What to do?

I have been living in an unplanned retreat for the last two months, which is to say, in a house without television or broadband, with a phone that doesn't do Twitter and no real page on Facebook. Many younger mortals would've died from this deprivation but I am still here, feeling all the better for not having all that junk food for thought cluttering my mind. It's been so easy to tune into what's actually happening within and around me.

I've read the headlines online and can see it's the same old, same old just getting older, growing darker. I've read Khenpo Gangshar's pith instructions urging me to get the key point: nangwa, Tibetan for perception. The key to the point is that what our five sense consciousnesses encounter--a table, the ocean, spaghetti--comes through loud, clear and purely what it is: a table, the ocean, spaghetti. How we receive the unadulterated news is the mess up known as nangwa, the way we personally perceive the table, the ocean, spaghetti: yuck, yum, ho hum. Gotta have it, go away, whatever.

That we do not all see the same thing the same way has become devastatingly obvious in the headlines. Some people see "share" as a noun, "my share", and see themselves as Republicans. Others see the word "share" as a verb, "to share", and see themselves as more Democratic. Some people are so blinded by their own feelings of powerlessness, they can't even see they are fiercely embracing the powerful people who left them powerless. And of course, traditionally in every culture, powerless men make themselves feel powerful as "men" again by beating up on women. So many men are all for destroying women's health care, work rights and bodies. What courageous warriors! These times would make wondrous Goya-esque illustrations for Samsara.

Idiocy and samsara are one spinning wheel in which we do the same thing over and over again and expect to get a brand new result. That's become a staunch Republican view: cut more taxes on the rich, more services for the rest of us, more regulations to protect us from predation and pollution--and just like that the horrific problems this already caused will vanish. I can see that's become an equally staunch Democratic view too: don't do anything and it will all just go away. People saw Obama and they saw  change; now they see Obama and realize that change was about them: they didn't see straight the first time.

Samsara and insanity are like this, same scenario over and over in new costumes: the Huns, the Mongols, the Islamic hordes set upon innocent towns, burned and pillaged them just the way the private equity firms set upon, take and pillage otherwise decent businesses, leaving the employees (residents) for dead. This country was founded exactly that way: when the first colonists the Plymouth Country shipped across the ocean died before sending back anything profitable, the investors abandoned the few survivors to the wolves so they could focus on a more promising project. And eventually we got to Plymouth Rock.

I don't miss this business of being left out of what passes for valuable information. I watch the tide coming in, the boats going out, the great blue heron stalking the sea-weedy shallows, the circles that follow the slap sound of fish jumping and bask in a world much larger than myself, a world that isn't out to get me. I get how the man-made world runs today: "Just give us your money and you get hurt." 

Corporations are people and their perception of the rest of us people, their nangwa, is that we are bank accounts. Nothing more. San Francisco medical specialists refuse suffering patients like me because Medicare doesn't pay them enough (and now we get proposals to pay them even less!). American Airlines will not let me use my free miles to fly from where I am to Paris, United Airlines will let me yo-yo all over the planet to achieve that simple thing. Viking Cooking Corporation steadfastly refuses to acknowledge it released a slew of ranges with dangerously defective electronics, so I have to pay all over again for a whole new cooking appliance. The IRS, unable to go after the million dollar cheats, has gone with vengeance after us little fry caught in its sudden change of rules. Not knowing the rules had changed after I filed cost me $210 in taxes and $1000 for the CPA to figure it all out. 

I see today in the headlines that the ordinary Chinese loudly rue what's become of them since getting rich became glorious. When they see yuan, they don't see joy, but everything they've lost. They feel as hopeless as we do. Today's opinion pages carry a story about being perpetually trampled on as a nobody in America, how the powers are so in their own world, they don't even perceive us at all. 

I see in headlines that we still so badly need drugs to make things look better to us, to upgrade our nangwa so to speak,  South American drug kings are hugely profiting from getting those drugs to us under the ocean in a new submarine that all our expensive taxpayer funded equipment cannot detect. It's so much easier to attack people for using drugs than to change the reality that leads them to take them, isn't it? It's so much easier to do drugs or do TV or spend endless hours scanning Facebook than to face yourself and get real, isn't it? What reality is there in Reality TV?

My teacher says we have to keep on putting out rays of sunshine into this dark world, and that gets harder and harder. In the 9th Century Padmasambhava predicted we would live in very black times and who can argue with that? Everything learned about psychology has been used to manipulate our perception, or as Khenpo Gangshar might say: to create nangwa. Lies are running amok because so these deliberately phony nangwa have been loosed upon the planet. 

I am trying to see straight. What I can do when I don't have the distraction of TV and broadband is cook. I can feed people. Having food makes people happy; it removes the fear of death. This is beneficial. A month ago I tuned into that truth, got on the stick and magically raised enough money to buy 2,000 kilos--that's 5,000 lbs--of the most nutritious dhal, superpacks of chickpeas, black-eyed peas and kidney beans--to strengthen the bodies of Buddhist monks, nuns and schoolchildren who devote themselves to ending suffering. Because enough people cared about helping them--and even thanked me for the opportunity to do something good in this venal world --my charity, my little charity Veggiyana, just amounted to a hill of beans! 

I don't think you will see that on TV or broadband anytime soon.


~Sandy Garson"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
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