slightly less of a rant
'All joy in the world', says Shantideva in his Entry into the Conduct of a Hero Vowed to Enlightenment (a literal translation of the Sanskrit title Bodhisattvacharyavatara), ' comes from wishing happiness for others. All suffering from wanting pleasure for oneself.'
It doesn't really matter 'who started' what, the point is how to stop.
Not 'we have every right to', but 'what can we do to change the situation from the ground up?'
Let's assume that everyone is ultimately mistaken and that everyone is maybe a little right in the little they can see through their projection, beliefs, hopes and fears.
The point - as the Zen master said - is: "When will this fellow who plays with mud ever have done?"
Samsara - 'running round in circles' - is notoriously endless. It's like a child's game, endlessly creating sequels and variations, endlessly segueing from one to another... Till mother calls.
Then it's dropped.
Just like that.
Things that are sure:
* you will not make friends by killing your enemies and/or their children - what you will do is create enemies who have nothing to lose and everything to gain in killing you
* enemies defeated will always regroup to come again another day, often with smiling faces to hide their knives
* it's trust that creates trust, peace that creates peace, brotherly sharing that creates recognition
* there is no 'them'; there is only 'us'
So... the 'solution' (if solution there is) seems to be in sharing, embracing, trusting, educating, ordinary human kindness, all of which - it seems to me - are within easy reach of ordinary human intelligence.
It's not Gaza and Israel that is the problem: they are a symptom of the problem.
The problem is us.
I've heard it said (by people I love and trust, even) that we are hard-wired for violence, hard-wired for fear. I totally refuse this.
What we are, at base, is sheer wonder... pure awareness... That we have fouled this over the millennia with 'clever ideas' and theories about this, that and the next thing (fear and violence not the least of them), is known to the Buddhists as 'simultaneously arising ignorance', an ignorance simultaneous with and even endemic to awareness as long as it remains 'me-centred' and thus unable to realise its own, multi-faceted (in that it is the same thing - the same 'seed' - in each and every being - each 'centre of awareness') infinity.
'Solutions', then, are not in trying to beat 'the dog' into submission. They are in showing respect and care, in sharing and opening one's heart and hand and mind to what, till now, one has considered 'other'.
The world, we know and Alice repeats, is as we see it. In fact what we see is not 'the world' but only what we believe the world to be. We say 'seeing is believing', but, in actual fact, believing is the very nub of what we permit ourselves to see.
Ad, since we are capable of apprehending only one tiniest fraction of the infinity of what it is possible to know - a few octaves of sound, a few grades of colour and light - even before we call into question attention, interest, projection and bias - to claim we know anything about anything is hubris indeed...
Everything we know is wrong - tainted, distorted, polluted by our blithe assumptions that we are the 'owners' of the situations in which we find ourselves, that we are somehow in control. I'm prepared to bet you can't even recall what you were thinking as you started to read this letter, and certainly not the details...
Somewhere in here is cause for a little thought, no? - a little humility?
Because otherwise you going to have to decide for sure that one side or the other in this conflict is right. They cannot both be right (although they can definitely both be wrong!). The questions are bigger - FAR bigger - than the questions being asked here (or anywhere else, for that matter)
Be part of the solution, not the problem.
It doesn't really matter 'who started' what, the point is how to stop.
Not 'we have every right to', but 'what can we do to change the situation from the ground up?'
Let's assume that everyone is ultimately mistaken and that everyone is maybe a little right in the little they can see through their projection, beliefs, hopes and fears.
The point - as the Zen master said - is: "When will this fellow who plays with mud ever have done?"
Samsara - 'running round in circles' - is notoriously endless. It's like a child's game, endlessly creating sequels and variations, endlessly segueing from one to another... Till mother calls.
Then it's dropped.
Just like that.
Things that are sure:
* you will not make friends by killing your enemies and/or their children - what you will do is create enemies who have nothing to lose and everything to gain in killing you
* enemies defeated will always regroup to come again another day, often with smiling faces to hide their knives
* it's trust that creates trust, peace that creates peace, brotherly sharing that creates recognition
* there is no 'them'; there is only 'us'
So... the 'solution' (if solution there is) seems to be in sharing, embracing, trusting, educating, ordinary human kindness, all of which - it seems to me - are within easy reach of ordinary human intelligence.
It's not Gaza and Israel that is the problem: they are a symptom of the problem.
The problem is us.
I've heard it said (by people I love and trust, even) that we are hard-wired for violence, hard-wired for fear. I totally refuse this.
What we are, at base, is sheer wonder... pure awareness... That we have fouled this over the millennia with 'clever ideas' and theories about this, that and the next thing (fear and violence not the least of them), is known to the Buddhists as 'simultaneously arising ignorance', an ignorance simultaneous with and even endemic to awareness as long as it remains 'me-centred' and thus unable to realise its own, multi-faceted (in that it is the same thing - the same 'seed' - in each and every being - each 'centre of awareness') infinity.
'Solutions', then, are not in trying to beat 'the dog' into submission. They are in showing respect and care, in sharing and opening one's heart and hand and mind to what, till now, one has considered 'other'.
The world, we know and Alice repeats, is as we see it. In fact what we see is not 'the world' but only what we believe the world to be. We say 'seeing is believing', but, in actual fact, believing is the very nub of what we permit ourselves to see.
Ad, since we are capable of apprehending only one tiniest fraction of the infinity of what it is possible to know - a few octaves of sound, a few grades of colour and light - even before we call into question attention, interest, projection and bias - to claim we know anything about anything is hubris indeed...
Everything we know is wrong - tainted, distorted, polluted by our blithe assumptions that we are the 'owners' of the situations in which we find ourselves, that we are somehow in control. I'm prepared to bet you can't even recall what you were thinking as you started to read this letter, and certainly not the details...
Somewhere in here is cause for a little thought, no? - a little humility?
Because otherwise you going to have to decide for sure that one side or the other in this conflict is right. They cannot both be right (although they can definitely both be wrong!). The questions are bigger - FAR bigger - than the questions being asked here (or anywhere else, for that matter)
Be part of the solution, not the problem.
posted by cloudhand at 2:05 AM
