Hi Brendan,
Well, that the Pope calls for a ceasefire is a nice sentiment for sure, but I get the feeling that Putin needs some more battering. I don’t think either side is ready to talk. A Buddhist friend who was not aware of the obscene desecration of the Buddhist monuments at Bamian once told me that the solution to Bin Laden and the Taliban was to have the Dali Lama talk to them! Those guys would have eaten him for breakfast.
Spiritual people can be exceptionally naive, not to mention gullible. The great outpouring of affection for Trump from the working class is a case in point. Could there be a more unlikely saviour for “America,” whatever that word means? I had to part company with one of my long-time Vedanta friends who couldn’t see that his veneration of a morally corrupt person was in conflict with his spiritual values. He said I was trying to trick him and that ShiningWorld was on “the wrong side of history.” This after he gave 10 years of service to ShiningWorld! Some of us are incredibly attached to our pet gripes. If someone feels that they got the short end of life’s stick these days, they often dig in their heels, mount some kind of political bandwagon and become culture “warriors,” as if attacking and defending opinions were a real war. I won’t bother you with other examples from my own experience.
Vedanta insists that no attachment or obsession be kept from the light of self inquiry. When I was teaching in San Francisco back in the days of the Gay Mecca, I insisted that the gays who came for teaching look at their sexual identity in light of their true identity if they wanted to grow spiritually. Except for three, all of them chose to discontinue inquiry. America and gay and every other blessed concept…black/white, Christian/Muslim etc. is totally unreal. What isn’t the Self? To say I’m this or that or that or that this or that is right or wrong misses the point.
The Pope is a good guy and should call for world peace but he’s more work to do at home so far as the church enjoys its fair share of the usual sins. Keeping people in a prison of fear and guilt doesn’t qualify as a noble calling. Didn’t Jesus say that we should remove the log in our own eye before removing splinters from other’s eyes.
Putin needs a serious taste of the lash. In Handel’s Messiah, a verse says that God “makes the rough places plane,” meaning a person who violates His laws will have his head, meaning ego, shaved off. It needn’t be a dramatic headline-grabbing death like the guillotine. It’s usually an inexorable patient quotidian grinding away of the spirit until the light in the eyes goes out. Look at Trump these days, who is a shadow of his former self. Where are the glorious rallies, the boat parades, the trucker strikes, the media frenzies? He’s lost his mojo and become a caricature of himself, a petty vindictive old man out to settle scores. Sure, a few die-hard toadies are still hanging on pandering to his gargantuan sense of insecurity, but that ship has sailed.
America is just an idea that means what you want it to mean. It is not great or not-not great. Putin is just a word that refers to a symbol of Russia, which is only what an individual thinks it is. The views expressed here are what you make of them, although this email contains a truth that stands beyond the person offering them. People often say that that person should can the “political” rants and stick to Vedanta but Vedanta is a life science. It looks at the individual with reference to the total and the total with reference to the real Self…the non-dual non-experiencing witness of it all. Assuming this perspective gives us a meaningful choice. We can see reality from within our limited minds and suffer or we can see it from the limitless perspective and enjoy. That’s freedom. The rest is just sound and fury.
Love,
James
