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.