Tag: John F. Kennedy

CRAZY WISDOM

Posted on 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.

Enlightenment and Social Hope, Part 4

Posted on by kathiemm
For Enlightenment by Kathie Malley-Morrison

By Stefan Schindler

The recent triumph of anti-democratic Republican Party politics was made possible with the criminal complicity of the Democratic Party, the mainstream news media, and the rise to political power of Christian fundamentalism.

In the hotly contested 2000 presidential election, the Supreme Court halted the counting of votes, and then appointed George W. Bush the winner, in what was nothing less than a judicial coup d’état.

The Cheney-Bush Administration then launched a lie-based war against Iraq and Afghanistan, the cost of which now exceeds two trillion dollars, hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths in the Middle East, and widespread Muslim hatred of America. In 2008, the Cheney-Bush Administration climaxed its reign of deficit spending and global terror with a domestic economic meltdown which saw American citizens suffer the greatest recession since the  Depression of the 1930s.

Meanwhile, America’s homegrown economic apartheid becomes more extreme with every passing week; the Pentagon budget blooms to finance more wars; fifty percent of university teachers are slave-wage adjuncts; more than fifty million Americans are deprived of healthcare; and the planet careens toward nuclear war and ecological apocalypse.

Hence we might conclude that Immanuel Kant implicitly points to a national motto that ought to read: “Treat all people always as ends in themselves, rather than merely as means” to personal gain.

Hence also – as Voltaire, Rousseau, David Hume, Mother Jones, Emma Goldman, Dorothy Day, Helen Keller, I. F. Stone, Buckminster Fuller, John and Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Maya Angelou, Dot Walsh, Kurt Vonnegut, Lewis and Meg Randa, Howard Zinn and John Lennon would applaud – we should revise America’s Pledge of Allegiance to read:

“I pledge allegiance to the planet, and to all the people and creatures on her; one ecosystem, universally sacred, with nourishment and beauty for all.”

 

Buddhist Social Democracy, Part 2

Posted on by kathiemm

by Stefan Schindler

In Buddha’s worldview, “each life is precious, endowed with freedom and opportunity.” The Buddhist social democratic path to peace offers widespread time and place for deconditioning.

Buddha says the institutions of society ought to serve schools, not the other way around.

Buddha’s politics entail an educational revolution, inspired by Whitehead’s maxim: “Boring teachers should be brought to trial for the murder of young souls.”

The heart of Buddhism is the fusion of wisdom and compassion: the enlightenment adventure, individually and socially. This includes reverence for language, and constant cultivation of the critical thinking skills necessary to combat sophistry in all its nefarious forms.

Buddha understood the perverse impact of sophistry on the welfare of the multitude. Socrates did too, saying at his trial that, actually, Athens was on trial. Socrates today would say King’s quaternity includes a fifth: “Wealth, poverty, racism, war, and sophistry always go together; and we cannot solve one without solving the others.”

As political discourse becomes just another form of the curse of advertising, the more a society sinks to what Thomas Hobbes called “the war of all against all.”

Socrates was condemned to death for his battle against the sophists. In modern America, the brightest lights of two generations – John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King and John Lennon – were assassinated.

A national pedagogy of Socratic-Buddhist insight – with beneficent influence on the world – could slow contemporary America’s repeat of the self-engendered social implosion of classical Athens’ march of folly.

All the wars in the world are sophistically engendered, sustained by citizens seduced by schools and news-media that ignorate instead of edify.

Buddha’s emphasis on respect for language – and for knowing relevant information – is part of his therapeutic approach to healing the world’s woes. “Right speech” is another spoke on Buddha’s eightfold Dharmachakra.

Buddha’s political vision is heart-centered rationality, where the power of the state and all social institutions promote communal well-being. Communal well-being includes each individual’s freedom for self-discovery and creative evolution. Buddha’s politics are educational, pragmatic, organic. A community is a web of life.

The word Buddha means awake. Buddhist social democracy neither intends nor promotes religious conversion.

Tenzin Gyatso, the fourteenth Dalai Lama, daily declares he is a socialist, while saying also that the point is not to become a Buddhist but awake. He urges “a common religion of kindness.”

Buddhist social democracy blends holistic education, egalitarian economics, and a culture-wide primacy of cooperation over competition. Pope Francis – igniting a Renaissance humanism to redeem our spirit – echoes the Dalai Lama’s call to awakening.

If humans are walking question marks – and if philosophy is the journey from the love of wisdom to the wisdom of love – then this is what Buddhism teaches, and what the sangha practices.

Groucho Marx said: “Blessed are the cracked, for they will let in the light.”

Now here’s a Kenneth Patchen poem.

The scene of the crime which is also known as civilized living.

Until the Sun’s Wound is healed in our own hearts.

Love (which includes poetry) is to science

as the free and beautiful catchings of a child are

to the vile and unreturning throes of the hangman.

A feeling of passionate mercy. The rest doesn’t matter a damn!

                                                                                           Hallelujah Anyway