A plea for sanity and virtue, Part 2

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.

The Things We Carry Still. Part II

by Stefan Schindler

Members of Desert Lenten Experience hold a prayer vigil during the Easter period of 1982 at the entrance to the Nevada Test Site. Their sign reads “They will beat their swords into plowshares.” In the public domain. Author: National Nuclear Security Administration / Nevada Site Office

Will we ever turn our swords into plowshares? The question haunts us still.

The kings of caprice cast shadows on the wall, and thereby turn us all into victims of their elephantiastical delusions.  Plato’s cave .  The matrix of manipulation.  The self-crucifixion of what passes for civilization.  A crime so horrific Thomas Merton calls it “the unspeakable.”  Yet John Lennon spoke its polymorphous perversity with scorching clarity: “They torture and scare you for twenty odd years, then they expect you to pick a career.”

It’s been said that memory and imagination are what make humans human.  If that’s true, then what we are – and what we do – is a function of what we remember and what we imagine.  Difficult indeed to remember what one has never heard or read.  Even more difficult, then, to imagine what could be.

Jean-Paul Sartre said: “A writer has a place in his age.  Each word has an echo, as does each silence.”

 Faulkner said: “The past is not dead.  It’s not even past.” 

Dylan said: “He not busy being born is busy dying.” 

Thomas Paine said: “These are the times that try men’s souls.”

We are all on trial now.  Jeremiah’s prophetic warning was never more relevant: “You shall reap the whirlwind.”

The Wasteland” is not just a poem by T.S. Eliot; nor merely a medieval legend, best portrayed in Parsifal’s quest for the Holy Grail.  The Wasteland is our fate, unless we change our ways.  The Weapons of Mass Destruction that threaten our collective survival are matched in power only by the Weapons of Mass Dysfunction which turn humans into lemmings stampeding toward the cliff.

Chogyam Trungpa  invites us to “recollect the sanity we were born with.”  To do so is to break the chains of illusion which cripple both memory and imagination.

Martin Luther King said: “We must choose between nonviolence and nonexistence.”

To be or not to be – the choice is ours.  To educate or ignorate – that is the question.  Courage of conscience is our only hope.

Socrates, Buddha, and Thomas Paine

An Illustration of the Golden Rule by Norman Rockwell used as the cover of the April 1, 1961 edition of the Saturday Evening Post. In the public domain.

 

by Stefan Schindler

The failure of Judaism, Christianity and Islam to embody their ownmost message of peace partly contributes to the increasing appeal of Buddhism in today’s postmodern war-torn world. Also, there is something absurd – counterproductive, self-defeating, and morally obscene – about the profit motive that is the engine of war. We must put a stop to that engine, before it puts a catastrophic stop to us all.

Transforming swords into plowshares, peace is the fertile soil for the world our children deserve; where schools are gardens of learning and the streets are daily bedecked with festivals, fairs, and creative arts; where cooperation has primacy over competition; where truth and goodness combine to produce beauty for both young and old.

Such is the Buddhist social democratic vision for a peaceable kingdom, offered to the world in what the Dalai Lama calls “a common religion of kindness.” Practical; peaceful; communal. Guided by Socratic dialogue and debate; where “virtue is pursuit of virtue.” Guided by what Thomas Paine called “common sense” and “the rights of man.”

To recall what Chogyam Trungpa calls “the sanity we were born with,” is to embrace voluntary simplicity, lifelong learning, and compassionate service.

It is to take the heart of the Torah – the Golden Rule – and make it the guiding light of an awakening culture: a culture committed to an ethic of universal brother-sisterhood.

It is to recognize that to be is to interbe. That individual authenticity is a function of learning, self-discovery, creative evolution, and service to community.

The word “Buddha” means “awake.” James Joyce daily prayed that he “awaken from the nightmare of history.” Social democratic Buddhism – also called Engaged Buddhism – shows a path out of Plato’s cave.

Buddha’s “Eightfold Path” includes “right vocation.” Right vocation exhibits right thinking, right speaking, right intention, right action – for all of which, the guiding maxim is: “Do no harm.” Buddhism is therapeutic; and the world is much in need of healing.

Was it merely coincidence that the Spirit of The Sixties combined with the introduction of Buddhism to the West to plant the seeds of peace and love which still remain our best hope for a global civilization rooted in creative evolution?

Echoing the saints and sages of the ages, and their mythic tales of archetypes, Jean Houston forty years ago invited us to embrace the Aquarian challenge of “the possible human.” She invoked William Blake; and she embodied the pioneering spirit of Joseph Campbell, Buckminster Fuller, and Teilhard de Chardin.

Today, Richard Oxenberg invokes the spirit of John Lennon when he asks us to imagine “meanings beyond words to speak … where divinity graces humanity … agapic God of a thousand names and no adequate name … where the holy is healing and wholeness.”

Freedom from is freedom for. The enlightenment journey begins with disengagement from society’s Weapons of Mass Dysfunction, resounding through the land in what Howard Zinn called “declarations of independence.”

The enlightenment journey proceeds along what Carlos Castaneda calls “a path with heart.”

The enlightenment journey opens to the realization that the meaning of life is learning and service.

The two wings of Buddhism are wisdom and compassion. Wisdom and compassion are the twin roots of the tree of life of a culture that is civil, civilized, and awake.

Co-founder of The National Registry for Conscientious Objection, a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, a recipient of The Boston Baha’i Peace Award, and a Trustee of The Life Experience School and Peace Abbey Foundation, Dr. Stefan Schindler received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Boston College, worked one summer in a nature preserve, lived in a Zen temple for a year, did the pilot’s voice in a claymation video of St. Exupery’s The Little Prince, acted in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” and performed as a musical poet in Philadelphia, Boston, and New York City.  He also wrote The Peace Abbey Courage of Conscience Awards for Howard Zinn and John Lennon.  He is now semi-retired and living in Salem, Massachusetts. His books include The Tao of Socrates, America’s Indochina Holocaust, Discoursing with the Gods, and Space is Grace; his forthcoming book is Buddha’s Political Philosophy.

 

Buddhist Social Democracy, Part 1

by Stefan Schindler

   All things pass; life is brief; seek freedom; be kind.  Siddhartha Gautama, Gangamala Jataka

 “A Buddha arises for the welfare of the multitude.”

This is a common refrain in Buddhist sutras. On Buddha’s Eightfold Path to the common good, a spoke in the Dharmachakra – Siddhartha’s “Teaching Wheel” – is “right vocation.” Right vocation is ethical employment guided by the medical maxim, “Do no harm.”

Buddha’s politics aim for moral-egalitarian economics, informed by the main Buddhist issue: suffering and freedom from suffering (the first and third of Siddhartha’s Four Noble Truths).

A just society is peaceloving and peaceful. Violence opposes that.   Violence and poverty go together. But if poverty is the breeding ground of crime, so too is wealth. Indeed, the primary cause of poverty is wealth itself. Excess wealth among the few creates insecurity, fear, desperation and despair among the many. This is a crime against humanity.

Buddhist social democracy offers economic balance, making space for personal and communal creative evolution. Heart-centered pedagogy is its path, where all the institutions of society support lifelong educational opportunity. Giving peace a chance through voluntary simplicity and the joy of learning.

A psychiatrist for the criminally insane once noted that her clients’ crimes were mere drops of blood in the sea of pain inflicted by the captains of industry and their political, military and media puppets.

Locally and globally, economic apartheid is capitalism run amok; a collective Faustian bargain. The delicate balance of freedom and authority tilts toward fascism.

Benito Mussolini said: “Fascism ought rightly to be called Corporatism, since it embodies the fusion of state and corporate power.”

American Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis declared: “We can have democracy, or we can have vast wealth in the hands of a few. We cannot have both.” Howard Zinn observed: “While the jails are full of petty thieves, the grand thieves are running the country.”

Thirsting for distraction after long hours of competitive work, citizens become historically and politically illiterate; ignorant of their actual past, present and trajectory. Trapped by “chains of illusion,” in a high-tech version of Plato’s cave. Worldview warped by a blizzard of epistemological confetti. Unable to cope with the power elite’s weapons of mass dysfunction. This is important.

An informed citizenry is the prerequisite for a functioning democracy, gifted with the leisure, skills and desire to comprehend, critique and oppose plutocratic ruptures in domestic and global harmony. George Santayana elaborates: “Those who don’t learn from history are condemned to repeat it.”

The more a government serves capital profiteering instead of the welfare of the multitude, the more fractured a society becomes.

Martin Luther King offers a diagnosis: “Wealth, poverty, racism and war always go together; and we cannot solve one without solving the others.”

H. G. Wells warned: “History is now a race between education and catastrophe.” Accordingly, a just society does not empower a news media which critiques peacemakers in the name of patriotism.

Nagarjuna says to a sophist: “When you cast your faults onto me, you are like a man riding a horse who has forgotten where his horse is.”

Mark Twain says, with an exasperated sigh: “The lie is half-way around the world before truth has its boots on.”

Chogyam Trungpa – twentieth century Tibetan Buddhist in the West – shows Buddha’s teachings to be therapeutic: “Buddhism is all about returning to the sanity we were born with.”