Tag: William James

CHIMES OF FREEDOM

Posted on by kathiemm
The Freedom Bell which resides in the Washington Memorial Chapel at Valley Forge. his file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license. Author: Senojor1

by Stefan Schindler

William James, Mark Twain, I. F. Stone.  Emma Goldman, Helen Keller, Molly Ivins.  Jim Hightower, John Pilger, William Blum.  Lewis Lapham, Michael Parenti, Victor Wallis.  Vandana Shiva, Joan Baez, Naomi Klein.  Ami Goodman, Abby Martin, Daniel Berrigan.

David Talbot, James Douglass, Thich Nhat Hanh.  Oscar Romero, the Dalai Lama, Dan Ellsberg.  And, of course, Chris Hedges, Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn.  These are just a few of the torch-bearers of the spirit of Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King and John Lennon.

Peace is possible.  Progress has been made.  Meanwhile, the struggle continues.

A crisis can be ongoing and deepening for a very long time.  This has been the case with the USA for forty years at least.  1968 might well be seen as the pivot point.  The full and fatal swerve toward economic apartheid and the rollback of FDR’s New Deal began in earnest in 1981 with Reaganomics.  The hammer-blows against social enlightenment have kept the war machine in full throttle and kept too many Americans in thrall to sloganeering and sophistry.

The earth groans, bees disappear, and in 2020 the wasteland grows.

But danger is also opportunity.  Breakdown is often breakthrough.

Behind the news there is a global dance.  A collective invitation to give peace a chance.

What is true for the individual is true for the whole.  Fate is determined by the choices we make.  Let us use our freedom wisely.  What Kant said at the end of the 18th century is true now: “We live in an age of enlightenment; but we do not yet live in an enlightened age.”

Perhaps the essence of life really is learning and service.  Siddhartha Gautama, Meister Eckhart and Thomas Merton thought so.  I believe it too.

Keep the faith, my friend.  We may yet be on the verge of something great.  A turning of the civilizational wheel toward the wisdom of James and Twain and company.  You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.

Growing into The Spirit of The Sixties

Posted on by kathiemm

Stefan Schindler with John Lennon collage

by Stefan Schindler

In my early childhood – born just north of San Francisco, and fresh from two years in England – I spent four years in Texas, then one in Alabama, unconsciously absorbing from both states a culture of racism and American superiority.

Then the family moved to Japan, where I spent three years absorbing a new culture, and, subconsciously, an alternative worldview. It changed my life, and I shall be forever grateful. When the family moved from Japan to Pennsylvania, I was shocked to discover fellow students who had never been out of their home state. I was like a visitor from the moon.

My formal education continued to be mostly ignoration, but the year was 1960, just in time for me to grow into The Spirit of The Sixties. As I  watched The Beatles evolve into Peacemakers, coinciding with my college years, I began to realize just how brainwashed I had been.

My father, a bomber pilot in World War Two, was a career officer in the U.S. Air Force, rising through the ranks to become a Lieutenant Colonel. Hence our family’s many moves around the country and the world. Hence also my military upbringing.

When I entered Dickinson College in 1966, I joined ROTC (and its elite “Pershing Rifles” group). I quit after six weeks, having been ordered to do this and that my entire life, and now, in college, finally free from my father’s commanding influence, and joyfully participating more and more in the anti-establishment counter-culture revolution.

By my senior year at Dickinson, 1970, while President Nixon continued The Vietnam War, I was a member of S.D.S – Students for a Democratic Society – and with fellow peacemakers disrupting ROTC drill performances on the football field, and, more importantly, marching in peace demonstrations outside the gates of the Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, just a few blocks from Dickinson.

After graduate school, post-1975,  I embarked upon a self-education program, leading to my further political awakening, a new appreciation for Mark Twain and William James as members of The Anti-Imperialism League, and the writing of my book, America’s Indochina Holocaust: The History and Global Matrix of The Vietnam War.

Now, just about a year from 2020, I see The United States of Amnesia failing to learn the lessons of history, and increasingly becoming a high-tech version of Plato’s cave, governed by plutocracy, divided more and more by economic apartheid, and careening toward ecological apocalypse, nuclear war, and another Great Depression. John Lennon was right – “We are led by lunatics.”

Fortunately, the spirit of Emerson, James, and Twain lives on in the activism, writings and wisdom of people like H. G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, I. F. Stone, Martin Luther King, Noam Chomsky, Michael Parenti, John Pilger, John Prados, Dan Ellsberg, the Berrigan brothers, Molly Ivins, Howard Zinn, Bertrand Russell, Amy Goodman, Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer, Victor Wallis, Naomi Klein, Lewis Lapham, Thich Nhat Hann, Sulak Sivaraksa, the Dalai Lama, Vandana Shiva, and so many others.

Like Maya Angelou, I know “Why The Caged Bird Sings.” I know that the meaning of life is learning and service. And I give thanks for friends like Toni Snow and Lewis Randa, who help me keep the faith and keep on truckin’, as a Compassionate Peacemaker and global citizen, committed to Universal Brother-Sisterhood.

Note from Kathie MM: Please share with people on your email lists Stefan’s inspiring story of his journey to peace activism-and send us your own story for publication on engaging peace. Many families, many communities, include peace activists who go about the business of making the world a safer more just and human place. Share the stories. 

 

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 2

Posted on by kathiemm

For Enlightenment by Kathie Malley-Morrison

by Stefan Schindler

Liberation from self-imposed immaturity is liberation from social conditioning.  Liberation from social conditioning is escape from Plato’s cave.  Escape from Plato’s cave involves appreciation of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s tragic dictum that “man is born free, but is everywhere in chains” – what Eric Fromm calls “chains of illusion.”

To break the chains of illusion is to become what Albert Camus calls a “lucid rebel.”  A lucid rebel engages in Promethean protest against the vast ignorance that Buddha recognized as the primary cause of suffering.  Ignorance, Buddha said, manifests primarily as greed, hatred, craving, clinging, and delusion.

To overcome such ignorance is to embrace the point made by Karl Marx: “The demand to abandon illusions about our condition is a demand to abandon the conditions which require illusion.”

For example, the primary function of the U.S. military is make the world safe for the Fortune 500.  The primary function of U.S. education is to ignorate.  To awaken people to these nefarious facts, Martin Luther King declared: “Wealth, poverty, racism, and war – these four always go together.”

Hence the only way to move from an age of enlightenment to an enlightened age is to recognize that the four vices noted by King are inextricably entwined with pervasive political sophistry, a lapdog mainstream news media, and jingoistic pseudo-history in what Gore Vidal calls “The United States of Amnesia.”

Equally relevant here is Mark Twain’s observation: “It is easier to fool people than to convince them they are being fooled.”  Also worth noting is that Emerson, Twain, and William James were members of The Anti-Imperialism League.

The point is this: The U.S. will never be the country it ought to be – and will never be at peace, either at home or abroad – until it eliminates Presidential pardons, throws corporate and Presidential criminals in prison, conscientiously repents for America’s Indochina Holocaust (euphemistically called The Vietnam War), and dismantles the American empire (the largest and most globally devastating in world history).

It is therefore also necessary to transfer most of the Pentagon budget to an educational system in which schools and universities are gardens and palaces of self-actualization, artistic expression, authentic historical literacy, sophistry-detecting critical thinking skills, and cooperative creative evolution.