Buddha – Engaging Peace

The Yin and Yang of Detachment and Compassion

Posted on January 11, 2020January 11, 2020 by kathiemm

by Stefan Schindler

The peacemaker’s path is a rhythm, a balance, a dialectic. Faced with the horrors of the postmodern world, it is necessary to refresh oneself daily with what Kierkegaard calls “infinite inwardness.” In Asian terms – Buddhism is a way of staying sane in a world gone mad, and a way of healing the madness. Detachment and a passion for compassion go together like Yin and Yang.

It’s not a question of cultivating apathy, in any degree. It’s a question of letting go, having faith, taking the time to put the world on hold to sink into the bliss-wisdom-grace of one’s own enlightened heart, there to be nourished, strengthened, and refreshed, so as to return to the world with a passionate but equanimitous dedication to peace and justice.

Total freedom from suffering is a nirvanic ideal, and if we’re lucky, we occasionally get a fleeting glimpse of it; but striving for it is like a monkey trying to grasp the moon’s reflection in a pond. Buddha was a pragmatist. His path to equanimity – balancing compassion and detachment – is a Middle Way. For us, it’s a razor’s edge. And Socratic refreshment of the soul – Kierkegaard’s boundless faith in what Plato calls the Good, the True, and the Beautiful – can benefit from meditation, but just as easily be found in a walk in the park, a walk in the forest, a walk along the beach, baking bread, or pruning a garden.

You and I and so many others … we’re just Pilgrims on The Path, and it’s OK to feel, really feel, sorrow, even anger, so long as we attempt to respond to those emotions with some degree of enlightenment. For us, a broken heart is an Opening Heart. Crucifixion leading to Resurrection. Not merely once or twice in a lifetime. Rather, the more informed one is, the more haunted life becomes by the tragic and absurd – all the unnecessary and ceaseless suffering humans cause other humans – and the crucifixion-resurrection rhythm becomes a part of every day, for decades.

Daily faced with the Chinese holocaust in Tibet, going on sixty years now, perhaps there is no more broken-hearted person in the world than the Dalai Lama, and yet, from the depths of that abyss he daily rises to teach peace and work for peace, with a smile and a sense of irony and humor, because in that same abyss he finds a measure of peace, where the finite is kissed by the infinite.

A plea for sanity and virtue, Part 2

Posted on May 1, 2019May 5, 2019 by kathiemm

by Stefan Schindler

Is the sun rising or setting on all of us?
Kathie MM

Part Two: Resurrecting the Wisdom and Spirit of Helen Keller, Dorothy Day, Molly Ivins, Martin Luther King, and Howard Zinn

In The United States of Amnesia, governed by Weapons of Mass Dysfunction, we daily witness America’s devolution into barbarism.

Therefore, it is better to swim against the current than to be swept over the cliff.

Collective Awakening is ever more necessary for the restoration of sanity and virtue in a republic apparently intent on self-destruction.

Insofar as the Republican Party is now wholly lost to the forces of sexism, racism, militarism, sophistry, empire, xenophobia, economic apartheid, ecological suicide, fear mongering, war making, science denial, and religious extremism – i.e., a polymorphous perversity of elephantiastical greed, bigotry and delusion, committed to the total overthrow of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal for the American people – and insofar as multi-party pluralism in a two-party system sold to the mega-wealthy is now and in the near future off the table, our best hope for a brighter future is for the Democratic Party to regain its heart and soul; both of which were lost at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968, when it betrayed the Civil Rights and Peace Movements it was obliged to embody in the spirit of our assassinated hero, Robert F. Kennedy.

Karl Marx urged egalitarian economics, arguing that each person has a right to the material security which allows for self-realization and creative service, free from oppressive constraints. Buddha taught the same.

Which is why the Dalai Lama consistently teaches “a common religion of kindness,” committed to nuclear disarmament, global peace, ecological pragmatism, economic security for all, and lifelong free education in a planetary community where the institutions of society serve schools (and not, as at present, the other way around). What the Dalai Lama urges and teaches is nothing less than a Global Enlightenment Project.

Also, it might be worthwhile to remind people that if they have a Social Security card, they are a card carrying socialist.

There are today strong voices in Congress urging a restoration of sanity and virtue. They remain too few, and the forces arrayed against them are strong indeed; but those voices are a beacon of hope, and they deserve our support because they recognize the following:

People before profits = The Sermon on The Mount = The Golden Rule at the heart of The Torah = Heart Centered Rationality = Ahimsa = “Right Vocation” in Buddha’s 8-Fold Path = Covenant = universal health care = Ecosocialism.

CRAZY WISDOM

Posted on December 3, 2018December 2, 2018 by kathiemm

By Stefan Schindler

Do you occasionally feel that you’re about to go crazy? Or think that perhaps you already have? Do you often feel like Don Quixote, vainly tilting at windmills? Yes, probably. But then you remember the meaning of the term Greater Fool. A Greater Fool is one who exhibits greatness in commitment to peace, no matter how foolish that commitment seems in a world intent on going mad.

You remember that you are not alone. You have comrades. Millions of brothers and sisters equally committed to kindness and compassion. They too are Greater Fools, like Jesus, Buddha, Gandhi, Romero, Tolstoy, Emerson, Tagore. Like Mother Jones, Emma Goldman, Dorothy Day, Helen Keller, Vandana Shiva, Amy Goodman, Naomi Klein. Like Martin Luther King and Muhammad Ali. Like Mark Twain, William James, Noam Chomsky, Michael Parenti, Michael Moore, Howard Zinn. Like Meister Eckhart, Thomas Merton, George Fox, Matthew Fox, Thich Nhat Hanh, the Dalai Lama. Like Rosa Parks, Maya Angelou, Jane Fonda, Joan Baez, Susan Sarandon, the Trung sisters of Vietnam. Like Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. John and Robert Kennedy, too. Greater Fools, one and all.

And, yes, The Beatles. “All you need is love,” they sang, and you hum it every day. War without end seems to be the world’s way, and yet you never cease to chant, “Give peace a chance.” The Statue of Liberty weeps. Mother Earth is crucified. Storm clouds darken the horizon. And yet you sing: “Here comes the sun.” Yes, I am you, you are me, and we are all the walrus. We have each other. We keep the faith. We persevere.

Chogyam Trungpa, combining Tibetan Buddhism and Zen, called it Crazy Wisdom. So, yes, it’s OK to be a little crazy, as long as your craziness is that of the Greater Fool. Humanity may elect lunatics for leaders, and go about their business sleepwalking through history. Yet you, at least, are awake. Indeed, you are part of The Great Awakening. You belong to The Global Peace Abbey. It welcomes all and has no walls. We are warriors for peace, on the cutting edge of evolution. There is no greater satisfaction, no greater joy, no greater service.

So rejoice, my friend. The angels sing your praises, and lend you unconditional support. The reward for service is increased opportunity to serve.

Confronting Economic Apartheid and Political Ignorance with a Common Religion of Kindness

Posted on May 11, 2018May 11, 2018 by kathiemm

by Stefan Schindler

Everyone has a philosophy – a “worldview,” a system of values and beliefs influencing actions – whether they know it or not (through conscious, critical reflection).

Bertrand Russell’s early twentieth-century call for philosophy in schools is mirrored in Alfred North Whitehead’s The Aims of Education. I refer readers to my web-posted essay “The Tao of Teaching: Romance and Process.”

Philosophy in schools (including for children) and in public spaces (Francis Bacon’s “marketplace of ideas”) is much in need of augmentation and enhancement, and this especially true in the USA.

Philosophy can, or should, enhance critical thinking skills and ethical reflection – from early youth through old age. However, what is often missing from the call for philosophy in schools is a necessary conjoining of philosophy with what Michael Parenti calls “real history” (as opposed to the jingoistic mush of social conditioning). To paraphrase Santayana: Those who don’t learn from history are condemned to repeat it (as the USA is intent on doing, over and over, at great cost to the nation and the world, including the biosphere).

Democracy and justice depend on informed citizens, and the USA has perhaps the most historically illiterate citizens in the modern world. Hence the disastrous results of America’s political process ever since the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. People cannot think philosophically about – apply critical thinking skills to – what they don’t know. As increasingly evidenced in America, economic apartheid and historical-political ignorance go together. Hence the tragedy of increasing poverty, fear, prejudice, and scapegoating, and the equally tragic ease of political manipulation, in which citizens vote against their own best interest.

Recalling Plato’s parable of the cave, Howard Zinn observed: “The truth is so often the opposite of what we are told that we can no longer turn our heads around far enough to see it.” Hence Noam Chomsky notes: “The problem is not that people don’t know; it’s that they don’t know they don’t know.” To which I add: Individual innocence is no protection against collective responsibility. And thus, to conclude: Insofar as the purpose of life is learning and service, and insofar as Buddha’s political philosophy advocates democratic socialism (what the Dalai Lama calls “a common religion of kindness”), society should serve schools, not the other way around.