It’s So Overwhelming: Rediscovering the Core of Our Being

DT continues to do all he can to stir up the chaos, the shock, the abuses so we can’t keep up. My e-mails are flooded with petitions, unbelievable news stories, information on protests that happened and ones to join, and requests for money to fight back against the assaults. Never before did I so anticipate and cheer on suits against the government. I used to automatically delete 95% of emails; now, 95% seem too critical to ignore.

 

This morning: Scott Dworkin, Massive Anti-DT Protests Erupt Everywhere and More Good News. And: Opinion You Don’t Want To Miss. Trump IRS Pick Just Enriched by Tax Schemers, Trump Relaunches His Tariff Corruption Game. Articles on DT’s threat to the economy and threat to our ability to afford our lives. The Supreme Court denying or sometimes affirming DT’s lust for absolute power at our expense. The illegal imprisonment of immigrants, the attempts to destroy due process and the rule of law. Articles repeatedly appear on the destruction of health care, environmental protections, and all government functions that support the well-being and the very lives of most Americans.

 

And notably, an article in the New York Times on Easter Sunday about how Americans desire and are turning to a belief in a god, soul, afterlife, a spiritual dimension to their lives. 92% of Americans claim they have some kind of spiritual belief. The article, Believing, by Lauren Jackson, appears in a section of the Times dramatically titled America Wants a God. It’s part of her now yearlong project studying a significant shift in American life, after decades of people turning away from religion. A good number of us, 40 million Americans, had left their churches, synagogues, etc. and looked to jobs, gym classes, mysticism, meditation, mostly secular replacements.

 

But since the pandemic, the environmental emergency, and DT, more and more of us have felt an “existential malaise.” Our world, our lives are threatened on so many fronts, and we want somewhere to turn for support, for reason, for care. And studies, including one by the Pew Research Center, show that people who practice a religion, or have some sort of regular spiritual practice, tend to be happier, and one from Harvard on how religion contributes to being healthier. (Yeah, Harvard.)

 

This revival of spiritual longing, or maybe desperation, rings very true to me. We see this in the great interest in mindfulness over the last 40 years. And on the other hand, we see it in the maybe one third of Americans who have declared DT their new God or savior. I don’t know how believing in the Donald’s holiness makes people happier. I mean, he sells bibles for extra cash and seems to sell access to power to evangelicals for votes.

 

If godly means moral, caring about the well-being of others, living by the Golden Rule or Ten Commandments, and knowledgeable of the content of whatever Holy teachings one says one believes in, I think DT is probably one of the last people on earth to be called godly. But he nevertheless claims the title so absolutely others seem to accept his insistence as proof. When an assassin’s bullet just grazed him, he claimed God intervened in his behalf. Maybe spreading hate has a happy edge to it, or makes people feel united in a community of shared bitterness. Or maybe people can mistake autocratic political power for power over eternity.

 

Since even before the early Middle Ages, religion was often pitted against reason. With a 20th century decrease in church membership there was an increase in trust in science, research, rationality. And, at the same time, an increase in materialism, in a commodification of every aspect of life. Our own attention, our very mind, became the biggest commodity to sell. Although maybe this effort of commodifying the human mind, of controlling the mind of others, has always been the biggest power that certain humans hungered for?…

 

*To read the whole article, please go to The Good Men Project.

How Our Understanding of Freedom Can Liberate or Imprison Us: The Illusions & Delusions in Our Understanding of Freedom

“The mind is the forerunner of all things,” said the Buddha in the collection of sayings called the Dhammapada. We are led by our ideas, not just our emotions. Our mind, our way of thinking guides every element of our lives, what we feel, what we value, what we imagine is possible, and how we relate with others.

 

One word or idea that is so important to understand in today’s world is freedom. The word and what it represents is at the heart of our national anthem; “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” It reminds us of the sacrifices people made for freedom and for the survival of a nation, for resistance to an invader and the preservation of a freedom from external control over us.

 

But our understanding or misunderstanding of that word can cause us to lead a life that imprisons or liberates us; that hurts us and others or one that enriches us. And we see the hurtful way of understanding the word expressed daily by politicians and the news media in this country. Because the freedom from which the national anthem primarily expresses is what philosophers call negative freedom; this might be a necessary condition for us to have physical control over our lives but is not sufficient for us to feel liberated.

 

This was recently made so much clearer to me when I started reading a book by historian Timothy Snyder called On Freedom. The subject is one we have all probably thought about in different ways at different times in our lives.

 

Americans are told that freedom was given to us by the Founding Fathers. But freedom cannot be given, says Snyder. A country isn’t free; people are free. If we think of freedom as only freedom from outside sources of control or threat, then we can be convinced we need to sacrifice freedom for security. We can think the personal and political situation is always us separated from and against the world and we become habituated to always rating ourselves in opposition to others, instead of studying how we feel in ourselves. We reduce human beings, with inner lives not that different from our own, to things. Hitler called Jewish people “foreign bodies,” parasites, vermin infesting the German racial organism.

 

DT speaks in terms that are alarmingly like Hitler’s, dehumanizing immigrants of color, as well as Democrats and those who oppose him, calling them, us, “vermin.” Such thinking as DT illustrates makes us feel perpetually uneasy, insecure in ourselves and our world, isolated, suffering.

 

Such thinking leads us to feel that if we just remove obstacles, barriers, regulations, and, limit the reach of government we expand our freedom. That our freedom is opposed to that of others. That we know the truth, and that no other truth, no other facts, are real. And thus, opinions different from our own must be destroyed. Only leaders strong enough to assert their own truth with absolute conviction and power can save us. This misses the obvious; such an absolute leader negates our own power to lead⎼ or to have a meaningful vote. Negative freedom, says Snyder, is not a misunderstanding so much as a repressive idea.

 

He gives us examples from Ukraine and its struggle for life against Putin, an oppressive invader who wants to kill not only the Ukrainian nation but any of its people who would even consider opposing him. But Snyder reports that when Ukrainians remove Russian invaders from their villages, they don’t use the word freedom. They’re glad that “something terrible has been removed from their lives,” that the threat of imminent death or torture is ended. But the term they use for this is deoccupation. The occupier is gone.

 

They realize “freedom is not just an absence of evil, but a presence of good.”…

 

*To read the whole post, please click on this link to The Good Men Project.