Dark reveries
swirl through my head as I come out anesthesia, swimming in pain medication,
after total knee replacement surgery. In rapid succession, like channel
surfing, stream of consciousness segments dance across my mind.
Right now, I am reliving
a waking vision, I first had many years ago, so real that I wrote about it at
the time for the Monitor.
I am standing on an ocean beach consumed with
foreboding, watching the tide go out and out, exposing a rock-strewn bottom with
fish flopping about in muddy puddles, all the way to the horizon. I didn’t know
about the existence of Tsunamis, at that point in my life, but sensed something
horrible was happening.
And, so it was.
Soon, I hear a deafening roar and watch in horror as the tide reverses, sending
a massive wave, several hundred feet tall, right toward me. The dream ends with
my world going dark as I am swept away by the avenging tide.
Meanwhile, my
hospital roommate, also recuperating from knee surgery, is having a terrible
time, moaning and groaning, flopping about in his bed from Restless Leg
Syndrome and frequently calling out to the nurses, who rush in with various
pain meds that do no good.
Trying to escape,
I switched on the TV only to be assaulted with a barrage of news stories about
death and destruction. Two pieces stood out: a UN report estimating that there
are 21 million refugees worldwide, 5 million from Syria alone. That’s bad
enough. But, on top of that, there’s an additional 44 million displaced folks, who are exiles inside their own countries,
trying to survive like the flopping fish in my Tsunami dream.
Millions of our
disinherited brothers and sisters have been cast off their land, directly or
indirectly, because of climate change; most of the rest are displaced by war, a
pursuit in which the U.S. is undisputed world champion: Since WW II, we have
engaged in an accelerating string of wars, getting drawn in ever deeper in
conflicts around the world, wars we can never win.
Back in the
1950s, Dwight Eisenhower, WW II military hero who understood the human cost of
war, warned us about this looming danger, a consequence of the accelerating influence
of the military-industrial complex: ”Every gun that is made, every warship
launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those
who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”
My feverish mind
spun again, this time landing on something the Buddha said, 2700 years ago,
acknowledging this same human dilemma:
I’ll tell you of the anxious
dread
that made me to shake all over:
Seeing creatures flopping around,
like fishes in shallow water
so hostile to one another!
–Seeing this, I became afraid.
Then the Buddha
goes on to offer a mind-blowing solution!
Seeing people locked in conflict
I became completely distraught…
…But then I discerned here a
thorn
hard to see, lodged deep the
heart
It is only when pierced by this
thorn
that one runs in all directions.
So if that thorn is taken out –
one does not run, one does not
sink...[1]
What the Buddha
is saying so totally counter-intuitive, it blows my mind! Especially in our
country where we worship the Second Amendment, We normally think of ourselves
as safer when we are armed. But Buddha is saying the opposite; the taking up or arms is not something born
of fear but what gives birth to fear.
In my
untethered, chemically altered state, this is a revelation from on high: Rather
than some pie-in-the-sky notion, it is the Rosetta Stone, the key to human
survival in our postmodern world of escalating nuclear proliferation and accelerating
climate change.
And, yes, it can
be done! Starting from the grassroots, from you and me pulling the thorns from
our hearts.
Because we are
all pierced by these thorns of unwholesome cravings and desire – greed, hate,
delusion and their toxic emotional byproducts – we will have to learn to take
them out by careful practice: careful practice being nice to each other.
It will take
hard work: our habits and ingrained societal worldviews are difficult to change.
But it can be done if we are motivated enough. People do it all the time: training
for a marathon, learning to play the violin, beating an addiction.
The only
difference here is that the goal is not just our individual welfare, but the
fate of the earth.
xxx
[1] These verses, translated by Andrew Olenski, are found in one of the
oldest parts of the Pali Canon and, according to Olenski, “very likely express
the Buddha’s own process of trepidation and discovery.”
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