Awake in This Life

This is interesting. I’ve always thought that a commitment to social justice was at the core of Christian (as well as other) spiritual teaching. At least that’s what Thomas Aquinas seems to point out in his writing.

Perhaps Beck has something on Aquinas.

Money quote:

On his radio program, Fox News’ Glenn Beck encouraged listeners to leave their church if it proclaims a concern for social justice:

I’m begging you, your right to religion and freedom to exercise religion and read all of the passages of the Bible as you want to read them and as your church wants to preach them . . . are going to come under the ropes in the next year. If it lasts that long it will be the next year. I beg you, look for the words ’social justice’ or ‘economic justice’ on your church Web site. If you find it, run as fast as you can. Social justice and economic justice, they are code words. Now, am I advising people to leave their church? Yes!”

You can listen for yourself here.

Here’s an argument that I’ve danced with for years: where do we draw the line on the Buddhist precept of not killing. Having just gone through a round of anti-biotics, I knowingly killed lots of things in my body.  The name of the drug regimen “antibiotics” even means “against life”. What’s more, I’m glad that I’m now better able to care for my kids because I was aided in “murdering” the bacteria that was flattening me. Violation of the first precept? I wonder.

And what about my Vedanta friends who don’t eat anything that has a face? Or my Dharma friends who smugly proclaim their vegetarianism on ethical grounds yet dig into tuna fillets that have been seared rare on an open grill, but won’t touch any lamb? Is it the cute principle? When I ask they can’t really say.

Whatever your stance, it’s a great place to observe our attachments.

…before we cede the entire moral penthouse to “committed vegetarians” and “strong ethical vegans,” we might consider that plants no more aspire to being stir-fried in a wok than a hog aspires to being peppercorn-studded in my Christmas clay pot. This is not meant as a trite argument or a chuckled aside. Plants are lively and seek to keep it that way. The more that scientists learn about the complexity of plants — their keen sensitivity to the environment, the speed with which they react to changes in the environment, and the extraordinary number of tricks that plants will rally to fight off attackers and solicit help from afar — the more impressed researchers become, and the less easily we can dismiss plants as so much fiberfill backdrop, passive sunlight collectors on which deer, antelope and vegans can conveniently graze.

via  Another Challenge for Ethical Eating – Plants Want to Live, Too – NYTimes.com.

Stuart Davis offers us a nice piece of writing that confronts what many might see as fundamental flaws in the Rationalist’s arguments against religion.

I just finished reading God Is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens. He’s given us another powerful work in the vein of Sam Harris (The End of Faith), Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion), and Bill Maher (Religulous). Team Rationality is ushering in a long-overdue examination of religion in the modern world. They make a strong case that religion is sick and dehumanizing. I would say more specifically, sick religion is dehumanizing. And we do have a global pandemic of sick religion: billions of believers stuck in low levels of consciousness, riddled with pathologies. ‘S called Samsara where I’m from.

However, reading these best-sellers has inspired me to make a wish-list. Here are five things rational religion-haters should know:

Read on…

Jeff Sharlet writes on Killing the Buddha about how Christian fundamentalism helped turn Somalia into the next staging ground for Islamic radicalism.

Stuart Davis nails this one beautifully:

I know Bill Maher thinks Pat Robertson is an idiot. So do I. But not because he’s Christian. I think Pat Robertson is an idiot because he’s a developmentally arrested person. And he expresses his retardation through the vehicle of religion. But he would not be at any higher level of development if he was an atheist. He would just acquire different furniture for his arrested mind. If we investigate Christianity more closely, we discover its developmental depths. The deeper we go into any spiritual tradition, the more we will find it anchored in direct experience and immediate data, and the less we find it identified with dogma and belief.

I’ve been reading and listening to lots of conflict over the past several days. Along with the recent killing of the doctor who performs abortions as well as yesterday’s shooting at the Holocaust Museum, it got me thinking about some writing I did on this topic.

…in today’s global religious culture, we find major attachments to division and resistance not only between groups of people but perhaps, more importantly, between people and their sense of God. Most churches do not operate from a place of interconnection with the Divine, but they rather have a tradition of relating to both God and each other from a hierarchical place of separation. Most traditions tend to view God as something apart from what we experience each moment as ourselves. We pray to God rather than living as a conscious expression of Him. And yet, for many, to recognize ourselves as expressions of all that is holy is considered blasphemy. In truth, seeing ourselves as separate from God in any way indicates that our ego, either singularly or collectively, is at work. Churches, mosques, temples, and all the other traditional organizations that fixate, codify, and dogmatize their ideology will only impede an Awakening, since their work centers itself around the convictions and attachments of the ego. These convictions lead to absolute certitude, and certitude eventually leads to violence. As such, if a government or religion decides to identify itself with a system of institutional separation it will only generate more clinging and, in turn, more resistance, more anger, and more suffering, for more people. And yet, this is exactly the situation that the world seems to be in: people are forced to commit themselves to a stunted spirituality or to nothing in particular. In either case, we feel less connected to each other and ourselves, while our spiritual landscape becomes more and more barren.

It surprises me in my discussions with people how their spiritual lives seem to reflect a felt sense of this frustration. The places they worshipped as youngsters seem irrelevant to the way they live in today’s world. And yet they yearn for some type of shared spiritual connection.

A couple of more pieces on the ongoing saga of Osel Hita Torres who recently left monastic life and his tradition:

Over at the Guardian, Victoria Coren offers up an interesting bit of analysis:

…you have to know what you are rejecting. Otherwise, the rejection has no meaning. So my advice to the gurus of Buddhism, who have been drumming their fingers for it, I am sure, is to be hopeful rather than worried. All spiritual leaders need their time in the wilderness. If Osel Torres spends the next five years trying to get into the film industry, listening to Hendrix and watching people bounce desperately around in smoky boxes, then returns to the path of the Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition, he could grow up into the greatest lama of all time.

Time magazine has also picked up on this story:

The abdication of the anointed tulku is a significant embarrassment to the group he was supposed to head, the powerhouse Foundation for the Preservation of the Monastic Tradition (FPMT), the foremost Tibetan teaching organization in the West. It also challenges Westerners who have adopted Buddhism to find more sophisticated ways of understanding its magical side.

Time goes on to quote Robert Thurman on the issue:

Robert Thurman, a Buddhist scholar, former monk and friend of the Dalai Lama, recounts that when told years ago that Hita was to receive a traditional Buddhist education in India he expressed concern. Thurman’s argument: “If he wanted Tibetan traditional [education] he could have reincarnated in a Tibetan family in exile.” The result of the misplacement, he says, is that Hita “has broken away in a full-blown identity crisis.” Thurman thinks that after some time in our “busy postmodern world,” Hita may see the value of the Tibetan tradition, “which he will then be able to approach or not, of his own free choice.” And, he adds, “More power to him!”

Ah, reincarnation. Sacred truth or egoic refuge?

I thought I’d share this exchange I just had with a reader:

Michael, for some reason, issues of guru abuse are coming at me from every direction. I just had a good friend call me asking to talk – she has been with a guru here in the Bay Area for 7 years and is thinking of leaving her community. Her community is devotional to this woman named “S.” It sounds like from what my friend says that there has been emotional abuse from her guru. Her community sounds like a confusing jumble of projections and power struggles. I’m confused b/c I know some people (Ken Wilbur?) say that cruelty from gurus is compassionate and done purposefully so that the devotee can wake up. Even though my friend agrees with this viewpoint, her guru has said some things quite cruel to her that she says don’t sound true. So she is losing trust in S. Her guru will also not allow for others in the community to question her correctness on any issue. That does not sound right to me. There are other things as well that I’m confused about…. I realize nothing is black and white, all or nothing. But I’m really questioning what the hell is enlightenment if it can look like what S is teaching.

My response:

For one, your friend should leave if there is abuse. In all cases, abuse
derails the process. While I’ve never once heard Wilber endorse guru
cruelty, if he did, he should reconsider.

Second, confusing “jumbles” of power struggles show up all the time in
community. We, at Infinite Smile, have been lucky so far but should also
be aware of stuff like this showing up as we grow. That said, teacher and
community should work together as a container for radical shifts in the
way students meet the world. So any organization that doesn’t reflect
kindness inherently defiles what’s most important in the process of
awakening.

Third, gurus are supposed to be relentless at pointing out clinging. This
doesn’t mean they should ever be cruel. Pushing happens and should. We
shouldn’t feel entirely comfortable with our teachers. They are not our
friends, after all. They are our guides on a treacherous journey and there
isn’t room in this work to lose our balance and either become too enamored of either the heart or the mind; the relative or the Infinite. This is serious business. Hilarious, but serious.

I notice in myself at times that I become aware of impatience
arising and thoughts that center around there not being enough time or
energy to waste on the same old stuff that students keep bringing up over and over again. Then I realize that I didn’t get
into this business for the outcomes. I got into it because I didn’t really have
any other choice.

Having said all of this, 21st century sensibilities help devotional traditions get pretty sticky. It never made much sense to me, but then again it works for some people. Regardless, total devotion to a teacher always brings out interesting qualities in both teachers and students. So what should we be looking for? One quality: trust. Are they firm? Good… this is definitely helpful. Are they cruel? This actually can reify egoic clinging in most of us, which is why I’d say “move on.” Without trust, intimacy can’t flourish. Without intimacy, the entire process becomes a “jumble” of egoic clinging.

Then the follow-up:

I think my friend is just beginning to step outside of her community’s foggy habitat
and admitting to herself that S is absolutely not flawless – and this is when the
problems began. Yikes! S was evidently enlightened through some kind of transmission from
Adi Da, but never actually worked with him. Maybe that’s part of what’s going on. She began teaching when others called on her to do so – is it a teacher’s responsibility then to not heed the call to teach until they know
they are ready? How does one know? And why do you think such a shift occurs when student has committed to one teacher?

And finally:

When is the right time to teach? Well, I’m probably not the best person to answer this as it was never my intention to teach. Short answer, I don’t know. In our situation, what started as a class on uncovering meditative stillness in a suburban hamlet became something bigger. I was fortunate in that both Infinite Smile and I have had lots of guidance from lots of people who’ve done this stuff before. I still call on people all the time for advice and I’m constantly looking at both my practice and the sangha’s “center of gravity” to make sure everything about us is reflecting a deep unity with the teaching as best as possible and thus remaining “fog free.” Of course this fog-cutting takes attention and work. For example, teachers who are surrounded by sycophantic students can easily lose sight of what’s most important, and because they are seen as peerless by all those that are around them, they can fall into the trap of becoming totally devotional to themselves and their work. This creates communities of pseudo-enlightenment, where egos that think they are awake push well-meaning practitioners into the ditch. And these ditch-dwellers simply don’t have the tools to get out even though “getting out” is precisely what is needed if enlightenment is the goal.

Over at the Intent.com, Deepak Chopra offers some analysis of Obama’s speech in Cairo:

…it was a cobweb-clearing speech. The content wasn’t exceptional. Before Muslims assumed the role of bogeyman after 9/11, any tolerant educated person realized that Islamic civilization has a great heritage. Nor is it news that the Muslim world is far more complex than the picture painted by a tiny minority of fanatical extremists. Yet to hear an American president reiterate these things had a powerful emotional effect.

The heart of the speech, once we get past its effort at reconciliation, was Obama’s candid talk about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the social obstructions in Arab society. It was bracing to hear him say that “Israel isn’t going away,” just as it was moving to hear the words, “peace be upon them” when he referred to Muhammad and Abraham. In one stroke Obama set America’s policy toward the Arab world back on a sensible, moral, even idealistic path.

He goes on to intelligently call attention to what’s ultimately needed:

Yet there is a glaring problem that the speech didn’t confront directly, which is the inability of “good” Muslims to stand up for change. “Good” is equated with devout, and that’s a huge obstacle to reform. The Muslim world has not liberated its core values from the dogmas of religion. In the name of devotion to God women are denied even basic rights; terrorists march under the banner of faith; mullahs control credulous masses of believers; education for the average citizen is totally centered on the Koran. All of these are backward trends.

As I listened to Obama, I was struck at how he was asking to be met in resetting a relationship. As he said, he can’t do it alone. To be sure, America needs to reevaluate broken policies. But all of it needs to be actively supported by the part of the Muslim community that can “lunch in  London restaurants and shop in Paris boutiques as often as they attend the mosque.”

One of Andrew Sullivan’s readers posted this assessment of Dr. George Tiller’s murder yesterday. Whether you agree with his practice as it relates to abortion or not, the scope of this tragedy speaks to something very deep in our spiritual psyches.

Do they not understand that each day that Dr. Tiller lived was another opportunity for grace to prevail? For some that grace may have meant he saved the life of a woman needing access to a safe abortion, to others perhaps that grace would’ve been his own turning away from his practice. But the point is whenever we presume to be the gatekeepers of God’s love and grace, we ourselves are turning away from God. I grieve for the family, the church, and the community left to make sense of this unjust action and were witness to a heinous attempt to deny grace.

I too grieve for so many of those involved. Let none of us presume to be the gatekeepers so that we may increase our intimacy with whatever you define as God.

Poor Osel Hita Torres (or, until recently, Lama Tenzin Osel Rinpoche). Dale Fuchs from the Guardian reports that as a toddler he was seen as the reincarnation of the beloved Lama Yeshe and so ascended the throne to be worshipped by monks everywhere. Trouble was, he wanted to grow his hair long, wear baggy jeans, watch movies, and listen to Hendrix.

Can you blame him?

[Mr. Torres] is now studying film in Madrid and has denounced the Buddhist order that elevated him to guru status. “They took me away from my family and stuck me in a medieval situation in which I suffered a great deal,” said Torres, 24, describing how he was whisked from obscurity in Granada to a monastery in southern India. “It was like living a lie,” he told the Spanish newspaper El Mundo. Despite his rebelliousness, he is still known as Lama Tenzin Osel Rinpoche and revered by the Buddhist community.

(Bows, Buddhist Channel.)

Anderson Cooper writes:

The more often Americans go to church, the more likely they are to support the torture of suspected terrorists, according to a new analysis.

Check out Pew’s full survey here.

What would Buddha do? Would Jesus do the same?

“We have to say no to same-sex marriage,” said the Rev. George Gilbert, pastor of Holy Trinity United Baptist Church in Northeast Washington, who concluded his remarks by leading a chant: “Not on our watch! Not on our watch! Not on our watch!”

Sounds like attachment to me.
(via washingtonpost.com)

Here’s a very thoughtful post by James Wellman on Christianity’s misplaced cheerleading:

One of the questions that plagues my study of American religion is why there is such a frequent close correspondence between American Christianity and war making. This question displays my own liberal Protestant belief that violence should always be a last resort, and that churches and religious leaders should not be in the business of cheerleading for war. After studying American religion for two decades, I should know better—liberal, mainline, and conservative Protestants have all done it, and yet, I keep asking why.

Read on.

Matthew Yglesias offers an interesting find. It seems that Republican political operative and former Press Secretary to U.S. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) Matt Mackowiak says in an op-ed for the Austin American-Statesman:

The coming revolution is akin to “Fight Club,” the 1999 film that follows the struggles of day to day life for a regular guy who starts an underground fight club as radical and not terribly productive psychotherapy.

As Brad Pitt’s character, Tyler Durden, says in the movie, “Fight Club was the beginning, now it’s moved out of the basement, it’s called Project Mayhem.”

I find “Fight Club” to be a great film. But in it, Dissociative Identity Disorder combined with charisma and confusion result in a terrorist organization… called Project Mahem. Are we to assume that Mr. Mackowiak’s idea of a new, reinvented Republican Revolution will be the development of misdirected and fragmented terrorist cells? Will the New Right be a collection of people attached to non-attachment?

Sounds a little fundamentalist to me, but it would be interesting to see guys like Senators McCain and Hatch rip off their shirts and start beating on each other until someone taps out.

Damon Linker makes an interesting series of observations regarding the dominance of Christianity in America:

Somewhat fewer Americans are identifying as Christians; somewhat more are identifying as secular. And even those who remain religiously traditionalist are a bit less likely to believe that they should work for the transformation of the nation through the medium of electoral politics.

On the face of it, this is something we should welcome. Granted, as he points out, these are only trends, and it’s likely that a resurgence of collective fear might push things in another direction. Still, he asks a great question:

What will provide the theological content of the nation’s civil religion now that the “mere orthodoxy” of the evangelical-Catholic alliance has proven unsuitable for a pluralistic nation of 300 million people? To my mind, the most likely and salutary option is moralistic therapeutic deism. Here is the core of its (Rousseauian) catechism, in the words of sociologist Christian Smith:

1. “A god exists who created and ordered the world and watches over human life on earth.”

2. “God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions.”

3. “The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.”

4. “God does not need to be particularly involved in one’s life except when God is needed to resolve a problem.”

5. “Good people go to heaven when they die.”

Assuming Smith’s kind of Christianity were to reestablish a foothold in our constitutional democracy, whether you subscribe to it or not, we might be in far better shape. I say this because it would allow for a deeper tolerance and more accurately reflect Christ’s teachings.

Of course Smith’s Christianity doesn’t do much to integrate the various teachings of enlightenment, nor does it come close to uprooting the seeds of egoic attachment. But it does offer a chance for deeper listening.

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.

I recently took some good-natured swipes from one of my more “fundamentalist Buddhist” friends, who struggled mightily with my assertion that reincarnation didn’t matter in terms of Awakening.

I’m sure many of my more traditional Buddhist friends will disagree with me, but to debate whether or not something is true in relation to any tradition, dogma, or scripture misses the most sacred aspects of any great spiritual teaching and certainly misses the point of Awakening into an enlightened perspective. Freeing ourselves from the entire cycle of birth and death is available to us in this lifetime at this moment. No one needs, therefore, to bother with any future speculation of rebirth as we walk the Path.

I go on:

…when we attach to the faith and religiosity of any wisdom tradition, we diminish its ability to assist us on our climb. This weakening occurs because when we are caught by any attachment our limited egoic view begins to think of itself as something Infinite. For example, consider how the view “I get to live another life all over again” can be a wonderful place for ego to maintain a perceived sense of control over the ultimate chaos of death. The sense that an “I” exists is the very unconsciousness from which we wish to awaken. Awakening, in this sense, is seeing beyond all that the mind, or small self or ego, offers. In the most common views of reincarnation, this delusion of the fixed, and persisting “I” is bolstered by the belief that something separate survives the clutches of death when, in reality, all objects of the mind are subject to time and therefore must succumb to the clutches of death.

Justin Gest writes in the guardian.co.uk about whether multifaith religious education is a failure?

In advance of the release of a new pamphlet, Philip Barnes questioned the success and value of religious education in the UK. He writes that religious education fails to engage pupils’ interest and “does harm” in alienating many devout people by suggesting that all religions are equally valid.

This is interesting. Are all religions equally valid? If a particular faith encourages acts of violence as a means of defending a particular version of  truth, are they equally valid with a tradition that, say, doesn’t? How might we best present this to a group of eighth graders?

Of course I agree that there should be a much more sophisticated discourse surrounding faith in pluralistic societies. But these discussions need to embrace nuance rather than cling to blunt offerings of pablum. Schools might just be the right environment for this as long as teachers can bridge the gap between conviction and wonder. Otherwise we’ll run into trouble.

Gest continues:

… if issues of religious difference are not addressed in schools, they will certainly be addressed outside of them, potentially by people with hate-filled agendas of misinformation.

These people exacerbate the greatest problem facing social cohesion and inter-religious relations today – perceptions that religious differences are irreconcilable.

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.