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

 

Aztec dancers perform at the “End the Wars at Home and Abroad” Spring Action 2018 in Oakland, California. April 15, 2018. File licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license. Author: Pax Ahimsa Gethen.

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.

 

Buddhist Social Democracy, Part 2

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

 

 

Were truer words ever spoken?

April 11, 2015 “The culmination of years of talks resulted in this handshake between the President and Cuban President Raúl Castro during the Summit of the Americas in Panama City, Panama.” (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza) Image is in the public domain.

In explaining his decision to end the US policy of isolating Cuba, President Obama recently said, “We know from hard-learned experience that it is better to encourage and support reform than to impose policies that will render a country a failed state.” 

These are wise words. Not a single other country in the world supported the US policy of isolating Cuba, and we should applaud the role of Pope Francis and others who helped the US and Cuba move toward reconciliation.

In discussing steps in the normalizing of relationships, President Obama mentioned the release from Cuban prison of USAID sub-contractor Alan Gross, held for five years on charges of spying, as well as the release from US prison of the final three of the Cuban Five, accused of conspiracy to commit espionage and held in maximum security prisons across the US.

President Obama also referred to human rights abuses in Cuba, proclaiming thatBut I’m under no illusion about the continued barriers to freedom that remain for ordinary Cubans” and “I call on all of my fellow leaders to give meaning to the commitment to democracy and human rights at the heart of the Inter-American Charter.”

To avoid rightful invocations of hypocrisy, the United States government needs to review its own barriers to freedom for immigrants and people of color. Ana Belen Montes is still locked up in a psychiatric ward at the ncis. US whistleblower Jeffrey Sterling is still imprisoned for spying (because he provided classified information to New York Times reporter James Risen about deliberate misinformation given to Iran). And also right here in the USA, immigrant children are kept in prison-like institutions.

Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology

Pope Francis

Pope Francis visiting rehab hospital
Photograph produced by Agência Brasil and published under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Brazil License

I am not a Catholic in the Holy Roman Church sense, and indeed have long had a distrust of organized religion because of its historic role in perpetration of and tolerance for violence—the infamous bloody Crusades not being the only such example in the annals of the Catholic Church.

HOWEVER,

I have been wanting for some time to write a post on the remarkable new leader of the Catholic Church—Pope Francis I. As another Easter approaches—a holiday celebrated by millions around the world, Catholic and otherwise—I find myself longing to hear that people are really listening to his messages of peace and social justice.

Here are just a few excerpts from his recent APOSTOLIC EXHORTATION, “to the bishops, clergy, consecrated persons and the lay faithful on the proclamation of the gospel in today’s world”

*Just as the commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’ sets a clear limit in order to safeguard the value of human life, today we also have to say ‘thou shalt not’ to an economy of exclusion and inequality….

*Today in many places we hear a call for greater security. But until exclusion and inequality in society and between peoples are reversed, it will be impossible to eliminate violence. The poor and the poorer peoples are accused of violence, yet without equal opportunities the different forms of aggression and conflict will find a fertile terrain for growth and eventually explode.

These messages are catholic in the sense of “universal’ and “wide-ranging” and what a miracle it would be if they could spark a renewed commitment to the sense of brotherhood, and sisterhood that are essential to peace and social justice.

Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology