UnMind 99. Death & Disaster, Dialog & Dharma III

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Be realistic —
Give up your designs on life.
It has its own plan.

In the last segment we addressed the first few questions that arose from the Zen community regarding the most recent mass shootings in the context of buddhadharma and daily life practice, concluding with the point that Zen Buddhism is not overly optimistic on these issues, but certainly not pessimistic, either, as generally regarded by the uninitiated, owing to its emphasis on confronting suffering rather than trying to avoid it. Zazen practice is thought to engender an attitude not of resignation or hopelessness, but a practical approach to problem-solving, beginning with the premise that some problems are not amenable to quick resolution. In fact, we may not see the end of this particular insanity in American life in our lifetimes. To continue where we left off:

Someone asks: Thank you for your willingness to step forward and wade into these very painful events that occur, when so many spiritual and political leaders go silent, when a very massive loss of life occurs.

I say: Well, you can’t blame them. You’re bound to be misunderstood and maybe vilified, no matter what tact you take in the context of these emotionally sensitive affairs

Yes. I am speaking to you out of an emotional place. This Uvalde, this shooting at this school, has triggered a lot of emotions. Sadness, tears, anger, frustration. Wanting to do something. Not wanting to just stand back while these things occur. Getting even more angry when I hear what our political leaders who are bold enough to step forward have to say about protecting my right to go publicly into the community with assault weapons and bags of ammunition, like somehow that‘s patriotic and the right thing to do. I have a sense to bolt. I live in a community that actually puts assault rifles on their campaign signs. It feels toxic, and there’s actually a little bit of fear. To be fair, a lot of them are hard-working, good people. But I have this strong sense to bolt. But I don’t know where to go. I don’t particularly want to leave my state. But to find some kind of like-minded community, that would be required, I think, or maybe even leave my country. I am sharing these with you, and thank you for listening. I welcome your thoughts.

Sure. Well, I would say, Welcome to the club. I think you’re not alone. A lot of people have the same thoughts, escaping to Canada, and even fantasies of taking revenge. Why doesn’t someone go shoot up the NRA convention, you know? Like — you guys seem to think this is a good idea — well, here it is.

But you can understand the arguments on both sides, to some degree. Thich Nhat Hanh did a lot of work on world peace, and of course he came from Vietnam, where they saw massive atrocities that would probably make these look like child’s play, no pun intended. But he said in order to work for world peace, you must be world peace. You cannot take a side. And that’s hard. That’s hard to do. It’s really hard not to take a side, when some things seem so glaringly obvious, obviously wrong-headed.

Even logical comparisons fall short in the face of the stubbornness of fixed opinions. One that stands out starkly for me as just being a neutral fact, is that every other country that has brought access to weapons under control does not have this problem. And they do have all the other problems that this is blamed on, such as mental health issues. So that’s a glaring discrepancy to my way of thinking, but one that assumes that politics — unlike anything else in our culture — works on logic. And it is very clear that politics is probably one of the most emotional professions, or categories of activities, that we have in modern culture. Probably always was.

Buckminster Fuller, as you may know, was an indirect mentor to me. I met him a couple of times. I never was his student, but he was an influencer of my generation of design professionals. He called his design approach “anticipatory comprehensive design science.” He tried to anticipate problems before they happened. This is how he taught his students. Come up with solutions. Do the definition, do the analysis, the prognosis and so forth, and come up with solutions so they are sitting there, ready to go, when the rest of society recognizes: This is a problem. So that’s a big, heavy lift, to do that well. His geodesic domes were examples of that, along with a lot of other things that he did in his lifetime.

He was a philosopher as well, and wrote about a lot of subjects, including politics. He said it all began with Malthus and Darwin. Malthus did a world resource inventory, and concluded there’s not enough to go around, basically. Darwin developed his origin of species, which was then misinterpreted to mean survival of the fittest — meaning whoever is strongest, basically — and so the politicians said, Keep me in power, I’ll make sure we get ours. And to hell with the rest of the world. I said that. That was the robber barons period. Might makes right.

His other comment on politicians was something like, We turn to politicians for solutions to our problems. But if they had any solutions they wouldn’t be politicians. Politicians’ job number one is status quo — maintaining the status quo for themselves, for their constituents, for their sponsors. So that’s the beginning of the corruption, right there.

When we look at Buddha’s example, he did not become a politician. He had the opportunity. He was warrior class and was slated to be chief of the Shakya clan, which is close to a political position. But he would be reporting to the Brahmins, who were the number one caste; the warrior caste was number two. So you could say that Buddha was basically a draft-dodger. He didn’t want to do that. And he was highly placed and wealthy enough that he had the option to pull out of the usual social program assigned to people in his position.

So we want to have a realistic view of what Buddhism is about, and how it probably started, as well. Buddha apparently did not go against the political structure of the time, the caste system, head-to-head. One of our members, a Pulitzer-prize-winning journalist, recently published a book titled “Caste,” in which she posits that actually, we live in a caste system, but we don’t call it that. She considers race to be just one of many aspects or dimensions of the total caste system in this society. Read the book.

What Buddha did — at least if the story has historicity — was to set up an alternative way of living. Like many of the communes in the 1960s into the 1970s tried to do here. I knew a lot of people who tried that. They were based on a lot of faulty premises, I think, which is why and how many or most of them failed. I think the difference is that Buddha’s community was based on meditation. It was also based on the ideas of impermanence and imperfection, and so forth, Buddha’s model of reality. But essentially it was based on the communal practice of meditation. That’s the glue that held it together, in my opinion.

I think we are doing something similar. We’re a bit like a Tupperware marketing approach going underground, into peoples’ houses, not going into the stores. We are trying to bring this practice into this culture as kind of an almost subversive activity. We are training people, if what I feel is true, we train people to think truly independently and find true freedom; and be able to act interdependently. It’s the most subversive political thing you can do. Because every political system depends upon people thinking dependently, and acting co-dependently. The real revolution starts at home, with each individual. Every top-down solution we have ever seen has not worked. Just after the revolution, guess who owned the dachas at the lake? The Bolsheviks. Same system, different players. Shuffle the deck, that’s all it is.

If you become truly independent, and are willing to act interdependently, then by the ripple effect, we will build a better society. We are fortunate to be in a democracy where we can do this without being persecuted. So far.

Someone asks: I’m hearing a lot of discussion about how to practice compassion and not let events like this just utterly annihilate you. You are called to witness suffering, to hear the cries of sentient beings and not turn away. We can’t take a pass, we can’t ignore the causes of suffering. We should avow our complicity in the structures here. I keep thinking about just how related we are as a species. Human beings do not have much genetic variation compared to other types of animals. We are all very similar. You are not more than fifteen, sixteen cousins away from most people on the planet. Just by the nature of life, you’re fourteenth-million cousin of your cat, or something, you know what I mean?

I say: And in terms of proximate causes, you’re only one airplane ride away from anybody else on the planet. Many exacerbating conditions such as this have never existed before in society.

Someone asks: That’s what I think when I think about starting here with human nature, and not getting into the fear that is obviously the goal of these fascist strikes on the heart of open society. It is not hard to see what’s really happening here. There is this act of terrorism, there is this radiating atmosphere of menace. It is intended to intimidate us. And Zen training is supposed to give us some impulse toughness, in order to persevere against that. And you’re right, that can be freedom.

I say: A historical claim of Zen has always been that it is a way of facing life, but it is also a way of facing death. That is why it has had such a tight relationship to the martial arts and the military throughout China and Japan. If you look at the consistent factor of Zen transitioning from India through China to Vietnam, Korea, Japan and the Far East, it’s like this — I hate to use a cliché like “beacon of light” — it’s just this constant thing that is moving through all this insanity. If you think that what we are facing is bad, try going back to China or Japan during their warring periods. Or Vietnam for that matter. The so-called history of humankind is “written in blood,” you know. And yet, Zen somehow survived.

So I think it’s pretty strong. I think you can’t go too far wrong, by emphasizing Zen as kind of the core of what you do. The center to which you return and reconsider, maybe, you know, Well I blew that one. Like the other day I tried to hold our monthly ZENtalk open-ended discussion via Zoom. I thought I had it all set up, but I couldn’t even find the way to get the meeting to start. Zoom Zen. Zen Zoom.

One of the connections between Design and Zen is that we experiment. We take a risk, we take a chance, and we fail, again and again. As Dogen said, “Fall down seven times, get up eight.” Another expression he used was, “The bullseye depends on the hundred misses.” So in Zen, we are not afraid to take action. In Design, we try to define the problem thoroughly before taking action, just as a hedge on your bet, you know. So that you are not only going on gut level intuition with your own confirmation bias and all that kind of stuff. We mitigate the risk to the extent feasible, but without analysis paralysis.

Design has historically been primarily a group process. Great inventions have come up in groups, not brilliant individuals in their ivory towers, as commonly thought. I think the same thing is true in Zen. Dogen, Bodhidharma, Buddha — they were all surrounded by groups of people who were all working together in a collaborative way to pull this off, make this Zen thing happen. It wasn’t a Lone Ranger, individual genius kind of proposition.

And I think that’s what we need to do now. We need to bind together as much as we can, and take collaborative action to do our best to create an alternative to this insanity that we see. Doesn’t have to be on a big scale. We don’t have to go up against “them.” Of course, some of our people are supporting politicians. It’s okay to get involved in the politics. I don’t see any reason not to. But don’t get your hopes up that that’s going to provide the final solution, that political action is going to make it all different. Human nature is a stubborn thing. Especially when facts are no longer that stubborn.

To be continued.