Awake in This Life

Current TV has made a series of short satiric cartoons known as SuperNews that have on several occasions cracked me up. You may find the following offensive. Apologies if you do. What got my attention was that this parody of Fox News host Glenn Beck reflected so many of his attachments.

via “The Glenn Beck Apocalypse” – War Room – Salon.com.

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve received several inquiries relating to how any of us could possibly “let go” of that man called Rush and all of the unconsciousness that he spits out over the airwaves each day. For the record, my preference is to choose music over talk whenever I can. I should also note that while I’ve only listened to Mr. Limbaugh a few times in my life, I have found his commentary, political and otherwise, tends to embody the very attachments that veil awakening from our sight. And these veils are spread easily. But this doesn’t make him evil. Unconscious, maybe. Egocentric, for sure, but evil? If he’s seen as evil, his unconsciousness must be spreading.

Unconsciousness, like the common cold, gains traction on the terrain of those who see the world as being divided dualistically between in here and out there; I’m right and you’re wrong; and, us versus them. A deep and authentic stillness practice will eventually show anyone brave enough to commit to its rigors many significant things, among them: first, that us is them, and second, that no one is brilliant enough to be 100% wrong.

Seen through the Dharma’s lens, Mr. Limbaugh can be an amazing teacher since, at least in my sangha, he seems to put people in touch with many of the thoughts and feeling that they cling to. So bows to Rush, and any other person in this life who forces us to face our attachments. His words and deeds might just inspire compassionate and mindful action that intimately, and intentionally, meets all of the unconsciousness thus lessening its charge, decreasing its valence within us as well as within those who echo his sentiments.

With this in mind, I was struck by an article in the Huffington Post, where Mike Papantonio makes an interesting numerical argument regarding Limbaugh’s affect:

The analysis on Rush is easy. Historically, he has had zero impact on the outcome of elections. Every day during the 2008 presidential primaries, he attacked John McCain and predicted McCain would never win in the primaries. All the anti-McCain hate talk Rush could dish out had no effect on the outcome. Next, Rush tried to show that he had political muscle by calling Barack Obama a communist and a Kenyan illegal immigrant. Rush was certain that his vast political influence would end Obama’s presidential hopes. But the truth is Limbaugh’s political influence is not vast at all.

He goes on:

Let’s buy the spin and assume that 13 million people at some time during a week listen to Rush’s rants. If every one of those listeners does exactly what Rush begs them to do, as they march off the cliff they will have zero impact on elections. In the last presidential election 125 million people voted, and the Democrats whom Rush vilifies daily pulled off sweeping victories all over America. Rush has an approval rating with the general public that is even more dismal than the one W. left behind when he left office. Gallup puts Raging Rush’s favorables at around 28%. An entire generation of young voters tuned Rush out years ago. Instead, they tune into places like Jon Stewart’s Daily Show or the Colbert Report to follow politics.

What do you think?

Bows, Mike Papantonio.

In this podcast, Michael invites us to lose everything, especially ourselves. As ominous as this may sound, he goes on to suggest that in allowing ourselves to truly face the fact that, sooner or later, everything will be taken from us. Letting this recognition in to our conscious experience primes us for Awakening, even in the midst of hell.

via Infinite Smile » ISmile203 – When There is Nothing Left of Selfhood.

Over at integral praxis, they posted a vid that incorporates nice imagery with the thought-provoking words of Dr. Brian Swimme. Two notes:

1. I know of few individuals with a more interesting view of the comprehensive whole than Brian Swimme. He gets the big picture and can articulate it brilliantly in small ways.

2. Because of this, I will always give him my ear whenever he starts speaking.

Gerald, over at The Level 8 Buddhist takes on the use of alcohol:

As the Buddha taught, alcohol and intoxicants cause heedlessness. The more you drink, the more heedless you become. It’s not that you become heedless after X number of drinks only, any amount will impair mindfulness and make it harder to practice Buddhism on some degree or another.

While I agree that the abuse of any substance can impair one’s practice, seeing that our attachments to stories surrounding the substance can also inhibit realization. Getting fundamental about abstinence can be an addiction that veils awakening from our sight. In a similar way, knocking back several shots of tequila in order to numb our experience can do exactly the same thing.

This isn’t to say that the use of alcohol should be embraced among otherwise sober Buddhists. Instead each of us should look to see if we’re caught by our use, or non-use, of any intoxicant be it something tangible or intangible; be it a form or a thought. This leads us into an even deeper level of inquiry where we get to ask ourselves questions like: Is this pint of Guiness an abuse of an intoxicant? What is my relationship to it? Or perhaps, is my abstention from alcohol an appropriate response in this moment? Is my vow not to abuse alcohol the same thing as never using it?

Over at Tricycle, Alexandra Kolyanides posts a wonderful bit on Faulkner’s advice to writers back when he won the Nobel Prize.

I was struck by how his words sounded like the Path.

The young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat

Are we willing to meet all the agony and the sweat in order to uncover what is always True?

He continues, sounding more and more like Dogen Zenji:

He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart

In the Genjo Koan we hear:

To study the Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be enlightened by all things of the universe. To be enlightened by all things of the universe is to cast off the body and mind of the self as well as those of others. Even the traces of enlightenment are wiped out, and life with traceless enlightenment goes on forever and ever.

(Bows, Alexandra)

TIME Magazine’s David van Biema gives us 2008′s Top 10 stories on religion.

For my money, this story is especially fascinating since it applies to our sangha in really specific ways.

A 35,000-person poll by the Pew Forum for Religion & Public Life found that 28% of U.S. adults have left their cradle faith for another one — 44% if you’re talking about denominations rather than faiths. The poll suggests great national piety coupled with remarkable disdain for the multi-generational doctrinal and ethnic ties that used to define American religion.

Over the past few years, more and more people have approached me and described their feelings of an increasing irrelevance in relation to their traditional faiths. They keep lamenting the fact that their choice is a stark one: either stick with a tradition that no longer seems relevant, or avoid tradition altogether. Either way they feel lost.

I couldn’t help it. I just had to keep this story going since I think it is actually quite meaningful.

All of us should consider how it is, on a psycho-spiritual level, that we both let information about our world in, and then how we express it. Is there clinging? Is there resistance? As much as I tend to laugh at much of Deepak Chopra’s public persona (especially his new sparkle glasses), I believe he’s received a raw deal from both Dorothy Rabinowitz at the Wall Street Journal and Sean Hannity at FOX News. I should also add Elizabeth Hasselbeck at The View, but I was told by a Buddha that she doesn’t count.

Anyway, Michelle Haimoff, at the Huffington Post, offers us some clarity in piece she wrote today:

Chopra, who is a senior scientist at Gallup, was part of a team that conducted a poll of 600 million Muslims (about half of the Muslim population of the world). Countries polled included Pakistan, Morocco, Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, Iran and Saudi Arabia. What he concluded in the poll is that the vast majority (92-95%) of Muslims are moderates, and they admire the West for their entrepreneurship, business and modernism.

So what does this tell us?

Based on the survey, the cause of terrorism is “a rage that comes from humiliation, lack of respect, and also from factors that we are unaware of, generally uneducated about.”

And how does this ignorance manifest in the US?

We have no understanding of how these violent ideologies are born. We want to just go to war and kill the terrorists. Well, the bad news is you can kill as many terrorists as you want, but you cannot kill terrorism. In order to kill terrorism it’s gonna have to be a 50-year Marshall Plan to not build war torn cities, but to build ideas. To rebuild violence torn minds. To educate them, to help them, to cooperate with them, to create economic partnerships so that the rage disappears, and to understand them. There are very simple rules for having a dialogue. You respect your enemy. You talk to them with the attitude, ‘Yes. We understand that you also have injustice and we also feel injustice. Can we have a room here for forgiveness on both sides? Can we refrain from belligerence?’ The more belligerent we get, the more belligerent the radicals get.”

And, apparently, the more belligerent the right wing talk-show hosts get:

…when he appeared on Hannity and Colmes, Hannity shot him down for comparing a recent Scientific American article about cancer to terrorism. Evidently, when we treat cancer too aggressively, cancer cells hijack normal cells and make them co-conspirators in spreading the cancer. “Do you see an analogy there?” he said. To him, the collateral damage of the war on terror has caused some people to get hijacked by terrorists to become co-conspirators in spreading the terrorism.

Even better:

Bill O’Reilly asked him to come on The O’Reilly Factor too. “I will appear on your show on two conditions,” he emailed O’Reilly. “Number one: You will not raise the volume of your voice. And number two: You will not interrupt me. And I will not raise the volume of my voice and I will not interrupt you.” O’Reilly has yet to reply.

At least the WSJ had the decency to agree to publish Chopra’s response to the Rabinowitz’s earlier piece in Friday’s paper.

So what does it all mean? Well, for one, I’m glad Deepak is running interference for those of us teaching from a cushion. Well-meaning men and women like me cough out podcasts, blogs, and occasional books while he is using his well-deserved celebrity to mix things up in the mainstream media, not to mention within the hearts and minds of those who now watch The View. Kudos. Please continue. You’re making a difference.

From a Buddhist perspective this is a story not just about Right Action, or Right Speech. Rather, this is also a story about how we are evolving as people through, and with, each other. It’s sloppy, painful, and somewhat funny, depending on your perspective. But let us allow for that deepest of perspectives to guide us. Then, maybe, just maybe, our actions and our speech can reflect something bigger about us that doesn’t cause so much harm.

The International Herald Tribune offers an interesting piece on the implications of this past week’s attacks. The major theme shouldn’t surprise any one.

The terrorists’ barely concealed ties to Pakistan suggest that a key objective of the Mumbai assault was to fan the dying flames of Indian-Pakistani conflict.

Because of this, neither the Pakistanis nor the Indians will serve themselves or the world at large if they give in to the politics of attachment. This necessitates much needed communication among all parties and offers  India’s PM Manmohan Singh a chance to show some leadership by articulating to his people that the Mumbai attacks, while probably Pakistani in origin, should not be allowed to refuel the engines of hatred that destabilizing forces so badly desire.

… extremist Pakistani groups as well as Al Qaeda have a strong interest in provoking fresh hostilities between Pakistan and India. A revival of India-Pakistan tension could relieve much of the domestic pressure on those groups; it could justify a renewal of support for the Taliban on the part of Pakistan’s powerful Inter-Services Intelligence; and it could return the domestic focus in Pakistan to the plight of Muslims in Indian-ruled Kashmir.

Bows to all that are hurting in this process, and blessings to those with the courage to let tragedy open their eyes, hearts and minds.

Over at Salon, Steve Paulson writes about biologist Stuart Kauffman’s new approach to God in his recent book, “Reinventing the Sacred”.

[Kauffman] seeks to formulate a new scientific worldview and, in the process, reclaim God for nonbelievers. Kauffman argues that our modern scientific paradigm — reductionism — breaks down once we try to explain biology and human culture. And this has left us flailing in a sea of meaninglessness. So how do we steer clear of this empty void? By embracing the “ceaseless creativity” of nature itself, which in Kauffman’s view is the real meaning of God. It’s God without any supernatural tricks.

He goes on to poke holes in the reductionist, or flatland approach, as Ken Wilber has spent so many pages doing.

It’s comforting in that the entire universe is seen to be lawful; we can understand everything, from societies to quarks. Yet a number of physicists, including Nobel laureates Philip Anderson and Robert Laughlin, feel that reductionism is not adequate to understand the real world. In its place, they talk about “emergence.” I think they’re right.

Here’s where it gets a little sticky for me. With all due respect for Dr. Kauffman and his attempts to realign spirituality into something more relevant, I worry that he’s confusing the Universe’s creativity with creativity’s source. That source, or Source, literally has “no thing” to it, and yet it gives birth to “some thing” in every moment. The agentic value of all somethings isn’t deniable, nor is agency separate from the Source. But agency isn’t God. The Source of agency, on the other hand, gets us closer to the substrate of all things that spontaneously bridges Itself with and into all things as a divine and messy creativity… in each moment.

Bows to Andrew Sullivan for the heads up.

Here’s a podcast from InfiniteSmile.

Saddened by today’s events in Mumbai. Tweet Grid is offering a fascinating glimpse at Twitter users, some at the scenes, in realtime.

May all beings find the peace.

Michael Paulson writes of last night’s screening of “Milk” for this morning’s Boston Globe:

California is facing a measure that would restrict gay rights amidst a national debate over how the nation’s legal framework should view homosexuality. The conservative religious community throws its muscle behind the proposition. And the gay community protests. Sound familiar?

To bust up George Santayana’s quote a little: those who forget the Now are condemned to repeat the past.

Interesting read over at the On Faith section of the Washington Post:

Malaysia’s top Islamic body fresh from banning tomboys issued an edict Saturday that prohibits Muslims from practicing yoga, saying that elements of Hinduism in the ancient Indian exercise could corrupt them.

The National Fatwa Council’s chairman, Abdul Shukor Husin, said many Muslims fail to understand that yoga’s ultimate aim is to be one with a god of a different religion…

Interesting line: “to be one with god of a different religion.” Does this suggest that this specific brand of Islam is polytheistic? Our god versus your god must mean that there are at least two gods in someone’s mind. Everyone breathe deep and strike a pose, say downward god… er, dog. I meant dog.

Yesterday, Michael Paulson’s Articles of Faith Blog addressed media coverage of religion during the presidential campaign season:

…the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life offer a critical look at how the news media covered the role of religion in this year’s presidential campaign in a report released today. (The Pew graphic at right shows the percentage of the overall religion-related campaign coverage that focused on each candidate.)

Interesting. Obama took the lion’s share of attention despite YouTube evidence of Rev. Thomas Muthee interesting practices involving Sarah Palin and the rest of her church congregation.

Spiritual Politic’s Mark Silk makes a great point about this in his assessment:

In late September, a Pew report noted ‘the relative lack of attention to Palin’s religious biography within the mainstream media,’ and nothing happened afterward to require altering that assessment.

Regardless of the amount of coverage, I’m fascinated by the implications of what the mainstream media finds most valuable to offer its consumers. Will their choices help us to consciously evolve at anypoint in time, or is fear what will continue to drive the delivery of information?

Over at the Washington Post’s, On Faith section, John Mark Reynolds makes the point that humility supports our spiritual evolution. He also suggests that we have little control over God’s plan for us:

The events that impact a nation are ultimately in God’s hands. Because God loves human beings, He does not always give us what “we deserve.” No nation, and this includes our beloved United States of America, would long survive that test

That does not mean that God’s will is easy to understand. God’s actions are difficult to read in history, because His world is complicated. The blessings earnestly prayed for in one nation may bring harm to another people. God balances great complexity in making this the best possible world for free human beings.

This is all well and good, but to assume that God is somehow separate from us puts us squarely in the dualism that hinders real humility. How arrogant for any of us, in other words, to assume that we are in anyway separate from the Infinite. The shattering realization that all of us are dynamic expressions of the inseparability of Spirit, or God, or the Infinite is precisely what offers us glimpses of an authentic humility; one that includes everyone and everything, eternally.

In Karen Armstrong’s recent post, Calling All Religions to Compassion, she rightly brings up some key points of integration for traditions:

Compassion is indeed central to every one of the major world religions — but sometimes you would never know it. Increasingly religion is associated with violence and intolerance; it seems preoccupied with dogma, belief, getting to heaven, or enforcing correct sexual behavior. There are magnificent exceptions, of course, but it is rare to hear religious leaders speaking of the primary importance of compassion. People don’t even seem to know what it means.

What’s fascinating are the responses from people.

I admit that I was transfixed by the Olympics last night. It was amazing to watch Michael Phelps and Usain Bolt do the impossible.

But I Tivo’d Rick Warren’s interview with Obama and McCain last night and upon my early morning review, and then listening to the Sunday Morning TV Gab, I came away with an interesting mix of feelings.

First of all, I’m interested in how many Americans are truly interested in the depth of a candidates religious convictions and what this might or might not imply.

Further, what does it say about a person running for office if they cling to the ideas that support a mythic god?

Then, to what extent, and in what capacity, should those of us who don’t cling to a mythic god care about what the candidates said last night?

Michael Paulson of the Boston Globe writes well about the event, as does Andrew Sullivan.

Life after death, or life after life, depending on how one looks at it, is one of the more fascinating aspects of spiritual practice since we’re not really sure what happens when we die. There are plenty of scriptural teachings to suggest that reincarnation exists. Maybe it does. Certainly, this would make things easier on each of us since we get to live all of this over again and again until we get it right. But aside from faith, scripture, and suggestion, there is little if any authentic empirical evidence to suggest that reincarnation actually happens. There are undoubtedly cases suggestive of reincarnation, but in our conventional world, we just don’t have the tools to determine if reincarnation awaits each of us or not. But does it really matter?

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A big part of living a conscious life means that we are living fully at every moment, aware and accepting of the fact that at any moment we might die. At this point of experience, everything simultaneously becomes a gift and a mystery. But there is a common spiritual confusion with this carpe diem attitude. Some practitioners feel that conscious living means that we should “go for it, because nothing matters.” The fearlessness that comes with the go-for-it attitude can be helpful along the Path, but any fixation that “nothing matters” is dangerous unless the mindset is met with a clear sense of ethics and responsibility. This is why an enlightened recognition must be also met with a purposeful relationship to an ethical code. The Precepts arose out of Zen and other Buddhist practices for this very reason. The Old Testament offers us the Ten Commandments, which provide similar guidance, and other traditions do the same. Allowing a deep intimacy with these rules, rather than attaching to them, prepares us for embodying the equanimity that comes with an Awakened perspective.

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