The Age of Integrity

What has become very clear to all who are interested in global issues, revealed through mainstream and social media, is the absence of true leadership.  The ways in which absolute power corrupts absolutely are being revealed day by day. The young are more affected by this because they  weigh the meaning of their lives with what they observe from the outside.

Because the power of rulers is mostly about control and intimidation, the world for them is not a place of texture and diversity. Everything must be managed and dominated.  Even those who instill systems of justice live under the constant threat of being dethroned. The rulers who stay in power longer, it seems, are those who have behind them the military, the media, other superpowers, and the determination to do whatever they must to stay in power, including killing their citizens.

War may appear to be about land and resources, but is, if we look deeper, about something else. It is about controlling the imagination and creativity of human nature.  It is about ideologies that keep people in fear and doubt about their own power. There must be war to interrupt the capacity for people to organize and gain knowledge. Hatred and fear of femininity, of homosexuality, of the poor, of social justice, is inflamed in order to keep us suspicious of our nature - the means to be fully engaged humans.

The war is against humanity, the environment, and nature. The war is against the future, against hope, against love and compassion, and against the capacity we all possess to change our world.

If we fail to find the integrity to create justice in our communities, to fight injustice, then we shall feel Orwell's 1984, and Atwood's Oryx and Crake, very intimately.  We shall live in the trenches of WWI, in Sarajevo, in Syria and all the other places of siege.

Integrity is not a political party or a club.  It requires our conscience to question our representatives, those given positional power, our community, our church, and our selves. It requires mindfulness, diligence, and most of all - insight.

There are no instructions on how to lead a life of integrity.  Our friends and family will not applaud. The subject won't be made into a Hollywood blockbuster. There will be no Nobel prizes for those who build the world for the good of all. (Nobel winners such as the Dalai Lama and Nelson Mandela are two who have been recognized but most of the integral work is done by millions who are never recognized.) It will go unnoticed by mass media - in fact, blacked out, just as any sign of civil engagement is intentionally censored there. All we have is our determination to seek and act upon truth, to do what we believe is right, and to live in love and compassion.

However, if this age of integrity doesn't come to pass in thought and action, life will not be worth living.

I think the most important thing to remember though - is that the terror and destruction our world has endured is not accidental.  It is not simply through ignorance and the failure of humanity to live in peace. It is the strategy of abusive power to keep the masses powerless through chaos and violence.

The point is not to kill those who have power but to replace their power with our own power - that which loves our grand-children, and is integral to the survival of life on this planet.

Design the Future Based on the Truths that Nurture Us

Yesterday’s shooting at a Sikh Temple in Wisconsin is only 16 days after the shooting in Aurora at a midnight screening of the latest Batman movie.

Whether you believe this is part of an elitist conspiracy to break down civil society by brainwashing unstable men, or whether America is being punished by God for allowing liberal views, or that the invisible hand  (the economy) is creating despair – one thing is certain – the  violence that has been glorified for the colonization of other countries and the exploitation of the masses for the profit of a few, has been brought home. No-one is spared.  No place is safe. No prayers or ideology will fix this until most of the people on this planet realize we are all in this together.

Chris Hedges notes this day in 1945 when “the United States demonstrated that it was as morally bankrupt as the Nazi machine it had recently vanquished”.  This was the bombing of Hiroshima, and Nagasaki three days later. Hedges calls it “an act of mass annihilation” when the Japanese were about to surrender.

War does not bring peace, not a better standard of living for the masses, or an example for establishing workable communities – what it does achieve is social and cultural alienation.

I see the age in which we live (modern age) as being an age that succeeded in separating  power  from life.  Every century has defined and re-defined the war between a reverence for and the degradation of life.

We live in a time where power has been so centralized and violence so internalized that the distinctions between war and peace, duty and civility, wealth and poverty, truth and lies, have no meaning in the public sphere at all. We are the victims of our nations’ foreign policies.  We live in the theatre of other powers’ fantasies.

What can we do to defend life? 

First we must organize on the principles of a life sustaining power-from-within.  This means we design the future based on the truths that have nurtured our lives.  Love, support, health, nutrition, rest and freedom from violence. It’s not rocket science, it’s not fireworks and it’s not entertainment.  But we are the stewards of that which we value.

We could give up the notion of power over others, of superiority, and consumerism. We have no need to compare ourselves with others or to compete – these are instruments of propaganda to alienate us from our own worth.

The life we want is the life we make, and we are on the bridge of the next age. 

How Oppressive Power Needs Its Own Mythology

Gary Younge, in his recent Guardian article, titled  The world as seen by Republicans, in a land of myth and amnesia lists the mythologies that drive the Republican political movement in the US.


Younge points out many conservatives believe the problems of America are caused by foreigners or foreign influences. "For a core group of Republicans "foreign" has become an epithet – a slur willfully blurring the distinction between non-American, un-American, liberal, non-Christian and non-white."


Onlookers, including Gary Younge, understand this is part of an election strategy to beat the Democrats by targeting Obama's right to be president.

"This is of course a proxy for race made popular by the birthers, who, despite all the evidence, insist Obama was born in Kenya. In a world where direct racial attacks are out of bounds, "foreign" becomes a useful metaphor. This man, it says, is essentially not like us or even from us. 

Branding him Muslim, as though this too were in itself an insult, has the same function. A recent poll revealed the proportion of Republicans who believe Obama is Muslim has doubled since 2008 and now stands at almost a third. The trouble with these dog whistles is now that everyone can hear them they are scarcely worthy of the name."

But the end result has a much more ominous outcome from a nation whose Foreign Policies have dominated the rest of the world since World War II, when another party almost dominated Europe by creating mythologies and branding scapegoats.  The whole structure of European societies were destroyed almost beyond repair.


Just as the Nazi's segregated the Jews, who had been part of European societies for centuries, the Republicans are segregating African Americans as being un-American.


After the defeat of the Nazi's, tremendous energy was put into rebuilding civil society, which then helped to bring about freedom and a better standard of living. Which then tragically funneled into  consumerism.


Centralized power controls global business, media and government, and is in the process of destroying civil society absolutely, because it is the enlightenment and education of global citizens that hold the greatest threat to their absolute domination. 


It is at this point where power no longer needs to pretend it takes care of, or protects the people, because life itself becomes redundant.  But once we deconstruct the mythologies of leadership and power, we can construct new mythologies that revere the power of diversity and the means to our survival.

Senryu

Imagine 

all the people

living

This senryu is an homage to the song "Imagine" written by John Lennon. It was released, according to Wikipedia, in 1971 as a single, and then again in 1975 with the album "Shaved Fish".


I think this song is one of the most popular anthems to peace and Lennon's words resonate as much today as they did then.  

How is your sic-o-meter?

Is your skin uploading too much information these days? Do you see strange reports on Facebook and Twitter?  Phrases quoted, beliefs expressed, coming from the mouths of those who should know better? Are you wondering what happened to our leaders and our stateswomen?  Do you ask why there is no good news anywhere?

Well you have joined the world as you perceive it.  Your body is now a nervous substrate of all the information you read, see and hear.  Your sic-o-meter is working.

If you feel there is nothing you can do to respond effectively to all this noise, you are not alone.  What I think might be happening to your mind-body receptor (and mine) is the convergence of all those tweets, headlines and status updates. They are pureed into a felt-sense of the world which may feel like you are well-informed.

This puree, already containing your tribal associations, your habits and prejudices, will blend with external information. Rationally you may think that a mud slide in the Kootenays doesn't affect you, or that suicide bombers in Pakistan are not a threat to your loved ones.  You may not even stay awake at night worrying about climate change outside of a heat wave in summer.  You may receive the hourly news with equanimity and calm as though all the bad things just happen to others.

But our sic-o-meter could be working a lot better if we are able to see the many ways in which we are connected to this world.  If any news story elicits empathy for those who are personally affected, then our sic-o-meter does more than hear and internalize the 'out-there'. It tells us how we can respond, emotionally, intellectually, and physically to the world we live in, so that we are not powerless, not simply sitting in the audience watching a movie.

This doesn't mean taking sides. Or giving all our savings to charity. Or declaring our political opinions with everyone we meet.  The way in which you or I can respond is as a member of this global human family.  It is compassion not judgement, that gives us the power to respond authentically.  Judgement  without empathy is an alienation technique that gives us the fleeting sense of being innocent bystanders.  We are not, we are stakeholders.

Water for Elephants - intentional spoiler alert

Last night I watched the movie Water for Elephants directed by Francis Lawrence, starring Reese Witherspoon, Robert Pattinson and Christoph Waltz.  The quality of the production was very good.  The acting, scenery, camera work, was all excellent.  But all this was lost under the endless frames of violence.

The bulk of the storyline, which was potentially a very good storyline, was filled with scenes of brutality, oppression and denigration of human and animal life. Frame after frame showed us just how depraved and brutal, the circus owner was.  After half an hour you get it.  The owner, August, clearly a psychopath, created his world based on the premise that you must beat down the life force in all living creatures - even those you profess to love, until all that remains is unquestioning obedience through fear.

The mainline story is about the love between a runaway hired hand, a vet student who was called away from his exams when his parents were killed in a car accident, and the circus owner's wife who is the "star performance".

The movie starts out with so much promise and descends into a tale of good versus evil; showing us how evil August is, and how good the hero is.  How beauty and innocense is raped over and over again for one and a half hours, while the love story ending gets about twenty minutes.

Why spoil such good storylines with so much emphasis on the violence?  Is it to make sure that everyone, no matter how stupid or numb, gets it? Is it because of the touted notion that violence and sex sells?

For me, the beauty of the elephant, the costumes, the actors, was crushed under the same hammer until my insides were so enraged that I was shaking. Yes I know its a movie and that it isn't real, but it isn't just the visuals that enrage me, its the consistent elevation of violence in entertainment, and what it does to our nervous substrate, that makes me so angry.

The book, written by Sara Gruen, is reviewed by bestsellers.com, and it says

Water for Elephants moves between the story of the traveling circus in 1930 to the story of the older Jacob’s fight to maintain sanity. While most of Water for Elephants is about the circus, the chapters about the older Jacob provide a depth to the novel and a poignancy to the story that makes the whole book richer and more real.

So why did this story that had so much cinematic potential become drowned in brutality? It would likely have cost millions to create.  Is there a message that the backers required from the movie in order to get their funding?  How does violence observed work within the senses when it is overemphasized? What does it do to young imaginations as they learn to participate in their community?

The Power of Insight

The fifth of the five spiritual powers is the power of insight. Thich Nhat Hanh maintains that the power of insight "is a sword that cuts painlessly through all kinds of suffering, including fear, despair, anger, and discrimination." He goes on to say that an insight is more than a notion and Hanh's key teaching is the insight of impermanence.

I look for stability through democracy and social justice perhaps because it offers some comfort that others might do unto me as I would do to them.



Because of my attachment to social justice I act according to what I believe is just and fair. I raise my family on ideas of justice and kindness and empathy.   Self-interest to me is contributing to a world guided by laws based on a reverence for life.

But at the moment what I hear and see in the news, in social media, on the internet, on the radio, goes against all the notions of justice, kindness and empathy. I feel outraged not just because I fear something bad will happen to me or my loved ones, but because I believe that when we get rid of that social contract built on the golden rule then all that remains is fear, despair, anger and discrimination.

As I look deeply into this problem I realize that my community is rich with many acts of social justice and kindness. Every day yields signs of  this. One on one, in small business, there are many acts of generosity, signs of care and concern. The violence that fills media is happening to someone else. But this insight does not make me feel better, or powerful.

Hearing about the massacre of women and children in Houla chills my bones even though it is far away from my children and grand-children. Yet impermanence suggests there is nothing to guarantee the safety of my loved ones - that the justice I expect today will not always be here. But impermanence means also that I can't anticipate how we will deal with this horror and how we will respond to it on a global scale.

So as I watch my expectations eroding in the face of impermanence, feeling absolutely powerless to find a response that is likely to hold what I value, all that remains is the civil acts I do here and now.  And these acts demand more than the golden rule - they demand compassion.