The Art of Power by Thich Nhat Hanh

"To me a civilised society is one where people have the time to live their daily lives deeply, to love and take care of their family and community" wrote Thich Nhat Hanh in his book The Art of Power.

The cover slip says "Power is good for one thing only: to increase our happiness and the happiness of others. Being peaceful and happy is the most important thing in our lives and yet most of the time we suffer, we run after our cravings, we look to the past or the future for our happiness".

The world renowned Vietnamese monk laid out five spiritual powers: faith, diligence, mindfulness, concentration and insight. Under each of these he explains how they work as powers. However, none of these tools are like new apps that you can purchase and install for your hand held device. They are gained by practice, by constant mindfulness. And after the discipline we must learn how to handle power skillfully through cutting off our cravings, offering love and cultivating insight.

None of this is new. It's as ancient as the Buddha himself. Sound as the teachings of Jesus, the leadership of Moses and the courage of Mohammed. It's not rocket science; the lessons are not difficult to read, and you don't have to have an Einsteinian IQ to understand. Also there are many popular books about power that offer similar teachings. They are saying that true power comes from within, and if we practice what they preach, we shall be powerful and happy. Every generation has great thinkers and great teachers, capable of imparting the power of their knowledge on the rest of us.

Are the teachings of Thich Nhat Hanh, Simone Weil, Martin Luther King, Jr., Pema Chodron, Eckhart Tolle, the Dalai Lama - simply new ideologies that could turn against the humanity it proposes to revere, if they suddenly possessed hegemonic weapons?

Why is the measure of power in our current world most noted in terms of its ability to control through death and destruction?  Why do right wing political campaigns appear to win on the premise that fear works? How is it that power, as we have learned it, turns people and institutions into monsters?

Why are some of us, so impressed with this kind of power?

Well, at the moment, I would guess that it takes less effort to avoid self-interrogation, and so we do what is easiest.  In this way we enable bullies, we support systems of oppression.

For me, the difference between the teachings of Thich Nhat Hanh and other ideologies is the former values life itself and others promote exploitation.

Ultimately it is up to us how we investigate, probe, question and interrogate all the information that competes for our attention. The way of moving forward without causing more pain in this world is through love and hope, and the understanding that even though I am not in control of the world, I am part of its desire to thrive.

New Fruit on American Trees

 

146 sculls hang among the leaves

as if an image is needed

for us to see how love for guns

is greater than our love for children

if this were a democracy

if the sanctity of life came first

we would choose life over guns

and profit

but those who enabled this killing 

will watch more to come tomorrow

trying to do their job

without thinking or feeling

—it costs too much to be human

in this manufactured silence

as if everything is okay

easier to be 

a job description

Henry Giroux: Cult of Violence Inseparable from Cult of Authoritarianism and Neoliberal Fascism

 

"the modern Republican Party not only endorses calls for violence by members of its own party, including those made by Paul Gosar, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and others, but it has also become a party that openly views violence as a legitimate way to secure its desired political outcomes — to seize power and destroy democracy. Rather than being alarmed by violence, the Republican Party has created the conditions that suggest it wishes for even more." 

Read the whole article here: https://truthout.org/articles/to-end-mass-shootings-we-need-to-change-the-deeper-structure-of-life-in-the-us/?

Political Organization: rights or responsibility

 

We live in a universal casino. Our leaders have left us to cope with greed and gun violence.  Policy wonks throw a dice to make decisions on what needs to be done as we shall watch our institutions fail, fall apart, dissolve into the meanest most base outcomes.

Climate change is happening and we are selling oil mining opportunities to other nations. Provinces are giving up on health care. Everything has been corrupted except for the people who have brought children into the world, the people who are parents, teachers, nurses, health practitioners, and the philosophers who are anxious about the well-being of people.

Options for our shared future have been sold today as they are often sold by those we trust to use their power responsibly, and the fifth estate scraping by with whatever stories they can get to print, often giving up on real journalism while fascist nations penalize reporters who are trying to do a good job.

The mood now suggests that to care about the world is naive and dangerous, better to make a quick buck if you can then hide in your basement, castle or another planet. Virtue is dead. Soon we shall all have guns and trucks. We shall forget music and art, nature, comfort and warmth.

 Scenes of fear, greed, hunger and spite as shown in Les Miserables, The Handmaids Tale, 1984, dominate our entertainment. Those brave souls who attempt to save lives cannot cope forever with the storms of public fear and rage. When we run away to somewhere safe we find there is no safe place. Everything becomes open territory after civil society has been destroyed in our imaginations.

The usefulness of life will capitalize the streets. Pornography will be the public commons. Torture becomes live entertainment. Children kidnapped as slave labour or left to starve on the streets. 

Why? Because the public imagination has been co-opted into the authority of the market and every generation is fed with contempt for any idea that suggests we should care for one another. That each one of us is responsible for the moral guidance of our society. That doesn't mean control, it means influence. How can you and I influence a society when kindness is replaced with a gun?

It's a problem of astronomical proportions. All our power begins in the imagination. If we cannot believe that we have something good to offer the world it's because we have been brainwashed with fear and hatred. Contempt for life. 

Institutions that once protected us have become redundant and the only noise a contest on how to get control, to win, get powerful. Do you think this is an accident that we came to this? Be hopeless or find the "enemy" and kill them. 

And while we feel like we are fighting for our lives, we seek scapegoats, our sentiments become more fixated on the enemy, we (yes we because these are sold to us as solutions) have chosen. 

The endgame becomes the war. Our passions which might have loved and helped those who are at risk are funnelled into killing. This has been the pattern since the Roman empire. Hate and torture are the "answers" to fix that which is our humanity - fragile feelings, lovingkindness, empathy, critical thinking and feeling.

Sentiments that build community, the village, the family, our cousins and our elders are ridiculed as soft while guns and bombs wipe the slate of our senses, so that all we see and seek is power.

Then we are shocked when a teenage boy brings a gun into an elementary school and kills twenty children! 

What is Weakness?

 

It took me years to understand that words are often as important as experience, because words make experience last. William Morris https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/william_morris

Weak is an overused word, a criticism for those who are not in the same party as you. When you go for a job interview you may be asked what your greatest weaknesses are. But I am looking at the accusations found in news articles. The popular kind of behaviours called weak. 

"All cruelty springs from weakness" said Lucius Annaeus Seneca. (Roman Statesman 5 - 65 AD. Brainyquotes.com)

Two thousand years after Seneca was born, no commentator said the young man who gunned down innocent shoppers in Buffalo was suffering from weakness. The event was cruel to be sure, and his manifesto quoted misinformation from White Supremacists, but no commentator of note called the movement weak. To cause such havoc would appear to be powerful in effect. 

Weakness seems so opposite to violence, war, racism and hate, because it causes so much suffering. But should the general population rise up and go to war against racism? What country or continent is without racism?

White Supremacy is a weakness built on lies and the abuse of all who are not white. I have used the words mental illness before but it doesn't help anyone who is held up as powerful. The word evil is packed with power, so the gunman who shot innocent shoppers last week has been called evil. However in this climate where evil is a threat and therefore has power, and actually threatens the entire planet, can we find the actual cause and a medicine for it?

Is our entire human endeavour to fight cruelty weak? Are we who live lives of love and nature weak? Can we accept we are not in control and war will not fix cruelty no matter how brave and strong our military might be?

To not do anything to fight injustice is weak, to believe we can change things is weak, to ignore the struggles of those who put themselves in danger's way is weak, to criticize who who stand up against injustice is weak, to look away when you see someone being hurt is weak, to side with the bullies is weak, to be cynical is weak, a government who doesn't fight for what is right is weak.

No matter how loud or confident 'a leader' may sound if he does not side with the afflicted he is weak because he/she is not doing his/her job. To not be sure when to step in and defend those who are bullied is weak but war is not a way out. To not understand that missiles and bombs cannot defend anyone is weak. To throw money at the arms industry without helping those who have been harmed is weak. To join a group without saying what you know to be true is weak. To buy things just for your own pleasure that encourages inequality is weak. To not speak truth because you fear losing your job is weak.

We are all weak at times but to pretend you are never weak or wrong is weak and what will come of it is far more dangerous than the original problem.

When Power Becomes You

 

"If America and the world should have learned anything from the first Gilded Age and the fascism that began growing like a cancer in the 1920s, it’s that gross inequalities of income and wealth fuel gross inequalities of political power — which in turn lead to strongmen who destroy both democracy and freedom." https://robertreich.substack.com/p/the-anti-democracy-movement?

My family and friends are sick of me bringing up the word "Power", as well as my theories about politics. I love my family and friends and don't wish to sicken them but I still feel the need to express the emotional and intellectual struggle inside. 

Now I don't have any special insights and knowledge to enlighten the world but I have a passion which drives me to keep writing and speaking.

Stay strong I tell myself but I am sickened by news of young men carrying guns to supermarket where customers are predominantly African-American. On a previous occasion I was sickened to view a short video of a woman struggling to walk with a walker when a younger woman came up behind and pushed her over.

The basest message in that video: whoever is weaker than you just push them over.

When I was at school 60 years ago there were kids who would run up to you and push you over just because they felt like it.  The advice given was: Just hit them back,  you must not be soft or you'll be a target forever.

Forget being top of the class or pretty or popular, just be the best fighter. Britain had survived centuries of invasion by worldly bullies from larger countries but it also became a bully itself. Training its sons to fight back even when they were not attacked.

When I first came to Canada and started work my focus was on winning the war on success because wherever I felt vulnerable or afraid I was a failure. Every day in my early life I worked on that binary. Was I a winner or a loser and every event where I felt vulnerable I had to shape up. While I didn't know it, I became a bully, determined not to let anyone get the better of me.

My ego was my world and all it's "truths" were filtered through my sad, lonely internal voice. I suffered rage and depression trying to navigate a personality who only wins and never loses. One minute I was winning and the next, losing.

One day I recall feeling my blood boil, I went out for a walk, and for the first time in my life, I felt I needed to hurt someone or something. This really frightened me because I never had the courage to go out and hurt someone purposely, just to hurt them. I had lived my life trying to get along wherever I was.

However I couldn't see how my thoughts and opinions hurt those I loved or liked or needed. A toxic broken ego eventually realized it was not success but vanity and I changed my values. The world I needed was of loving kindness even though there were examples of kind gentle spirits being disregarded.  I had to learn and do things differently. 

The wealth of community, friends, curiosity was my wealth, my reward. So rather than seek "achievements" I began to seek fellowship where the fear of losing was replaced with support. I became part of something larger - humanity.

The trick  is to find enough information to connect your mind and heart. My power is to feel, to see, to think and to care about all who live in this world on this fragile planet. You are the power you seek - to write, paint, give birth, organize, listen, think and sometimes to weep.

Counter Racist Attacks: Examine Your Views

 

1. What is race? Is it history, colour of skin or shape of eyes? When we see someone who does not look like us, do we know who they are? How many struggles they fought and overcame, how much money they earn or how much education they have? Is it what they wear? Hijab or kippah? Their hair shape or colour?

Truth is we don't know. It's a label passed down for generations. Any generalization - such as 'well organized', or rich - removes the reality of that particular individual as if knowing the heritage of someone means we don't have to know them personally. For example - a man who is white can operate on privilege and assume his views represent reality. Once I make a generalization I don't need to inquire, I assume.

This is a habit that's hard to break for me even as I know it's destructive. 

(a) Many of the Protestant English families who live in South of England have two children. (b)They are emotionally invested in material comfort and (c) two is perfect. A single child is alone, (d) two gives the child company without adding to the  population, (e) more than two is a sign they don't have access to contraceptives or that they are Roman Catholic, Muslim or Jewish.

Five assumptions I made without checking statistics. Generalizing is a habit I grew up with and believed it proved I was "informed". This is privilege. I cannot feel the harm I do by my assumptions.

Many years ago I stated innocently "I assume ..." and a friend said "You can't assume anything" meaning I would not be criminally charged but my opinion might not be right.

In the "White, Protestant, Christian world" - people express opinions. It's normal. Like saying "what a lovely sunny day" to a stranger passing, whose name and life I know nothing about.

These habits lead to statements like "everybody knows this" in response to news articles or group conversations.

The privileged live in the land of "Everyone Knows This!" The assumption that we are normal and what we believe is reality.

2. Poverty, Homelessness. If I have managed to earn enough for food and shelter then everyone can. I am not special.

I am not a recent immigrant but my accent is still English. Somewhat like the Duchess of Cornwall. There are people who don't like the English because of what we have done to colonial people. I personally am horrified, sickened, to hear of all this, but I must keep open to the pain my people have caused indigenous people, African people brought to Canada and US by slavery, minorities such as Jews and Muslims. I must also feel discomfort knowing that my father, brother, grandfather and uncles, have bullied their wives and mothers through male supremacy, without being aware of it.

3. My personal attitudes. Watching Ridley Road on PBS I am stunned that Nazi's were attacking Jews in the early 1960's. That it was dangerous to wear religious symbols that were not Christian. Not because the Crucifix is a better symbol than the Jewish star or the Muslim crescent moon but the assumption that Britain is a Christian nation. Yes there were public schools that used "The Lord's Prayer" during morning assemblies, but since Britain had colonized Canada, India, Australia - their people being part of "The Commonwealth" were "welcome" to live in England. Yet there are anti-immigrant sentiments in all these nations. Mostly expressed by settled white European people, who, like me, are ignorant of the pain "we" have caused while expressing our opinions with unearned confidence.

4. Education. Throughout my adult life I have wanted to learn more. My punctured ego likes the idea of adult education. Mostly because I want to believe my mind is educated. Having never been good at math, science, or sports, I have stuck with the arts. I learned that the arts are essential to our mental and economic health. For example I have been inspired by Thomas King's stories, the gut wrenching poetry of Patrick Lane, the gentle searing truth expressed in Jan Zwicky's poems, and others. I have also made fabulous friends through the arts. Apart from learning that I am not as smart as I thought I was, I began to rethink the beauty of the teachers who brought me out of my own dark assumptions. The idea that I don't know everything and I am not in control has been a welcome ointment for depressed and anxious soul.

Furthermore I have much gratitude towards African American and Canadian people, the Chinese immigrants, the Jewish people who were my teachers and doctors, and later my friends. My heart was saved by the Welsh, Scottish and Irish people who I noticed had songs, dance and poetry - while I couldn't identify this culture in the London area of England. 

Is the arts an overflow from the threat of the Capitalist hierarchy of this age that demands life becomes profit for a few? I do not blame the privileged and rich - they are also my friends. I do not blame the authoritarian politics. Blame is unaffordable in this age of so much hate and destruction. What this planet and all who depend on it really needs is friends, compassion and social justice. 

These cannot be found from my ego. I must own the problems that really scare me. The world is what we make of it. If we only want entertainment and fun, we cannot help to heal our world. If we only want things, community will die of neglect. If we only want wealth we shall be enslaved and become robots.