Dalai Lama – 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.

And ye shall inherit the whirlwind (or learn to live in gratitude and grace), Part 3

Posted on July 12, 2019August 10, 2019 by kathiemm

Bridge Interrupted by Reverend Dr. Doe West

by Stefan Schindler

We are free to become free. This is the lesson taught by Socrates. It is also the essence of Buddhism. The word “Buddha” means “awake.” Awakening, as Plato would say, is recollecting the sanity we were born with. Nietzsche quotes Pindar: “Become who you are.”

We are inextricable strands in the holistic web of being and becoming. Said the poet Byron: “Are not the mountains, waves, and skies, a part of me and of my soul, as I of them?” John Lennon said: “I am the walrus.”

Whitehead said: “In order to acquire learning, we must first shake ourselves free of it.” To shake ourselves free from chains of illusion, William Blake –implicitly evoking Plato’s allegory of the cave – urges a cleansing of “the doors of perception.” This has long been the virtue of Zen; and it is a sign of hope for human survival that the “mindfulness” movement is today finding widespread resonance in what Marshall McLuhan called “the global village.”

To give birth to a government by and for the people, we need a concerted effort, both individual and collective, to shatter the illusion that democracy and capitalism are synonymous. The two terms desperately need to be separated: analyzed and evaluated on their own merits, and put together again only in a modest, enlightened, socially pragmatic fashion, in conjunction with – and this too is a crucial point – a radical dismemberment of the specious and misleading caricature of Marxist politics that has so long reigned supreme in the American psyche, placed there in service to the captains of capital.

Greta Thunberg is a Swedish teenager. Imbued with ecological despair and courage of conscience, she is leading a global youth revolt against the status quo. As the climate crisis intensifies, the glaciers melt, polar bears die, and the earth burns, she calls on politicians “to act as if your house is on fire.” She was recently honored by Tenzin Gyatso, the fourteenth Dalai Lama, as a major world peacemaker and a voice for sanity and virtue.

John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Robert F. Kennedy, John Lennon – the brightest lights of a generation shot out to assure the triumph of the corporate counter-revolution against The Spirit of The Sixties. Giving peace a chance would not be an option. Yet, despite the victory of the mega-wealthy and the war-machines during the tragic course of the last half-century, there is a global undercurrent of awakening that daily increases in momentum. More and more people are realizing that it is better to swim against the current than to be swept over the cliff.

If philosophy is the journey from the love of wisdom to the wisdom of love, so too is our collective journey to peace, justice, and survival.

Note from Kathie MM: Pegean says: I have become who I am. I am fat and fluffy, warm and affectionate, and I know the wisdom of love. Join me in it. There’s room for all of us.

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.

FROM DARKNESS AT NOON TO THE GLOW OF HOPE, Part 2

Posted on July 12, 2018 by kathiemm

by Stefan Schindler

The Tragic Triumph of the Reagan Counter-Revolution

Against The Spirit of the Sixties, Now Counterbalanced by

the Rekindling of Candles in the Wind

What is to be done about the country in times that seem increasingly dark? Well, all is not lost. The seeds of peace sown in The Sixties continue to sprout across the land. If despair is blowin’ in the wind, so is hope, and the reinvigorating of protest against the status quo. If more and more people are sleepwalking through history, it is also true that more and more people are waking up.

Yes, the sophists, dogmatists and fanatics are better funded and better organized; but there is also an ongoing energizing of national and global enlightenment. A reawakening of the enlightened protest that was the signature glow of The Spirit of The Sixties.

You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one: Imagine: a world living in peace. More and more people are doing that, and committed to acting in such a way as to bring it about. For example, the Dalai Lama is one of the most admired people in the world. He is a living archetype of peacemaking, calling for egalitarian economics, ecological sanity, and a common religion of kindness.

Meanwhile, forums for enlightened discourse proliferate daily. Engaging Peace, Political Animal, and The Peace Abbey Foundation are three such forums.

Let us, then, as we said in The Sixties, “Keep the faith,” “Keep on truckin’,” commit to lives of voluntary simplicity, love our neighbors in the global village, sing our songs, do our dance, and stay committed to giving peace a chance.

We have a duty: the greater good to serve. And thus bequeath to our children: the world of peace and beauty they deserve.

Imagine it here and now.