Just Coming & Going

 

A little before the halfway point of Ram Dass’ Journey of Awakening: A Meditator's Guidebook, he makes an astonishing statement.  As we continue to meditate we find that each...

...moment starts to have a richness or thickness of its own. Fewer moments are special as more of them become richer. This lessens the rushes, the highs and lows. As they disappear we sometimes feel a sadness and depression, a sense of having lost the richness and the romance of life. Indeed, an awakened being is not romantic, for nothing is special any more. Every moment is all of it. No romance. Just the coming and the going. Coming and going.

Most of us have a view of meditation where we strive for a core experience, we heighten our sense of joy, we feel less pain.  We calm down.  But Ram Dass, who passed away in late 2020, believes otherwise.  For him, meditation enables us to see our thoughts as just thoughts, not an expression of any kind of reality, neither outside in the world or in our heads.

People, for the most part, do not live this way.  The “romance of life” is what keeps us going, and we are willing to put up with the lows to gain (what we hope) is the coming highs.  We don't want to chuck the whole deal down the chute because we know lows are coming.   I think a part of Ram Dass lived this way.  In his later years he lived in a house in Maui.  If “nothing is special anymore” than why not pick the cheaper double wide trailer outside of Horseheads New York, for instance, and not  pricey Hawaii?  We do so, if we can, because we know it is better to live in Maui than Horseheads.  There are more peak experiences in Maui than upstate New York.  

Although Ram Dass’ message speaks strongly to me, and it is most useful – I struggle with  what he sees as human aspiration.  Most of us are romantics of some sort and can never eradicate that impulse, especially artists.  Just coming and going is not inspirational.  Being 'even' kills our creative impulses.

Kabbalah: Secrecy, Scandal and the Soul by Harry Freedman

 

Kabbalah: Secrecy, Scandal and the Soul by Harry Freedman has a salacious title that only half fits the book, but overall Freedman  takes us on a fine journey of Jewish mysticism through the ages.  The book is a standout as it explores both Jewish manifestations of the Kabbalah, and the Christian, Reformation and metaphysical counter-parts, usually spelled with a “C”.  This gives us a rare treat:  an incisive overview of the topic from the earliest times to the New Age.

Death of a Naturalist: Poems

Death of a Naturalist: Poems by Seamus Heaney, are a robust collection, featuring the natural and agricultural world, as experienced through the nuanced observations of the narrator.  This world felt very much like the one I inhabit: a mix of woods and farms, small homes and extremes of weather.  These poems are a gift.

What We Were, and Are...

 

Born in Africa: The Quest for the Origins of Human Life, by Martin Meredith, tells the fascinating of how we evolved. What I find most interesting about this work is how much our categories of what a human, of the genus homo, is and what is an ape.  

A lot of energy in the early years of fossil hunting was spent attempting to draw this line.  We now know from genetic studies that we carry the genes of at least three other members of the genus homo.   One of the definitions of a species is the ability to interbreed.  If we did so with three groups of (now) extinct members of the genus homo, how much more so would it have been in the time period Meredith covers, millions of years ago in Africa?

The idea that there is a spectrum among apes and hominids frees us from the conceptual constraints about morphology, speciation, and the unanswerable philosophical question of what is human.  Our past is far more complex than our ideas.  With increased knowledge of our origins, we generate more and more questions.  

Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood and the Prison of Belief

 

Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood and the Prison of Belief, by Lawrence Wright, is, as the title suggests, a very critical survey of Scientology.  But Wright is “fair” when he discusses the actual tenants of the religion.  Scientology has little that is new; it simply uses new terms for ideas that are found in many established religions.  It is certainly as wacky, maybe even less, then the Kabbalah, which I study closely.

The major issue presented here is the allegations of violence and and other criminal forms of control that the Church allegedly uses against dissenting members, journalists, and others critics.  What is documented in this book is illegal, and if even a fraction of what Wright tells us is true, it shows deep systemic criminal problems within the religion. 

But in the end, Wright appears optimistic of Scientology’s prospects.  He reminds us that Mormon’s were considered dangerous radicals, persecuted, killed, and driven into exile in their early years.  Now, many Americans (especially conservatives) see them as paradigms of certain elemental American values.  Christian Science was once considered fringe and dangerous.  Now its newspaper is a major player on the world stage.  One day, Scientology may mellow out, and become far more mainstream.  When the fires of revolution flare out, even the most radical religions move toward mainstream, and acceptance.

Alas, The End

 

Alas, Babylon: A Novel by Pat Frank, is somewhat dated but holds up surprisingly well, thirty years after the end of the Cold War.  The key is good storytelling.  We care about the citizens of Fort Repose, Florida, even though the Soviet Union is no more. The book often has the racial and gender sensibilities of 1959, but it is difficult to tell if this is the author’s perspective, or simply a mirror held up to the times.

Like most nuclear war survival books and films, we now know that even a limited nuclear engage would be a species terminating event.  Some books and films came close to this realization, especially the BBC’s 1984 masterful Threads.  Yet even in this work, ten years after the nuclear exchange, a bare bones government is being formed in northern England.  People hang on - but in a nightmare. That would not happen.  But I suppose you can’t write a book where the bombs go off, and everyone dies – the likely, but not very dramatic, scenario. 

The Unfortunate Need for Self-Defense (and how we don't risk our well-being for others)

 

The Rohingyas: Inside Myanmar's Hidden Genocide by Azeem Ibrahim, shows, sadly, that more than half a century since the Holocaust, and other genocidal acts since then, the world community will not come to the aid of endangered minorities.  The Rohingyas are on their own.  The world does not care. 

This books explains how the Rohingya were transformed into “the other” by the government of Myanmar (Burma).   Ibrahim illustrates what Timothy Snyder has written of the Nazis in World War II: the prime way to commit genocide is to strip a people of their national, legal rights.  Once that is done, a minority group is at the mercy of the government, and other groups.  Without access to the legal apparatus of the state, genocide is nearly inevitable.

The sad take away from this book is that minority groups have to have some kind of self-defense (as backup) especially if they find themselves in a situation like the Rohingya.  Humanity is not yet evolved enough to treat the so-called stranger with love and care.  We don't risk our well being for others.