Are People Crazy?

Frankly, I don’t know whether it’s worse now, or better, or the same as it’s always been. But the news of the past few days seems to indicate that people, many people in this once-envied republic called the United States of America, really are crazy. There is a madness afoot in this land that I find truly alarming. What set me thinking about this is a piece I just read about Amy Cooper, the now-infamous “Central Park Karen” who threatened to call police on a black man, and did call 911 to report that a Black man was “threatening her”—apparently because she was outraged that such a man would have the temerity to tell her to leash her dog. The man in question, also named Cooper, was not threatening her at all; he was birdwatching in an area called the Bramble that requires dogs to be leashed, and was telling her to comply, even offering her dog a treat. Ms Cooper, in turn, knew that calling the police on a “threatening” black man would result in his arrest and possibly his death. And yet that was the ploy she—a white woman calling police on a threatening Black man, with all that implies in this nation—chose to get back at him for correcting her lawless behavior. 

         Now we find out that this same Ms Cooper has a history that fits alarmingly well with this most recent caper. An acquaintance she claimed to have had an affair with has reported that several years ago, Ms Cooper became ‘obsessed’ with him, and to get back at him for refusing or dismissing her sentiments, sued him for $65,000, claiming several outrageous damages. Her suit claimed that Martin Priest, married and then divorced, had gotten another girlfriend pregnant, and came to her desperately seeking money, lots of it, promising that he wanted to get back with her after his problems were solved. But that prospect disappeared when, according to Cooper, Priest’s girlfriend emailed her and revealed that she and Priest were living together and planning to marry. Whereupon Cooper filed her retaliatory lawsuit. Priest, in a counter-suit, claimed the charges were “completely salacious” and “absolutely false.” According to the account in the May 26 New York Post, 

Cooper’s suit was later dismissed when neither side showed up for court conferences in January and March 2018, records show.

In an interview with the Post, Priest added that Amy Cooper’s lawsuit was a complete fabrication, that “I never had a romantic relationship with her” and that her allegations were “divorced from reality.” 

            It would seem, then, that this “Karen,” who had an encounter with a black man in Central Park and tried to get him arrested and worse, has a history of grievances to which she responds aggressively, to put it mildly. And whether we can believe her lawsuit or not, it certainly appears that she is behaving like far too many other demented citizens of our great republic. When faced with criticism, or rejection, she goes immediately on the offensive. Rather than respond to accusations with self-examination leading, perhaps, to self-corrective behavior (she could have just leashed her dog as the law required), she attacks in the most vile, aggressive way, putting all the blame on the innocent party and seeking to inflict serious damage. It is as if her image of herself is so fragile that she cannot bear the slightest intimation that she could be wrong or, god forbid, disrespected.

            This brings to mind that other vile response, the one by police officer Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis. Too many police officers in our time act as if their orders, particularly those aimed at minorities of color, must be complied with immediately and abjectly. Any resistance, any hint of non-compliance must be met with ultimate force. To do otherwise, to allow a person of perceived lower status to fail to kowtow to an officer’s absolute authority, is to invite that dreaded “disrespect” and the threat of rebellion. It simply cannot be allowed. And when such an attitude is even hinted at, severe physical force, up to and including murder, is required and justified to stamp it out. Violence not to control merely (Floyd was already handcuffed and on the ground), but to punish severely. What we can surmise is that, aside from racism, beneath this attitude lies fear. Fear that the entire order upon which these representatives of the law have staked their existence, will collapse if a single breach if allowed. In the case of George Floyd, the neck of not just Floyd, but of the entire black community, needed to be knelt upon without letup. To assert control even at the cost of his life.

            This is crazy thinking. Yet this seems to be the thinking—if one can call it that—of many of the citizens in our time. Many seem to be on hair-trigger alert, and in a nation that is so widely armed with the most lethal weapons, such hair-trigger sensitivity is dangerous indeed (there are reportedly groups of white supremacists infiltrated among the demonstrators in major cities actually seeking to foment a civil war). It is as if we’re all living in the time of dueling again. Of slapping one’s rival in the face with gloves. As if the much-heralded Christian ethic of ‘turning the other cheek’ has been fully suspended. As if the average person in America has such a fragile opinion of himself or herself that the slightest ruffle of feathers is enough to set off the bomb of self-protective warfare. And that self-protection takes the form of strutting and arrogance and the rapid resort to lethal means of retaliation. Nothing less will do. Nothing less will soothe the easily-bruised, perilously-exposed ego. 

            If this mental condition sounds familiar, it should. It’s very close to the diagnosis of the same mental condition exhibited by the president of the United States: Malignant Narcissism. This is the most extreme form of narcissistic personality disorder, said to be characterized by not only extreme narcissism (narcissism is named after the ancient Greek demi-god Narcissus, who fell in love with his own reflection in a pool), but also the added conditions of antisocial personality disorder, aggression and sadism, and paranoia. Thus, such a person’s interest would be directed exclusively at what affected him or her with no concern for the welfare of others (the basic narcissism), but also be excessively worried about harm coming from imagined others (paranoia), and prone to want to hurt them either before they could strike, or in retaliation for imagined harms. The retaliation would be characterized by extreme, excessive forms of aggression, with the intention of doing more damage than might be proportional. We see this and have seen it for years with Donald Trump. His response patterns have been attributed to advice he early in life received from his mentor, the notorious Joe McCarthy lawyer, Roy Cohn. Cohn apparently advised Trump not just to respond instantly to a perceived attack, but to counter-attack with twice as much venom. And never admit guilt or wrongdoing. Trump clearly took that advice to heart, not only as a ruthless real estate promoter and businessman, but also as a politician. He had very early on discovered that most politicians, though ruthless too, played by a set of rules which he could exploit by simply ignoring or flouting them. And he did. He insulted without limit. He sued for ridiculous reasons. And he distracted from problems by being outrageous. When he became president of the United States, he adhered to the pattern that had got him there: no ethical restraints, no compassion, hue always to the strategy of all out warfare against perceived enemies—whom he saw everywhere. By using Twitter to implement this strategy, he could be almost free from cooperation with or oversight by the press, which he made one of his prime enemies. In all this, Trump has set the pattern of behavior for our time. After all, if the man holding the highest office in the republic obeys no moral or ethical restraints, but is characterized by unconstrained egotism and self-interest, and is free to insult openly, bullying even those on his side, then the ethical field is open for every American to behave in the same way. Insult, attack, and take no prisoners.

            Of course, there are countless other factors that determine the moral and ethical and mental patterns of an age. It cannot be without consequence that everyone is by now aware of the perils looming from the dangerously rising temperatures known as global warming, human-made perils that threaten not only humans but vast areas of biological life on the planet. Nor can people be unaware (though they may deny it) of the exacerbation of this danger because of inaction and outright lying by both government and industry. The pattern of deceit and chicanery set by leaders like Trump is therefore reinforced in other primary domains. Everyone does it, is the idea; so why can’t I? And the ethic of capitalism itself, said to be the most natural, i.e. most fitting system of economics ever devised, reinforces this same notion: every man for himself, get all you can while you can, and screw the consequences. Exploit everyone, including the entire natural world which we believe God created for humans to exploit, and don’t omit whatever you can steal from government; it’s business, after all, and when it comes to business, ethics and human empathy just don’t apply. Neither does obscene wealth for the few and abject poverty for the many. It’s Nature’s way. 

            All this is crazy, of course, and ignorant and self-destructive and self-terminating in the extreme. But by keeping only short-term advantage in mind, by ignoring human suffering or paying it lip-service, by ignoring not only human connection but also the human connection with all other life forms, the foolishness can be sustained for a time, in some cases a long time. But eventually, the psychopath is caught. Eventually, the natural order demands its balance; its price. All that warring on nature leads to storms, pandemics, ocean acidification, and rising heat waves that increase in intensity. Videos surface and broadcast the injustice far and wide. Revulsion sets in. Widespread suffering and rebellion sets in. And suddenly, the entire game, not just the winning part but also the consequences, is revealed in all its fury. We may be in one of those revelatory moments now—a moment that is revealing the gross injustice in our health care, our life opportunities, our access to the most basic necessities. With more to come. So that generalized disgust, remorse, repentance, and reimagining and reforming might begin. Let us hope so. For we have had enough of the rule of the crazies. Maybe, just maybe, it’s time for some sanity.

Lawrence DiStasi

Murder by Cop

Once again, we in America are having to confront the ugly fact of racism in our cultural genes. This week, Floyd George was murdered when a Minneapolis police officer, Derek Chauvin, kept his knee on George’s neck for several minutes until he died. The whole grisly episode was caught on video, where George can be heard pleading that he “cannot breathe.” Bystanders can also be heard pleading for the officer to let up, and for three other officers to help George. None of that help transpired, until George, not responding, was taken by ambulance to a hospital where he was pronounced dead. 

The episode is one of the most horrific such videos to emerge in recent years, reminding us of the similar death-by-choking video of Eric Garner, who died in a chokehold administered by another out-of-control Staten Island cop. A day before, another incident—this time of a woman in Central Park calling police to rescue her from a “threatening” black man—adds to the trope of blacks in America threatened by law enforcement. In this case, fortunately, the black man, who had chastised the white woman to leash her dog (he was bird watching, not threatening her at all) was able to prevail because he, too, videotaped the whole thing. The woman later apologized, but her racist ploy resulted in her being fired from her job. And not long ago, on February 23, Ahmaud Arbery was murdered in Georgia by a former police officer and his son, who alleged that Arbery might have robbed someone in their neighborhood. Arbery was, in fact, going for a morning jog, and made the ‘mistake’ of jogging through a white neighborhood, for which he was shot and killed.

The recent murder in Minneapolis was met with understandable outrage, not just by the black community, which demonstrated and ran rampant last night, but by the white mayor, who fired not only the officer who committed the crime, but also his three companion officers, all of whom simply watched the murder without attempting to stop it. But firing these men does not come close to justice here. As Floyd George’s sister has insisted, these men, or at least the one who knelt on her brother’s neck, should be prosecuted for murder. For that’s what it was: cold-blooded murder. There can be no attempt to excuse the action by appealing to that old police standby, ‘I thought my life was in danger.’ No. Floyd George was already subdued, lying prone with his hands in handcuffs behind him, when the life was choked out of him. Whether or not he had earlier resisted arrest, or committed a crime (the suspected crime was allegedly forgery), he was helpless at the time when brutal, lethal force was applied and he was executed. 

Now, we as a nation have to ask why? How could this brutality have happened again? And again. And again. Execution of a black man before even an arrest or trial. Murder by cop. Are all the policemen in this country insane? Racist? Products of a warlike nation that has steadily produced gun-toting veterans of those wars in which anyone classified as ‘enemy’ is to be ruthlessly exterminated, only to return to apply for jobs as cops where they seem inclined to continue their warlike behavior, only this time grimly bringing the war home to exterminate domestic 'enemies,' i.e. African Americans? It seems. I mean a few isolated incidents might be explained as the doings of ‘rogue’ cops, letting things get out of hand. But this consistent murder of black men cannot be seen anymore as isolated, one-off accidents. The pattern is too repetitive, too consistent, too frequent, more the rule than the exception. And it is clear that there is a whole history behind it; a history of seeing free black men as threatening. A history that began in the horrors of slavery, when plantation owners put a price on the head of any black person that had the temerity to try to escape a life of servitude. And that original virus has come down to us after 400 years almost unaltered, though mutated into several perhaps more subtle forms, especially in the area of law enforcement. 

And of course, we cannot forget the not-so-subtle influence of our current racist-in-chief, President Trump. For there is no question that his dog-whistle hatred of everything his black predecessor did, and his praise of “good people” who parade their racism and Nazism in public, has set the tone for our era. That public presidential support for tearing down the accomplishments of the black man who had the temerity to win the White House, has had the effect of unleashing the worst impulses of the already fascist-inclined among us—not least in our police departments.

But this is all too moderate. Too distanced. For what we are faced with here is, pure and simple, a racist armed force in a nation that has never gotten over its primal racism, with the awful result that the greatest danger to every black person in America is law enforcement. And it is a cause for outrage, for bloody murder. And the effects, as in all such situations, are not limited to black people in black neighborhoods. The effects of this persistent racism, now magnified by the politics that feed off it and exploit it, affect every American, white or black or brown. If one of us is unsafe, then none of us are safe. The toxic brew of fear, of aggression, of resentment, of hatred, spills over onto us all. The terrible, terrorist history behind it spills onto us all. Including the murderous riots by whites targeting blacks that most people, including myself, were unware of until a recent post reminded us of the white rampages of 1919. Known as the Red Summer, the attacks started in Chicago, and spread through some three dozen cities and towns across the United States. The riots involved white terrorists attacking blacks (some blacks fought back), and resulted in shootings, beatings, lynchings, and home burnings. The worst death toll occurred in Elaine, Arkansas, where between 100 and 240 black people and five whites were slaughtered, while in Chicago, 38 people died, with 15 more in Washington, DC. The riots were believed to have been fomented by competition for jobs in an economy depressed after World War I, and by government-inspired fear of labor-rights agitation among returning-from-the-war African-Americans that the government feared was bolshevik inspired. Whatever the causes, the persistent racist impulse in the nation made it almost inevitable that the fear and anger would be directed at blacks. 

Now, sadly, we are facing the same old animosities that have never gone away. And it is frightening and disheartening, to say the least. What can it be like to have skin color that makes you the target of the very authority that is supposed to protect you? What kind of anger, fear and outrage must assail one who must not only react from a distance, but from within the danger zone—which, for an African American, is everywhere? We who are white can hardly imagine. But one thing is certain: watching a police officer choking the life from a black man in cold blood, on camera, is something few of us can ever forget. The memory of it, the full realization of what it signifies, is enough to make anyone ashamed not just of America itself, but of being tarred with the identity, "American."  

Lawrence DiStasi

Mood Indigo

I’m in one of those moods again (remember that song?). Which maybe has to do with being locked in and trapped coronavirus-wise. Or maybe it doesn’t, and has more to do with the time of year, or regular bio-rhythms, or astrology, or simply the rise and fall of psychic energy, I don’t know. But I’m in one. Where life seems stupid and futile and everything I do or read seems the same. Not worth the time it takes to think of it. All our attempts at saving the moment or the day or the year, at getting ourselves out of the messes we’re all in (and god knows we’re in a lot of them), don’t seem to matter in the least. What is the good? We’re all heading to the same place anyway, sooner or later, and nothing we can ever do can change that in the least. What is the good of even writing these words? Few will read them and even fewer will care or think about them and so it’s just another jumble of ‘words, words, words,’ as Hamlet I think it was, said in a similar mood. 

            And yet, here I am writing again, pressing rather clumsily on my keyboard and making more mistakes than usual since my stroke took out much of the functioning of my right side, and hoping not only that my right fingers will get more skilled each day, but that something useful or at least proportional or balanced or coherent will come out of this pressing of keys that I hope results in something. And what supports that hope? What can possibly convince me that even if I do manage to come up with something—that is, if my brain, now acclimating to the rhythmic motions of my fingers on a keyboard, can generate something out of the nothing I’m feeling, the nothing that I’m doing, the nothing that is—it will mean something? I don’t know, obviously. Which is one of the magical things about this whole endeavor. Writing, I mean. That sometimes, even when one has no idea what to write, something gets written. It’s the going-through-the-motions ploy. Just start to do it, go through the motions, fake it till you make it, and something will come. And though often it doesn’t, mirabile, it often enough does. Just look. I’ve already got a couple of paragraphs. True, I haven’t said a fucking thing yet, but there are two whole paragraphs of nothing in the completed column already. That means something, no?

            No. It means nothing. Nothing means nothing. And we are all, whether we like it or not or know it or not, meaning junkies. We demand that things mean something, especially ourselves (some would say that finding meaning is not only what we do, but what we are as conscious beings).  And even though I’m already weary of this piece and this line of thought, I keep going on with it in the hope that something, anything, will come out of it. Something meaningful. And I don’t know where it even comes from, this foolish optimism that lulls, that gulls us into hoping for meaning, into going on when we can’t go on. Pace, Beckett. 

            Alright. Enough of this au-ful digressing on this hopeless state. What was I going to say? I was going to say, I think, that some of us, many of us, are getting tired of this hiatus. Imposed from without by this little shit virus. Or rather from our fear that this little shit virus could end us. Could sneak up on us unannounced and unnoticed and slip into our cells and start hijacking them until we can’t breathe, and die. That’s really what we’re afraid of, why we’re all hunkering down in our little cells. Dying meaninglessly and ignominiously beneath an array of mechanical hospital equipment, attended to by people in masks and face helmets as if we had been captured by aliens, only to gasp our last away from anything meaningful or anyone meaningful in our lives the way people now do. Meaningless death via this little shit virus. 

            Trouble is, we’re leading meaningless lives precisely because of trying to escape from this meaningless death. All corona has done is dramatized for us how meaningless our lives are, even normally. And that’s something. Maybe even something meaningful (and look how it creeps in no matter what!) Even writing about meaninglessness provides an opportunity for the little shit to slip in meaning. It does. I haven’t even listed my meaningless activities yet, and already I’m back to finding meaning, or at least desperately seeking one: ‘Sure; that’s what we can do, that’s a direction to head in, a discourse about how even meaningless activity can throw a life vest to /for meaning. So don’t despair, little ones’; and we don’t. Anything, goes the old nostrum, can give us meaning; even meaninglessness. Ah yes. Never give up because at some point the meaningless itself turns into meaning, and we can, we will, we must salvage this piece of nothing and turn it into something. 

            So there it is. You see? The mystery. We start with nothing, and we end with something. This is the way the world goes, after all. Something comes from nothing. Even though the song says, ‘nothing comes from nothing, nothing ever could,’ in reality, nothing—the vacuum—actually produces something. Produces everything. That’s the current view, it seems. That from the great void, the great vacuum of space, with a little quantum fluctuation or quantum foam, came everything we now see, and touch, though it may be only with our instruments. Yes, the quantum void (is that even a term?) produces the vast multiplicity of everything there is in the universe. And it all started from nothing; or what appears to be nothing. From emptiness. Which means the Buddhists are right. All is empty, you and I are empty if we plumb deeply enough, and from that amazingly potent emptiness springs all of us and everything else we can see or think of or imagine.  

            So don’t despair. You see in this very piece how it works. From nothing came something. And it seems that it always and regularly does. Even from this shit, not-even-properly-alive coronavirus will eventually emerge something, is already emerging something. And we can look back on it and write about it and marvel once again at the great and impossible empty fecundity of which we are a part. Which we are. And which we will dissolve back into as soon as the shining, which we also are—like flowers, like the petals of flowers that are all descending now at the end of Spring, petals littering the ground and seeds futilely dropping onto concrete but no matter, they don’t seem to mind being wasted, they are living fecundity after all—will likewise drop seemingly wasted, seemingly useless. 

But are they? Are we? Perhaps not. 

Lawrence DiStasi

To Be a Being

Most of our day-to-day lives are spent doing, or thinking about what we should do next, or should’ve done before. And how we can improve our output, which is to say what we do—where do means ‘accomplish.’ But ever since Heidegger, we have been made aware, if dimly, that all this doing is not really what we are about. This doing, that is, leads us to ignore, or submerge, the real business of our lives, which is something else. How to get to that ‘something else,’ though, is really the central question, and not an easy one at that. Because we don’t quite know how to stop doing, and just “be,” or at least focus for a time on the being part. Whole disciplines like philosophy and psychology and even religions such as Zen have arisen that purport to instruct us in this art—the art of simply being, one might say. 

            It really should be simple. Just drop all the projects you have or might want to finish before you die, and say, ‘ok, from now on I’m going to just sit here and ‘be.’ But try it sometime. Such as now, when we all, or most of us, have time to spare in this coronavirus-enforced pause. Just take advantage of this delicious hiatus in traffic, in air pollution, in busyness, in having to be somewhere and having to engage with clients or bosses or schedules or friends, and just sit in your rocker or backyard recliner, and be. But what do you do? Take a run to get in shape. Take a long bike ride. Walk at a good pace to get that good cardio-vascular stuff going. Or do something relaxing, like a difficult jigsaw puzzle. Or just plain relax. As a wry saying in Zen goes, “don’t just do something, sit there.” But it’s not so easy. We are so habituated to doing something, anything with our spare time, anything to look as if we’re not just wasting time (oh god, don’t let me waste the precious time I have been given), that even when not pressed by an outside job or imposed task, we usually dream up projects or activities such as cleaning or reading or watching movies or mending or knitting or washing the car or digging in the garden so we can ‘make use of’ our time. It was Ben Franklin who famously urged us Americans to this manic mode, with sayings that reinforce it: ‘lost time is never found again’, and ‘never leave that till tomorrow which you can do today,’ or ‘dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that is the stuff life is made of.’ Then there are humble little sayings we all learned as kids: ‘a stitch in time saves nine’ or the Latin ‘tempus fugits (I always add the ‘s’ for fun).’ Which all make us constantly aware of the clock and its constant ticking the time of our lives away. Indeed, it could easily be said that we are, we modern humans, enslaved to the clock. What time is it? Will I have time to finish this task or job or take this vacation? Is it time to go? Hurry up please, it’s time.

            It never seems to end, this anxiety about time, about filling our time sufficiently with worthwhile things to do. Because as Franklin reminds us over and over, that is what life is about. Which is to say, justifying our lives with enough doing so that it does not turn out to have been wasted. As if there is some judgment coming at the end, some Nobodaddy waiting at the end of the line who is going to say, “And you. How did you spend your time? Did you do enough? What have you got to show for it? Let’s weigh all the time you had against how many things you actually did, and finished.” 

            Just saying it makes it seem silly. There is no measurement. There is no measurer. There is nothing, no one that we know of judging us for how much we’ve done, or accumulated. There is just living, being alive at this moment. There is, in short, just being. And we are all being, all the time, no matter what we happen to be doing, or think we’re doing. The trouble is, we are not aware of it. Of being. We fog it over with what Heidegger called “das Man.” This is Heidegger’s term for “inauthenticity.” It’s the perceived demand (perceived by mass man) to yield to habitual and technological constructs, such as clocks, digital or otherwise, and computers and cars and all the appurtenances of modern life like airplanes that allow us to save time and get to places that used to take days and weeks and which we can now reach in an instant. To save time. So that everything becomes a “thing,” including ourselves. In other words, in this frantic process, living beings like ourselves become things. So that our relationship with all life, with ourselves even, becomes ‘thingified.’ What this means is that we see everything as an object with regard only to its use to us. Us human things. Plants become not miracles of living matter, each one specifically tuned to do what it is meant to do—grow and attract specific insects and produce flowers that are unique to each one and beautiful both to us and to insects and incite our wonder and appreciation for our kinship with it—but rather exhibits for our pretty garden, or, when planted and pesticided and harvested in ever more efficient ways, rewards in the market for our busyness; money in our accounts. Trees, miracles of endurance and communication and in moderating weather and creating soil and homes for countless other beings both above and below ground, become simply things to be harvested and sawed down and up and sideways into useful commodities for a like market. Animals get subsumed under this same ‘use’ paradigm: cows and pigs and chickens as rapidly-growing weight for the scales, to be sliced up in record time into bite size, and machine-packaged and sold in plastic for anyone who can pay the price to be diverted from the fact that this ‘thing’ they consume without looking too closely is a miracle of evolution and organic organization, not to mention of feeling and emotion and intelligence. And of something else besides, something indefinable that we call ‘life.’ Being. Which we still cannot identify or put a label on. We just know, somewhere in the deepest core of ourselves, that this ‘thing’ is not a thing at all, but a being. And therein lies the rub. 

            What, then, is this ‘being?’ What are we when we are not doing constantly, to the detriment of our awareness, but just being? Again, it’s not easy to say. That may be because ‘saying,’ using language, is associated with, connected primarily with doing. We need words to do efficiently, especially when we’re using tools, or machines, or weapons. But when we’re simply being—and again, it is no easy thing to simply be—words tend to fail us. Words are what we use when we need to be precise, and precision usually demands separating things into their comprehensible components. In other words, to ‘grasp’ the things of our world, we need to be able to see their component parts. And that is what we do when we do things, when we use language to comprehend the way to do things that are useful. When we are just being, on the other hand, we simply, if we’re lucky, apprehend what there is, without thinking about it or describing it (we may do so afterwards in retrospect). We appreciate it, perhaps. Appreciate the fact of its ‘beingness.’

            A teacher of mine had a felicitous way of expressing this, using not the word ‘being’ but the word ‘experiencing.’ Now this word, in modern jargon and especially in advertising, has been cheapened like everything else that is used commercially. Experience this restaurant. Experience this movie or cereal or toilet paper. But Joko Beck had in mind something other, something far deeper. Here is her first sentence in a talk about this: 

            By experiencing, I mean that first moment when we receive life before the mind arises.

Receiving life before the mind arises. That sounds, to most of us, almost impossible. What is life before the mind arises? Is there life before the mind arises? I think so; and I would submit that it has to do with being. And it is both our universal condition, and the aim of our most diligent practice. It is, as Joko later puts it in this same talk, “the absolute: call it God, Buddha-nature, whatever you wish.” The problem is, life takes this initial experience and turns it into behavior. Into doing. We take our raw, wondrous perception, our being, and turn it into what we must do to survive and thrive in this world. Our behavior, our actions, our doing. And usually that doing is dominated by the tools we’ve developed or been given, and those in turn compel us to see things through their dividing-up-the-world lens. Including other beings. Including our very selves. And thus our own being remains, for most of us, hidden from ourselves (not to mention the precious being of others.) And our lives remain what Heidegger calls “inauthentic.” 

            Is there a solution to this dilemma? This occultation of our birthright? Not in so many words. It takes practice. And the gradual, over time, realization that in fact, there really is no gulf, there really is no dilemma. We are all always being nothing but being. But we “cover it over with our ignorance,” as Joko says. And the real task in life is to see through this ignorance, to become more and more aware of it and the why of it, and to come more and more to know that what we are, even when we are doing, is really just this. Being. Being with all other beings. All of them.  

Lawrence DiStasi