, the ideology is anything but Christian in nature, which if geared to the teachings of Christ, to treat your neighbor as yourself. 

SAHM destroyed Cretella’s position showing how she cherry-picked bad science to reach her conclusion. Nevertheless, Pence continues to endorse Cretella’s conclusion with his own bad theology and in so doing destroys his own view of himself as being “a Christian, a conservative and a Republican.” And why might I say such a thing? To answer that question we must first define some theological terms and say what it means to be a real Christian instead of a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

To the second issue (e.g., a real Christian) one must abide by the essential teaching of Christ to “love one another as I have loved you.” It is specious to claim the title without abiding by the essential teaching of the founder. And to the first issue (e.g., Theological terms) when Jesus taught that sort of love he was referring to a term found only in the New Testament. The term, in Koine Greek, is ἀγαπάω (agapē ) and meant “unconditional love”, or if you prefer “love with no strings attached—be they gender, race, ideology or any other means of discrimination”. So the concluding question here is whether or not Pence, and his puppet master Trump, are in fact promoting genuine Christian unity and love amongst all people, or a faux Christian wanna-be agenda that promotes division and one-up-man-ship? 

Beyond 911—Over the cliff

It has been 15 years since 911, and it’s time to dust off a previous post that was painful to write and perhaps painful to read. I wrote about the side of a veteran’s life that nobody wanted to hear. We much prefer to bathe in the glory of war and avoid the aftermath. But as one who fought and has an aftermath, I thought it was important to paint the whole portrait.

Similarly, some time ago I wrote a book (The Non-Identity Crisis) that has the following on the dedication page:

“This book is dedicated, not to a person, but rather to an idea: the eradication of war and the end of suffering. In particular what I have to say in this book is dedicated to all who have experienced anguish resulting from the tragedy of 911. I write as a fallen warrior with my own wounds inflicted during a previous conflict—The Vietnam War. True for all warriors of any and ever war, the scars never go away, even the ones that lay buried deep in your mind. We learn mostly from our own suffering and if we wish to not keep repeating it, the only ones who can chart a new course are us.”

In this book I write a lot about what war is really like when we scratch away the veneer of glory. We are living in the aftermath of 911, Osama Bin Laden is now dead, and our actions years later reflect this trauma. Bin Laden is now gone but his legacy is not. There is a message in this book that addresses both our responsive actions and moving beyond the trap. I’d like to share with you a perspective from the book that may not been immediately evident:

“When you kill another, sooner or later their surviving loved ones will come after you. War is the ultimate failure of the human family and if we ever hope to live in peace we are the only ones who can create the conditions for that to happen. What we are doing right now around the world is continuing the legacy of war and thereby guaranteeing future conflicts. What I have to say throughout this book is how to end it. Holding onto the desire for vengeance and justification for killing that emanated from 911 virtually insures our collective downfall. The mantra of ‘Never Forget’ is a banner for that downfall and only appropriate for those who never fought. For those of us who have fought, we must forget and forgive or go insane. What Bin Laden started but couldn’t finish on 911—to bring down our culture—we may do to ourselves due to our attachment to revenge at all cost. Did he anticipate our predictable response? It’s impossible to say, but a fundamental rule of warfare is to know your enemy and goad him into a trap of his own making.”

If we are sincere in wishing to honor the sacrifices of our young men and women who so valiantly offer themselves to defend our way of life, the best way of doing that is to stop the insane path we are presently following, bring our warriors home and pay for their healing and restoring their lives.

A call to arms!

The world wants you.

With what’s happening now in the U.S. I think it’s time to repost a message I wrote a while back. This post is not going to be one of cozy satisfaction or insular “I’ve got mine, get your own.” No, instead it is going to be one of those, “I’m mad as Hell and I’m not going to take this anymore” posts. 

If you haven’t yet noticed, the world in which we live is quite literally going to Hell in a handbasket, and fast. 

• The entire Middle East is a blazing inferno, causing immigrations so massive as to resemble rats fleeing a burning ship; 

• Our nation has gone from the most admired in the world to a miserable excuse of squawking catfights, immobilized by the dogmas of inflexible, political ideologues who’ve been sold to the highest bidder. And we routinely cast aside allies that took years of blood, sweat, and tears to create; 

• Religious bigotry and blame continue to sprout their self-righteous ugliness; 

• Wars have now become routine, perpetuated by the same people who whine about a balanced budget, and unthinkingly slash support for the very people who risked all to defend our way of life, yet give no consideration for the fact that waging war is the most costly human endeavor there is. At the same time Congress is establishing economic policies of slashing and burning institutions that took decades to build; 

• Violence everywhere is sky-rocketing and causing massive tides of immigrants to flee to temporary havens (one of which used to be us, but we are now rounding up and caging them, with no foresight given to their value); 

• Diseases (long considered to be eradicated) are returning and joining pandemic plagues with the potential to kill us all; 

• The gap between the super-wealthy and the burgeoning poor is becoming ever wider (worldwide); 

• Those who could or would care for the less fortunate have stopped; 

• We incarcerate more people in the U.S. than any other nation on earth, and there are more guns in the hands of “ordinary citizens” here who slaughter more ordinary citizens each week than all those killed in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars put together, yet mouth banalities that guns don’t kill people; 

• And worst of all the climate is getting hotter, whole regions of our country are experiencing environmental meltdown and becoming more unstable and threatening every moment of every day…on and on.

I’ve been writing this blog for eight years now with messages that are admittedly inadequate but are intended to accomplish one single thing: promote peace, unity and brotherhood. I have done so under the rubric of Zen because that is what saved my life, changed my perspectives from greed to gratitude and implanted genuine compassion in my heart. And do you want to know what I’ve experienced over those eight years? Two things of significance: an audience that grew from nothing to nearly 100,000 readers worldwide and the continuation of small-minded, self-righteous nitpicking by esoteric experts who express their platitudes yet do nothing themselves to foster unity and peace. Nevertheless they seem to have an abundance of time to criticize me for doing what I can, albeit insufficiently. My patience with, and tolerance of such “head-in-the-sand-do-nothing” people has grown paper thin, and yes, “I’m mad as Hell and I’m not going to take this anymore.” 

Legalists are everywhere: Buddhists castigate me for not being a purist (never mind there is no such thing as a Buddhism but rather different sects who argue amongst themselves just as much as any other religion), Christians demean me for not being in their exclusive flock, atheists reject anything spiritual and Zen folk elevate themselves to the status of being superior to everyone else not like them. 

Nobody seems to embrace the essential spirit, but instead can quote chapter and verse of their own sacred texts. Famous Zen Master Bassui said, “If you truly want to read the sutras, you first have to awaken the mind that does the reading. All formal readings from the sutras can be destructive. The wonderful dharma of one’s mind does not change through successive eons; it is the essence of all the sutras.” 

Perhaps if people who think to themselves, as I used to, (“Oh I know so little or can not do very much”) would just support and encourage those who are trying to make a difference (instead of sniping) we would live in a much better world. If only a small number of those 100,000 would merely forward on messages of hope and peace it would make a huge difference. The world is burning, act now, or be prepared to roast along with everyone else (me included). 

Undoubtedly I’ll lose a few readers with this post but that’s okay. Obviously, my critique doesn’t apply to everyone. There are many dedicated, people striving to be selfless servants and attempting to make our world a better place. You know who you are and I greatly admire you. I would suggest you watch this and then do some serious reflection.

Bipolar

Manic depression; Bipolar affective disorder is a certifiable mental illness that can mimic something akin to phases of awakening. 

The principle of dependent origination says that everything in life is a reflection of this fundamental principle, and this is illustrated with the broadly known relationship between suffering and enlightenment. 

Bodhidharma said that without afflictions, there could be no enlightenment. The two are linked by the principle of dependent origination. A famous Zen saying is, “No suffering. No enlightenment. Little suffering. Little enlightenment. Great suffering. Great enlightenment.”

In his commentary on the Sutra of Complete Enlightenment, Chan Master Sheng Yen said that nobody having good dreams wants to wake up. Only when they have nightmares are they eager to do so. The point is that there is a correspondence between the magnitude of both suffering and awakening. The entirety of Buddhism concerns the alleviation of suffering. There is no other purpose for this quest than that. So some reading this may think to themselves, “I don’t suffer so Zen isn’t right for me.”

I have two rejoinders to this observation: (1) not yet, (2) and denial. The “not yet” part realizes that it is impossible to live and not suffer because the fundamental nature of conditional life is suffering. The “denial” part concerns resistance (a form of attachment which creates more suffering). And I am not throwing stones of blame. I too remained in denial too long and paid the price. I wrote about this in another post: The Four Horses of Zen.

Nobody wants to suffer and unfortunately this motivates many to stay in states of denial. The pain is too sharp to bear so we stuff it down and try to go on with life and this can eventually be a large problem because it isn’t possible to keep suffering locked away forever. Sooner or later it seeps out and corrodes our sense of wellbeing.

When you learn to mediate (and practice it) all of that suppressed mental poison gets released, you clean out the pipes and move on toward wholeness. It isn’t fun to lance that boil but it beats living with the compacted aftermath of suppressed suffering. Along the way toward restored mental health there can be wide swings from one depth to the opposite, but this is the necessary result of mental house cleaning. Zen is not a practice for the faint of heart. It’s only for the most desperate and those who exhibit the necessary courage to go through the anguish required to have a life worth living.

Occupy Wall Street expanding to Main Street

The American Spring

What at first seemed like a small and isolated fringe movement in New York City is now popping up across our nation, even in the conservative heartland of Kansas City.

Meghan Whalen, a 30-year-old single mother, said she got involved with Occupy KC because of inequality. “We’re not going to come out of here tonight and say, ‘Okay, guys, we figured it out. This is the one thing why we’re here.’ Because there isn’t one reason. That’s just the truth. People who can’t swallow that and handle that, I’m sorry. There isn’t one reason. There just isn’t.”

She is right. Many overlapping reasons seem so convoluted and twisted together that making sense almost seems impossible. But as Whalen stated so well, it isn’t necessary to figure it all out to realize that something is very wrong, not only in Kansas City but across the globe. What began with the Arab Spring is now metastasizing to everyone’s spring and what is common to all of these is greed, anger, and an unwillingness to just grin and bear it any longer.

The “jobs, jobs, jobs” mantra has become a clarion call for survival falling on deaf ears of politicians and captains of industry who are immune to the suffering of those impacted by their own bad decisions. The world’s wealth is progressively more and more concentrated into the hands of fewer and fewer; simultaneously, the chronically poor ranks are expanding. These two trends are not unrelated. The sucking machine of greed is depleting the lifeblood required for meaningful solutions.

The pathway to economic contraction is creating a worldwide imbalance with fewer and fewer able to meet nations’ financial needs and more and more in need. The gap between the haves and the have-nots has never been greater in the modern era than today. The middle class has been the tax revenue backbone of contemporary societies, which has enabled stability and economic expansion and is rapidly becoming an artifact of the past. The chronic poor’s ranks are expanding, and wealth is increasingly concentrated at the top of the socio/economic pyramid.

No economic system can continue for very long with such imbalance. This disparity is clearly illustrated by looking at the distribution of assets in the United States. Four years ago, 62% of business equity and 61% of financial securities were held by the top 1% of the population. In the same timeframe, 73% of the debt was owed by the bottom 90% of the population, leaving just 5% of the top 1% debt.

This imbalance has resulted in close to 85% of total wealth in our country concentrated in the top 20%’ hands and so little owned by the bottom 20% that it is nearly impossible to measure (.1%). When the gap between compensation for heads of industry is compared to compensation for the people they employ, it is understandable how much concentration is happening. This is not unexpected when you consider the following—In 1950, the average executive’s paycheck ratio compared to the average worker’s paycheck stood at 30 to 1. Since 2000 that ratio has exploded to 300-500 to 1. The rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer, and the Middle Class is gradually sinking into the abyss.

These conditions of imbalance and injustice have profound effects across the economic and political landscape. It is blatantly obvious that some groups must meet the financial needs of our country. The tax base is disappearing, needs are expanding rapidly due to financing continuing war, growing costs associated with the justice system, costs of entitlement programs (e.g., Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, VA benefits, etc.) are about to leap into the stratosphere as the baby boomers reach the age of qualification, natural disasters are coming one after another in rapid succession, unemployment compensation, and other contributing factors too many to identify. In the meantime, vast amounts of money are needed to finance new technologies which would ensure our competitive edge in the world market place, pay for the education and training of our population to compete in that market place and slow down (and hopefully stop) global climate devastation which is making this entire scenario worse.

Washington’s political climate has become so divisive that any clear-headed reconciliation seems beyond the pale of possibility. The population segment who can meet these burgeoning financial needs refuses to do so, and the traditional source (the middle class) can no longer. To counter this rising tide, the wealthy, in ever-growing numbers, are moving their assets off-shore and playing other financial shell games to avoid paying more taxes. To avert financial meltdown by defaulting on our federal obligations, our elected officials have chosen, as they always have, to delay, procrastinate and push the dirty decision making down the road onto someone else’s plate. In the meantime, the opposing forces have both pledged to not cooperate but instead play Russian Roulette with our heads as the target.

Taken as a whole, these intertwined conditions have metastasized to the point that no person, however intelligent or clever, can ever hope to unwind them. This complex perspective is what Meghan Whalen and millions of others sense, but can’t define. And unless we find the source leading to this entangled Gordian Knot, there is little reason for hope. What is that source, and how can we find it? Without being evasive or coy, I am now in the final phases of publishing my next book, which lays out the case. It will be available for sale sometime in the next couple of months. The title is “The Non-identity Crisis: The crisis that endangers our world.”

Fighting household gods

Around the world, different people have worshiped both “household gods” and God in another house called “The House of God.” Even today, many churches call themselves The House of God. There have been many ideas regarding where God lives. A popular thought is that God lives in heaven, located in the sky. 

When asked, Jesus said that God lives in each of us, but that idea didn’t get too far. I guess not many people could buy that notion, so they went back to the tried and true idea with which they were most familiar—God lives in the temple, or the church, or the synagogue or some other “holy place” but for sure not in our inner being. But this placement for his holiness didn’t stop the household god practice, and people still have both: the everyday god and the special God, who lives in the church, but never in us.

In ways this arrangement seems to work well since it keeps God/god conveniently located so that he/she doesn’t become pushy and intrusive. Shouldn’t everyone get some private time? Who wants a judge sitting on your shoulder watching your every move. Teens today have an Internet lingo worked out for that. It’s called “POS”—Parent Over Shoulder, which they can send via text messaging to their friends to signal, “What I’m going to send now is the cleaned up version since my parents are snooping.” So it looks like keeping God located away is a good thing. That way we can be two faced—One face we use normally and one face we dust off and use when someone is watching.

Unfortunately it is very tough to fool ourselves. We are always there, snooping and it won’t do much good to send POS to get away from our self. To reconfigure that dilemma, we have split ourselves into different compartments, which develop into split personalities. Apparently this becomes highly sophisticated with multiple personalities in the same body which gets very confusing when trying to relate to someone like that. “Is that you Jane? Mary? Lucy?...Who’s home today?”

All jesting aside, these are poor souls who can’t manage to integrate these conflicting aspects in a way that is acceptable to them (whoever “them” might be). It’s a sad situation but not so very far from the dilemma we all wrestle with by presenting the right face. This is a genuine problem when you don’t know who you are in the first place. In that case, you can be just about anyone you choose to and not be anyone at all.

Lots of people spend years in therapy trying to come to terms with this problem. It plagued me for a long time so I’m not making light of it. In this state of confusion we are simply imprisoned by delusions which are rooted in the phantom known as ego—The mythical monster that doesn’t exist but seems very real. That monster causes us to become wholly self-centered which creates a cascade of problems. 

In that state we think we are the center of the world. In effect we become the household gods and expect the world to bow down to us. It is very maddening (which makes us angry) when the world doesn’t respond well to our self-absorbing antics. And often times, after the fact, we think to ourselves: “Where did that come from? I can’t believe I was such a schmuck?” Then the guilt sets in, especially when we see ourselves repeating over and over the very behavior we just acknowledged about which we were embarrassed. That emotion fills us with self-doubt, self-hate and overwhelms us with thoughts of shame and inadequacy, all of which we experience as caustic and degrading.

In the midst of this all together nastiness what we fail to realize is that these emotions are like the warning light that switches on in our car when we need a change of oil. We should feel this way since these are signals to bring us up short and cause us to pay attention to what is fueling this causal chain. If we are really careful (usually takes years before we stop putting ourselves through this wringer) we’ll back-track these nasty emotions and come to see the phantom—our ego is the culprit. And after that, if we’re really careful (more years) we find that we are not any phantom. We are real boys and girls who share a common base of just your every day household variety, everywhere and nowhere, not special Buddha-Nature. Jesus was right.