When, in a crowded casino, the endangered hero of a lousy movie grabs his girl and jumps into a car that’s on display to zoom out through shattering windows into the neon-lit boulevards of Las Vegas, it’s all about generating a moment of surprise. When Teardrop, in the film Winter’s Bone by Debra Granik, grabs his niece Ree by the hair and tells her “I told you to shut up once with my mouth” we are caught off guard, and in that shocked opening we engage anew with the world. When Shakespeare writes “And pity, like a naked new-born babe…” he varies the um-pah, iambic rhythm in the last three syllables to surprise us, and then focuses our opened minds on that vivid closing image. And surprise – subtle, awakening shocks – are what Velazquez is after when he drops the sharp diagonal of the table edge between the curving shapes that compose the Water Seller of Seville. With art (even in its degraded forms), it’s all about the surprise that frees us from conceptual filters and opens us to the seamless emergence of the present in all its vivid complexity. These thoughts came to me at the Getty Villa looking up into the vacant eyes of the Tzitzimitl, which is an artifact designed to do precisely the opposite.

A monument to the depravity of human beings in authoritarian mode, the Tzitzimitl leans forward in the main gallery, hands reaching out, grinning with a lecherous avidity. Small holes perforate the top of the Tzitzimitl’s head. Here, the priests would pour bowls of human blood, and the blood would seep down through the open ribs to drip off the pod-like liver that hangs below the rib cage like the clapper of a bell. A demonic figure dredged up from Aztec Mexico, this life-sized terracotta statue must have been terrifying in the shadowy dark of the temple pyramids, shrouded in smoke while those dying under the sacrificial knife wailed and groaned. The Tzitzimitl is an instrument design to deliver psychic collapse.

We mill around the Tzitzimitl’s legs, me and the other visitors to the Getty Villa, as if the dark and repellent energies that surround this grim artifact have entirely dissipated. But something in me is alarmed, as if I am crossing a line that should not be crossed. A feeling of dread rises up as I watch the tourists scan the explanatory plaque, and then shuffle off under those vacant but watchful eyes. No surprise here: you are defined totally by the reductive narrative of the social hierarchy, the Tzitzimitl whispers, and you must submit and obey its imperatives, even unto your untimely death.

Through the use of this kind of terror, the Aztec priesthood maintained a regime of conquest and domination for the two centuries preceding the arrival of Hernan Cortes in 1519. The curators of the show, “The Aztec Pantheon and the Art of Empire,” take pains to connect the power structure and practices of the Aztecs with those of Imperial Rome, and I would not argue the point. The human urge toward conquest and domination observes no historical, regional or ethnic boundaries. In fact, I’d be willing to extend that analogy to the kind of overt, directly coercive American empire advocated by Dick Cheney and others on the virulent right wing of American politics. The comparison might seem outlandish…except if you are don’t happen to be an American. While thwarted, at least temporarily, in their overt political aims, the right’s communications infrastructure – the infamous, Fox-centered Right Wing Noise Machine – continues to seep polluted thought into the cultural mind stream like a malignant tumor. Rather than work cooperatively to confront the very real and quite alarming environmental and social challenges unfettered Capitalism has created, we are forced to battle disinformation at every turn.

I went to the Getty Villa thinking about the issue that’s come up in recent posts about how the brain is shaped by experience, and how concerted efforts must be made to to alter such “hard wiring.” I’m curious about the collective correlates of this individual effort, which connect for me with the very pressing issue of sustainability – our ability as a species to outrun our own destructive capacities. No doubt there were Aztecs, perhaps a great many of them, who recognized the inherent absurdity (not to mention the barbarity) of human sacrifice, but were powerless to alter a deeply rooted pattern of ritual that was also linked to the tangible benefits of a militaristic empire. In contemporary America we are not in the habit of cutting beating hearts from living victims…but we consume way too much of everything and it’s arguably a more destructive habit in the long run. Authoritarian elements in American cultural life are being energized by how desperate huge segments of the population are to avoid even modest changes.

Recent research into the fine-grain neuronal structure of the brain underscores the roles of “invariant memories” and pattern recognition play in human intelligence. To form predictions about what will happen next, the brain reaches back through the vast, neuronal archive and builds on what has happened before. When predictive statements about how the world operates reach a certain level of complexity we call them stories. Stories are comforting, but when we forget that they are also artificial, stories quickly lead us astray. Reality is inherently non-conceptual. If the stories we tell ourselves are not continually readjusted the invariant memories that drive them inevitably deliver imbalance.

As an institution, the Republican party seems to understand all this. Representing the interests of the top one per cent of the population they have become adept at manipulating the story elements buried in the national consciousness, and then frame every issue in narrative terms that resist the influence of reality. As we approach the 2010 midterms they seem determined to wring short term advantage from every situation regardless of how increasing imbalance leads at some point to a crash. Course corrections can be traumatic, involving opening to direct experience unmediated by protective conceptual frames.

For anyone familiar with tragic drama, “direct experience unmediated by protective conceptual frames” begins to sound like a description of catharsis, the shattering moment in which the tragic hero suddenly sees how radically off target his (or her) conceptual picture of things has been. The hero of tragic drama is forced down into the experience of the present moment. There he confronts the somatic voltage of unprocessed traumas directly such that they no longer distort his vision. The shock of this moment is conveyed to the audience watching the tragedy of Oedipus or Lear unfold on stage. The experience is cognitive but also deeply emotive, rooted in the collective body as well as the mind. It’s no accident that tragic drama flourished most powerfully in Athens and Elizabethan England, which are arguably the two most transformative and dynamic societies in the history of man.

As individuals, one action we can take to escape confining narrative and conceptual frames, is to go to the body. How we do this in a collective way is a big subject, clearly. But it’s hardly an abstract issue today. After my encounter with the Tzitzimitl, I found the opulence of the Getty Villa oppressive. Weighty panels of multicolored marble buttress the impression that in the hierarchy of social values you are near the very pinnacle. The last thirty years have seen a remarkable transfer of wealth up the socio-economic ladder and today income inequality is greater than it was in the 1920s. Many of my friends in the arts community are suffering today, their livelihoods in question. Our ability to inquire about root causes of our situation begins to ramp down as we are forced to focus on issues closer to home. In this way economic trauma confers a short term advantage to authoritarian forces, but only on the way towards the chaos of collapse.

Stepping back to look at the longer term I’m compelled to quote from the opening of Knowledge and Politics, by the remarkable Brazilian social theorist Roberto Unger:

“In its ideas about itself and about society, as in all its other endeavors, the mind goes from mastery to enslavement. By an irresistible movement, which imitates the attraction death exercises over life, thought again and again uses the instruments of its own freedom to bind itself in chains. But whenever the mind breaks its chains, the liberty it wins is greater than the one it had lost, and the splendor of its triumph surpasses the wretchedness of its earlier subjection. Even its defeats strengthen it. Thus, everything in the history of thought happens as if it were meant to remind us that, though death lasts forever, it is always the same, whereas life, which is fleeting, is always something higher than it was before.”

Unger, who until recently served as a minister in the Lula government in Brazil, certainly deserves several posts of his own. For now let us hope his former student, Barak Obama, learned enough to break some of the more destructive patterns clouding the American mind.

Talk to people about sustainability and you might notice them recoiling into a resigned stoicism. The momentum in the direction of over-consumption seems vast and formidable, as indeed it is. Better, when caught picnicking between the hi-speed rails, to avert your eyes from the onrushing bullet train, and focus instead on how the honey drips off the baklava. You can invoke Thomas Malthus while you do so. Malthus, the 18th century economist, who, extrapolating food supplies against population growth, predicted mass famine in Europe in the not-too-distant future. The resourcefulness of human beings in their economic activities has proven Malthus wrong again and again, and perhaps we will sidestep disaster this time too.

Indeed there are many places where human ingenuity continues to show bright magic – the sustained, exponential up scaling of our ability to process and convey information, for example. With such dramatic increases in interconnectivity, un-guessed at solutions to challenges like global warming and peak oil could be right around the corner. But perhaps we shouldn’t count on it.

Speaking of interconnectivity, right now, on your computer, you can find “Century of the Self” and watch a riveting four-part BBC documentary by Adam Curtis that sheds light on how we got here. Curtis illuminates a vast, decades long campaign, begun by Edward Bernays in the 1920s, to reshape human behavior so that it suited the aims of a vanguard elite. No, Bernays was not a Bolshevik. Rather, “fast Eddie” was the American nephew of the great Sigmund “Uncle Siggy” Freud, and his field was public relations, marketing, advertising. Bernays, working with colleagues equally schooled in how to manipulate unconscious drives, used psychological insights to shift America from an economy based on need to an economy based on desire.

As you might guess, Bernays and company did not lack for funding; Curtis quotes Paul Mazer, a Wall Street banker working for Lehman Brothers in the 1930s: “We must shift America from a needs- to a desires-culture. People must be trained to desire, to want new things, even before the old have been entirely consumed. [...] Man’s desires must overshadow his needs.” Creating the churning engine of the consumer economy was every inch a conscious project, which also suggests it can be consciously reversed or, at least, seriously revised.

The Century of the Self follows the evolution of Bernay’s ideas as the post war paradise of an oil-fat America proceeded. The reductive Orthodoxy of the circle around Anna Freud and the crude behaviorism of BF Skinner gave way to the deeper, eros-based critique of Reich and Marcuse. And marketers hung on for the ride, reaping the benefits as the generation of the 1960s shifted from social rebellion to the life-style consumerism of the famous “me” generation. The series concludes with the focus group-based politics Bill Clinton and Tony Blair brought to the world in the 1990s.

While as a whole quite strong, Curtis’ series can only cover such a large historical arc by engaging in historical shorthand. There’s the issue of Curtis’ starting point, for example. While Bernay’s certainly seems to have engineered a huge economic pivot toward desire, America was from the start pre-disposed in that direction. Amor is the root of our name, after all, and we have always been a land of desire, a garden of dreams. When the Enlightenment cut the roots of religion, heaven toppled westward and unfurled toward the blue Pacific, and all the hungry souls of Europe felt the sudden tug of self-invention. Happiness, freedom from lack, could be theirs, if not tomorrow, then the day after tomorrow. The secular religion of progress was born long before clever young Eddie climbed up onto Uncle Siggy’s knee.

What Curtis does very well in this series is to underscore how responsive entire populations can be when their dream lives are massaged and stimulated in the right ways. Here we encounter the plasticity of social relations I mentioned in Part 1 of this post. It’s a correlate, on the collective level, of the plasticity of the neuronal structures in our brains that determine how we behave and the choices we make in the world. All the experts agree: change comes through steady persistent effort lit up now and then by shattering, transformative breakthroughs.

At the science writers workshop in Santa Fe a generational shift seemed clear to me. There was Tanya Elliott herself, speaking with focused passion about new approaches to the issue of sustainability. And the younger people in the group seemed to react differently to her presentation. About Elliott’s dire prognosis many older attendees expressed skepticism tinged with an oddly anxious condescension, while in private comments a number of the younger people spoke to me about how large the problem looms for them. They seemed more than prepared to re-examine established habits in return for a new and more sustainable paradigm. Sensibly enough young people want to know that their choices make sense in terms of irreplaceable resources. And the shadows of Exxon Valdez and BP are never far from their minds.

The key value in the consumer economy is progress, for which you need energy. To shift to sustainability, we must move toward balance as a core value. Respecting the motivational energy of desire while insisting also that the needs of the future must also be kept in mind? Call it the “middle way” economy. And just as the psychology of Freud fueled the shift to a desire-based economy, the neurology of happiness may be what fuels the shift to an economy of balance. Delusions of all kinds need to be left by the wayside. Elliott, for example, cited plenty of empirical evidence that, beyond a relatively low threshold, wealth ceases to provide well-being. Being the object of other people’s envy and seeing yourself as part of an elite – these emotions may feel good, but only if you presuppose an underlying neurosis of chronic, soul-consuming lack. This is the great, dirty secret of La Dolce Vita – it’s full of empty calories and leaves you unprepared and flabby in the face of death, which is, famously, no picnic.

So where then for happiness? The pragmatic approach to mindfulness practice that is flourishing in the West is based on empiricism, the direct observation of sensations, feeling, thoughts – the content of experience moment-to-moment. Stripped of unnecessary cultural baggage, it turns out that the wisdom traditions of Asia share a core value with scientific inquiry, an underlying faith in the world, and an embrace of the notion that we have to start any form of engagement with what is verifiably true. Both traditions have a healthy regard for how our picture of the world can be deeply distorted by the brain-structures and biases laid down by prior experience. As meditation teacher and writer Ken McLeod puts it, science and awareness practice both begin with the faith that we need to look at the truth and open to what we find there.

I began this two-part post describing being haunted by a memory of the cement stairs of the apartment complex my family rented in Santa Monica right before my parents split up. As a child I could already read how the patterns at work in my life might play out. It was certainly cause for some alarm. Indeed, for many years our summers came to resemble the close of one of those Antonioni films, full of mute devastation, the catastrophe extending out toward a distant, flat horizon. Or like a Joan Didion essay right at the end, when she has rolled you out into a thin ribbon of alienated sensitivity exposed beneath a hot SoCal sun. Divorce and dislocation, as we all now appreciate, can be hard on youngsters.

But there was also, standing there looking up at the stairs, already the recognition, hard to articulate but always close by, that on a deeper level I was entirely unaffected by what was unfolding in my family’s life. The sun was shining. The August sea was warm, and if you dug down into the sand with your toes you could feel the small sand crabs there, burrowing away. The world was alive and everywhere vibrant, and at moments I knew myself to be profoundly free. Comfort, for me, would lie not in some remembered security, but in the possibility of a more complete connection to that energized field of experience. This sense of being non-separate is what thinkers like David Loy and Francisco Varela describe as the actual truth of our situation. Learning to embrace the mystery of how this non-separation could be true opens toward an energizing sense that we are, moment by moment, participating in the story of how the material of the universe emerges upwards into self-awareness.

And so I have to note in passing that, wherever you are right now, whatever you’re doing, the world around you is luminous. In the name of social progress, Loy asks us to recognize that this luminosity is a crucial part of what we fundamentally are. We tend to forget this fact more or less completely, and identify instead with what limits and constricts us. Such limitations are, of course, real enough too, but we need to continue to investigate how they may be expressing themselves in the larger dysfunctions that threaten our common future.

No doubt correcting this massive imbalance seems unlikely…but then from the start life itself is utterly unlikely. As is the fact that a collection of splitting, looping protein strands would give rise to the kinds of thoughts I am expressing now, or to the fingers that tap these thoughts out into words…or to the optic nerves that, many miles away, carry these improbable symbol-marks up into your neocortex where they bloom out into something that approaches meaning. If it is miracles we need, we might begin noticing when they arise around us. It’s a task that might keep us surprisingly busy, and that might balance somewhat the other efforts we are now called upon to make.

On a visit to Santa Fe recently I read up on neuroplasticity and found myself haunted by the memory of a set of cement stairs. These stairs I encountered briefly when I was eight years old and my parents were hurtling toward their final separation. The stairs belonged to a monthly rental in Santa Monica where we had traveled for the summer from the East. They led up to a hallway and, at the far end, an apartment I never wanted to enter. At night the thin walls would shake with my father’s wounded bellowing and the sound of things breaking. We children would gather in the corner of the bedroom, the three of us, around our youngest sister as she cried from an ache in her chest that wouldn’t ease. There was no safety in the world for us, huddled there in the dark, and we knew it and were filled with fear.

I’ve come to Santa Fe to attend a workshop in science writing and I have been reading the recent books authored by the instructors. Sandra Blakeslee, one of the country’s top science writers, is leading the workshop, the 15th of its kind. Working with her is George Johnson, a writer duly celebrated for his ability to explain things like Quantum Chromodynamics in elegant, simple prose. On the first night the attendees gather in the courtyard of the Ghost Ranch for dinner and drinks. As I say hello I keep catching little glimpses of those cement stairs, the somatic charge of old remembered fears traveling up through my body.

You can’t pursue a meditation practice nowadays without bumping into a book on neuroscience. Advances in the technology of brain imaging have opened the inner realm of meditative states to empirical study. The Embodied Mind by Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosche, first published in 1991, was a seminal text. A Buddhist himself, Varela, along with his co-authors, reviewed recent developments in the neuroscience of perception to buttress the core Buddhist concept of non-dualism. After The Embodied Mind, the stream widened considerably. Psychopathologist Richard Davidson began hooking Tibetan monks up to brain scan machines and recording the results. Davidson was soon joined by a growing circle of accomplished scientists and meditators including Jon Kabat Zinn, Daniel Goleman and more recent authors such as Daniel Siegel. Sensing the opportunity, the Dalai Lama lent his considerable weight to the endeavor, helping to create the Mind-Life Institute in Boulder, Colorado, where these investigations continue today. The controversies surrounding this research will continue for a time, no doubt. In the end we will arrive at a closer understanding of the underlying reality of how experience and neurology interweave. Also significant in this ongoing inquiry are non-Buddhist researchers into mind-body issues and brain science, such as Antonio Damasio, Vilayanur Ramachandran and Jeffrey Hawkins.

Dan Siegel’s book, The Mindful Brain, published in 2006, begins with an overview of the emerging field of contemplative neuro-science. Siegel then focuses in on how negative emotional experiences get hard wired into the brain, and how this wiring restricts our freedom and insures neurotic suffering. He presents a new explanation for how specific social and emotional circuits in the brain can be harnessed to transform our experience through basic meditation practices such as mindfulness. Here, I note in passing, are the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths – suffering, its cause, its cessation, and the way to achieve its cessation – in modern dress.

Change comes hard, but it can come, is the message. Affective Anxiety disorders, like the one that sends images of the cement stairs reeling through my mind, can be addressed through concerted effort. When somatic emotional charges are fully felt in the present they release their grip. We no longer confuse such strong emotions with who we are in any real sense, and after a while the conditioning ceases to express itself in neurotic behavior. Engaging with experience in this kind of non-dual mode begins to cultivate within us a sense of inter-connectivity with other beings, and an authentic concern for their welfare. And over time the momentum of practice calls upon us to engage with a larger effort to ease suffering in the world.

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On our first day together the group of us visit Santa Fe Institute which overlooks Santa Fe on a hilltop just outside of town. Founded in 1984, SFI is devoted to the study of complex adaptive systems. This study of “emergent” phenomenon widens the scientific gaze to include those complex processes that arise out of the interactions of much simpler elements. SFI’s Nobel-winning patriarch Murray Gell-Mann has summed up this view with elegant concision: “you don’t need more to explain more.” Whatever mystery there is in the universe resides below, in other words, in the basic particles and forces and how they interact, giving rise to miraculous complexities such as Gell-Mann’s intelligence.

At the Institute we gather around a very long table to hear Omidyar fellow Tanya Elliott talk about her current efforts to construct a model for sustainable development. Elliott is an inter-disciplinary researcher with a doctorate in theoretical physics and an on-going interest in language and cognition. The subject of her talk is how patterns of dysfunction have been hard-wired into the economic and social structures that are reducing our chances of survival. The coordinated, sustained effort required to undo this collective “wiring” clearly echoes the efforts we make as individuals to liberate ourselves from neurotic patterning. The tension between reductive patterning and expansive opening holds true across different scales, including the one where we live and breathe.

In his TED talk on Beauty and Truth in Physics, Gell-Mann points out the remarkable fact that beauty is actually a very successful criterion for choosing the right theory in physics. By beauty, Gell-Mann is talking about the distillation of complex phenomenon into equations with an elegant simplicity to them, E=MC2, for example. Our gradual approach toward a unified theory is like the peeling of an onion where the successive layers resemble each other. The equations derived to make sense of the last layer come close to explaining the new one: approximate self-similarity holds true across the different scales.

Listening to Tanya Elliott I wonder again what self-similarities underlie the long elaborate drama Freud called “Civilization and Its Discontents.” Psychologists often act as if emotional trauma were the exception to the rule, but perhaps trauma is, quite literally, our birthright. More so than any mammal we are dependent on our mothers for survival. The huge neocortex that provides our capacity for awareness is to blame. We can’t stay in the womb a moment longer than we do or our heads would grow too big to emerge. And so our sensitive brains are immature when we enter the world. A colt can get up and run at the end of its first day, while we must cling for dear life to our mothers into our second year. Whenever this external life-support system is unresponsive, even for a brief interval, we are viscerally traumatized, literally in fear for our lives. As they form, our brains are flooded again and again by this intense emotion, which shapes our neural pathways. Our sense of being an independent self is infused from the start by anxiety, and is perhaps entirely an expression of this anxiety.

Unflattering though it may be, embracing this view allows us to understand how the pursuit of “normal” happiness might lead to the collection of ills – nuclear proliferation, peak oil – that currently darken our horizons. Perhaps we need to redefine the paradigms of what constitutes “normal” if we are going to gain any traction over the large scale imbalances that threaten us. Perhaps it is this “background” anxiety hidden behind the “normal” self that is expressing itself in environmental degradation and our addiction to unsustainable levels of consumption.

In books such as A Buddhist History of the West, historian David Loy unpacks the issue of “lack” as a historical and cultural force driving human history. The history of the West, to Loy, is defined by our ongoing attempt to escape or explain away our experience of groundlessness in the world. We are not “real,” in the way we long to be, Loy writes in a remarkable essay titled “Self Transformation and Social Transformation” (Tikkun): “the sense-of-self is a psychosocial construct, it is ungrounded and ungroundable—hence always insecure… we try to bolster an illusory construct by focusing on something outside ourselves, which cannot provide the grounding we seek from it…no matter how much money I may accumulate, it will never be enough. The same is true for fame, power, beauty, and so forth.”

The foundation of Western political thought is the recognition by the ancient Greeks that political systems were themselves social constructions. Loy points out that this is, in fact, an invitation to rearrange our collective life so that it works better for us. Surveying our current situation Loy laments the mass suffering that arises when the “three poisons” of greed, ill will and delusion provide the foundation for social interaction. “Today,” he writes, “our economic system has institutionalized greed, our militarism institutionalizes ill will, and our corporate media institutionalize delusion.” Such a situation might seem daunting and unworkable, but, as many of us know from direct experience, change truly is possible if we first have the courage to look at dysfunction in all its lurid glory.

…in time it would come: the killer instinct
unleashed among in-laws, the blood-lust rampant.

Beowulf —  Trans: Seamus Heaney

A culture like ours, rooted in the worship of a man whose hands and feet have been nailed to beams of wood, should be open to possible links between violence and the sacred. And yet in recommending A Prophet (Un prophète), the prison noir by Jacques Audiard that won the Palme D’Or at Cannes last year, I feel compelled to warn you about scenes of violence in the film. A Prophet is not a movie for the faint of heart. But part of what’s refreshing about the film is how it treats human violence with depth and integrity, rewarding our attention with some valuable insights.

There’s a premeditated murder early in A Prophet that is particularly harrowing. The protagonist, Malik, a prisoner of French-Arab descent, visits the cell of another Arab prisoner, an informant named Reyeb, for a sexual exchange. Malik arrives with a disposable razor blade concealed in his mouth and we have seen him coached by members of the Corsican mob on how to transfer this razor to his teeth, where it can be used to sever Reyeb’s jugular vein. Malik himself will surely be killed if he fails in his mission, and his visceral fear of the Corsicans overrides any compassion for his victim, whom he scarcely knows. The murder when it comes is brutal and messy, but Audiard has also given it the disturbing intimacy of a sacrificial rite.  As James Joyce famously wrote about the tragic effect, pity and terror here combine to “arrest” our minds, uniting them with the sufferer, but also with the secret cause of the suffering.

In many ways the subject of the film is the odd intimacy that now develops between Malik and his victim. As the story unfurls, Reyeb returns in ghostly form, seeming to confer almost magical powers on the forlorn Malik. Malik begins to display remarkable talents as he navigates the power structure of the prison. Tutored by the Corsican gangster in charge of things, Malik forges alliances with Arab gangs on the outside. After a second spasm of violence, he takes control of the entire enterprise.

Violence on screen, or in any other art form, is upsetting. Adrenalin flows, our breathing turns shallow. It’s impossible to argue with people who don’t embrace to such material…unless it’s a pretext for a more general philistinism. From Homer to Sarah Kane, great art tends to wound us in one way or another. Moreover, our staggering gift for violence is perhaps our defining feature as a species, so it’s hard to know what is being served by avoiding its representation in art. If executed effectively and with integrity, depictions of violence offer glimpses of mysteries that return us to our lives in a more vital and urgent way. In scenes throughout A Prophet, the camera hovers close to Malik as he ponders such mysteries, as do we, rooted to our seats in the movie theater.

This unnerving dimension of human violence, has been explored in depth by the French cultural anthropologist Rene Girard. The author of the seminal Violence and the Sacred, Girard does not flinch from large ideas. His central thesis is that at a certain stage in their development all human communities faced an impending apocalypse of inter-clan violence, and that this blood feud is the terrifying monster vanquished symbolically in every myth (see the Beowulf quote above). Salvation arrived in the scapegoat mechanism, the sacrifice of the Pharmakos in Athens, for example, who would then be worshiped for his very real contribution to the survival of the community. So violent are we as a species, Girard believes, that those cultures which failed to stumble upon the scapegoat mechanism were wiped out in a storm of contagious tit-for-tat killings – the depravity of Rwanda or Bosnia played out to the bitter end.

It would take a very long post to unpack all the evidence Girard marshals and all the implications of his thesis. To Girard our violence is “mimetic,” by which he means it springs from competition for social roles, which are inherently plastic and adoptable. For me, given my engagement with Buddhist thinking, what’s interesting is how mimetic violence relates to the concept of “emptiness.” It is precisely because we lack any intrinsic, enduring form that, in the grip of dualism, we resort to imitation – mimesis. In contrast to our nagging sense of groundlessness, the Other appears fixed and solid. Secretly craving these qualities we seek to become “original” copies of the Other…which can only happen if the Other is eliminated in the process. We find the Oedipal relationship, in which the son seeks to copy and replace the father, so revealing, not because it is special, but because the tangled dynamic of mimesis becomes clearer when lit up by the primal energies of close family bonds.

Paradoxically, aggressive acts temporarily seem to deliver the solidity longed for by the egoic self, and this makes violence as contagious as small pox. Imagine me striking someone you love and feel how definite you become, how liberated from free-floating anxiety. The anger that runs through you is an entirely negative experience perhaps, but you are certainly free from feelings of “lack” or self-doubt. In the grip of anger we truly do become mirror images, replicas, of each other, and our public world becomes a nightmarish echo chamber of reciprocal violence. The mechanism of sacrifice ends the Hobbesian “war of all against all” as the violence is directed at the scapegoat. By common agreement the blood feud is buried with the victim, who is then worshiped as a god, becoming the lynch pin of all culture and myth. But the peace that descends is only temporary, and the seeds of mimetic violence will sprout again.

Certainly, anyone who has spent time working in the dramatic arts recognizes the significance of mimesis and the plasticity of the self, and all tragic dramas are rooted in sacrificial rites. But in Girard’s view social hierarchy in general arises out of the initial, hidden sacrifice. Even the competitive mimesis of the market economy – in which every new product is instantly cloned – is a distant, sublimated echo of the mimetic violence percolating underneath. And whenever we come to resemble each other too closely – when income inequality levels out, for example – the old atavistic anxieties begin to stir. Opponents of the death penalty, for example, miss how the leveling of incomes during the 1970s caused alarm among the defenders of social hierarchy. As recent governors of Texas seem to understand, erroneous executions are to be secretly celebrated; the more innocent the victim the more the execution will function like an actual sacrifice, buttressing the forces of social hierarchy.

There’s much more. The essential narrative of the Old Testament, according to Girard, is the story of the scapegoat mechanism held in abeyance. Abraham comes close to sacrificing Isaac…but then holds back. Joseph’s brothers’ turn him into a scapegoat…but he survives. With Jesus, however, we arrive at the return of the scapegoat mechanism in classic form. In Girard’s view the final lament of Jesus was that with his own sacrifice our bond with violence would only be buried, not broken. The aggression remained, sublimated in the various forms of culture, ready to continue its destructive magic out of view. Seen in this way, the idea that a second reckoning would surely arrive was more the product of clear thinking than prophecy. To survive, Girard suggests, the species must finally and completely shed its bond with violence – both greed and aggression – in its direct and in its sublimated forms.

While Girard may be extravagant in the claims he makes for his ideas, it’s hard to see where he really goes wrong. One reason the issue of mimetic violence is so hard to illuminate is that those who come to understand it directly, like Malik in A Prophet, are rendered mute by what they have experienced. The murderer exists apart, on the other side of language. Whether you define their difference as a form of spiritual insight or as a moral disfigurement, they speak in riddles or remain silent. From Macbeth on the battlements to Raskolnikov on the crowded streets of St. Petersburg, the killer is drawn into the heart of things to his ultimate peril. The genius of A Prophet is how it shows this dynamic operating in a vehicle as unlikely as Malik, an everyman who seems empowered solely by his bond with the would-be lover he murders.

Depictions of violence in art beg the question: what cherished self images are we willing to forgo in order to lessen the actual suffering we are causing? No doubt we would prefer to forget our own shadow material, which today gets played out, not in primal blood feuds, but in gushers of black oil flooding the waters of the Gulf. From a Buddhist perspective, our ultimate opponent is not aggression or greed but ignorance. Artists examine human violence in order to illuminate the Darwinian habits that also explain our current success as a species. But the violence cultivated by the imperatives of natural selection is now a limiting factor when it comes to our continued survival. Evolution itself now calls on us to break our hidden bonds with violence. A first step, perhaps, is to draw them into the light and look at them with an unflinching eye.

Gunfighter Nation presents The Alamo Project
An Interview with Rita Valencia and Alexis Steppling

I meet Alexis Steppling, associate artistic director (and co-founder) of Gunfighter Nation, in an Altadena coffee house where he is hanging out with his wife Suzanne and their toddler daughter, the lovely and good-natured Stella. Lex has a friend along who is wearing a fitted tee-shirt and tells us he has just passed the bar exam with the intention of becoming an entertainment attorney. This is a very complex world, I am thinking, as the late middle-aged man starts singing a folk song. The friend leaves and Lex and I retire to a table in front, where it’s quiet except for a nervous female vocalist waiting to perform, who it turns out, knows Lex slightly from high school and wants to chat. Alas.

Rita Valencia: How did Gunfighter Nation emerge into your life, and why?

Lex Steppling: A long story…Since my teens I’ve had many experiences of building spaces for change.

RV: What do you mean by the word “space”?

LS: In my teens I was having a pretty hard time of it, and then I went to a transformative camp program “Brotherhood/Sisterhood”, run by a group called National Conference for Community and Justice. It was an intensive experiential program about breaking down barriers, encountering racial, gender and class issues. In America we are hyper-obsessed with class bias around difference. The goal at the camp was to build a safe environment, to acknowledge, take responsibility for bias. People would fight, scream, dialogue in a frank way. Then we realized, experientially, it was possible to make positive change. Breaking down barriers is not pretty…encounters around these issues are cathartic.

So this first “space” for me was a physical place where accountability, responsibility and trust existed, where transformation could come about.

I continued to work with the organization, eventually became a counselor at the camp, got involved in community organizing with different groups…and it gave me the opportunity to travel to Cuba and then to Venezuela under an educational research license. There, people did not have a black and white viewpoint about the revolution, but there were acutely aware of their sovereignty.

In my travels, working in public health and other community issues, too often in these contexts, critical thought was never encouraged, nor was asking questions.

Socialists and communists organized with goals for certain projects–and you do gain skills in that way.

But often activism is doing for the sake of doing. There are signifiers to being an activist. Some of these folks still have a doomed ideological Che Guevara syndrome: “worship me for saving the world”… There is only so much to be done against Capital. Revolutionary language does not work. To think change comes from protest is ridiculous. It’s not enough. I want to work to create functional models. Make a space for people to come to solutions…meet the practical needs of communities: FOOD, SHELTER and EDUCATION (read, writing, arithmetic) If you want people to change…you have to do something tangible…for instance feed them by creating a community garden, create a sustainable experience.

RV: How did your activism start to engage with the arts?

LS: I had a turning point doing this show called Soul Rebel Radio on KPFK…I hooked up with some of my rap buddies and we decided to do these skits about issues in current events. We started with a six month commitment, and though I left it a couple of years ago, now the program’s been going 5 years.

I don’t think of myself as an artist, or writer. If you want something to happen you do what you have to do. It was my goal with the KPFK show to get younger people to listen…I wrote plays as part of that project.

Every step is a SPACE. There are skills that one learns, which arise from hands-on practice, with resources to exchange–not just cooperatives, not just living off the grid — such living doesn’t exist…

Gunfighter Nation is a way to bring people together to be better artists and to create a space for critical thought and developing a critical vocabulary, a space of discipline where people really are learning, primarily: “DON’T look at things a-historically.”

It’s also a space for youth to learn from elders and elders from youth.

I’ve brought in friends, Efe, the drummer who was a friend from childhood…a friend who’s a stand up comedian…

RV: What did your friends in the activist community have to say about this project? Any resistance?

LS: Many agreed that old models are fixed on IDENTITY. “I’m a somebody in the activist community”… you take on certain signifiers, and reject others.

This group (Gunfighter Nation) is intentionally ambiguous.

RV: Art is all about ambiguity. How does this work in The Alamo Project, where you’re taking on an historical subject with so many facets?

LS: Memory itself is ambiguous. The Alamo is all about Revisionism, history under attack, deconstructing an American myth.

The way language is debased [through mass culture] it can mean anything. Lots of people don’t know how to read, or don’t choose to read…but they are literate in new ways. Language is changing…but we must try not to shy away from how it changes, but head first into it…with skills…conditioning–if we continue to find signifiers that keep us in a comfortable place we’ll never get anywhere.

We have to engage with each other instead of nestling into our own circles; question each other with respect, not validate, but challenge one another.

Art triggers critical thought. Euphoric or painful…

The Alamo project will put people in a strange place…it’s a relentless and weird deconstruction of western revisionism…after the show, in the night and the days that follow, each person will have echoes, hopefully for a long time to come.

RV: Is there a goal for Gunfighter Nation?

LS: As a group we need to shed any kind of vanguard mentality.

We are throwing stones into the water, making ripples.

Gunfighter Nation presents The Alamo Project
An Interview with Rita Valencia and John Steppling

The Alamo Project is an evening of short plays about the Alamo. The Alamo, the legendary 1835 seige of a Texan mission, is emblematic of the ease with which past events can become myth, and how myth serves the purpose of the mythmakers. As part of this process, history, real history, becomes irrelevant…but there is the devil to pay. And that’s where Gunfighter Nation steps up, with a body of idiosyncratic plays that twist the tale in totally unexpected ways. It’s a late night event to begin after the regularly scheduled play at the Odyssey Theater. So have an dopio espresso after dinner and head on down.

This is the first group project of Gunfighter Nation, a new coalition that has formed of young, socially and politically active youth and experienced writers and actors. Many of the older people have a history in this town as a sort of underground literary movement. Some were members of Padua Playwrights and others have joined the fold more recently. They share a unique utopian, idealistic vision that contrasts with the latent cynicism of commercially driven art-making which dominates the current cultural domain. (And it’s a membership that’s had multiple theater awards, grants and productions to their credit, but have eschewed a commercial or academic/institutional career.)

The name Gunfighter Nation comes with a quote by D.H. Lawrence: “The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic and a killer”. At the outset, the group embraces the notion of owning a legacy which is steeped in the ugly stereotypes that we recognize as American, but wish to disclaim, and transforming these ideas by actively inhabiting them. I took a few minutes to speak with Gunfighter Nation’s artistic director, John Steppling, at Burrito King in Silver Lake about the genesis of the company.

Rita Valencia : What is it you are trying to accomplish with Gunfighter Nation?

John Steppling: I returned from living out of the country eleven years and wanted to start a group, but had no grand plan. The idea was to start with people whose work I respected and create a laboratory setting for theater and eventually film. Crucially, we would work without joining into the competition for turning out an economically determined product. No auditioning. No ulterior motives to be adopted by Hollywood, or a big institutional theater, or ANYBODY. So I got together with my son Lex, and Wes Walker, Guy Zimmerman, others like Harvey Perr, and we had a discussion about the idea of putting on work with “no critics”, and also to make this be an educational process: a laboratory setting for theater and film with a pedagogical dimension. We felt it was important to attract people who had not necessarily worked in theater: young writers and community activists. My question was, is there a hidden voice within the culture that we can develop?

Now, “Alamo” is a theater project, and to that end we’ve developed a mutually satisfying relationship with Ron Sossi and the Odyssey Theatre which is free from bureaucratic hysteria, political correctness and the unnecessary pressures of unrealistic economic goals. But even though we have been able to pull together a show and a venue, we are emphatically not creators of product. This is perhaps an impossible thing in a society that is over saturated with commodification…

RV: Theater has been dying for years, trying so hard to be financially viable.

JS: It is interesting, after being away from L.A., to come back to the institutional theater scene in Los Angeles, and to find that the Mark Taper Forum not only has no interest in creating art, but a vested interest in destroying it. Art is challenging to people’s conventional concepts about the world and as such it is not a stable business venture. Entities like the Mark Taper Forum are closed to the community on not just an institutional level but on a psychic level. This is precisely why there needs to be a group like Gunfighter Nation, creating a community which is process-oriented, not goal-oriented, where we are looking for what works in a piece of writing and what does not. As soon as the economic is prioritized you have created the first and most profound obstacle to transformation, and you will be crippled. There are economic realities which of course we recognize, and we are not offering solutions, only attitudes and techniques. That’s why we have reached out to people who are engaged in social justice issues.

RV: Don’t social activists tend to be suspicious of artists?

JS: Well now, on the left wing, or “progressive” side, art is supposed to be morally instructive and supportive of the ideology of progressive politics. On the right wing, “conservative” side of the culture, the arts are seen as entertainment, escape, and a vehicle for celebrity. Both are wrong. The problem on the left, with its demand for moral instruction, and then its marriage with political correctness, results in this confusion about the anti-hierarchical, and the confusion leads us to a lack of discrimination, a lack of rigour. You don’t do anyone a favor by lying to them. So where we are at with “post-modernism” is that there are questions that need to be asked and are not being vigorously pursued. Perhaps only a full economic collapse will open the dialogue on these questions. You cannot separate the economic and the cultural.

RV: Hasn’t high art, art that requires a certain level of training and knowledge to appreciate or enjoy, always been an experience for the very few?

JS: You cannot sustain any communal memory or consciousness with mass media product. The country is starving–psychically and spiritually. High art is unavailable to the culture at large–so how can anyone even have a chance to develop a taste for it? Big theater/art institutions have become culturally irrelevant. But they have the potential to reclaim relevance. This is a question that education needs to address. A great number of people, given access and tutelage, would make art and respond to it. But there is a vested interest in stopping that from happening. It is like being at a supermarket with only Pepsi and Coke. Buying up the cultural shelf space right now are the big media empires. Theater becomes pathetic–maybe they put up an August Wilson revival with a movie star in it–to what end? The Taper, the Geffen, South Coast Rep–are on tenuous ground financially. They should all go out of business. Young writers need a place to experiment, to fail, to succeed, to learn; not to aspire to these middlebrow graveyards that are institutional theaters. The Taper and its ilk are totally irrelevant. Can ANYBODY in this city actually say, “I can’t wait to see what the next season of the Taper is going to be”?

RV: You mentioned excluding theater critics from the group and from the shows.

JS: The reason we decided we didn’t want them is because they are part of this problem. What use are they to artists? They don’t help getting audience to shows, they are a nuisance and an irritating insult. On the whole they are uneducated, philistine, and interested only in pandering to the institutional theater they serve.

Art must be disruptive, awakening, and personally transformative. Adorno said that the rise of fascism in Germany was largely a result of the destruction of education after World War One. Today we are besieged with a vulgar barbarism that we have to stand up to if we are going to survive as a community of artists and thinkers.

Dispatch Oman, Part Two, Food and Labor
by Aram Yardumian

Muscat, the capital of Oman, is the cleanest, whitest city on earth. There is very little graffiti and what there is amusing enough to leave be. Remarkably little trash blows around, especially given the dumpsters have no lids and the Arabs litter with gusto; but the closer one is to the palace of His Majesty the squeakier the roads feel beneath your feet. Hundreds of kilometers of highway are lined with irrigated grass and flowers. Traffic moves on the British roundabout system and each roundabout has a sculpture in the center to give it a name. Muscat proper is very small, but when the surrounding districts (Ruwi, al-Khuwair, Muttrah, et al) are included the area becomes sizable. It is a port city with huge cargo ships arriving every day to unload Toyotas, beef franks and Iranian strawberries, and dhows hauling in bloody giant tuna and kingfish to be scaled and cleaned on an open tile floor by the harbor.

At a typical American strip mall you may find a Laundromat, a Chinese take-out, a real estate office, a pornographic bijou and a dollar store; here in Oman you will find a laundry (with Indians inside ironing and washing), a coffee shop with an Arabic name and Indians serving Indian food, a real estate office run by Indians, a ‘library’, (stationery store), run by Indians, and a sundry shop, run by Indians (which in the greater sense of the term includes Pakistanis and Bangladeshis.) Yes, both in Muscat as in the Interior, I must often labor to remind myself that I am not in India.

It is true, then, that Oman is fundamentally Arab, and that Omani passport-holders constitute a near-100% Arab majority, but running the show on the guest-worker program are thousands and thousands of Indians who are lucky to have made it here at all. One is hard pressed to find a blue-collar Arab anywhere, cab driving excepted, it stands to reason that businesses here are Arab-owned and Indian-operated, with profits swimming rapidly upstream.

The Indians live precariously here just as they do at home. They sleep afternoons on narrow highway medians, weld without goggles, ride three to a bicycle down dark roads, sleep two or more to a bed in a rusty, shabby brick room adjacent to whatever laundry or machine shop they work in, grinding their crescent wrenches round and round, and ironing my underwear. When they go missing their photograph and passport number are printed in the newspaper in the ‘absconded’ column, putting one in mind of the Grand Old American South. They’re Muslims naturally, though I do suspect some converted to get away from India. My regular barber in A’Direez, who for a dollar will shave you to the last particle, trim your nose hairs with a stork-beak of a scissor, and suddenly crack your neck, is Tamil.

Our cook, Amin (whom I would bring home with me if I could), comes from Chittagong—the last fingernail of Indo-European trajectory before the Burmese border. His English is a little better than my Bengali but communicating in the kitchen by pantomime and example is easy. Before Amin I was on my own for cooking and had to learn how to cook dal in a week of laboratory experiments with turmeric, green chilis and coriander. I had no intention of setting him the task of making my meal every day, but Amin took it on himself to put an end to my sad culinary attempts. Now, every lunch and dinner I came home to find some kind of well prepared dal or chana waiting for me. Prior to that I was stuck on fava beans. I ate every can of fava beans in Wahra and A’Direez and was slowly eating through Ibri’s supply, with plans to venture as far as Rustaq and Nizwa to get my hands on more of them. The men and women from whom I bought all the fava beans really thought I’d gone off. I didn’t buy bread or rice or even disposable razors and soap, just fava beans, and after two weeks I might have had liver spots or green skin for how they looked at me. I found one bag of papadum in Ibri and never, much as I tried, found another. It must have been left over from the Harappans.

Much to my delight any roadside cafe in Oman serves chicken curry, yellow dal, green salads and papadum. It’s enough to upset many an American a bit too loyal to the cuisine on which they were raised, and it’s enough to make me praise Allah. For once I can enjoy myself royally and watch others hoist themselves on the cranes of their own fussiness.

I’ve hunted near and far for what one might call ‘traditional’ Omani food and all roads seem to lead to one answer: dates. Tens, maybe hundreds of varieties of dates grow here and their specifications are as subtle and numerous as with wine. Color, density and sugar content are quantified per type, making some delicacies and others common tripe. Hints of flowers and other fruits are pointed out to you when you sample them at the souq, and naturally some are more expensive than others. It’s hard to stop eating them even when you know you are going to suffer terribly for it. Dates are eaten whole and are used to make a fecal-looking paste speckled with nuts; you dip your hands into it I’m told; thanks but no thanks. Grilled fish is another Omani specialty but not in any unique way. You can buy strips of dried, salted eel and be as confused as I about what to do with them, and you can order a grilled hamoor at a restaurant and chase bites of it with bottled water. If the flavors are singing in Oman, I can’t hear them.

Each day my wife visits the Kali machine at UCLA. The techs lay her down on a metal pallet and bolt to her head a hard white plastic mesh that’s been molded to fit her face. The linear accelerators of the IMRT (Intensity Modulated Radiation Therapy) device, big as a small car, start up. Seven beams of X-ray radiation target the zone beneath her right ear where the parotid gland used to be. This gland, the largest of the salivary glands, was surgically removed in January, along with the malignancy that had grown within it. Any cancer cells that lingered in the wound would eventually sprout into new tumors, so they need to be destroyed. Each day the X-rays of the Kali machine tear into the exposed DNA of cells in the process of replicating. Since cancer cells do almost nothing but replicate the X-rays kill them off with great efficiency, leaving the delicate surrounding tissues damaged but capable of regeneration. The Kali machine hums and hovers around Jenny’s head for about fifteen minutes and then the techs unbolt her and we drive back East toward Silver Lake.

Merciless and potent, tongue protruding, Kali dances with a belt of skulls dangling from her waist below her many blue arms. The destructive aspect of the divine feminine, Kali takes away what currently exists in order to open a space for what will come. She dissolves form to reveal an underlying “emptiness” full of potential. Cancer cells, meanwhile, with their blind, obsessive self-copying, strike me as the ultimate triumph of “form.” A single note tapped over and over, cancer replicates with endless uniformity, confronting us with the monomania of the death instinct in its purest manifestation. By ending death’s sovereignty Kali, paradoxically, is a bringer of life.

When I first heard about the seven beams of IMRT my mind immediately turned to the Seven Points of Mind Training, the Tibetan meditation sequence that has been a part of my sitting practice for half a decade now (a good translation is important). First brought to Tibet in the 11th Century by Lord Atisha and written down in the 12th century by the Kadampa master Chekawa, Mind Training turns the engine of the self into reverse, amplifying the experience of compassion and presence. The idea is that we cut ourselves off from fully experiencing our lives by pushing away the things we don’t like and by clutching the things we do like too tightly. This pattern of aversion and attachment becomes a fixed and rooted structure of separation, a false self progressively alienated from authenticity. With Mind Training you practice the opposite: giving away what you’re attached to and taking in what you don’t want. Counter-intuitively the result is an energized presence that reminds us of our innate freedom, a rising up out of the meaningless struggles of samsara. Deceptively pithy, the adages of the Seven Points interconnect with a subtle logic, like a complex and beautiful score one can only begin to appreciate after long exposure.

In the waiting room I sometimes unpack the parallels between the seven beams and the Seven Points. Implied in the comparison is the notion that the emotional patterns and self-images composing the reactive ego echo the replicating monomania of cancer cells. In left-brain thinking mode we impose a single interpretive straightjacket over all our experience – must be this! Can’t be that! We view ourselves as separate and apart and continuous in time, blinding ourselves to the imbalances and dysfunction we create in the world around us. The path of practice involves a steady engagement with the retreating forces of the ego, which sprout everywhere, cancer-like, distorting the energy of the awakened aspects of mind. In this view the purpose of practices like the Seven Points is to search out every hiding place of the reactive self – paging Sidhattha Gotama, head oncologist.

Opinion is divided on the extent to which the current prevalence of carcinoma is the result of environmental degradation, but everyone knows toxicity plays a role. On my iPhone as we make the trip across the LA basin I tap into satellite imagery of the globe as it appears from outer space. The healthy greens and blues are shot through now with the necrotic tissue of asphalt and concrete, the socio-economic carcinoma of 21st century human development. On a geological time frame this burst of growth is abrupt, beginning back only three hundred spins around our small star. The black spot would have started in the mill towns of Southern England and spread quickly East and South before jumping the blue Atlantic (on trade ships loaded with textiles and slaves) to metastasize in the fertile tissue of the resource-rich Americas.

And yet tonglen, the Seven Points, and all the other Asian imports (Zen, Theravada, Tantric practices of all kinds) come to us via the era of unprecedented wealth and plenty created by that same fire. The oil fat post-War American consumer paradise generated enough light to crack open the fortress of the Western mind. In its pragmatic materialism liberal democracy produced a sustained experience of what the Buddhists mean by the “Human Realm.” One of the six “realms” of samsaric existence, the Human Realm is defined by the pursuit of mundane material satisfactions. The satisfactions may be real enough…but so is the disappointment as time continues on, sweeping us along. As sure a recipe for suffering as the other five realms, the Human Realm is different in one regard – in classical depictions it’s where the stem of the lotus of Nirvana – non-dual awareness – finds its roots. The Human Realm is where we enter “the way,” in other words.

It’s important to understand this today because the stem of the lotus is delicate and under attack. The neocons and other proto-fascists, whose moment was the presidency of George W. Bush, are devoted to shifting our political realities in the direction of the lower realms. Descendents of Thomas Hobbes, who viewed humans as inherently evil and life as a war of all against all, the neocons embrace the solid feeling that comes when the self is under attack. They are denizens of the Hell Realm, in other words. What makes them particularly dangerous is that they recognize the utility of scarcity. Scarcity propels us into our brain stems toward reptile mode where we are easily controlled. The neocons have an advantage in that scarcity is easier to generate than abundance, and the coming short fall in oil reserves, to choose just one example, will provide them with a wealth of opportunity.

Hobbes counterweight on the left would be Jean-Jacques Rousseau: “Man is born free but everywhere he is in chains.” Rousseau’s ideas took a hard hit in the mid 20th century as the idealistic revolutions in Eastern Europe and China gave rise to totalitarian forms of state socialism. As a result, the emotional reserves of the left are in much worse shape than the last time Capitalism faced a crisis like ours – the stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression. But Rousseau’s ideas seem less foolish when viewed from the perspective of non-dual thinking. The concept of private property, to choose one example, stops making so much sense when we abandon our determination to separate from the underlying contingency of our lives. If you give a man a way of relating to this aspect of experience, that man will stop wasting precious time amassing a huge fund of private property and then rigging the game to protect it. Great private wealth is famously useless in the end, a false promise that has seduced many lives into a compromised existence.

To me it seems clear that Western political thought, aided now by advances in brain science, is knocking on the door of the non-dual. Empirically speaking there really is no world separate from what we experience in the here and now. There is great mystery in that – how could this vast world exist non-separately from my experience, and also from your experience? Not to mention non-separately from the experiences of the multitude of other souls breathing right now? How can we begin to make sense of a paradox like that? I certainly can’t…but maybe it’s possible to live with that mystery instead of needing to resolve it. Mystery and paradox, after all, define the material world down to its quantized roots.

My hope is that a new mode of thought will emerge to help us ride out the assorted crises confronting us. A series of questions announce themselves: how could the bedrock of laws be modified to retain all the creativity and energy of a capitalist economy but in a more balanced way? What socio-political practices would allow us to mitigate the trashing of the planet? My sense is that the shadows created by the harshly analytical Western mind may yet conceal solutions to the complex of interlocking crises on the horizon. The empirical traditions of Western science remain a potent tool for correcting the imbalances we have created. I write this as a man who feels as grateful right now for the medical technology of the Seven Beams of IMRT as I have felt for the transformative power of the Seven Points.

Dispatch Oman, Part One, The Coast, Interior and Empty Quarter
by Aram Yardumian

Oman: what do you really know about it? To begin with, it is not in the capital of Jordan, nor is it one of the trucial states. It is in an independent Arab nation whose nipple, a rock formation called Ras-al-Jinz, is the easternmost point on the Arabian Peninsula, bordering Yemen to the west, Saudi to the northwest and the Emirates to the north. Separated from all of them by vast stretches of uninviting dune desert, Oman has avoided total domination by Seljuks, Macedonians, Mongols, the British, and—most fortunately—Ottomans, and is therefore quite stable and happy. It is a nation recently opened to the world, one curiously modern and welcoming of the infidel and the things we do and peddle. In Muscat, the capital, we go to Carrefour, Lulu Hypermarket, Baskin Robbins, Borders, and KFC (rather the Omanis go to KFC, I eat at Cafe al-Failaq) to buy things and to remind ourselves that there really is no clash of civilizations. Oman’s motto, as coined by His Majesty Sultan Qaboos bin Said is something like ‘progress with respect for heritage.’ And while these forces cannot always operate concomitantly (the secret police recently built a compound on top of some important grave assemblages in Ras al-Hadd) it’s not a bad way forward.

As archaeologists, we are welcomed especially by the many bureaucrats and officials who live what appear to be painfully boring lives in plain square office warrens. The interminableness of these office buildings cannot be overstated. They are kudzu reaching into a thicket—you may follow and follow and lose your mind before the end. We nearly did. Following a visa mishap (the wrong stamp was used at the airport), I spent long afternoons traveling deeper and deeper into the Heart of Bureaucracy, one office opening into the next, each turbaned man behind each desk more salt-poisoned with boredom and less able to communicate, the maps on succeeding walls less and less resembling anything geographic. I never did find Col. Kurtz. But one sympathetic fourth cousin of the Sultan went so far as to produce a stamp and ink it, and bring it close to my passport—but he just couldn’t bring himself, in the end, to make an expedient move. Ultimately I took matters into my own hands to expedite the process. (In the end, I drove to the United Arab Emirates, had my passport stamped, made a u-turn and immediately re-entered Oman).

The country is divided, historically, between the coast and the Interior, the latter of which reaches up into the Empty Quarter, and down the southern coast of the Peninsula to the border with Yemen. The Interior is slower, more old fashioned and more preposterously friendly than Muscat which has super highways lined with bright flowers, Peugeot dealerships, blocks of mysterious-looking flats, and a desalinated water supply. In the Interior you wave at everyone, young, old, blind, animal and mineral, and they wave back, and if you are invited in for coffee or tea you kindly accept. Camels wander freely along and across the road. And you’ll tie your tubes in knots to keep from hitting one of them in the car. The sheikh of A’Direez died recently in a camel accident—that is to say, he was driving at night in the mountains and hit a camel crossing the road. When this happens, the camel’s legs buckle under its weight, and all its entire body crashes through your windshield, and it is curtains for you, with the horn blaring under the combined suffocating mass until the Bedu find you in the morning.

Geographically the Interior is much like East Africa: savannah with flat topped, thorny acacia trees that grab onto your mutarrh and pull; the fantastic mountains that look as if they were dropped there by cosmic helicopter. Settlements exist wherever there is water available through falaj (or qanat) system and the aqueducts that transport the water for irrigation. Date palm oases exist here and there by the side of the road, and are grown crowded closely to maximize one’s share of the falaj water. The groves are woven together so densely that they become, upon entry, cold and Jurassic, and unwelcoming of the sun. Yet, between the trees, bright green robust grass thrives and strange giant dragonflies move slowly about.

Reading Stephen Batchelor’s Confession of a Buddhist Atheist is likely to have an irreversible impact on your image of the historical Buddha. Far from a demi-god who woke up one day beneath the Bodhi tree and lived out his life in an alternate universe defined by bliss and ease, Batchelor’s earthy and forceful Siddhattha Gotama exists within a Shakespearean landscape defined by passionate treachery and high political intrigue. While Batchelor takes pains to present this figure as one of many legitimate pictures of the Buddha, the picture he paints couldn’t be more bracing.

Toward the end of Confession, for example, Batchelor tells of an old king who, when visiting Gotama, hands his sword and turban to his military commander and enters the sage’s hut alone. Inside, Gotama listens as the king laments his dwindling capacity to generate fear, let alone respect, in his subjects. Out loud the king wonders how Gotama has managed to preserve his own authority so successfully. At the end of the meeting the old king steps out of the hut and is dismayed to discover that his general has absconded with the insignia of royalty. Instantly, he sees that the visit was a diversion set up by his son, whom the general is now en route to coronate. As the defeated old monarch rides away, Gotama knows the new king will now attack his homeland, taking revenge on the population for a deep and long-simmering humiliation. He travels out and sits beneath a tree on the border of the country. When the new king approaches at the head of his army, Gotama persuades him to turn back. Before long, however, the troops return – the king has ordered them to invade the land and slaughter every man, woman and child.

The old monarch in the story is King Pasenadi, who ruled the kingdom of Kosala in the Ganges Plain of Central India some twenty-five hundred years ago. His son, the new king, is Vidhudaba, and the land he will invade with murder in his heart is Sakiya, home of Siddhattha Gotama, the Buddha Sakyamuni. For forty years, Pasenadi has been Gotama’s main patron and protector, and because of his demise the remaining few years of Gotama’s life were marked by an elevated state of uncertainty. This is just one of many remarkable narratives Batchelor has patiently brought to light out of the vast archive of early Buddhist texts called the Pali Canon* (See Note), narratives that force a grounding reassessment of what it means to practice the dharma.

An iconoclast and polemicist, Batchelor has earned his authority on contemporary practice the hard way. A monk first in the Gelug lineage of Tibetan Buddhism and then in the tradition of Korean Zen (where he met his wife Martine, herself an accomplished practitioner), Batchelor’s understanding of the dharma stacks up against anyone’s. He also writes extremely well. His first book, Alone with Others, was rooted equally in Shantideva’s Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way and Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time. The Awakening of the West came next, followed by the hugely influential Buddhism Without Belief.. Batchelor’s 1998 translation of Nagarjuna’s Verses from the Center presented the 5th century Mayahana teacher as a poet, while his Living with the Devil traced the parallels between the figure of Mara in Buddhism and that of Satan in the West. In addition to his work as an author, Batchelor is an accomplished photographer. He is, in short, a very impressive gentleman.

I heard Batchelor read from Confession recently. We were at Against the Stream, the dharma center on Melrose Avenue in East Hollywood founded by Dharma Punx author Noah Levine. Levine presents the dharma as a rebellion against the forces of greed, hatred and delusion, so Against the Stream felt like an appropriate setting for Batchelor. Seated on a small dais at the front of the room, he read a few passages from Confession and then took questions from the crowd. Batchelor almost visibly winced as these questions centered on issues of reincarnation and karma that he views as completely unfruitful avenues of inquiry. Batchelor is unflinching in his advocacy of an empirical approach to practice, stripped of belief. And the Confession is in part an effort to separate out those teachings that were unique to Gotama, such as “this-conditionality,” from the common cultural traditions of his day.

Reading Batchelor brought home how my own subtle idealizations of Shakyamuni Buddha have been driven by secret longings to become invulnerable to harm. It is through the space opened by admiration, I sense, that certain “gaining” ideas can infiltrate one’s practice. Instead of a total critique of normative modes of living, the dharma then begins to devolve into a smile button pinned to the lapel of a spurious identity, the vain self-image of being someone on the path to “enlightenment.” Reading Confession helps re-energize the practice of dharma as an effort to radically transform the ground of experience. Seeing Gotama so deeply engaged with the radical contingency of his time and place underscores how dogma will not help us – we must engage with experience breath by breath.

Confession also contains an extended meditation on the blessings and pitfalls of religious institutions. Without institutions, religions disappear…but institutions inevitably distort the insights and practices they exist to convey. On this level Confession does for Buddhism what Elaine Pagel’s The Gnostic Gospels did for Christianity. Exploring recently unearthed gospels by renegade apostles such as Thomas and Phillip (and even Mary Magdalene herself), Pagels radically altered our sense of the actual teachings of Jesus. In a similar way Batchelor ponders the effects on Gotama’s teachings of the struggle after his death between the authoritarian Kassapa and the dreamy Ananda. While Kassapa may have compromised the subtleties of the teaching, he also helped to ensure we can experience the dharma today.

The tension between the dogma and practice is always challenging because language itself is part of the problem. The experience of presence is immediate and ephemeral; any attempt to depict it becomes distorted by the crudeness of words. The linguistic “forms” we deploy to describe the experience of dharma begin to do what all forms do, which is to persist and draw energy, replicate and spread taking, finally, institutional form. Seen in this way the issue of enduring institutions on the one hand versus the immediacy of practice on the other falls under the rubric of “the middle way.” The challenge is to hold both ends of this spectrum balanced in the mind at one time. Our problem can be viewed as a root imbalance or bias in the direction of the “form” end of the spectrum. Using the language of modern science, we tilt toward the left-brain, with its strong ego-based linearity, over the connective right brain. Gotama then becomes a pioneer in a necessary rebalancing, a forerunner of the kind of human being we must all become if the species is to continue to thrive.

If Batchelor at times seems overly harsh in his assessment of the traditions that formed his sensibility, it is perhaps to provoke an important question: where do the impulses of orthodoxy and hierarchy lurk within the emergent culture of Western dharma? Already, no doubt, such retrograde forces are exerting their distorting effects. And yet one of Batchelor’s themes is how elastic the dharma is, able to adapt to radically diverse cultural settings, and resistant over the long haul to all efforts to co-opt its transformative power. This elasticity is rooted, perhaps, in the dharma’s capacity to activate the remarkable gifts of practitioners like Mr. Batchelor himself.

*Note on Batchelor’s translation

For the confirmed dharma-geek, Confession of a Buddhist Atheist includes an account of how Batchelor managed to track small threads of biographical narrative hidden in the vast Pali Canon. Crucial to his ability to do this is A Dictionary of Pali Proper Names, first published in 1938. Running itself to 1,370 pages, this massive index allowed Batchelor to follow accounts, for example, of King Pasenadi, cross-referencing for accuracy and detail. Batchelor is translating this primary source material himself, giving even more weight to his portrait of the man Siddhattha Gotama.