Good Song: Nobody Asks

Here's insight we can use.

In this short meditation, Rusty Ring favourite Peter Mayer sums up the lesson we all should have learned long ago, but that many – perhaps the majority – of us are still sulking over.

Candid elaboration on the Zen notion of dependent co-arising, as applied to the human condition (a subordinate form I prefer to call co-dependent arising), the whole track consists of little more than Peter's own voice and guitar, enhanced here and there with a ghostly violin at the edges. It all adds up to power that commands attention, and a sedate simplicity our sort esteem.

Another cut from Peter's excellent album Heaven Below.

I've got this on frequent rotation these days, as I absorb demands to take arms against successive waves of faceless, vaguely defined offenders. Give it a click; see if it doesn't help to keep you on-task as well.


NOBODY ASKS
by Peter Mayer

Nobody asks to be born
They just show up one day at life’s door
Saying here I am world
I’m a boy, I’m a girl
I'm rich, I am sick, I am poor

Nobody asks to be born

No one is given a say
They’re just thrown straight into the fray
The bell rings at ringside
And someone yells fight
Some just end up on the floor

Nobody asks to be born

And no one’s assured
Of a grade on the curve
Or a friend they can trust
Or a house where they’re loved
And no life includes
A book of how-to
Because nobody has lived it before

So to all the living be kind
Bless the saint and the sinner alike
And when babies arrive
With their unholy cries
Don’t be surprised by their scorn

Nobody asks to be born

WW: Bodhisattva Day is 20 March!

(That's me in my cardigan on Bodhisattva Day 2014. This year Bodhisattva Day falls on Thursday – i.e., tomorrow. For information on the bodhisattva principle, Bodhisattva Day, and how to participate,
click this link.)

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

Good Video: A Disquistion On The Nature Of Idiocy

"Whenever I'm about to do something, I think, 'Would an idiot do that?', and if they would, I do not do that thing."

This is the opening statement in the above-embedded excerpt from a Northwestern commencement address by Illinois governor JB Pritzer. It caught my ear because it reminded me of my own rule of thumb: Nothing stupid is Buddhist. Listening further, I found similar agreement with several more of the governor's insights. Take this one:

"The best way to spot an idiot: look for the person who is cruel."

Been relying on this one since childhood. Beware: it's not just for those you dislike. For example, though I long binned ideology as the only thing dumber than dogma, I live mostly on the left. And these days, I'm surrounded by fellow travellers who believe focussed cruelty is an effective retort to racism, classism, homophobia, sexism, religious bigotry, sexual predation, a catch-all crime called "insensitivity", and literally any other arrogance conceivable by monkeys. And so they ramp about, rightwinging anybody they can spin into a target.

Which is why I'm uneasy in their company. Because without you're an idiot, you know that sooner or later, by that standard, we all hang.

The governor does have a somewhat outdated view of our evolution, however. As I recently explained, far from securing our survival, we had to skim our ancestors' reptilian instincts off the gene pool to avoid them scrubbing us. But Pritzer is exact when he points out that empathy and compassion are evolved states. They are in fact seminal to our extraordinary run on this planet.

So the cruelty so fashionable to this era can't be forgiven as innate. The vicious make a conscious human choice.

No natural selection there. Just a mountain of karma.

Anyhow, I won't spoil the rest of the video for you. It's an excellent – one might say, prophetic – 3 minutes, that quite stands on its own.

Be sure to note Governor Pritzer's closing declaration. That we've so long allowed cultural authorities to teach us and our children the opposite reflects poorly on our own selective fitness.

I respectfully propose that reversing this trend is the essence of engaged Zen.

Good Song: Don't Judge a Life

If you don't know John Gorka, you should know John Gorka.

Few artists sing the human heart like John. A number of his songs sum up affecting moments of my life in ways that not only people my isolation, they help me understand what happened.

But in this case he's addressing a wider problem. The immediate topic is fellow poet and good friend Bill Morrissey, who possessed much the same gift as John's, had much the same sort of career – ignored by the machine, adored by initiates – and died in 2011 from complications of a dissolute life.

An Amazon reviewer who knew Bill quoted him from a conversation they'd had:

"Most everybody knows that I've had some rough sledding for the last few years, including my well-known battle with the booze. A couple of years ago I was diagnosed as bipolar and I am on medication for depression, but sometimes the depression is stronger than the medication.

"When the depression hits that badly, I can't eat and I can barely get out of bed. Everything is moving in the right direction now, and throughout all of this I have continued to write and write and write."

And then he was gone.

Don't Judge a Life – bookend to Peter Mayer's Japanese Bowl, spinning the issue from first to second person – is a reminder we all need on a daily basis. I particularly like this part:

Reserve your wrath for those who judge
Those quick to point and hold a grudge
Take them to task who only lead
While others pay, while others bleed

Readers with a solid base in Christian ethics will instantly recognise the source of this counsel. The same precept in the Buddhist canon is a little less explicit, but our teachings on bodhisattva nature clearly endorse and require it.

And both faiths stand firmly on the last verse.

DON'T JUDGE A LIFE
by John Gorka

Don't judge a life by the way it ends
Losing the light as night descends
For we are here and then we're gone
Remnants to reel and carry on

Endings are rare when all is well
Yes and the tale easy to tell
Stories of lives drawn simplified
As if the facts were cut and dried

Don't judge a life as if you knew
Like you were there and saw it through
Measure a life by what was best
When they were better than the rest

Reserve your wrath for those who judge
Those quick to point and hold a grudge
Take them to task who only lead
While others pay, while others bleed

Tapping the keys in a life of rhyme
Ending the tune and standard time
Silence fills the afternoon
A long long way to gone too soon

Don't judge a life by the way it ends
Losing the light as night descends
A chance to love is what we've got
For we are here and then
We're not

(Photo courtesy of Jos van Vliet and Wikimedia Commons.)

Hindsight

I was difficult when I was younger.

Part of me would like to go back and face some of those challenges and circumstances again, except... not be a jerk this time. Think it might help?

"Not making a bad situation worse." Right up there with "being grateful for your blessings", and "cherishing other people just because they're in the boat with you."

Lessons it took me longer than most to learn.


(Photo courtesy of Jonny Keicher and Unsplash.com.)

Lynch's Law

An old friend last week posted a link to The Cruelty of Call-Out Culture: How Not To Do Social Change, David Brook's timely and incisive denunciation of our current lynch-mob fad. (The link goes to the original NYT post, which may not be available to all. Sadly I was unable to find an unregulated source.)

In it, Brooks relates a recent NPR segment on two members of the punk scene who were tarred and feathered (virtually, so far), then shunned, utterly and irrevocably, by their erstwhile comrades.

The first target, best friend of one Emily, was accused of "sending […] an unwelcome sexually explicit photograph" to a woman Emily apparently didn't know. Emily instantly turned on him, intentionally busted up the man's circle of friends, and effectively destroyed his life. She's had no further contact with this professed "best friend" since.

And then Emily herself was called out, in her case as a one-time cyber bully, having among other things posted a piling-on emoji to an Internet thread mocking a classmate. More than ten years previous. When she was in high school.

She instantly came in for the Adulterer's Special in her own right and was shunned in turn, as deeply and implacably as her apparently irredeemable former friend, by the same crowd she too regarded and depended upon as family.

At this point some may repress a smirk, but it turns out putting folks' eyes out ain't all that tidy, droogies. Witness:

"[Emily's accuser said the act of denouncing her] gave him a rush of pleasure, like an orgasm. He was asked if he cared about the pain Emily endured. 'No, I don’t care,” he replied. […] I literally do not care about what happens to you after the situation. I don’t care if she’s dead, alive, whatever.'"

Let's be clear. In this man's view, death is a reasonable punishment for flippancy. I think the moral here is, vet your allies carefully.

In further justification of his aggression, this individual declares that he was physically and emotionally abused in the past. In response to which my Zen training has taught me to ask: "By her?"

I'll warrant the reply to that one is less erotic.

Although by Emily's figuring she made moral progress between her bitchy teenage years and conscientious adulthood, let's note that her actions at both ages were identical: flush a pariah and move in for the kill.

Perhaps most frightening of all, she even condones her own attackers' behaviour, accepting the Gandhic hotbox she helped build as a righteous reaction to her ostensibly inexpungeable crimes. In other words, it seems she has gained little insight from all of this. She's suffered, deeply and grievously, for nothing.

Which is my definition of hell.

As for her tormentor's delusions, let's crack those right now: victims of injustice are more responsible for their actions, not less. Far from green-lighting cruelty, survival obliges you to stand firmly and publicly against the megalomania and mindless brutality that brutalised you. Particularly when it metasticises into an untargetted orgy.

Some commenters to the article claimed that vigilantism is righteous because duly constituted authority has long ignored, condescended to, even criminalised the victims of social crimes. Basically, "bullies must be bullied because bullies won't bully the bullies who bully the bullies I bully."

Now there's a koan. But the Buddha already solved this one for us, 2500 years ago:

"Blood stains cannot be removed by more blood. Resentment cannot be removed by more resentment."

That there's a paucity of justice in this lazy world is woefully clear. That we can secure it by further injustice is the con of a grifter.

Due process and calm analysis – of everything, including intent and context – are the right and left hands of justice. And empathy is its brain. If after patient and thorough investigation a case turns up weak, the accused is usually innocent, at very least of the precise charge or degree. As unsatisfying as that is to those who burn for payback, there is no other route to a just society.

If justice is truly your goal, you have to get off the sofa and build a system that values and compels it. Which is exceedingly difficult to do. But anything less just triples the injustice.

Bottom line: the karmic benchmark here remains the same it's always been: "Am I different from my enemies? Do I eliminate suffering, or create it?"

It's a tough inquisition, and one I freely own I fail on a regular basis.

But it simply will not do to skip it.


(Graphic courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer.)

Compassion Kyôsaku

"[Kitano] was thin and not in good health, but Shunryu was mesmerised by the way he would lay out his bowing cloth and lower himself to place his forehead on it, and above all by the way he would rise up again. He was so frail that every time he bowed Shunryu thought he wouldn't be able to get up, but he did, time after time.

"Eventually Shunryu realised that it was harder for him to watch Kitano bow than it was for Kitano to do so."

David Chadwick, Crooked Cucumber



(Photo of Avalokiteśvara Bodhisattva statue in Bodhisattva garden of Truc Lam Tri Duc Zen Monastery courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer.)

Good Story: To See the Invisible Man

"And then they found me guilty."

I've been meaning to post on this found teisho since I launched Rusty Ring, away back in the Kamakura Period. Somehow I always found a reason not to; afraid to cock it up, I imagine. But conditions have conspired to kick me into gear.

It seems we've entered the Age of Vengeance, wherein no limitation on the godlike All-Seeing I will be endured. Both Right and Left are stomping about, meting out "justice" from a position of self-declared moral superiority, yet in style remarkably similar to a pogrom. (And also to each other. Here's a koan: if you must become your enemy to defeat him, can you?)

As for insight; empathy; forgiveness; compassion; the instinctive restraint that governs men and women of good faith…

Get a rope.

In such times, a hermit monk could do worse than invite his brothers and sisters To See the Invisible Man.

Robert Silverberg's seminal contemplation on the nature of true decency first appeared in the inaugural (April 1963) issue of sci-fi pulp Worlds of Tomorrow. I became aware of it in 1985, when it was faithfully adapted for the first revival of Rod Serling's Twilight Zone.

For those 20-odd minutes I was riveted to the television; though still in my early 20s, I'd lived enough to recognise the unflinching truth Silverberg was burning into my screen. It's nothing less than a Jataka Tale on the gulf that separates bourgeois morality from the real thing.

In this case, we have a man sent up the river for the crime of "being an arsehole". (No wonder Silverberg's utopian society has done away with prisons; with laws like that, there'd have to be one on every block.)

Will their ingenious, diabolic alternative sentence turn this egocentric bastard into a productive citizen? You'll have to see it to find out.

At this writing, two uploads of the Twilight Zone segment are available on YouTube:

• an integral print over Spanish subtitles has survived there since 2015
• and dendrochronology pins this old-style three-parter all the way back in 2008 CE.

The entire series is also available on DVD.

With track records like these, and any good luck, you'll be able to find at least one of them. The writing, performances, and direction are all excellent. Allowance allowed the changing norms of television production, it's aged very well.

If on the other hand you prefer to read the original, then by truly miraculous wrinkle of the Enlightenment Super-Path:

• the entire April '63 issue of Worlds of Tomorrow is freely available in ebook form, or...
• if you'd rather have just the text, the Ru-net offers it here.

For the rest, I'll leave you with my war cry:

"That which does not kill me, makes me kinder."

It's a simple insight that I realised soon after I become a monk.

It also explains why my own society frequently hates me.

(Mad-scientist chortle.)


(Photo from a screen-cap of the Twilight Zone episode.)

Tough Love

Once, when I was in Grade 2, my teacher had all of us save our milk carton from lunch. Afterward we folded it into a flower pot, filled it with dirt, and planted a single bean in it. Then we lined up our little pots on the windowsill and waited.

To nobody's surprise, within a week each had produced a shoot. Our teacher then divided us into groups and issued new orders. Group Number 1 got to leave their bean plants in the sun and care for them as usual, but everyone else had to stop watering theirs, relocate it to a closet, sit it on the radiator, or the like.

I was ordered to put mine in the refrigerator.

What happened next remains as vivid to me as this morning.

I have a loving, if independent, nature, and in the few days I'd been tending it I'd conceived an affection for the bright green tendril striving upward. I also wasn't a moron. What seven-year-old doesn't know what happens to a living thing in the faculty room fridge? Years later, as a teacher myself, I could have prepared a better lesson plan than that during passing period. Using nothing more than what I had in my desk.

On a Friday afternoon.

I hung back as the rest of my group came forward, hoping she wouldn't tally us. But she did.

"Robert?" she demanded. "Where's Robert? Don't you have a plant?"

I mumbled the affirmative.

"Bring it here."

I hesitated, carton in hand.

"Do you hear me? Bring it here."

"But…" I stammered, barely audible. "I don't want to kill it."

"What?" she snapped, incredulous.

I raised my eyes.

"I don't want to kill it."

At this point my teacher pitched what can only be called a power tantrum. "Oh, I see!" she snarked, enraged beyond self-respect. "Everyone else is participating, everyone else has to do what they're supposed to, but Robert (her voice dripped) doesn't want to kill his!

"Everybody look at Robert! He's not like us! He's special!"

I began to sob, and she continued to demonstrate why I have so little respect for authority. (And possibly why my attitude toward women was for so long uncharacteristically hostile.)

"You put that bean plant on the cart THIS INSTANT!" she commanded.

I did. But I didn't stop crying for some time.


Half a century later, I'm just starting to catch a whisper of public commentary about the state of empathy on this backwater planet. Not much. Not enough. But a few writers, here and there, are beginning to question the fitness of our souls to ensure our continued survival.

Empathy is the defining human strength, the single advantage that pushed our fangless, clawless arse to the top of this heap.

But we have a knotty relationship with the stuff of our success. The "toughness" and "courage" we admire in leaders and ourselves amounts most often to cruelty, self-centredness, and indifference. Those who betray a glimmer of "weakness" – empathy, compassion, sophistication, humanity, evolutionary superiority – are abused and ridiculed. The rest of us are conditioned to look on silently.

Which is why empathy needs claws and fangs.

In my life I've consistently been punished more severely for empathy than for cruelty. When guilty of the latter, I've been disciplined; when the former, I've been humiliated, ejected, and blacklisted.

Therefore, it's increasingly critical that decent, fully-evolved human beings learn the difference between insensitivity and just pissing others off. We must refuse to pipe down when advocating forgiveness, generosity, and the objective analysis of karma, regardless of sneers and threats. The alternative is what we already have, what's killing us progressively faster: government by the least human. Whether national, local, or in some grade school classroom.

Most importantly, we must actively patrol the state of empathy in our communities, and teach future generations to honour and protect their own evolved souls and defend those of others.

So check it out, bitch: this entire species depends on the beans we produce.

Stand aside, please.



(Adapted from Growing Up Home, copyright RK Henderson. New Life [photo] courtesy of Juanita Mulder and Pixabay.com.)

20 March is Bodhisattva Day

On 20 March, I'm inviting all brother and sister seekers to be mindful of the Bodhisattva. "Bodhisattva" is the Buddhist term for those who dedicate their lives to ending suffering, in ways large and small, and also – especially – for that bit inside all of us that urges us in that direction.

Why 20 March? Well, that's Fred Rogers' birthday. "Mr. Rogers" was a North American children's entertainer ("mentor" is more accurate) who embodied the Bodhisattva Way. His gentle, respectful demeanour and careful attention to those around him are legendary. It's also completely true; my brother and I met him at a public television business function when we were 4 and 6. He gave us his undivided attention, genuinely interacting with us and ignoring the politicians and PBS executives milling about. And I've had similar stories from others. Dude was real.

So there may be others as qualified as my brother Fred to be the poster child of bodhisattva nature, but I doubt there's anyone better.

Therefore I propose that 20 March be Bodhisattva Day. You don't gotta be Buddhist to get a piece; Mr. Rogers wasn't. (He was an ordained Presbyterian minister.) You just have to agree that people should strive to default to their compassionate impulses, as a matter of policy.

I further suggest that, as an unobtrusive and respectful statement of conviction, we honour this day of reflection by wearing a cardigan sweater.

But no pinching people who don't, eh?

Mr. Rogers' own cardigan, now on display at the Smithsonian.

(Photos courtesy of KUHT [Mr. Rogers on-set], Rudi Riet [Mr. Rogers' sweater], and Wikimedia Commons.)

Choice

(The following is an excerpt from "Rough Around the Edges: A Journey Through Washington's Borderlands." Copyright RK Henderson.)

Because the choice is ours.

Many years ago, when I was a student, I entered a supermarket. A lady stood out front with a coffee can, collecting for charity. She was a cheery sort, a plump, maternal woman with a rosy Anglican face.

Ahead of me strode a man in a green coach's jacket. "Would you like to give to the Church relief fund?" she asked.

His voice had all the silk of a snow shovel on wet asphalt.

"I was poor all my life, nobody helped me!"

Taken aback, the churchwoman bobbed, and he stalked past, shoulders hunched, fists jammed in his slash pockets.

I never saw the man's face, but his greying comb-over and spare tire are stamped on my mind.

I should have pulled out my grocery money, a single twenty, and handed it to her right there. I should have said, "Here's ten for me," and dropped it in her can, "and ten for him." But I didn't. In the moment, all I could think to do was raise an eyebrow, as who should say, "No good deed unpunished, eh?", and keep walking.

But the guy bothered me. He was rude. He was ungrateful. He was angry. It was years before I solved his riddle.

You decide what it does to you.

You don't decide what happens. When you're born, where you're born, who you're born, how you're born. Land slides, fields flood, markets crash, families fail, houses burn, dogs bite, lovers leave, people die. Dashboards dash and draught boards draught.

You take a number and you watch the wheel. Same as us all.

But you decide what it does to you. Whether it makes you hard or soft. Hot or cold. Mean or mindful.

Poverty doesn't do that. Pain doesn't do that. Heartbreak doesn't do that.

You do that.