116: Earth vs Hell / Samsara vs Nirvana

SUBSCRIBE TO UNMIND:

RSS FEED | APPLE PODCASTS | GOOGLE PODCASTS | SPOTIFY

**Hell to Pay**
**Having sown the wind,**
**we are reaping the whirlwind.**
***Mother Nature’s pissed.***

WHAT IF THIS IS HELL?

The 1995 hit song released by Joan Osborne: “What if God was one of us?” reminded me of another mythical story called “The Rabbi’s Gift.” It is a tale of a rabbi visiting and giving a talk at a Christian monastery fallen on hard times, in which he suggests that one of the few remaining monks may actually be the Messiah in disguise. The monks come to embrace this notion as a distinct possibility, a What if…surely not myself, but maybe any one of you…may indeed be the promised Second Coming? and this very idea results in the revitalization of the monastery.

What with all the events happening in the world today, and within my living memory, the present seems to be an OCD reiteration of “the past as prologue.” This got me to thinking of another What if?: What if this Earth — and by extension, the whole present universe — is not positioned somewhere between heaven and hell, but actually is Hell, itself? Capitalized to indicate not the relative, everyday hell of good versus evil, but the Biblical realm of absolute Hell? Leaving aside for the moment the other possibilities, such as whether or not there may be a heavenly realm somewhere else, or another universe existing as a kind of purgatory — sandwiched between a paradisical slice of existence and a hell realm — as earthly existence is often conceived. Not in the subjunctive or speculative sense, but in harsh reality.

While in the throes of redrafting my recent “DharmaByte” published monthly in our STO newsletter, to post as this podcast, she who shall remain nameless informed me that a relatively obscure but famous-in-certain-circles writer, Cormac McCarthy, had died recently, at 89 years of age. At my age the obits form an increasingly noticeable, and frequent, focus. I followed the link to the online story, discovering that I was familiar with only one of his works, one that had been made into a movie, “No Country for Old Men.” What struck a chord for me was the following:

Mr. McCarthy’s fiction took a dark view of the human condition and was often macabre. He decorated his novels with scalpings, beheadings, arson, rape, incest, necrophilia and cannibalism. “There’s no such thing as life without bloodshed,” he told The New York Times magazine in 1992 in a rare interview. “I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea.”

It would be a “really dangerous idea” to naively trust that human nature is basically good, and will out in a benevolent way, in dealings with loved ones as well as with strangers. I have been mildly rebuked for remarking that in Zen, we do not aspire to human nature; we aspire to buddha-nature. Some might like to believe that the two are synonymous, but I beg to differ. What we see on TV every day is reflective of human nature. What Buddha discovered and transmitted is the latter, a potential for spiritual awakening that all human beings are said to have.

But sometimes, I must confess, I wonder if it is more likely that while many, most, or even all, human beings may have buddha potential; the likelihood of their realizing it is diminishingly small, approaching zero. Especially with the world population reaching its natural limit, approaching 10 billion, with resultant strain on limited resources. I believe the reason Matsuoka Roshi insisted that “Your enlightenment will be even greater than Buddha’s” is simply because it is so much more difficult now. If you do manage to wake up as he did in simpler times, in the midst of all this distraction and tumult, it will be a big f’ing deal, to quote POTUS. Later in the report, a touch of McCarthy humor, sorely needed in these trying times:

His characters were outsiders, like him. He lived quietly and determinately outside the literary mainstream. While not quite as reclusive as Thomas Pynchon, Mr. McCarthy gave no readings and no blurbs for the jackets of other writers’ books. He never committed journalism or taught writing. He granted only a handful of interviews.

Love that expression — he never “committed” journalism — as if it were a crime. I assume it to be a quote or paraphrase. Reminds me of the Tang dynasty Ch’an poem “Hokyo Zammai—Precious Mirror Samadhi” by Soto founder Tozan Ryokai that says, regarding buddha-dharma, “Just to portray it in literary form is to stain it with defilement.” There is nothing that cannot be defiled in some sense, reduced to brute vulgarity by the self-centered depredations of ignorant humankind. Our greater angels may never succeed in conquering our lesser devils. The arc of history may not, ultimately, bend toward justice. At least not human justice.

This conjecture is not entirely alien to conventional Protestant Christianity, as I learned when participating as a panelist on an online Christian-inspired interfaith dialog originating in South Korea, with the mission of promoting world peace. Two junior Christian minister panelists, one from Africa, one from the US, went to great pains to explain, to our equally young audience, just how is it that a loving God could permit such atrocities as are daily fare on the news, and increasingly in our neighborhoods, a question that naturally comes up more and more frequently.

They held that the doctrine of the Second Coming teaches that the Earth is currently, indeed, ruled by Satan; and that only when Christ is reborn on Earth will the Great Deceiver be defeated, and an eternal reign of peace on Earth will surely ensue.

Some anomalies in this belief came out as well, such as that Christ redux will live a normal life after vanquishing the Devil — including marrying and fathering children — and will naturally die, when his time has come! They did not clarify whether he is expected to retire to heaven to receive his reward, letting the kids take over the planet, one supposes. But I was intrigued by the notion that this branch of theism allows for a kind of rebirth — as taught in classical Buddhism — if limited to the “one and only begotten son of God.”

Whatever the future implications of my initial hypothesis — that we may literally be living in the real, one-and-only Hell — I think it reasonable that if we take an unblinking look at the operative conditions and emerging trends underway around the globe, for the moment ignoring their many possible causes, a telling description may emerge. A short list from the top of my head — and that you may feel free to embellish — includes, in no particular order:

National leaders betraying their own citizens, and waging war on other nations, approving of the bombing of civilians, including children, all the while claiming some just, altruistic or noble motive.
Religious leaders giving lip service to the gospel, benefiting from lavish lifestyles of the clergy, while abusing children and/or covering up the rapacious and predatory behavior of others.
Charitable leaders pocketing proceeds and ripping off their donors based upon good intentions and genuinely charitable instincts of their victims.
Government leaders at all levels promoting myths of free markets while on the take from the corrupting influence of lobbyists.
Spouses cheating on, abusing and murdering spouses.
Parents abusing and murdering children; children murdering parents.
Employers abusing employees; employees murdering employers.
Neighbors shooting neighbors; strangers killing strangers; psychotics shooting students, shoppers in stores, and partyers at festivals: in ever-greater numbers.

I could go on, as could you, to include reemergent ethnic and racial animus. Or, my personal top three: climate change; widespread pollution; pop-up pandemics. Pick your favorite natural-cum-manmade disaster du jour. But this is getting a bit depressing.

My basic question is: Does this not read like a fairly convincing, if not perfect, description of Hell? Or hell on Earth, at least? Isn’t it surely going to get a lot worse before it gets better? And the human race will not be satisfied with pillaging and plundering only this poor planet. We may have “slipped the surly bonds of Earth,” but instead of touching “the face of God,” we are plotting to colonize the moon, as a stepping stone to another whole, fresh planet to plunder.

Having recently launched its 27th space ship — more than our total launches in history — the private space industry in collaboration with NASA is planning to send astronauts on a ride around the moon and back, then to land on the moon once again, as a launching pad for a future junket to Mars. As a Sci-Fi junkie, I welcome these developments. But as a citizen, I regard them with a healthy paranoia, as to the intent and eventual use, or misuse, of our enhanced powers of world domination. Please indulge me in a flight of fancy:

Let us suppose that in the more distant future, the Mars colony has expanded to a sizable portion of the planet, while still reporting back to Mother Earth. At a certain point, what if we make another game-changing discovery. After re-establishing a breathable atmosphere, as once enshrouded Mars, we have had the luxury of time to discover that, indeed, the planet once hosted life, which is earth-shaking enough. But further, that it was in fact once occupied by an advanced civilization of intelligent beings, as imagined by an early astronomer, who discovered what he took to be the “canals” of Mars.

Suppose that we discover evidence of historical traces, indications of civilization, long obscured by eons of accumulated debris, much as we still find traces from ancient civilizations on Earth. Like Easter Island, say, but on a planetary scale.

We were hoping to colonize, and bring to life, a brand new world, a do-over of the Earth we have left in tatters. But Mars is revealed to be an ancient world, perhaps much older than the tenure of humanity. We now know that Mars was once similar to Earth. But some cataclysm must have occurred, wiping out all life. Or somehow, its denizens managed to blow it up.

With climate change looming back home — triggering all manner of natural disasters no longer exactly natural, but karmic consequences of humanity on a global level — we begin to accept the terrifying possibility that we may be truly alone in the universe. And that when and where life occurs, and even when it evolves to control its means of survival, a self-destructive Achilles’ heel kicks in.

Rather than as God’s chosen people, privileged to live in what could have been a kind of earthly paradise, as we would like to believe, we are instead doomed to be reborn, again and again throughout eternity, into this vast, hellish chiliocosm. “When will they ever learn?” on an infinite, and eternal, scale.

WHAT IF THIS IS SAMSARA?

To wrap this up on a more positive note, the implications of Buddha’s insight led to Buddhism’s cosmology, which is not blindly optimistic, nor overly pessimistic. It places human existence on one of six planes, with three others below — the realms of animals and insects; hungry ghosts; and the “Avici hell” realm; and two others above — the realm of the Asuras or angry gods; and “Tusita heaven.”

The model is based on various degrees of suffering or lack thereof, indicating that only human beings can come to full awakening as did Buddha, because our realm has a balance of just enough suffering, plus the ability to become aware of it as stemming from self-awareness, recognition of the problem being tantamount to solving it, the necessary antecedent to liberation. In the other five realms, there is either too much suffering to overcome, or too little to prod its denizens into the necessary realization, for transcendental awakening to occur.

The polar extremes of existence are known as “Samsara” and “Nirvana.” It is thought to be possible, but not likely, that humanity will wake up from their deep sleep and realize the true Way. Which could be tantamount to world peace. But that this can happen does not mean that it is foreordained. It could go either way. It should be noted that this model is not taken as literal, and that whether we find ourselves in Samsara — the world of patience; or in Nirvana — the state of liberation; is entirely up to us; that is, what we individually and collectively do about it. Heaven and Hell are self-created, according to Buddhism.

Master Dogen is said to have declared that actually, we do not go from the shore of Samsara to the other shore of Nirvana. The other shore finally comes to us. Matsuoka Roshi questioned the wisdom of spending your whole life yearning for an afterlife in a distant heaven that may or may not be there, rather than dedicating your attention to this life. Shohaku Okumura Roshi wryly commented in a dharma dialog at the Zen center, that everybody says they want to go to Nirvana. But if you go there, there is no one else there. Only bodhisattvas can go there, and they choose to stay here. So, he concluded, our mission is to transform this “ocean of Samsara” into Nirvana. I say to hell with all speculation.

You will have to determine for yourself which approach suits you, which model is a higher approximation of your reality.