Beyond Good and Evil

Hamlet:

What have you, my good friends, deserved at the hands of

Fortune, that she sends you to prison thither?

Guildenstern:

Prison, my lord?

Hamlet:

Denmark's a prison.

Rosencrantz:

Then is the world one.

Hamlet:

A goodly one, in which there are many confines, wards and dungeons,

Demark being one o' th' worst.

Rosencrantz:

We think not so, my lord.

Hamlet:

Why then 'tis none to you; for there is nothing either good or

Bad, but thinking makes it so. To me it is a prison.

-- Hamlet, Act II, Scene ii

This thing that we call 'I' is nothing but a construct, a figment of our imaginative brains. This is the conclusion of much of the profoundest knowledge we have, yet it is practically unimaginable to our everyday minds. We interact on a personal basis, we experience things that register as good or bad for our very personal well-being, we live our lives each as unique and special creatures, and we revel in and cherish that uniqueness against all challengers, including the wisdom of the ages. We are all, like Hamlet, enclosed within the private prisons of our selves, and we like it that way, myself included. I am unique.

Things have become even more complicated since Shakespeare's time. We live in a mechanized, semi-sterile world too often disconnected from nature and the earth, and it's easy to lose our way. Our thinking has created many developments in the world, but we're out of balance with the simplicity of just being in the world. I have been faithfully continuing my meditations although mostly it's been just that, blind faith. Most of the time I've had no idea what I was doing, and was probably just making things worse. Maybe I'll look back on what I'm writing today and conclude that I'm still just making things worse, but I'm hoping not. I've gained some appreciation for the Zen predilection for paradox. If I can fully appreciate the sound of one hand clapping, I think I will have regained a level of comfort with that ever-elusive true self, and the simple pleasure of just taking in each moment one at a time without having to think about everything. There is so much we all share that is beyond words, before words, and outside of the limitations of intellection that give rise to paradox, good and bad, one and many, self and other. Life is more than these words. We have to stop and breathe it in.

Einstein proved that time and space are relative, but we persist in conceptualizing that they are not. The closer we look at these assumptions that define our everyday lives, the less solid they all appear. If it's more useful for us to persist in these assumptions, it's no less useful to also try and keep things in perspective and remain open to all the possibilities instead of clinging to fixed ideas. We need to stay flexible. As long as we keep trying to retain this image or that, we blur our picture of the world and reveal it only peeking through a maze of preconceptions and predispositions. Sometimes we don't even see it at all.

I don't think there's anything overly esoteric about what I'm trying to do. Quite the contrary, in fact. I'm just trying to follow the psalm that contained my grandmother's favorite verse. She quoted it so many times: "God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble." It's from Psalm 46, reprinted below:

1: God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble.

2: Therefore we will not fear, though the earth give way and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea,

3: Though its waters roar and foam and the mountains quake with their surging. Selah.

4: There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God, the holy place where the Most High dwells.

5: God is within her, she will not fall; God will help her at break of day.

6: Nations are in uproar, kingdoms fall; he lifts his voice, the earth melts.

7: The Lord Almighty is with us; the God of Jacob is our fortress. Selah.

8: Come and see the works of the Lord, the desolation he has brought on the earth.

9: He makes wars cease to the ends of the earth; he breaks the bow and shatters the spear, he burns the shields with fire.

10: Be still, and know that I am God; I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth.

11: The Lord Almighty is with us; the God of Jacob is our fortress. Selah.

-- Psalm 46

I'm just trying to be still. It hasn't been easy. I keep learning more about what "being still" is. It's an acquired taste. I'm feeling my way as I go, and no one can help me. I can only do this myself. We really are unique -- whatever that means.

Survival is the second law of humanity.

The first is that we are all one.

-- Joseph Campbell

Context: The United States and Iran

A segment on Keith Olbermann's Countdown yesterday encapsulated the history of U.S./Iran interaction over the last hundred years very nicely. The better you understand the context of the situation, the more likely you are to make good decisions going forward. We've all heard what happens when we don't learn from history.

Imagine

The G-20 Summit and Labor

UK's National Union of Teachers one-day strike, April 24, 2008

The Nation's lead article today is a very good one by Max Fraser, called: Global Labor's G-20 Agenda. The international trade union movement is speaking out strongly about how they see the crisis. They want the world to join America in providing stimulus to the world's economy equivalent to 2% of the world's GDP, and they believe that stimulus should focus on job creation, green technology, renewable energy and similar efforts to grow the economy in a forward-looking and sustainable way. They want much stronger regulation, global recognition of workers' rights and environmental issues in trade agreements, and much greater emphasis on nationalizing troubled corporate and financial entities in order to distribute risk and reward in a fairer manner.

At some point, isn't it time to note that, if we're truly honest with ourselves, we're doing this all wrong? The world is focused on solutions to this crisis, and all of us know that the world's financial leaders are still too focused on retaining much of the system that created this mess in the first place. The iron is hot for some really fundamental changes in direction, but the majority of voices are still too dim to be heard. Labor will have its say at the G-20 summit, but in too many ways it will simply be heard politely. The depressing outcome may well be more years of depression as a system the majority have ceased to believe in is coaxed into creaking along on life support. All in all, it's hard to feel hopeful about the near term. The world seems resigned to living a lie long after it's been exposed, and it will not go well for most of its inhabitants, I'm afraid.

It's not for me to say what we should do. It makes me sad, though. I really believe it's when things get loose at the seams like this, it's one of our very few golden opportunities in the history of civilization, and once the gears are set in place to move forward in one direction, it may be a very long time before that chance appears again. This time, that direction may be a very hard one indeed for most of the world's inhabitants.

As I write this, it seems I've drawn an even bleaker picture than I'd feared. I do feel there's a very good chance we're destined for years of hard times if things continue the way they're headed, despite many good moves by Obama's administration. You can argue that there's not much time to debate while the fire is burning, and the task at hand is simply to put it out, but I don't think that analogy captures every aspect of this complex crisis. Once the flames subside, what will we see as we survey the battered landscape? There will still be initiatives to resolve the problems, but they will appear in a climate of reduced expectations, and the internal workings of the economic machinery that now lie so nakedly exposed will once again be withdrawn into opaque containers, visible to only a fortunate few. That reality will have become the new normal, where fewer still are left with resources enough to rebuild, while most are left to wander the charred remains.

A New Era

We're entering a new era with the election of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States. I've tried to help as best I could with my donations to the Obama campaign, and with interaction on major political blogs trying to combat the avalanche of smears and lies that proliferated these past months. Now, the hard part is waiting until he actually takes office, and searching for the best ways I might be able to help. I'm not sure if that will include more posts to this blog, but anything is possible right now. I absolutely don't believe we can all just go back to our normal lives now. Since we first saw the darkening storm clouds on the horizon, much more time has passed with very little action, and few would disagree that it's now a full-scale emergency.

The economic downturn is only the tip of the iceberg. I think we're seeing a widespread global disillusionment in old ways of thinking as reports of failure continue to roll in. I believe it's a terrible mistake to think we can sit back and just kibitz as a new president and congress prepare for their upcoming terms. President-Elect Obama has often reminded us that change happens from the bottom up, and we here at the bottom need to embody that change, and begin building consensus for the things we need to see. I feel gratified that so many of the things I've written about most passionately in these pages have revealed themselves to be such important parts of today's dialogue. It makes me feel greater confidence that I'm on my way to understanding, and that I've not gotten too lost or sidetracked by personal prejudice or confusion. But the learning curve is still very steep, and this new vista of possibility has me, for the moment, almost overwhelmed.

There's a new web site associated with Obama at http://www.change.org/, and I've joined it while selecting my personal cause as Fair Trade. I don't always react well to specializing in one particular area, so I selected Fair Trade since it seems to be such a broad umbrella, including the economy, the environment, and worker/human rights as part of its purview. I'm currently studying the topic as it's viewed on the change.org web site, and watching to see if this url or some other becomes a hub from which change can take place. I'm not sure yet either what I can do, or how, but I want to be a part of this somehow. I think we're in a time where so many of the prevalent methods have failed that it provides us an opportunity to take some profound new directions, and I believe it's likely we're not going to do enough unless we're prodded by revolutionary ideas.

I'm mature enough to see that too much change can frighten many to such an extent that change itself, however well-intentioned, can be counter-productive. It's going to be difficult to find the right mix between patient, long-term perspectives and the very fierce urgency of now. For the moment, it's just good to bask in the warm glow of a nation of voters who have in many ways rejected the misguided direction of Bush, Cheney and the NeoConservatives who found a perhaps half-hearted ally in John McCain. Very soon, our prayers for a chance to turn things around will have come to be, and given a government who will listen, we need to know for sure what it is we wanted to say. Be careful what you wish for, they tell us. The problems we inherit are surely more than we bargained for, and our task ahead is daunting in the extreme.

I know that the only right choices will be the ones that embody compassion, and that must extend to those who were wrong as well as those who were wronged. Whatever we do, I know it's going to take a lot of prayer, or meditation in my case. It's going to take a whole lot of love to see the right path to take from here.

Here's to tomorrow!

Update: Actually, the Obama-affiliated site is http://www.change.gov. Guess I'm not used to seeing a .gov site I can believe in. There's a painful period of adjustment here.