KEEPING UP
My teacher, Thrangu Rinpoche, likes to say that revenge is very bad for your health. I cannot argue now that I’m the one who fell flat on her face in a garage darkened by my vengeful refusal to replace even one of the three light bulbs the golden-haired consumers downstairs burnt out because they can never be bothered turning them off. I wanted them to fall and suffer from their own self absorption. Now I'm the one in Bandaids.
And I get to watch the gloating down there in the district of mumjumbia over the assassination of a Jordanian man named Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Evidently he was disturbing the minds of the powers that be there, wanting blood rather like a mosquito, and because we'd rather that he like mosquitoes would get out of our way, we took a big swat—talk about Raid! We had 57 in two days--and bombed the bejeezus out of him. Assassination is an Arab word. We showed them how well we learned it. The warlords of the Christian right (who could be the Christian wrong)supersized that old eye for an eye tribal retribution recipe by hunting down and brazenly killing a Muslim thug, then bragged their brains off about it with proud photos and press conferences. Ever anxious to offer wisdom, the media hunted down the relatives of his ostensive American victims, finally finding the wife of a far removed cousin of one dead hostage who said smugly: “Evil has been dealt with and I’m glad we triumphed.” Twas an evil for an evil.
My teacher says the problem with revenge is the problem of substance addiction: it feels good in the moment. You get high getting your way, then the bubbles fizz out and reality oozes in: you will need more because the other guy is going to want his revenge back on you. Ready or not the bogey man will get you if you don’t watch out. So you get taken hostage by anxiety. You flay yourself to shreds with fear: your stomach churns, your sleep fails, your body’s tense, your mind’s distracted and/or haunted—all of it draining your immune system making you even more vulnerable to biological attack, an extra added distraction.
This gets bad for economic health. Sometimes you get so nervous you build extra fortifications or hire guards or curtail your own freedom. That’s why we get to strip down to our underwear to get on an airplane, paying for the privilege of this security measure. We can’t get our own money out of our own bank without two dozen passwords and three dozen testimonials for our signature; why any minute we could see the great wall of Canada on our credit card statement. We have potholes on the highways, potheads in the schools, potlatch for the gun industry, potshots at the Geneva Convention that protected us too and all our money poured into various schemes of so-called defense of a country that is literally falling apart at its seams. Japan and Germany were the countries who triumphed in the 60s because they were the two forbidden to take revenge. Look on China and India, ye superpower falling down and be scared. Be very scared.
Yet American bumpersticker wisdom is: Don’t get mad, get even. Al Qaeda hitmen killed several thousand people, so we’ve gone ahead and killed more than twice that, the number of American dying in Iraq due to Bush revenge coming closer every day to the number killed by Bin Laden. That guy has his secret training camps so we have our secret gulag. In the world community we have come to be the cheese stands alone: a country as much a pariah as Iraq because we’re a country whose leader has sunk just like Saddam and Osama to being another harmer in the dell. I haven’t yet heard Bush praying aloud for heavenly virgins but that leering and loving attention to all the gory details in the photo of a blood stained dead man come as close to prurient as Al-Zarqawi did in his pornographic lust for violence.
We should be careful what we wish for. A bunch of black minded Middle Easterners blew up two Manhattan buildings so we in a black mood destroyed two countries —neither of them theirs. We blasted away any semblance of civilization in Iraq and any semblance of civility in America where everything we treasured as our cachet has been eroded or corroded by wire taps, torture, Executive evasion, wolf cries of secrecy, budget grabs and disregard for the financially challenged. Down here at the lowest common denominator, we so don’t want the tired, the poor, we celebrated Father’s Day with our patrimony in tatters: damn the Constitution, the Statue of Liberty, full speed ahead! We have taken care to destroy the so-called infrastructure of Iraq and if you read the daily news about schools, parks, levees, highways and train service here, you know we’ve done a damned good job of that here too. The Avengers cooked up the idea that democracy had to be spread around so they took it from here and carried it like some pot luck offering to the Persian Gulf where Iraq had an anaphylactic allergy reaction, making such a mess that nobody has it any more. So now we’re even steven.
It took Comedy Central to point out we do not show pictures of our own dead in Iraq because that could cause big protest but we did not hesitate to so proudly hail and parade the head of our enemy--just the way fearsome naked savages used to do. As it happens, American comedy is concocted from the pitfalls and pratfalls of such pettifogged arrogance. “How sweet it is,” Ralph Cramden crooned to Ed Norton as they plotted resentful vengeances years ahead of Archie Bunker. We laugh at the cartoon torments of Tom and Jerry, Donald Duck, Elmer Fudd. It’s funny how rage so distorts your perception, like fog on your eyeglasses or windshield, you never see when you rush to revenge what you’re doing or where you’re headed—like for that fall in the garage. None of the suicide squad who blew up the World Trade Towers was Iraqi, nor was Al-Zarqawi. These guys were all made in Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt but we blew up Iraq. Americans are so obsessed by convenience that since Saudi Arabia could blow our economy to smithereens in a nanosecond—talk about an inconvenient truth-- we went for the easy scapegoat, leaving our enemies good to go and us more insecure than ever. Wile E Coyote should have it so easy.
When asked what to do in the face of serious aggression, my teacher pauses with perfect comic timing, shrugs with a shy smile and says: “I don’t know. I fled.” This refers to the thousands of Tibetans who ran from the Chinese onslaught of genocide, leaving their bitterness behind. A young friend who is a poet just went “home” to Tibet where she found an old monk her family had known. He was about 30 years old when he was taken to prison and was in it for 18 years. He thus has no family now, she emailed. She asked if he gets upset thinking of those lost prime time years and he said no, we Tibetans are simple people. If he spent this time looking back he could not enjoy this freedom now.
Funny how the non-revenge of simple Tibetans turns out to be sweet. The Chinese did not win a Nobel Prize: His Holiness the Dalai Lama did. Neither Mao nor Deng is the reigning king of hearts of the Taiwanese and Hong Kong Chinese: the Buddha is because they are major supporters of the Tibetan Buddhists in exile. Even funnier is how something as horrific as the obliteration of Tibet wasn’t all bad in the end. If the egg had not been cracked, the dharma would never have leaked out to feed the minds of so many Westerners who so greatly benefit from it. Tibetans’ loss has been our gain because they put it behind them and went on. Now we have pain relief and stress management programs based on their techniques for meditation, modification in the behavior of depressives and prisoners due to their psychological insights, startling discoveries in science coming from their ancient texts.
I spent Father’s Day at a retreat studying one that is 1,200-year-old and explains how to become a truly happy person. The text by an Indian named Shantideva is called The Way of the Bodhisattva or good hearted one and it is basically a cost/benefit analysis of human behavior with regard to what makes us feel secure enough to be happy. The chapter that morning was Patience which begins this way: Hostility destroys all moral conduct, charity and reverence for wisdom that has been achieved over a long long time. No evil is there to approach hatred…Men of anger have no joy, forsaken as they are by all peace and happiness.
You can find up to the minute commentary on this in today’s headlines and soundbytes. My teacher’s commentary is: if we haven’t foreseen the results of being angry, when we are harmed by someone we will react with great anger. We will not realize the harm brought about by our enemy is minor in comparison to the harm coming from our own vengeful attitude. The usual example is that you so want to hurt someone, you pick up a hot coal and throw it. But the person ducks and goes away scot free while from contact with hot coal, you have to suffer the burn mark on your hand. (Or a fall in the garage.) The Christian commentary is: turn the other check although those Fundamentalists just butted right in.
Shantideva’s text goes on to say we should not even get angry with those who attack the symbols of our culture (in that case Buddha statues like the two at Bamyan, in our case two trade towers) because they are ONLY symbols of our pride in it: the culture continues on in us—unless we choke it out with our own anger—all of us turned into suicide bombers. In which case we’re left with nothing but the virgin territory of devastation, fear, vulnerability, hopelessness --all of which translate into dis-ease and that, as we know, is not so good for your health.
Technorati Tags: Yours In The Dharma. Sandy Garson, Dharma, Buddhist
And I get to watch the gloating down there in the district of mumjumbia over the assassination of a Jordanian man named Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Evidently he was disturbing the minds of the powers that be there, wanting blood rather like a mosquito, and because we'd rather that he like mosquitoes would get out of our way, we took a big swat—talk about Raid! We had 57 in two days--and bombed the bejeezus out of him. Assassination is an Arab word. We showed them how well we learned it. The warlords of the Christian right (who could be the Christian wrong)supersized that old eye for an eye tribal retribution recipe by hunting down and brazenly killing a Muslim thug, then bragged their brains off about it with proud photos and press conferences. Ever anxious to offer wisdom, the media hunted down the relatives of his ostensive American victims, finally finding the wife of a far removed cousin of one dead hostage who said smugly: “Evil has been dealt with and I’m glad we triumphed.” Twas an evil for an evil.
My teacher says the problem with revenge is the problem of substance addiction: it feels good in the moment. You get high getting your way, then the bubbles fizz out and reality oozes in: you will need more because the other guy is going to want his revenge back on you. Ready or not the bogey man will get you if you don’t watch out. So you get taken hostage by anxiety. You flay yourself to shreds with fear: your stomach churns, your sleep fails, your body’s tense, your mind’s distracted and/or haunted—all of it draining your immune system making you even more vulnerable to biological attack, an extra added distraction.
This gets bad for economic health. Sometimes you get so nervous you build extra fortifications or hire guards or curtail your own freedom. That’s why we get to strip down to our underwear to get on an airplane, paying for the privilege of this security measure. We can’t get our own money out of our own bank without two dozen passwords and three dozen testimonials for our signature; why any minute we could see the great wall of Canada on our credit card statement. We have potholes on the highways, potheads in the schools, potlatch for the gun industry, potshots at the Geneva Convention that protected us too and all our money poured into various schemes of so-called defense of a country that is literally falling apart at its seams. Japan and Germany were the countries who triumphed in the 60s because they were the two forbidden to take revenge. Look on China and India, ye superpower falling down and be scared. Be very scared.
Yet American bumpersticker wisdom is: Don’t get mad, get even. Al Qaeda hitmen killed several thousand people, so we’ve gone ahead and killed more than twice that, the number of American dying in Iraq due to Bush revenge coming closer every day to the number killed by Bin Laden. That guy has his secret training camps so we have our secret gulag. In the world community we have come to be the cheese stands alone: a country as much a pariah as Iraq because we’re a country whose leader has sunk just like Saddam and Osama to being another harmer in the dell. I haven’t yet heard Bush praying aloud for heavenly virgins but that leering and loving attention to all the gory details in the photo of a blood stained dead man come as close to prurient as Al-Zarqawi did in his pornographic lust for violence.
We should be careful what we wish for. A bunch of black minded Middle Easterners blew up two Manhattan buildings so we in a black mood destroyed two countries —neither of them theirs. We blasted away any semblance of civilization in Iraq and any semblance of civility in America where everything we treasured as our cachet has been eroded or corroded by wire taps, torture, Executive evasion, wolf cries of secrecy, budget grabs and disregard for the financially challenged. Down here at the lowest common denominator, we so don’t want the tired, the poor, we celebrated Father’s Day with our patrimony in tatters: damn the Constitution, the Statue of Liberty, full speed ahead! We have taken care to destroy the so-called infrastructure of Iraq and if you read the daily news about schools, parks, levees, highways and train service here, you know we’ve done a damned good job of that here too. The Avengers cooked up the idea that democracy had to be spread around so they took it from here and carried it like some pot luck offering to the Persian Gulf where Iraq had an anaphylactic allergy reaction, making such a mess that nobody has it any more. So now we’re even steven.
It took Comedy Central to point out we do not show pictures of our own dead in Iraq because that could cause big protest but we did not hesitate to so proudly hail and parade the head of our enemy--just the way fearsome naked savages used to do. As it happens, American comedy is concocted from the pitfalls and pratfalls of such pettifogged arrogance. “How sweet it is,” Ralph Cramden crooned to Ed Norton as they plotted resentful vengeances years ahead of Archie Bunker. We laugh at the cartoon torments of Tom and Jerry, Donald Duck, Elmer Fudd. It’s funny how rage so distorts your perception, like fog on your eyeglasses or windshield, you never see when you rush to revenge what you’re doing or where you’re headed—like for that fall in the garage. None of the suicide squad who blew up the World Trade Towers was Iraqi, nor was Al-Zarqawi. These guys were all made in Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt but we blew up Iraq. Americans are so obsessed by convenience that since Saudi Arabia could blow our economy to smithereens in a nanosecond—talk about an inconvenient truth-- we went for the easy scapegoat, leaving our enemies good to go and us more insecure than ever. Wile E Coyote should have it so easy.
When asked what to do in the face of serious aggression, my teacher pauses with perfect comic timing, shrugs with a shy smile and says: “I don’t know. I fled.” This refers to the thousands of Tibetans who ran from the Chinese onslaught of genocide, leaving their bitterness behind. A young friend who is a poet just went “home” to Tibet where she found an old monk her family had known. He was about 30 years old when he was taken to prison and was in it for 18 years. He thus has no family now, she emailed. She asked if he gets upset thinking of those lost prime time years and he said no, we Tibetans are simple people. If he spent this time looking back he could not enjoy this freedom now.
Funny how the non-revenge of simple Tibetans turns out to be sweet. The Chinese did not win a Nobel Prize: His Holiness the Dalai Lama did. Neither Mao nor Deng is the reigning king of hearts of the Taiwanese and Hong Kong Chinese: the Buddha is because they are major supporters of the Tibetan Buddhists in exile. Even funnier is how something as horrific as the obliteration of Tibet wasn’t all bad in the end. If the egg had not been cracked, the dharma would never have leaked out to feed the minds of so many Westerners who so greatly benefit from it. Tibetans’ loss has been our gain because they put it behind them and went on. Now we have pain relief and stress management programs based on their techniques for meditation, modification in the behavior of depressives and prisoners due to their psychological insights, startling discoveries in science coming from their ancient texts.
I spent Father’s Day at a retreat studying one that is 1,200-year-old and explains how to become a truly happy person. The text by an Indian named Shantideva is called The Way of the Bodhisattva or good hearted one and it is basically a cost/benefit analysis of human behavior with regard to what makes us feel secure enough to be happy. The chapter that morning was Patience which begins this way: Hostility destroys all moral conduct, charity and reverence for wisdom that has been achieved over a long long time. No evil is there to approach hatred…Men of anger have no joy, forsaken as they are by all peace and happiness.
You can find up to the minute commentary on this in today’s headlines and soundbytes. My teacher’s commentary is: if we haven’t foreseen the results of being angry, when we are harmed by someone we will react with great anger. We will not realize the harm brought about by our enemy is minor in comparison to the harm coming from our own vengeful attitude. The usual example is that you so want to hurt someone, you pick up a hot coal and throw it. But the person ducks and goes away scot free while from contact with hot coal, you have to suffer the burn mark on your hand. (Or a fall in the garage.) The Christian commentary is: turn the other check although those Fundamentalists just butted right in.
Shantideva’s text goes on to say we should not even get angry with those who attack the symbols of our culture (in that case Buddha statues like the two at Bamyan, in our case two trade towers) because they are ONLY symbols of our pride in it: the culture continues on in us—unless we choke it out with our own anger—all of us turned into suicide bombers. In which case we’re left with nothing but the virgin territory of devastation, fear, vulnerability, hopelessness --all of which translate into dis-ease and that, as we know, is not so good for your health.
Technorati Tags: Yours In The Dharma. Sandy Garson, Dharma, Buddhist
posted by Sandy Garson @ 7:48 PM
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