What Makes a Place Sacred?

 

After hearing a talk during my zoom Zen meeting recently—a talk which included accounts of pilgrimages that the speaker had taken to Buddhist and Hindu sites such as Mount Kailas in Tibet—I was intrigued by the obvious question: do certain places on our planet actually have a palpable, perceptible “spiritual” presence?  And if so, to what is the alleged “spiritual” feel of a place due: its site, its geology, its appearance, or the simple historical fact that humans have chosen it to be significant?

None of these questions is simple to answer definitively. But a great deal of work has been done over the years to try to answer them. It turns out that I have several books dealing with the so-called “spirit of place,” and so I consulted one in particular, James Swan’s anthology, The Power of Place: Sacred Ground in Natural & Human Environments, (Quest Books, 1991). And what I found on re-reading a few articles there was fascinating. In the introduction, Swan himself gives us some history about the concept of geomancy, an ancient practice first made notable by Pliny the Elder when he supposedly met some Persian magi able to divine the right actions for a specific place by studying the configuration of stones tossed on the ground. As to the term itself, its essential notion is that “some places have more power and presence than others” (1). As examples of such places, Swan cites Chartres Cathedral, Stonehenge, and Mount Fuji. He also mentions the one described by our speaker, Mount Kailas in Tibet, describing it as the “ultimate sacred mountain,” one identified as the cosmic axis of the universe, or axis mundi. Now what’s interesting about this latter concept is that many, if not most traditional, shamanic cultures have designated their own axis mundi—symbolizing the center of the world, where heaven or the sky connects with the earth. According to the New World Encyclopedia, the axis mundi symbol can be a mountain, a tree, a vine, a column of smoke or fire, or even something of human production—a staff, a tower, a ladder, a maypole, a cross, a pillar, a temple and so on. It can be feminine (an umbilical cord) or masculine (a phallus) or neutral (the omphalos or navel.) In Japan, it is Mount Fuji; in China the whole country, but especially Mount Kun Lun; the American Sioux said the Black Hills were the axis mundi; and for the ancient Greeks, both the oracle at Delphi and Mount Olympus were considered sites of the earth’s omphalos. 

So what does this mean? How many axis mundi(s) can our earth have? Is this all based on outdated magic and self-centered hallucination? Perhaps; but perhaps we should not be so quick to dismiss geomancy. In another article in Swan’s anthology, James Beal marshals evidence that, though ancient shamans did not know it, their sense that certain places were special may well have been due to their location at “dipoles,” which he describes as “nodes in the earth’s magnetic fields” (280). Apparently, the ability to “sense” magnetic fields is common among many species of plants, animals and birds. In pigeon brains, scientists have found tiny deposits of magnetite that seem to act as a kind of compass; and such magnetic sensors have been found in “nearly thirty species,” including humans. Beal goes on to say that 

deep within the earth the circuits of subterranean streams had formed a pattern which in turn generated changes in the earth’s local magnetic field, and are associated with improvements in positive electrostatic field strength and negative ion concentration….Shamans did not know these things…But they sensed them in the excited electro-chemical processes at work in their own nervous systems, which in turn triggered inspired firing of neurons and synapses in the circuits of their own brains…the place felt special and magical, spiritual…(280-81).

 

As a side note, Beal’s article asserts that both a positive electrostatic field, and negative ions are associated with positive emotional feelings in humans. In short, it could well be that the feeling of “spiritual” leading to the special-ness of many places had (and still has) an actual material basis. 

Elizabeth Rauscher in a subsequent article, “Working With Earth’s Electromagnetic Fields,” expands on this idea of human sensitivity to magnetic fields. Rauscher focuses mainly on the sensitivity of humans and other animals to magnetic fields set up by planetary activity, such as earthquakes and volcanoes. While human brain wave activity in the range of .01 to 10 Hertz is associated with relaxation and creativity, the onset of volcanism gave off a signal of 2.8 to 4.2 Hertz when measured. Rauscher then connects this to the electrical activity of the human heart:

I like to think of a 3.2 Hertz reading right before a quake or volcano as a little like a heart arrhythmia, following the Hopi idea of the “heart of Earth Mother” as being a viable model of reality (300).

In other words, Rauscher is suggesting, like Beal, that some humans are sensitive enough to detect electromagnetic signals from deep within the earth, especially concentrated around mountains—possibly explaining the long human predilection for “sacred” mountains. 

Whatever we make of this “scientific” information about what may have influenced human decisions about special or sacred places, it does provide some basis for what might otherwise seem like rank superstition. Which, given the plethora of sacred or special places that appear in almost every traditional culture, with the axis mundi attributed to so many disparate places over the globe, I must confess, activates my innate skepticism. After all, how many world navels could there be? And so, for this writer, the power of place tends to make more sense if viewed as a product of human choice— ‘this place is sacred, so we will name it the center of the earth and surround it with ritual to reinforce its sacredness.’ This is basically the thesis of Thomas Bender in “Making Places Sacred.” Bender begins with several italicized principles:

What is significant about sacred places turns out not to be the places themselves. Their power lies within their role in marshalling our inner resources and binding us to our beliefs (323).

In holding a place sacred, we grant power to a place and acknowledge that power of the place (324).

The inviolability of sacred places is essential (324).

 

In short, whether or not we “feel” something special when we enter Chartres Cathedral or when we circumambulate Mount Kailas may depend more on how many centuries humans have venerated and conducted rituals at such places than on the places themselves. This is not to say that the choosing of such places originally had no basis in material fact. Shamans may well have been people especially attuned to magnetic or other forces present there. But the main reason we now “feel” the “spirit of a place” may be due more to tradition and the culture that held it sacred, than any inherent spirituality. And, we should add, to the long practice of keeping it inviolable. 

This last consideration may be something we should all take into account. For with modern mass tourism—now said to be the largest industry in the world—it is becoming almost impossible to maintain this inviolability. As Bender notes early in his essay, given that “all places live through the reverence with which we hold them,” the fact that masses of  tourists flash their bulbs and gawk without reverence, without giving, with, rather, the desire to acquire something for themselves, constitutes the “root destruction of tourism” so prevalent in our time. In short, nothing sacred—not Delphi, not Yosemite, not Mount Fuji—may be able to withstand the assault of mass tourism which we modern humans have unleashed. Not to mention the weakening of our ability to sense the grand symphony of magnetic resonance to which we were once adapted and attuned, and which may be responsible for more of our well-being than we had thought heretofore. In sum, whether we believe it or not, the places which our forebears have designated as “sacred” may require our best abilities (if we value our sanity, and the genetic endowments not always obvious to our acquisitive cameras) to keep them more or less inviolate. For what would our world be if, as it is so fast becoming (think the ubiquity of shopping malls, fast food outlets), every aspect of our world had the same disneyfied, dismal look as every other; the entire world a street filled with cheesy Las Vegas replicas. That would be a loss, indeed. 

Lawrence  DiStasi

 

The Matter of Matter

We are all, if we’re honest, still mystified by death and what it means. By what the difference is, specifically, between a body that is alive and one that is dead. Indeed, now we have different categories of dead: brain dead, which means that the body may be still alive and functioning, but the brain functions are gone so there’s no voluntary movement; and paralysis or locked-in syndrome, which is the opposite: the body cannot move, but the brain still functions and is conscious. Both of these are variants of the “death” we usually mean: in one case the body, in the other the brain, no longer functions. What makes this even more confusing is that we seem to be told by physics that even when the body is “dead,” the matter that composes it, the meat and bones, still have that irreducible sign of life, movement—the electrons making up these corporeal elements presumably still spin and travel in orbits around some nucleus, and cells are presumably still capable of change. So the matter itself isn’t “dead,” but the organization of the particular matter called a human no longer functions as an independent whole. 

Of course, in the old days, the way this situation would be described to nearly everyone’s satisfaction, was to say that the “soul” had left the body. I’m not sure if this same image was used to describe what happens to an animal, say, when it is slaughtered. But the situation, outwardly at least, seems the same. Once alive, and capable of functioning as a whole, integrated organism, a cow when slaughtered becomes only meat, with different cuts serving as different dishes for humans. And then serving as nutrients for those same humans, whose gut breaks down the cow flesh and transforms it into energy and thereupon part of its own matter—its cells, its muscles, its bones and tendons, its hair. 

What this “soul” actually was, was never quite clear, but it was said to be both immaterial and immortal. That is, it did not die with the body. It survived, and could live in eternal bliss in someplace called heaven, or in eternal torment in someplace called hell. The important thing here, though, is that it was seen as the entity that animated flesh, matter (‘soul’ is anima in Latin, hence our word “animate”). And when it departed, that once-animated flesh or matter became “dead,” inanimate, lifeless, meat merely. To be sure, this satisfied the inquiring mind, because when one sees someone pass from being living to being dead, it certainly seems as if some animating spirit has departed. The animation so obvious when living becomes instantaneously changed, as if something vital has gone, fled. And now that we have mostly gone beyond concepts like the immortal soul, we are at a loss—I am, at least—to understand what happens when life changes to death before our eyes. The change is excruciatingly obvious, and anyone can recognize it instantly. But we seem to have no tangible concepts to explain it. 

Except this, perhaps. We, like all other matter and energy in the Universe, are governed by the Law of the Conservation of Energy. No energy or matter (they are said to be interchangeable) is ever lost; the sum total of matter/energy in the Universe remains constant. Therefore, when you die, the matter and energy that you are is simply transformed, or redistributed. As physicist Aaron Freeman has put it, in death According to the law of the conservation of energy, not a bit of you is gone; you’re just less orderly (cited from www.futurism.com) To expand on this, Jaime Trosper writes: 

In death, the collection of atoms of which you are composed (a universe within the universe) are repurposed. Those atoms and that energy, which originated during the Big Bang, will always be around. Therefore, your “light,” that is, the essence of your energy — not to be confused with your actual consciousness — will continue to echo throughout space until the end of time (futurism.com, “The Physics of Death”).

 

There we are, then. Physics has our answer. We are immortal, after all. Nothing of us is ever lost. All that happens when we die is that our atoms and our energy are transformed, “repurposed” to be used elsewhere. 

Of course, physics does concede that you are “less orderly.” And for me, there’s the rub. What is meant by “you?” And what is meant by “less orderly?” The answer science seems to provide us is that “orderly” here has to do with organization. When matter and energy are “organized” in certain specific ways, we have life. When that organization is interrupted or lost, we have death. Here is how Ralph Lewis, MD put it in a recent article:

Monism maintains that mind is an emergent property of matter and energy when matter is organized in particular kinds of complex ways. Moreover, matter achieves this immense complexity through spontaneous unguided processes of self-organization, further sculpted in biological organisms by powerful evolutionary forces. (Ralph Lewis, Psychology Today, July 18, 2019, read online). 

He goes on to say that when the brain loses “its exquisitely synchronized organization,” consciousness is lost (brain death, presumably), “and the unique organization of matter that constituted that individual's personhood, self or essence ceases to exist.” So Lewis maintains, with most of the scientific establishment, that “organization of matter” is precisely the essence of consciousness and also of life itself. That organization is what distinguishes living matter from dead matter. 

This is nice. But does it really explain things? Not quite, for me at least. That’s because other things display organization as well—such as  computers, or workmen building a house. We don’t call a computer an organism, nor do we consider carpenters building a house an organism either. They are directed, both of them, from outside—the computer by a program written by a human programmer, and the carpenters by a blueprint designed by an architect. So the organization comes from the outside; it is what organizes random elements into systems, from the outside. But there are systems that are self-organizing, and this seems to be the key. And we should note here that the words ‘organism’ and ‘organize’ are intimately related: organize means “to form into a whole with mutually connected and dependent parts,” while organism means “an organized or organic system.” Therefore, we can deduce that an organism is an organized system. 

To return to self-organizing systems, we should note first that there are many levels of these, from whole galaxies (which self-organize via physical properties alone) to cellular structures (which organize via physical properties plusgenetic ones that have developed over time by means of the evolution of properties that benefit the organism). It is the latter that we are interested in here. So we begin with a  definition of self-organization:

Self-organization is a process in which pattern at the global level of a system emerges solely from numerous interactions among the lower-level components of the system. Moreover, the rules specifying interactions among the system’s components are executed using only local information, without reference to the global pattern. In short, the pattern is an emergent property of the system, rather than a property imposed on the system by an external ordering influence (from www.assets.press.princeton.edu ).

 

The important point here is that self-organization emerges on its own, and often unexpectedly, without outside direction. And it is understood to emerge “using only local information.” A fish swimming in a school, for example, uses only itself and the position of its nearest neighbor as guidance; it does not have information about the overall pattern (the whole school) to which it contributes. And since it is a living organism, it probably is also directed by genetic information about where to go and how to swim in coordination with its nearest fellows. But there is no outside leader fish directing the formation of the school. It apparently self-organizes.

Most scientists now believe that all living organisms are not only exquisitely organized, but that they, and life itself, are self-organizing systems. That is to say, life emerges, according to this view, not via direction from some outside deity, nor by means of a vague entity called a “soul,” but via self-organizing processes that organize cells and organs and whole parts into, ultimately, all the various living organisms, including the human animal. Genetics, to be sure, plays a key part in this self-organization, but not outside controlling entities. Self-organization is the scientific key to understanding many systems, but especially those we call living organisms. 

That brings us back to the dead as opposed to the living. We recognize a dead system, and especially a dead human, instantly and intuitively. Whether we can articulate how we know this is another matter. But with the information we now have, it is likely a matter of organization. We recognize disorder, death, when we see it. Instantly. That we are natural pattern seekers must help. Shakespeare has Othello say in Act 3, Sc 3, “Chaos is come again.” The whole quote indicates that his no longer loving Desdemona is a sign to Othello that ‘Chaos is come again.’ Meaning that his whole world, once orderly and organized and making sense, will no longer when and if his love is gone. Historically, mythically, primal chaos is the image of the world before creation. Now, though, most of us no longer image the world of Chaos as existence before God brought order to it. We image it as the world without order, without organization, without self-organization. What would this be like? I can think of images I’ve seen, electron-microscope images, of plastic. Plastic displays none of  the order and organization of organic matter; the fibers are chaotic, as in these images: 

 

 

Compared to the electron microscope image of any organic structure, or even the orderly  structure of a crystal, this chaotic structure of lifeless matter gives us the idea of non-organization very well. 

Which is to say that Nature somehow self-organizes. And we recognize this self-organization intuitively in living matter (i.e. we don’t need an electron microscope). And we also recognize the absence of organization as the absence of life. What seems to depart, therefore, in death, is organization, pattern. Organized energy, perhaps. And we would surely prefer it if there were something more tangible to hang onto, something we could more easily identify, and identify with. But perhaps that is all we’re going to get, now that the soul no longer seems a viable entity. 

As a writer, I have to admit that I would much prefer thinking of a soul with little wings, than a concept such as “organization,” even “self-organization”—even self-organization that seems more than a little miraculous. Because, after all, how do we imagine a “self” that organizes itself before there is even a self? At least with a soul, we have something to begin with. But that comforting, initiating image, that comforting story, appears not to matter to matter at all. Which seems, according to our best science, to just go about self-organizing from the very beginning—whatever that turns out to be.  

 

Lawrence DiStasi 

 

 

It's Strictly Business

 

The title of this piece is probably known to most Americans, since it comes from that classic of all classic films, The Godfather. And actually, there are several iterations of the line in the film, whose characters repeatedly insist that “It’s not personal, it’s strictly business.” The “It” of course, refers to murder—which is always said to be done not for personal reasons, but only for business reasons. This theme may be one of the reasons The Godfather was and is so popular: it encapsulates, in vivid form, the dominant American paradigm—the primacy of business over all. “The business of America is business,” said Calvin Coolidge in 1925. And that paradigm has never varied. In the United States, equality—of opportunity, of access, of legal rights—may be trumpeted more loudly and get the most press, but the real ethic that defines everything is business. Business in its rawest, and often most deadly form. 

My thoughts have  turned in this direction because of an incident that occurred a couple of weeks ago, and was then brought home forcefully two days ago. The initial event took place when my remote to operate my Insignia TV suddenly stopped working. I immediately figured that it was a problem with the batteries (though I’ve had the TV for less than a year, so I was a little dubious that they could wear out so soon). The problem was that I couldn’t see where the batteries were hidden: there was no obvious cover to lift off, though there was a kind of latch. But when I tried to manipulate that latch, nothing happened, and, moreover, I could not see an opening or edge to lift. So, next day I went to Google, and keyed in ‘problem with remote for Insignia TV.’ I figured that the manufacturer’s website would come up and afford me some help, or at least a look at the manual (which I’d lost). But the very first entry Google presented was this: https://www.justanswer.com/insignia-tv/troubleshooting. Not looking closely, I figured this was connected to Insignia, so I clicked on it, and got justanswer’s website, which led me to fill in some personal information (I should have stopped there, but was eager for a solution), and then offered me instant help via a chat with one of their “experts”—for one dollar. That seemed reasonable enough, and I agreed to have $1 taken from my PayPal account. They also offered me continuing help for $46. a month, but I declined that. Then the guy they gave me on chat simply wrote, ‘remove the batteries and replace them.’ But of course, that didn’t solve my problem at all; I couldn’t find the removable cover to access the damn batteries. I kept trying to convey this  to the “expert” but he was impervious to my pleas, finally offering me the phone number for Insignia’s tech help. That was more like it, so I signed off justanswer and called Insignia. Within minutes, a very helpful woman talked me through the removal of the cover (it’s the whole back of the remote, the openings being very smoothly hidden) and I found the batteries, with a now-simple solution. 

So my problem was solved. But two days ago, a week or so after my actual problem, I got an email from PayPal, saying that my account had paid the $1, which was fine, and that $46.00 was being deducted monthly from my bank account!! WTF?? I had expressly indicated that I did NOT want the monthly service. But this scam operation, Justanswer, had somehow slipped the monthly service into active mode, and got me on their monthly service plan. Bastards. I realized that there was no use trying to argue with these swine, and that I needed to get in touch with my bank to stop payment (this after making sure no charges had been paid yet). So I called the bank, and after objecting when they said it would now cost me $31. just for a stop-payment order (I explained loudly that if they charged me, a long-time customer, for that service, I would cancel all my accounts. They quickly found a way to do it free of charge), I got them to issue the stop order to prevent Justanswer or PayPal from billing me through my bank. Then I called PayPal (can’t reach these guys either, so I started a chat), and after much manipulating, found a page to cancel the justanswer order. PayPal subsequently sent me emails to say that they had found in my favor and would reimburse me for any charges (there weren’t any.) I then rested; but after a little reflection, I decided to go back to PayPal and transfer the small amount I had out of there and to my bank, figuring there was no sense leaving anything for the bandits at justanswer to try to steal. I have since received numerous emails from both PayPal and justanswer apologizing profusely for any inconvenience, and wanting me to rate their service! My response has been a repeated request for them to go fornicate themselves.

Now, what I am still left with is my discontent, no, my outrage, at the casual way Google routinely enables this larceny. Because it was Google, in the first place, that made most prominent the Justanswer solution to my problem. Placing this option first led me to believe that I was being sent to the manufacturer, or its agent, to solve my remote problem (and by the way, I have since used the Duckduckgo search engine to ask my remote question, and the first response they offer is a link to Insignia; so it’s by no means necessary to place ads first). This means that Google, because these Justanswer fools pay them for advertising, gives their scam prominence and pride of place such that the unwitting like me tend to go there and get bilked. 

I have posted angrily about this on Facebook, and they, too, are complicit. Because what Facebook did was turn my angry rant into an opportunity to dominate my post with a huge visual of a Justanswer mechanic working on a car. So my complaint is turned into favorable publicity for the very scam I was complaining about! Both these giants—Google and Facebook—are thus in the business of serving not you and me, but their ruthless advertisers (and using you and me as fresh meat for these vultures). What’s more, several friends who saw my post have patiently explained to me that, usually, the first option that Google posts in response to a request for information is—you guessed it—an advertisement or two from one of their paying customers. 

        Now rather than this explanation mollifying me, it got me even more pissed. What is happening is that those who “know” how the internet works are cautioning me to be careful, to ignore the first answers from Google, because they’re usually ads. But this is not just an explanation; this is rationalizing what Google does—It’s just business, after all. I say, bullshit! This is larceny. It’s a way of taking advantage of those who don’t look too carefully. It is saying, “this is how America works.” It is implying that since the system works this way, the burden is on the consumer to be ready, to be wary. Caveat emptor—buyer beware: there are always sharks in the waters, and you have to assume that this American-business axiom means that the buyer is solely and exclusively responsible for the condition or quality of what he buys, and that the company is not.

But what I want to know is: where is the outrage? Where is the demand for regulation? Have Americans been so brainwashed that they readily accept that fact that they will always be fleeced if they don’t have their antennae raised to protect against crooks? That business is essentially a form of larceny? That one must always assume that every business is always looking for the opportunity to make a killing? And that, in fact, the ethic that pervades The Godfather, and organized crime, is not some foreign outlier, but really and truly the dominant ethic of America, the natural way, the homegrown and time-tested way of doing business? And that the guns and the enforcers we see in The Godfather are only metaphors for normal business practices? That Coppola’s masterpiece is really not about organized crime as perfected by Italian immigrants at all, but about the real America—the America of ruthless, anything goes, cutthroat capitalism. 

It’s actually what my father, himself an Italian immigrant, used to say regularly: “The only thing that counts in this country is the almighty dollar.” No one cares about quality (he was especially concerned about this because, as an expert hairdresser, he saw rivals, who turned out inferior work, thriving due to their lower standards and prices), but only about how much they can put over on a gullible public to make the most money. The cheapest, shoddiest products are the ones that sell, and make the most profit. 

And I am beginning to believe that he was pretty much right. That Google, and the internet itself, both of which started with high ideals to extend communication and information more widely than ever before, for free, have become mere money-making machines, perfectly adapted to that still-reigning American ethic that absolves every crime: It’s strictly business. 

 

Lawrence DiStasi

Fascism For Real, II

 

Just before the 2020 election, I wrote in a blog that the stage was being set for a real outbreak of fascism in these United States. This was prior to the January 6 assault on the Capitol, i.e., the Trumpers’ attempt to disrupt the normal (Constitutional) congressional certification of the election results—i.e. that Joe Biden had won a convincing victory over Donald Trump. Now, that assault has developed and led to a further outrage against democratic rule. The Republican Party has just voted to remove Congresswoman Liz Cheney from her post as chair of the House GOP Conference, where she has served since 2019. Cheney, of course, is the daughter of former Vice-President Dick Cheney—one of my least-favorite government officials of all time. His daughter, a representative from Wyoming’s at-large district since 2017, is not all that different, it seems, from her father. But she has proven, since the advent of Trump to the presidency, that she is, in part at least, a conservative of the kind we used to see more of in Washington: a conservative with a kind of minimal conscience and respect for the Constitution. 

Anyone who has looked at Liz Cheney’s career knows that she is by no means liberal or even moderate in her conservatism. From her earliest years as a government operative in the State Department, she has focused on foreign policy in the most hawkish fashion, advocating regime change in Iran, and founding with William Kristol a nonprofit organization called “Keep America Safe,” and partnering with the likes of the nefarious Elliott Abrams, and Richard Armitage of Iran-Contra fame. Some of her initiatives have been severely criticized for plotting covert actions against both Syria and Iran. As a card-carrying neocon, and a western free-land zealot advocating greater freedom for ranchers, she has fomented movements against environmental groups like the Sierra Club and the NRDC, up to and including asking the Justice Department to investigate such groups’ supposed support by China. So for someone like this writer, there is very little reason to like or respect Liz Cheney. 

But when it comes to Donald Trump’s attempt to invalidate the 2020 election, to promote the fiction that the election was illegal due to massive fraud, and thereby needed to be overturned, she has been a rock of integrity. The turning point for her seems to have been the assault on the Capitol when the U.S. Congress was attempting to fulfill its constitutional duty. After that devastating and wholly illegal assault, Cheney went public in blaming Trump, without mincing words:

The President of the United States summoned this mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this attack. Everything that followed was his doing. None of this would have happened without the President. The President could have immediately and forcefully intervened to stop the violence. He did not. There has never been a greater betrayal by a President of the United States of his office and his oath to the Constitution (emphasis added). 

Powerful words. And Cheney followed that statement with a vote in favor of Trump’s impeachment, one of only ten House Republicans to do so. In response, the Trump Freedom Caucus of the Republican Conference, led by that rabid attack dog Jim Jordan, attempted to censure her, and remove her from her leadership position in February of 2021. It didn’t work. Cheney survived that attempt when many Republicans, still aghast at what had actually happened at the Capitol, voted to keep her as a leader.  

But more recently, the agitation and calculation by the House Republican leadership that they could not regain the majority without Trump and his die-hard supporters, and Cheney’s repeated statements condemning Trump’s “Big Lie,” have led to yet another attempt to drum Cheney out of her leadership position. Led by Republican House leader Kevin McCarthy (who originally agreed with Cheney and others about Trump’s role in fomenting the Capitol invasion, and still, even after the vote, claimed that Republicans do NOT dispute the election and Biden’s presidency), House republicans have coalesced around support for Trump and his Big Lie that he is the rightful President, and censured Cheney on May 12, 2021, ousting her from her leadership position. Rather than use a recorded vote—which would put Republicans who voted against Cheney on record—the Republican leadership employed a voice vote, so that individual votes would go unrecorded. Covering their cowardly asses as usual. 

The fire between Cheney and Trump, and with him the craven Republican leadership, has not gone unrecorded, however. Cheney’s statement upon her removal continued her defiant stance: 

“I will do everything I can to ensure that the former president never again gets anywhere near the Oval Office,” Cheney said. “We have seen the danger that he continues to provoke with his language. We have seen his lack of commitment and dedication to the Constitution and I think it's very important that we make sure whomever we elect is somebody who will be faithful to the Constitution.” (rawstory.com.) 

 

Like most of what Cheney has said, these words seem commonsensical and appropriate, even for a rock-ribbed conservative and neocon. Trump, on the other hand, relished his certain victory over someone who, heresy of all heresies, wanted the truth—of his clear election defeat, of his culpability in the attack on the Capitol—to be acknowledged. He released this statement, full of his usual vituperative comments about an opponent, just before the vote:

“The Republicans in the House of Representatives have a great opportunity today to rid themselves of a poor leader, a major Democrat talking point, a warmonger, and a person with absolutely no personality or heart.”

 

Vintage Trump. And now the Republican Party, or most of it, has not only confirmed its fealty to this fraud of an ex-President and his Big Lie about the 2020 election, but has cemented it by deposing one of the few politicians on their side to call it out for what it is: the biggest lie ever perpetrated about an election in American history. 

This, folks, is no small matter. One of the two major political parties in the United States has now fully committed itself to a falsehood that is obvious to nearly everyone. The Big Lie. The one that Hitler’s propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels is said to have described as follows:

If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it…It becomes vitally important for  the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State. 

 

That, indeed, seems to be the current Republican position. Someone like Liz Cheney, in a leadership position, who has the temerity to not only tell the truth but keep telling it, is an enemy who must be judged unfit to hold that position in the Republican Party. The truth, in this case, is poison because it conflicts, publicly, with the constantly reiterated “alternative truth” of the big leader, Donald Trump. Trump, that is, is specifically following what the website Meidas Touch calls “the rules of the demagogue.” Such rules follow the time-tested method of “manipulating” the “weak-minded” masses by 1) establishing a common enemy, 2) telling simple stories “with no regard for the truth,” 3) attacking democratic institutions and the media, and 4) cultivating a cult of personality. We have seen all of them in Trump’s four years of behavior. But now, the Republican Party has gone beyond these simple Hitlerian rules. Now we have a major American political party—one that, irony of ironies, began as a radical party combating slavery—so fearful of opposing its putative leader, that it must silence and excommunicate Cheney for her unforgivable ‘sin’: telling the truth. Calling out the big man’s Big Lie. 

This strikes me as no less than astonishing. Have these people no shame? No sense of honor, or even simple logic? Do they not see—does Kevin McCarthy not see that censuring and removing Cheney for contesting Trump’s lie in one breath, and then asserting that he and Republicans accept the 2020 election in the next breath—does not make elementary sense? Does he not see what even a 4^th grader could see: that his two positions conflict directly with each other? Apparently not. Evidently, the House minority leader now thinks it’s perfectly acceptable to assert one “truth” for breakfast and assert the polar opposite “truth” for lunch. Which means that “truth” for Republicans now means whatever seems most expedient at the time. 

And that, friends, is the beginning of fascism. Authoritarian rule. Dictatorship. For that is what dictatorship essentially is: ‘Truth is what I say it is. Don’t give me your bullshit need for evidence. For proven facts. For the integrity of the process of arriving at your facts. Truth is what we say it is.’ And anyone who disputes that what we say is truth is persona non grata. A heretic. Excommunicated. And, if need be, burned at the stake. 

Nor has all this proceeded without internal dissent—precisely what leader McCarthy has said he was ‘only’ trying to stifle. Organized by Miles Taylor, formerly with the Trump Department of Homeland Security, a group of over 100 current and former Republican officials and office-holders is threatening to form a new political party if the current Republican Party does not change its pro-Trump-at-all-costs stance. Apparently these officials—including former PA governor Tom Ridge, and former NJ governor Christine Todd Whitman—have agreed that the cashiering of Liz Cheney is the last straw. The preamble to the statement released by Taylor briefly outlines their grievances:

“When in our democratic republic, forces of conspiracy, division, and despotism arise, it is the patriotic duty of citizens to act collectively in defense of liberty and justice…”  (NY Times, May 11)

 

Taylor himself added: “I’m still a Republican, but I’m hanging on by the skin of my teeth because of how quickly the party has divorced itself from truth and reason…” 

That pretty much sums up the problem. 

The question now becomes how far this accelerating drift toward fascism will go. Are Republicans so intimidated by this demagogue, so fearful of losing his idiot supporters, that they are willing to turn their backs on dignity, truth, integrity, liberty and justice to win another election? With the move to sacrifice Liz Cheney, who has been called Republican “royalty,” it appears that they are (not to mention their willingness to deprive millions of their right to vote). And though we may find it hard to believe that men and women who have sworn a sacred oath to uphold and defend the constitution could actually make such decisions, perhaps we should not be so naive. This nation has always harbored a vicious undercurrent of hatred towards its outsiders, its poor, its people of color, its aboriginal inhabitants, and has never been particularly shy about expressing and acting upon those hatreds—so long as they could be hidden beneath some legalism, some rational pretext. Now, however, with the arrival of Trump and his moronic minions, the need for any pretext has all but withered away. Now, it seems quite acceptable to many lawmakers for legions of overt racists and white supremacists to storm the very temple of democracy in a violent attempt to make the Big Lie a reality (GOP Representative from Georgia Andrew Clyde recently called the riot “a normal tourist visit”). Fortunately, Trump’s legions were thwarted this time. But with the blessing of one of the two major parties in the United States, they may not fail the next time. All right-thinking Americans should work and pray that the next time does not, can not happen here. For if it does, none of us can safely predict whether a nation “so conceived and so dedicated,” and now, so assaulted by the forces of hatred, cynicism and ignorance, can any longer “endure.” 

 

Lawrence DiStasi

 

Idiot Culture

 

It happened to me Tuesday. I had just taken part in a tribute to poet Diane diPrima, and it had gone beautifully, beyond what we had hoped for. And I got a message about her son Rudi spearheading a petition to get a park named after diPrima, which I agreed to sign, and then re-post on Facebook so other people could sign too. I did that, commenting that we had just done this lovely zoom tribute to Diane diPrima. Then this morning, I opened Facebook on my stupid phone (which is what I call my smartphone), and saw my post. And what it said was: 

“We just did this lovely tribute to diorama.” 

What-t-t? And I realized: I had been sabotaged once again by stupid, which, in its zeal, makes everyone else look stupid. By the spell check, that is, that employs some idiot algorithm to check all words it “thinks” should be simpler words, and apparently saw Diane diPrima, didn’t recognize her—she’s only a poet after all— and substituted what it “thought” I meant. And the closest it could come was “diorama.” 

            This spell-check algorithm is supposed to help us, make us smarter and more educated than we are. But in this case, it made me look stupid—like itself. And I go through this stupidity all the time, increasingly. Any time I’m writing on my computer, using Microsoft Word or composing emails, or on my “smart” phone composing posts or text messages, or anywhere where these damn algorithms come into play, I have to constantly watch to make sure a hard word or a foreign one—god forbid—doesn’t fall victim to a spelling correction that totally garbles my meaning. It drives me mad. And I realize I’m not really the person these “aids” are designed for. They’re meant to help the “average” person—the illiterate, the grammatically-challenged, those in the majority now, who are either mentally defective, or so badly-educated that they require some computer aid to help them write or add or spell or think. In short, we some time ago entered the Age of Idiots: a culture which takes for granted that Joe and Jane Average can no longer perform the basic tasks that any fourth-grader could have done forty or fifty years ago—when I myself taught fourth graders. And so, the modern “geniuses” who design and program computers, do those tasks for them. 

As you can see, I’m totally sick of this coddling. This dumbing down of everything. And have been for some time. I think the first time it hit me was when I worked for Harcourt Brace in their schoolbook division. I had already taught in classrooms from fourth grade to college and, therefore, more or less knew what teachers did. And how very hard it can be. But when it came time to create Teachers’ Manuals to go along with the fairly progressive texts we had written, the editors responsible for these manuals displayed what I thought was an alarming contempt for classroom teachers, and what they did. So they made everything over-explicit, not only designing lesson plans, but scripting every word the teacher was to say in presenting them. And when I would complain that teachers didn’t need this, and would probably resent it, I was ignored. Teachers, they claimed, now needed this hand-holding; this clear and precise direction. They were simply not able to think on their own. 

That contempt, and that determination to guide and shape and correct the most basic aspects of our lives, has now become ubiquitous. Spelling and grammar checkers on computers are only one aspect of this phenomenon. Hand-held calculators are another, now so universal that  even among students, there are few who can add or subtract, much less divide or multiply, on their own. And this translates to check-out registers in retail stores, where everything is done for checkers. In fact, as everyone knows, they simply have to scan the bar codes and the price is entered automatically, and the total calculated, with taxes and discounts, all without human input or thought. What this means, of course, is that corporations no longer need to hire clerks possessed of intelligence and  basic skills; they can use the most elementary labor available, and could just as easily use robots—which are coming soon to a store near you. And that, in turn, means (naturally) fewer personnel and lower salaries paid out, and more profit coming in. The same goes for almost any job that once required skills. Like editing the newspaper or even books. Editors no longer seem to understand basic grammar and syntax, much less the flow of a piece of prose. And the composing job—what was once hand-assembled by skilled designers and paste-up artists—is now done on computers. The robots are taking over, in short; and where they haven’t, the skills required (in warehouses like Amazon’s for example), have been reduced to an absolute minimum. Only a warm body is required. And the ability to go long hours without breaks; one is competing with robots after all. 

Where all this is heading is not hard to imagine. Robots will be more valuable than people (perhaps they already are). Most people will be valued mainly for their need to buy ever-more useless “stuff” (no ‘perhaps’ about it—they already are; though where they’ll be able to earn the money to afford “stuff” is beyond me.) And the ones who still know how to perform what were once routine tasks? They’ll be looked upon as dinosaurs, luddites, pimples on the blank face of “progress.” Preoccupied with details that no longer matter. Spelling. Adding a column of figures. Constructing a cogent and intelligible sentence, or knowing what agreement between subject and predicate is, or a verb ending, or a subjunctive. Fussy guardians of a correctness that has been outgrown. 

So I’m mostly annoyed these days by this mindless interference in nearly everything I do. Mostly my writing, since I’m one of those “dinosaurs” from another era, who does, in fact, remember how to compose a sentence, does know the difference between “like” and “as,” and can still write with reasonably legible handwriting and add a column of figures. Not that I haven’t been corrupted like everyone else. I have; there’s no escaping it. I use a computer program to design my books. And a calculator to do my taxes. But when it comes to spell-check programs, I often find myself with the urge to smash my computer to bits. Or perhaps find out who, precisely, has designed the programs driving me to distraction, and find some way to consign that person to whatever circle of hell there is that stores all the rotten, simple-minded prose that person has been responsible for. And which recycles it endlessly before his or her eyes, blaring a screeching, unbearable alarm for each stupid, mindless change. Forever—as Hell is wont to do. But of course, that won’t change a thing. The stupids, along with their idiot culture, are here to stay. 

 

Lawrence DiStasi

Uncertainty

 

I was made aware recently of just how difficult it is to stay with the fundamental uncertainty of life as it really is. I was sitting in our zen meditation group (via zoom), and one of the participants had some computer problem (I guessed) that was causing the light on the screen to brighten and darken every second or two. It was disturbing because I could perceive the recurrent flashing in my peripheral vision. My impulse, of course, was to do something: either alert the person vocally that her screen was flashing, or write a chat message, or otherwise try to take care of the problem. But I could do none of these things without interrupting others and making the problem worse. As I sat there, I became aware of how often this happens. I am constitutionally committed, I realized, to procedures being followed, to order being maintained, to being on time, to things going as they’re supposed to. And when they don’t, I register upset to one degree or another. The same is true of my expectations about sentence structure in a newspaper, and/or grammar or spelling in an online article, and so on (I’ve been trained as an editor). Or the way people drive. Or dress themselves; or groom themselves; or behave in public; or a million other actions or circumstances that we wish to conform to our expectations of what is “right.” We use the word “appropriate” these days, of course, to avoid the appearance of being a moral ‘auntie’ trying to enforce standards of “right” and “wrong,” or “good” and “bad,” but the moral judgment is usually what we mean. 

The source of this discomfort soon became apparent. Like most other humans, I have little tolerance for uncertainty; for disorder; for chaos. “Chaos is come again,” says Othello, referring to the time when he shall not love Desdemona; and we understand that, in his mind, his love for her and hers for him is what keeps his world orderly, from dissolving into chaos. Like Othello, we all insist on some sort of order to keep our lives afloat, and we also tend to insist that the amount or degree of order that we demand is not too much or too little, but just the “right” amount. And, of course, we get into endless trouble by insisting that ours is the optimum amount, and that others, if they knew anything, would insist on that same amount of order for themselves. In fact, the whole of what we call “civilization” is fundamentally the assertion and implementation of various degrees of order imposed on the randomness of reality. But a little reflection shows us that there is really no optimum balance between our preferred order and the chaos, or uncertainty, or randomness of life as it unfolds. And there is no way, either, of making certain that our expectations for order will be met. We want order and predictability, basically so we can be prepared for what’s coming, i.e., to control our world. We demand this “right” order, and if we cannot get what we want, if too much collapses, we tend, like Othello, to despair about continuing our lives in any reasonable or “respectable” way. 

Nor is it just weak or unintelligent humans who feel this way. The classic genius we all acknowledge, Albert Einstein, was so put off by Werner Heisenberg’s “uncertainty principle” as it relates to the quantum world, that he, Einstein, spent most of the rest of his life trying to prove how wrong that principle was. Heisenberg’s principle, that is, asserts that one cannot know both the speed and the position of a given particle at the same time—indeed, that the more we know about one, the less we know about the other. In response, Einstein retorted with statements like: “God does not play dice with the Universe.” What he meant was that chance cannot be the governing principle of the universe; that there must be some way to calculate both the position and the momentum of elementary particles, but scientists just haven’t found the right formula or solution or hidden order yet. But almost a hundred years later, Heisenberg’s principle stands on firmer experimental ground than ever, and Einstein appears to have been wrong. So perhaps we lesser mortals should not despair, or judge ourselves too harshly.

On the other hand, most of us would like to, if we could, have an accurate picture of real reality. At least I would. And the truth seems to be that we’re all, to one degree or another, deluded about reality. That is, we all demand that our view of the world include some kind of reasonable and knowable and predictable order. We like calendars and we like clocks for this reason, and take ever greater pains to be certain that they are correct: we now have atomic clocks, for example, giving us ever more accurate ways to measure time. But do they? Clocks are, after all, arbitrary impositions of order on what we call the passage of time. And what about Daylight Savings Time? Does it really save time? Does it have any effect whatever on the amount of sunlight that hits our part of the world? Not a bit. It affects only us, and the arbitrary time on our clocks we choose to get ourselves into and out of bed. The same is true of calendars: does the New Year on January 1 correspond to anything like a beginning in nature? Not at all. It doesn’t even coincide with a solar event like the solstice. It is an arbitrary starting point that we then imbue with all kinds of meaning—drunken celebrations, bidding goodbye to a bad year, hoping for a better year, resolutions for us to keep in the new year, and so on. In short, we humans seem to need these arbitrary markers in our lives to give them shape, to keep them from seeming formless, chaotic, without definition, and essentially infinite. For infinity terrifies us (which may be why death terrifies us as well.)

But if we are at all attuned to the world as it actually is, we realize, at least philosophically, that the world and its events have very little of the order we impute to them. Yes, the earth regularly revolves around the sun in roughly 365-1/4 days, but even that is subject to variation and change. As is the tilt of the earth which gives us our seasons. Yes, we rise at roughly the same time each day, but only because our clocks tell us to; if we set our schedules to the sun’s rise and set, our work days would vary with the seasons. Which they no doubt did in the past, e.g., in our hunter-gatherer days. We would also see—and this is one of the things zen training is meant to make us aware of—that many of our expectations of what will happen in any given moment, or what a person will do in a given situation, are simply mistaken. We base them, perhaps, on what might have happened in the past, but when we do, we remain oblivious to the fact that everything changes second by second, and nothing ever happens in exactly the same way twice. Much, if not most, of our discontent stems from this clash between what we expect to happen and what actually occurs. We want “good” things to happen in the same way, again and again. But if they did, if we could somehow influence life to conform to our expectations or desires, life could not go on. For one example, if we could get the DNA of dreaded viruses or bacteria to stay the same, to stop mutating and infecting us, or any organism’s DNA to remain fixed in the way it suits us, that would be the end of life. All life depends on mutations to adapt to always changing conditions. That is, in a nutshell, what life is. Stop mutations, stop change, and you stop life. The entire world, indeed, is like this. We might want the sun to stop burning—because we know that in four billion years or so, its fuel will run out, and it will first expand—incinerating us and all the planets—and then explode into a supernova or a black hole. In either event, this development of the sun will put an end to earth and to human existence. But would we really want to stop that? Would we really want the sun, or any other entity to freeze in place, to stop providing us with heat and light, stop developing as it must to be what it is? Would we want a tree or an animal or ourselves to freeze in place, to stop developing and remain permanently as we want it to at some moment in time? And which moment would that be? And would there even be any moments after that? And, most important, would we really want quantum uncertainty (which amounts to the underlying uncertainty of all reality) to not operate in our world?

A June 12, 2012 article in New Scientist reports on two scientists who have explored this question: “Sorry Einstein, the universe needs quantum uncertainty,” by Jessica Griggs. The scientists, Stephanie Wehner and Esther Hänggi of the National University of Singapore’s Centre for Quantum Technology, report that, with two bits of information (as analogues to the position and momentum in a quantum particle) encoded in the same particle, one cannot decode both bits of information. If you get more information about one, you get correspondingly less from the other. They then tried decoding information from both simultaneously (like measuring both speed and position of a particle), and concluded that this comprises more information than went in in the first place, thus violating the Second Law of Thermodynamics (which states that closed systems always move in the direction of more entropy, or disorder in the system). The article’s summary concludes:

Being able to decode both of the messages in Wehner and Hänggi’s imaginary particle suddenly gives you more information. As demonstrated by the piston, this means you have the potential to do more work. But this extra work comes for free so is the same as creating a perpetual motion machine, which is forbidden by thermodynamics.

 

In short, quantum uncertainty is necessary in order to preserve an even more fundamental principle, the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. And if quantum uncertainty is necessary, then so is the general uncertainty of the world. As corroboration, we might also think of the mysterious imbalance between particles and anti-particles that allowed the material world to come into existence in the first place. As noted on the cern.com website, “The Big Bang should have created equal amounts of matter and antimatter in the early universe.” And if it had, since matter and antimatter particles annihilate one another, the universe should “contain nothing but leftover energy” (ibid). But it does not; it contains more, including us. Somehow, and the mechanism is still not understood, some small portion of matter survived the expected annihilation of matter meeting antimatter, and now, “everything we see from the smallest life forms on Earth to the largest stellar objects is made almost entirely of matter” (ibid). As has been noted in many places, “the origin of matter remains one of the greatest mysteries of physics” (wikipedia). Imbalance and uncertainty, in short, allow us, indeed seemnecessary for us to be. 

            So, much as we might long for certainty in our lives, in our world, it seems that the forces that refuse to accede to our desires “know” best. What humans want most may be (and, as we are finding to our peril, often is) precisely that which would not only nullify us, but all other life, all other forms of existence as well. We should be grateful that our fondest, our most persistent desires (especially for certainty) do not, and cannot ever be realized. 

 

Lawrence DiStasi

Freedom or Liberation

“Freedom,” in recent years, has become even more of a rallying cry than usual in the United States. Conservative Republicans, and, in particular, those devotees of our last President, but also those who hearken back to the ‘good old days’ of Ronald Reagan, have used the cry for ‘my freedom’ as a cudgel to bludgeon opponents and justify their own intransigence in the face of what they call ‘government tyranny.’ Especially higher taxes, or government demands to wear face masks to protect oneself and others from Covid-19, or to abide by social-distancing requirements for the same reason, are seen as unwarranted and oppressive government intrusions—outrageous limits to the “freedom” that every American is guaranteed. 

            “Freedom to” people also tend to deny the second important freedom category—“freedom from.” This freedom includes the freedoms aimed mostly at less-well-off or impoverished people: the freedom of low-wage workers fromexploitation by rapacious businesses; the freedom of African Americans from slavery—a freedom that even a violent Civil War was not able to guarantee; a freedom that thousands had to fight for, even after that war, to get it enforced, and which, to this day, has never been fully implemented; the freedom of every American, including children, from hunger, from homelessness, from grossly deficient and costly medical care, from food deserts that lack access to nourishing and healthful food; and freedom from industrial corridors which pollute—with carbon emissions, toxic chemicals, poisoned earth and water sources—the very air that people must breathe, and the water they must drink. 

We should also note here that another significant word for freedom in our history is “Independence.” Enshrined in perhaps America’s most famous document, Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, this idea of freedom declared the right of the American colonies to be free from the tyranny of English kings, thereby setting America on its ‘sanctioned-by-nature’ independent and democratic course. But it did more. As its preamble states,

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

 

Of course, most of us have realized in recent years that the grand notion, “all men are created equal,” omitted significant chunks of humanity: women, who comprised half the population, and all those slaves brought from Africa, and immigrants from certain countries, and so on. So it seems that the Creator, in the minds of the founding geniuses who adopted this document, endowed mainly white men of property with those “unalienable Rights” to life and liberty (yet another word for freedom) and happiness. All others need not apply. And being deprived of this right was a big deal, since the idea of independence became the pre-eminent American ideal. The quintessential American, that is, believes himself not bound or connected or beholden to anyone; believes himself to be (or has the right to be) absolutely self-sufficient; able to provide for self and family, with no need for help from, or interference from, any government, domestic or foreign. And we teach this ideal to children almost from the day they take their first step. ‘You can do it yourself.’ The same goes for the nation as a whole: we insisted on being free of British taxes; free of all interference by any outside nation; and free from reliance on anyone: any other nation; any union of nations; any outside maker or grower or armed defender of anything. We independent Americans are said to have all we need right here, including millions of lethal weapons to defend ourselves, once we ‘make America great again.’ Free again. 

Without getting too deeply into it, of course, anyone with a modicum of knowledge about how things actually work can see that this notion of total self-sufficiency is, perhaps, the most dangerous and damaging illusion of all. Why? Because it relies on a complete denial of what we know about human social relations, botany, biology, and physics. No single entity, that is, has ever been, or ever can be totally free and independent. From the very beginning of our lives, we must rely on others: our mothers first, and our fathers, and families, and, in the very recent past, our tribe members, or our neighboring villagers, or, in today’s complex societies, our neighbors and fellow citizens—depend on them to abide by common rules such as stopping at traffic lights, or picking up their garbage, or contributing to the roads and bridges we all rely on, or not stealing into our houses at night to ransack them, or not playing loud music at three in the morning. Countless observances like these are required to make complex societies work. 

And this does not even begin to take account of the myriad inter-dependencies we have with the non-human world: the plants that supply our world with the green matter that serves us as  food, and the oxygen that allows us to breathe; the bacteria that supply our soil with nutrients, and without whose presence, in our gut, we could not even digest our food; the trees that form the soil we depend on to grow crops, and which manage the CO₂ that is overwhelming our planet because so many have been removed to profit a few; the oceans that supply fish and countless other nutrients and life itself, all of which are now at risk due to over-fishing and pollution and global warming and acidification; the rivers and aquifers that supply our drinking and irrigation water, that in many places has begun to run out. One could go on almost indefinitely, but the point has perhaps been made: no human being could survive for a second without the prior help of the organisms and natural elements that are the necessary precursors and support of us all.  

Large portions of our lives, in short, are built on illusions, the predominant one being the grand illusion of independence. And this brings us to yet another, deeper, and diametrically-opposed definition of freedom, of liberation: the one propounded by Gautama, the historical Buddha, nearly three thousand years ago. Gautama spoke about liberation in his most fundamental teachings. But the liberation he promised was not freedom from all earthly constraints or pains, but rather awareness of them, and thereby, of liberation from suffering. Because, as he expounded it, there was a cause of suffering, and it was due mostly to the clinging and attachment to the very things that those deluded by independencevalue most of all: the idea that they themselves are substantial and permanent; that everything they desire is similarly substantial and permanent and can be owned, kept, hoarded from others; and will not change; in short, delusionally attached to notions that the world and its objects can be controlled for their personal benefit, and separated from the nexus of relations in which they are embedded. This is what the Buddha realized himself, and then taught: that all this self-ishness was due to ignorance—the first of what he called “the three poisons” (the other two being greed and hatred.) For when he awakened, he saw that there were no “things” in and of themselves. Rather, every thing that appears to our minds as independent (including our very selves) is, in reality, dependent on all else. He called this “inter-dependent co-arising:” meaning that nothing comes into existence on its own; everything co-arises in cooperation with some other thing or many other things. In short, nothing IS on its own. Everything depends inherently and ineluctably on other “things” that co-arise with it. This interdependent co-arising is how real reality actually works. 

One has only to think of oneself. In order for one to be born, one’s parents had to come together by the agency of countless other conditions and events, social, biological, global. But even that hardly scratches the surface of what is involved in the forming of even one human being. First comes the biology of human growth from that initial fertilized cell, all of which is controlled not by anyone, but by evolution—e.g., the pre-ordained processes of cell growth into organs and blood and the billions of cells that we are. Most of these have been developed over eons via organic evolution—the chemical processes by which cells produce energy, how those cells come together to produce all the organs necessary for life, and how the female body nourishes and gives birth to that life. And how it grows. All done without human will or control. But even beyond that production of life from apparently nothing, the survival of that living entity, once it emerges into the world, is dependent on thousands of other constantly changing events and processes. That is to say, aside from the mostly instinctive nurturing that it requires, no organic being could survive without the work of plants upon which it relies for food, animals that can digest plants indigestible to humans to supply it with protein nourishment, and bacteria within its gut that make it possible to digest what it eats. This is not even to mention the plants that turn sunlight into green matter, without which animals like us would not have appeared in the first place. And trees and soil bacteria and fungi that produce the soil upon which plants depend. 

And yet, most humans insist on clinging to their own misguided notion of independence: their supposed freedom to ignore all other entities to accumulate and own and do whatever they wish to whomever they wish, without regard for the embeddedness of every thing in everything else (the results of this ignorance are now coming back to haunt us). The three poisons of greed, hatred and ignorance are what Buddha called the source of this grand illusion. And the freedom or liberation he offered involved seeing this embeddedness, seeing it and letting go of the illusion of independence. 

In short, the freedom, the liberation the Buddha offered was the exact opposite of what the conventional meaning of freedom and independence offers to the average American—and to people of most other advanced industrial countries, especially western ones. Whereas the conventional idea of freedom offers more and better access to the apparent goodies and delights of this world, Buddhism offers a path by which to see through these illusory and temporary satisfactions, and find true liberation. And that true liberation involves not the desperate and doomed-to-fail immersion in always-changing comfort and security, but rather a way to see that this immersion, this endless craving is precisely what leads to suffering (I want it; I deserve it as much as that person; why can’t I have it?). And that the way out of suffering involves seeing, and then the long practice of giving up on all those attempts to change and control life and make it work solely for my benefit, and instead, accepting real life, life as it truly is—good, bad or indifferent. And more than that, not resting in the self-satisfaction of having liberated myself, but rather working to liberate all others mired in the same delusion, by helping them to see the same thing. This last is fundamental, stemming as it does from the realization that no one achieves liberation alone; all liberation comes only in communion with the whole—the whole of sentient life with whom we are embedded, bound, connected, and which, in truth, we are. 

 

Lawrence DiStasi