"Paradigm shift" is a much overworked phrase, but it looks to me that that is what the human race is up against - we have to transform beyond the use of war to solve problems. As the Dalai Lama says, "Today, the world is so small and so interdependent that the concept of war has become anachronistic, an outmoded approach. "
But how? I definitely get enraged at the actions of both George Bush and Saddam Hussein - and many, many other dictators who do just as terrible things as Saddam. As to Mr. Bush and his predecessors in our govt., their violence is more sanitized - the U.S. govt has supported a host of repressive govts for its political and economic ends and looked the other way regarding genocide and torture - Rwanda, East Timor, etc., etc. Am sure the readers of this list are well aware that the U.S. supported and helped bring to power Saddam, Osama bin Laden, Noriega, Pinochet, and a long list of others, and that the CIA was involved in the horrors of Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, Angola, the Congo, Zaire....... So the U.S. itself wasn't pulling out the tongues and putting the electric prods to the genitalia, but it has financed such activities and _looked the other way_ and never said a word until the dictator in power began to ignore U.S. interests. Meanwhile, a war of a different kind is waged at home destroying the education system, denying health care, housing, welfare, decent jobs, environmental protections, while building more and more prisons - much more subtle, and not as obviously painful, but.....
But, Mr. Lempenin is right - the left has not generally taken to the streets for the above - except for the ongoing demonstrations and jailings regarding the School of the Americas - and I have often wondered why. This does not mean a lot of us have not been objecting - many organizations exist that have been fighting these ills.
However, the discussion here is really violence vs. non-violence, and it always comes to this - in just _this_ instance violence is justified... I've had many violent thoughts since the Bush march to war began (well, before that too). And when I catch myself up short and say back off, relax, think peace, I often feel that I have just been surrounded by cotton candy. I don't like either feeling. There is a very definite need and use for the passion behind rage - it is, after all, the passion one feels about protecting the innocent, about instituting justice, insuring equality.
The question is how to _really_ transmute it, transform it? The age-old question - how do you love your enemy? How do we pray for them? How do we pray for them and mean it? Then you get into - what is prayer? There's the one where you acknowledge you don't know what the ____ to pray and simply pray for the best possible outcome for everyone - or best possible evolution, as this is not a static process. Or we strain toward "enlightenment," where we feel our oneness with all things and align with cosmic consciousness or whatever you want to call it, to try to be that in the world. That road is said to be through meditation
But that tends to send people back into navel contemplation. Both psychiatrist James Hillmen and the brilliant philosopher, Ken Wilber, comment that concentration on 'individual growth" tends to become an escape from the fact that we are interdependent and live in a world that affects us and to which we have a responsibility (contrary to the 'create your own world' gurus).
How can we be fully human and fully spiritual? Seems to me we are required to walk the razor's edge with a heart broken open both to feel all the pain and rage and to respond with compassion. Not that I can do it, not that I even know what the latter really means. We're all just groping our way here.
As Gandhi said, "We must become the change we wish to see," a phrase also said so often it loses meaning for us. There are no new solutions - all the old ones are being played out right now. We are at the point where a critical mass of humanity must manage to transform, evolve to a higher level, to become so true to our Selves that we emanate Presence - which doesn't of course, mean we won't get our heads lopped off, for that is very dangerous territory.
We need some kind of meditation that is active in the world - "in the world but not of it" I guess.
But it's way beyond me.
Am going to forward the response I received from the Dalai Lama when I requested that he and other Nobel Peace Prize winners go to Baghdad, and included within it is his speech on the Iraq situation.
I have always wondered how he deals with the tragedy of Tibet, how he maintains compassion for the Chinese, how that is an answer (well, it's not an answer - it's a reaction, and certainly not one we who have been steeped in violence understand). Tibet gave up war as a strategy 1000 years ago - but evidently the laws of karma have ground out the present situation in response to its previous wars - and the irony is that it brought the Dalai Lama and the teachings of the Buddha to the West at this time - ??? (Imagine the karma of the U.S.)
The Dalai Lama basic response to the situation is to pray, which of course, doesn't feel all that strong in the face of what is raining down on Iraq. I think I'll ask him what he means by prayer. Meanwhile, James Twyman's Emissary of Light program (www.emissaryoflight.com)has been proclaiming good results from their collective prayers (of course most churches have for years). Physician Larry Dossey has written a couple of books on the power of prayer, including research studies showing that it has effects. And then there's quantum physics and how non-local quarks (or is it neutrons or protons?) Can affect each other through time and space.....
If we do not do the impossible, we shall be faced with the unthinkable. Murray Bookchin
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