|
The MoA Week In Review – (Not Ukraine) OT 2022-144
Last week's posts on Moon of Alabama:
> Despite the hopes pinned on them, sanctions typically don’t produce the regime change desired, and they take an enormous toll on those subjected to them. The very anticipation of sanctions triggers actions that preclude their effectiveness: aggressive states’ ambitions are stoked further by desire to secure additional resources to immunize against the deprivations of threatened sanctions. The premise of sanctions — that societies make political decisions based on economic rationalism like fear of falling living standards — is not borne out by history. People often prefer bad conditions to foreign rule. <
—
Other issues:
Technological Ignorance / Headline Disaster:
Brexit:
China:
Use open (NOT Ukraine) – thread …
“the description of eons of an expanding universe and eons of a contracting universe, and so on….as a medium for the Buddhist teachings of non-self, impermanence, and dukkha.”
Posted by: BM | Sep 5 2022 7:49 utc | 94
Now compare:
“the universe already exists in its perfect being, ineffable, formless, constant and ever-present…and yet there is a display of phenomena that it manifests continually – a display, not a reality – which arises and then dissolves back into…the very nature of reality itself – whence it came.
Posted by: Grieved | Sep 5 2022 4:16 utc | 82″
You began with: “Sorry Grieved, but that is the opposite of what the Buddha said – he said everything is constantly changing – no exceptions.”
Yes, every THING, every composite thing is constantly changing. But the nature of things, including the nature of mind, never changes for it doesn’t exist, it is a quality without form.
Put another way: what is the inference from impermanence? One side is ‘non-self’ and another side is ‘dukkha.’ One side is logical inference one side is felt, or emotional, inference.
Non-self basically is saying that because everything is constantly changing it is not solid, not permanent, not definable, actually not existent at all. (There is suffering because all beings in creation desire to experience, to live and it is painful to be hurt or to let go and die, also our predilection for pleasure makes us dislike pain so even our experience of pleasure is as a relief from pain or worry about future pain and thus is always fraught with existential angst.)
But the point is, the basic teaching of the Three Marks (suffering, impermanence and insubstantiality/egolessness) is not different from emptiness/sunyata and also not different from nature of reality/mind. These are the Three Turnings of the Wheel which tackle the same things from different levels of realization. Put folksily:
First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is.
First there is a self (which needs to be deconstructed by contemplating impermanence etc)
Then there is no self (whose emptiness needs to be expanded into boundless compassion and wisdom without any limits – the Maha/great in Mahayana
Then there is self (indestructible vajra/being because the nature of mind is Awake which is always there beyond birth and death because it is unborn and undying. And yet there is experience, clearly, both inner and outer, the inner often being called something like ‘nature of mind’ or ‘primordial wakefulness’ and the outer often being called ‘appearances’ or Grieves ‘display.’
The Buddhadharma is holographic but also multi-layered, or contains multiverses, the same things become different from different perspectives of the same things.
Anyway, I think the BIG WAR is mentioned in Grieve’s posts here, namely a struggle between the rigid, in fact deadening view arising from materialism, which ultimately believes that all life is lifeless mechanical versus non-materialism which experiences life as creative, dynamic, abundant and ultimately sacred – natural clouds forming, dissolving and reforming. The natural world is both empty and vivid at once.
The ruling elites are applying a materialist mindset to power which they accrue to themselves by controlling means of production, distribution, organization or perception-management. Having acquired such power it becomes solidified in their mind as a something which they desire to hold onto (akin to holding onto self) so that it can become permanent and their happiness therefore be without end in a vain attempt to vanquish the inevitable karmic unravellings of impermanence and dukkha.
Materialism tries to deny impermanence as well as the playful, ephemeral or ‘unreal’ nature of reality, aka ‘display.’ Life more resembles a living waking dream than solid mechanical physicality. If you look at experience directly, that’s how it always is, never-changing though witnessing constant change.
And so it goes…
Posted by: Scorpion | Sep 6 2022 2:44 utc | 111
Posted by: Grieved | Sep 7 2022 3:52 utc | 140
“So I’ll stand by the act of secrecy as unnecessary except to conceal objectionable behavior, and the enabling of secrecy by the media as a crime in itself. And I’ll call it all baseless and unjustifiable. And maintain that society has a vested interest in regulating it.”
All well said. I want to revisit the royalty question not as an advocate in today’s context but to clarify why it came up which was an example of leadership. A mechanic shop owner is the leader of that domain but not of the business next door or across the street. A Mayor presides over various important processes in his city but not of the region. And parents have a leadership role in relation to their children. And of course you have officers in relation to enlisted, perhaps the most clear cut example.
In all cases the leader has a perspective usually based on a combination of experience/expertise and responsibility. Let us take the simplest one, parents with children. Even if a father wants to communicate everything he knows and feels about any given topic or situation he cannot do so. For example, can he explain to his son the feelings he has for his wife? Or how to manage the relationship? Can he communicate in detail what the role of being father entails? To a certain degree, and if he is a master of communication, much can be transmitted from analogy or story, but most of the time the role doesn’t demand such communication but providing leadership and maintaining a certain distance because the role of leader is different from the role of subordinate.
Even a lowly lieutenant has to maintain distance from the men for the lieutenant will relay orders from above to charge over the trench and into almost certain death. You cannot get too chummy with the man who is going to order you to your death. And the lieutenant cannot share with the men how that responsibility makes him feel even were he to try and indeed were he to try the men would resent him and respect him less for it.
The boss in the mechanics shop can only fraternize so much. He has to reserve a certain authority so that he can give orders, admonish or encourage as needed and so forth.
So I wasn’t thinking about class systems nor hereditary systems of authority even though it sounded that way. I think the notion of royalty came up because we are discussing national polity dynamics so royalty is an example of national leadership, one which involves a living individual versus a written constitution or multiple-member committees within checks and balances systems with multiple different committees (congress, judiciary, CIA, NSA, CoC etc. etc.).
Every country has some sort of version of ‘executive privilege’ for example. Presidents – like many others in similar roles – have to assimilate information from different sources over time and also brainstorm quite a lot of ‘what ifs’ some of which latter, were they to be leaked, might make many uncomfortable or even enraged. There is a need for confidentiality. Just as with parents having a private conversation about their teenager who just got sent home for fighting at school: they need time to absorb the news and reflect on what is going on with their boy and 99% of the time that conversation should happen without that boy being present!
The root notion I clumsily tried to communicate was at a non-verbal level wherein someone in a leadership role has a perspective that none of the followers has – simply by virtue of assuming that role. Their perspective is different precisely because they have the burden of command/responsibility and only someone in that particular role at that particular time can have that particular perspective.
There is no need to communicate this or deliberately keep anything secret rather it is ‘self-secret’ as is described in related vajrayana terminology. Indeed, the secret higher schools in Buddhadharma have historically been the source of most of the problems and scandals throughout history and many schools, such as the Theravada, regard them as heretic, perverted – not without good reason, I might add. For the secret stuff is also the most private and the most private is the most intimate, the battleground where good and evil co-emerge at the heart level just as during the last night during which he attained complete enlightenment, as the story goes, the Buddha wrestled with all demons external and internal, just as Jesus was tempted by the devil in the desert before his enlightenment.
Similarly, the secret areas in a family or nation are not necessarily there for nefarious reasons but they often end up dealing with nefariousness coming from within and without the body politic. Difficulties happen; challenges happen; mistakes are made which have unfortunate consequences even when originally intentions were good.
However, once you get into deliberate hiding or even further deliberate misleading (lying) to hide more effectively, then you have gone too far as you have been arguing.
That is another virtue of royalty or dictatorship: by vesting ultimate authority in one individual, when things do go too far it is actually far easier to see it because a disturbed individual will manifest confusion, perturbation which will ripple throughout his or her entourage and be quite perceptible. However, with multi-layered committee (soviet) authority, this becomes not only harder to see (because the system itself becomes confused and confusing so individual behavior provides less meaningful clues) but far harder to remedy. A confused monarch can find a way to resolve the conflicts coming through on the other side with a resolution often by paying deep attention to inner conflict experienced and finding the way to resolve it. But if we are dealing with an implacably corrupt one it is relatively easy to overthrow him; a healthy upper class would find a way to throw him over, either with abdication in a sophisticated polity or simple exile or execution. Easier to cut off the head of one person than completely refashion the entire system with revolution, mass murders, burdensome ideologies which are always deficient, propaganda, re-assignment of roles and property and all the rest of it.
In the Bon tradition of Tibet it is said that the source of all negativity, aka ‘demons,’ is deception. When things are going well, a practitioner or master of sacred atmospheres, like a Shinto priest or Zen master (or King/President), can invoke sacred presence by summoning what in Tibetan are called ‘drala,’ which are like atmospheric spirits and, interestingly, whose literal root meaning is ‘beyond aggression.’ The obstacle to summoning such drala, it is said, is deception making deception the source of aggression which is a conflict with I and other. There can be NO deception when creating a sacred atmosphere / sacred perception. Classic royalty is the marriage of practical leadership with sacred perception because sacred perception happens naturally when Heaven and Earth are joined correctly. We witness this at weddings and funerals naturally. Time from past or future resolves into a vividly present moment saturated with a strong sense of awareness-presence (which you like writing about!). This is a natural thing requiring no mastery of arcane techniques. But for that to happen there can be no deception, no games, no lies, no bullshit.
Western polities are full of shit right now from top to bottom. Royalty won’t fix it, there is no basis for it (though England’s royal family shows that even in a highly confused and polluted polity the people naturally turn towards a symbol of leadership which her Majesty provides albeit in a highly constrained context wherein she has almost no actual leadership agency function whatsoever, it’s purely on the intuitive level where even so constrained it provides considerable influence).
So I guess that’s my final point on this secrecy rant: what matters ultimately with all these things I suspect is core motivation. A good society promotes goodness in all and a bad society doesn’t (over-simplifying greatly). The art of national leadership and governance systems has to be grounded in appreciation for and wisdom about promoting goodness which is fundamental to our natures and the nature of this planetary realm sphere we all share, as if in collective dream. It is fundamentally good (the meaning of the Dzogchen central deity KuntuZangpo – the All Good – if you read that stuff which I suspect you do).
Then there have to be ways to cleanse things once they have become defiled. The most common method is war since perversion usually roils rivers of aggression, or conflict, just as in a bad marriage the couple ends up fighting all the time, that shouting at each other being the only remaining way of expressing their connection, indeed their love.
Look at America: a non-stop fight with every section fighting with every other: WH with Congress with Judiciary with media with Intelligence with People with each other and each with all the others ad infinitum. No single neck to be severed from no single head!! So civil war is virtually inevitable though an amicable divorce (via lawful secession) would be the best non-violent solution since that effectively gets the current federal-level liars and cheats out of leadership roles relative to residents of any given State if it secedes from the federal union. Of course, once left with State leadership things could get worse but in theory they get easier to correct. In theory…
In any case, positive secrecy may be a function of role as I’ve suggested but it can only be positive in a sane, wise context. Absent that context and it tends to be a conduit for pernicious corruption which we now see flagrantly manifest in every aspect of western polity from top to bottom.
Sorry, this went on too long and perhaps wobbled about topic-wise too much! Appreciate the interchange because this type of analysis doesn’t often come up… an honour!
PS. I liked what you said about nobility which involves virtue, obviously, but also in a multi-generational class system only works if the underlying society is promoting goodness. It is helpful because leadership is a skill that takes time to develop and not all can do so well. In the short meditation text I cited earlier one line goes ‘This everyday body naturally radiates the loving virtuous qualities of a Bodhisattva whose compassionate heart nobly joins with all beings of higher lower and equal status’ – a nice description of nobility I’d say….
Posted by: Scorpion | Sep 7 2022 12:05 utc | 145
|
