, FEAR, ANGER and RECRIMINATION. In his near-century of life, Albert Murray's experience of ALL these issues, led to his confrontation of race by re-constructing American identity as omni-American, such that OUT of MANY • WE ARE ONE.
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ZEN is TAO and NOT ZEN without TAO
ZEN is BUDDHA and NOT ZEN without BUDDHA
TAO & BUDDHA are independent & of ZEN
ZEN is dependent on TAO & BUDDHA as ONE
Added by Michael Grove at 15:51 on November 16, 2010
d War One, extended further. When I was a child, our system of ideology and
mass media still protected that story, but in the last thirty years the incursions of reality
have punctured its protective shell and have ruptured its essential infrastructure.
We no longer believe our storytellers, our elites. We don’t believe the politicians, we don’t
believe the doctors, we don’t believe the professors, we don’t believe the bankers, we don’t
believe the technologists. All of them imply that everything is under control, and we know that
it is not.
We have lost the vision of the future we once had; most people have no vision of the future at
all. This is new for our society. Fifty or a hundred years ago, most people agreed on the general
outlines of the future. We thought we knew where society was going. Even the Marxists and the
capitalists agreed on its basic outlines: a paradise of mechanized leisure and scientifically
engineered social harmony, with spirituality either abolished entirely or relegated to a materially
inconsequential corner of life that happened mostly on Sundays. Of course there were dissenters
from this vision, but this was the general consensus.
When a story nears its end it goes through death throes, an exaggerated semblance of life.
So today we see domination, conquest, violence, and separation take on absurd extremes that
hold a mirror up to what was once hidden and diffuse. The year 2012 ended with just such a
potent story-disrupting event: the Sandy Hook massacre. Even realizing that far more, equally
innocent, children have been killed in the last few years by, say, U.S. drone strikes, it really got
under my skin. No one was immune. I think that is because its utter senselessness penetrated
every defense mechanism we have to maintain the fiction that the world is basically OK. Unlike
9/11 or Oklahoma City, and certainly unlike the horrors that go on around the world, there was
no convenient narrative to divert the raw pain of what happened. We cannot help but map those
murdered innocents onto the young faces we know, and the anguish of their parents onto
ourselves.
At the base of our Story of the People is separation, of humanity from nature, of me
from you, of each from all, and this event united everyone, of whatever culture, nationality,
or political persuasion. For a moment, we all felt the exact same thing. For at least a moment,
I am sure, most people were in touch with the simplicity of what is important; I am sure many
people had that fleeting feeling, “It doesn’t have to be that difficult, if only we could
remember what is so obvious now, that love is all there is.”
We humans have made such a mess of things, forgetting LOVE. It is the same realization we
have when a loved one is going through the dying process, and we think, “Ah, how precious this
person is – why couldn’t I see that? Why couldn’t I appreciate all those moments we had together?
All the arguments and grudges seem so tiny now.”
Charles Eisenstein
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