Quote of the Week 193 - A Zombie Life

In the Moment magazine of July/August 2011, the question “Is There Life After Death?” was posed to various Jewish figures, who provided responses. Following is one of those responses:

A ZOMBIE LIFE

I have no idea if there’s an afterlife. I’d like there to be. I’d like to think that when I said goodbye to my mom, it wasn’t forever. But how would I know? Because some guy in the desert wrote a book and told me so? I don’t go in for that stuff. I wonder about it a lot, but there’s no proof. I’ll have to wait and see.

I’ve always considered myself not Jewish enough for Israel, but Jewish enough for Auschwitz. I write about zombies. I try not to get into the spiritual aspect. I focus on the concrete: How do you not die when you’re supposed to? I grew up in California, so it’s all about disaster preparedness for me. We had earthquake drills; nuclear war drills, because it was the Reagan era; and then we had real disasters, we had fires, we had the Rodney King riots. L.A. was never safe. And now its even worse – 9/11, global warming. So I took that mindset of disaster preparedness and applied it to a science fiction concept. Zombie culture has really taken off in the last decade and it’s because of the times we’re living in. The world hasn’t been this inside-out since the 1970”s, and that was the last time zombies were popular.

There’s always a rise in spirituality when there’s a decline in the physical comfort of the world. Imagine if you lived in some village in Gaul, in the late Roman Empire, and the sewer system had collapsed and the barbarians were everywhere, and you were hungry and poor and terrified, and then along comes some pilgrim from Italy with that Christian glow, and he says, “Don’t worry, after you die it’s all going to be OK.”

I think Jews are probably too neurotic to believe that. I know I am. We think too much, that’s our problem. We sit around and debate, and wonder about the nature of reality, what is justifiable, what is not, what is sin, what does it all mean? Any good Jew by nature has to be a little bit conflicted. Being a good Jew means you don’t sleep well, and you don’t take your rabbi’s view as gospel. We’re questioners. So I don’t think the answer for Jews is heaven. I think the answer is Ambien.

--Max Brooks

Mantra Meditation Basics

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Meditation Basics - Condensed Version

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Ten Years After

As the ten-year commemoration of 09/11 begins to fade away, I would like to share something that I wrote a couple of months after that event that still rings true to me today, ten years later:

            Concerning September 11, there certainly is a lot to sort through. It was so shocking, amazing, and surreal. After that first wave was over, my reaction was just to “carry on”. I just have a few basic thoughts and observations. One theme that has kept with me is that our greatest strength is also our greatest weakness: freedom. It is what we cherish most, and what we flaunt most. I know that this “enemy” we are dealing with is founded in religious fascism with which there seems to be no room for compromise or negotiation. But this fascism has gained momentum not through promoting its message of what it stands for, which is ludicrous on its face, but what it stands against, which is the unfettered consumerism, materialism, and amorality which has come to epitomize the American way of life. 

            What was quite striking to me after September 11, was that for a whole week, all of the crass commercialism that has crept into every corner of our lives came to a screeching halt, and yet life went on. All of the commercials in all of the media were muted. It was eerie but actually quite pleasant. And then in the weeks that followed, as we returned more to “normal”, the commercialism started creeping back, with a new and bizarre message. Consumerism is now being equated with patriotism and freedom. It has become so evident that the economic well-being of our country is tied to extravagant consumption. Which leads to my next theme. 

            America is loved and hated throughout the world because of our strengths and weaknesses. Democracy and freedom are ideals that most of the world at least aspires to. Why they need to be so closely wedded to numbing commercialism and excessive consumption is another question. America is resented throughout the world because of our relentless materialistic imperialism that seeks to implant itself and its mindset into every corner of the world, and hardly to its betterment. The triumph of McDonald’s and Coca-Cola does not equate to a heightened civilization and is not to the betterment of the quality of life in the world.  Resentment is a powerful emotion, and our fascist enemies can use it to garner support in their crusade against the Western “infidels”. 

            Before September 11, we were wobbling because we were so out of balance.  Weaknesses were showing up in the functioning of the FBI, our premier law enforcement agency, the issues concerning our last election exposed embarrassing weaknesses to our very ideals and system of democracy, Columbine, parents murdering their children, a political system with partisanship paramount. One positive outcome of September 11 is that it will take a while for the partisan bickering to rear its ugly head. But in the unification that has emerged, these other serious questions have been deflected. Nobody is considering that maybe we shouldn’t be going back to “business as usual” because “business as usual” wasn’t so great. We’re all trying to go back to how it was, with just a new layer of heightened vigilance and security underlying a new sense of insecurity and vulnerability. September 11 shook our national psyche because we were so complacent in our sense of security and material well-being. That was a sense of security that many in the rest of the world never had to begin with, but we could never appreciate that. 

            A client of mine from Bangladesh pointed this out to me. He said in Bangladesh, abject poverty, insecurity, and death are everywhere all of the time, but Americans aren’t used to these conditions so close to home, while a good deal of the rest of the world deals with it on a daily basis. Foreigners like him come to America for the promise of material well-being we present, but at the same time, they resent us because of our material shallowness. 

            We must resist fascism of any sort, but that does not mean that we must promote excessive consumerism as the favored ends to democracy and freedom. Self-interest must be tempered with selflessness. Maybe it was too cynical and too anemic in its approach, but perhaps George Bush, Sr. was hitting upon something when he promoted “A Thousand Points of Light” and George Bush, Jr. with his “compassionate conservatism”. There is no doubt to me that we need further illumination and compassion, not through hollow demagoguery, but through an awakening and deepening of genuine spirituality.

            May we all find the proper balance and inner strength to get through these difficult and challenging times.

  

Quote of the Week 192- Longing for the Missing Moon, Admiring Buds and Faded Flowers

Are we to look at cherry blossoms only in full bloom, the moon only when it is cloudless? To long for the moon while looking on the rain, to lower the blinds and be unaware of the passing of the spring – these are even more deeply moving. Branches about to blossom or the gardens strewn with faded flowers are worthier of our admiration.

--from Essays in Idleness, by Kenko, a 14^th Century Japanese Zen Buddhist monk, translated by Lance Morrow

Quote of the Week 192 - What Is God?

I attended a Jewish conference this past Labor Day weekend called “Limmud”, which means, learning. If you haven’t attended one, you should check it out, as they are a lot of fun, and very educational. They are conducted all over the world, run mostly by volunteers. So I encourage you to do an internet search and check for one in your area.

At this conference, there was a young fellow named Patrick Aleph who was a presenter, and spoke about an ongoing project of his called “The God Project”, in which he is going all around the country and making video interviews of people talking about their definition of God. He discussed his findings so far, and solicited participants to allow him to video them. I volunteered, and this was the basic gist of our recorded conversation. A much more extensive conversation off-camera followed.

What is God?

I am that I am. And that’s all that I am. God is Popeye.

Let me answer that question with another question: What is not God?

To pose that answer in the positive, God is everything that exists, both known and unknown, and all activity and inactivity related to everything that exists.

But what about evil, does God include evil?

God includes the good, the bad, and the ugly. Nothing can exist independent of God.

God and Evil

I have been engaged in an ongoing private email dialogue with someone, and I would like to share an edited version of our latest exchange. It begins with their follow-up question to an earlier response I gave about the meaning and function of kundalini.

Thank you so much for your long and thorough reply. How then would you differentiate between God and Kundalini, since surely we cannot say that God is the author or source of sin or evil?

I will try to keep my response short this time.

First, I'll start with some questions for you to ponder:

Can anything at all exist without God?

Are you suggesting with your question that something (sin, evil) exists independent of God?

How can you suggest that, if you are a monotheist, which you appear to be?

If you are a monotheist, does not everything owe its authorship or source to the One?

If you have a child that becomes a totally incorrigible, lifetime criminal committing the most heinous of crimes, is he/she no longer your child?

Isn't Samael/Satan/Lucifer a fallen angel?

(A designation of God is in the name of Samael, as “El” is a designation of God, and “Samael” means “The Venom of God”. “Satan” is usually translated as “The Adversary”, who is considered an agent of God with the mission to tempt humans and test their free will and resolve to stay on the path of righteousness, and is sometimes referred to as “Sataniel”, again employing a designation of God in its name. “Lucifer” has a somewhat convoluted history related to the light of the morning star, but also is described as a fallen angel).

If so, when he was a good angel, was he not a creation of God's?

If so, did he cease to be a creation of God's after he fell?

I have differentiated between God and Kundalini the best I could in my last lengthy response. Kundalini, by my definition, is the designation for the power/activity of God as Creator, Sustainer, and Destroyer of all in the realm of the relative, of the manifest, of actuality. In that realm, God as Kundalini is a verb as much as a noun. There is a wonderful book by a modern Jewish mystic rabbi, David Cooper, called "God is a Verb".  Kundalini does not exist in the realm beyond creation. There, the ineffable God alone exists. 

Ponder, contemplate the above. Give it some time. Then l would like to hear from you.

Quote of the Week 191 - True Surrender

When your mind becomes aware that the Spirit is everywhere, then the mind surrenders. The mind learns that although it thought it knew all things, Spirit is everywhere and the mind is nothing. Mind learns that all the power it has is due only to the Spirit, the Source of life, the Source of Consciousness. Then the mind surrenders. That is the meaning of true surrender; such self-surrender is the highest of all yogas. Your mind surrenders when you reach such a height that the mind doesn’t function any longer. Mind is still there, but as it becomes aware of the Reality, its ego vanishes. When you fully understand the functions of mind, you will know how to work with yourself.

--from Essential Swami Rama, Swami Jnaneshvara Bharati, Editor