A New Kind of Dream: Maybe A New Form of Reality

Over the last two weeks, I’ve been having a new kind of dream, or one that’s new for me; one that clearly changes its plot over a night but not its trajectory or theme.

 

The first one I remember occurred last week. It involved being asked to come back to the alternative secondary school where I taught for 27 years and teach one of my old classes. Maybe there was a shortage of teachers, or one would be out sick for a while. In one version, it was a philosophy course called Questions. In another, it was a history course, The Historical Development of Human Ideas.

 

The first course, Questions, was just that. It was built around what the students and I chose as the deepest questions in our lives. It always started with different versions of the same question: How do we face death? It always ended with what is an ethical life. In between, it could be about love, meaning, reality and truth. Or do we have free will, and what is mind?

 

The history class began by asking who are we? What, if anything, can we say is characteristic of us humans? And what are the biggest problems you are concerned about in the world today? We spent the first and second day analyzing which of these problems are most basic and underlie the others. Then, the rest of the year, answering: from the ancient beginnings of humanity, what do you think are the roots of these problems? The final exam would be following a strand through pre-history and history of how that problem changed and developed.

 

But in the dream, I questioned whether I knew enough to teach the history, or either course. Not only because so much of what we know about human history and pre-history has changed over the years, or been clarified. But because we, human society, has changed so much since I retired in 2012. The students are now in a far different place and are suffering so much. We’ve been facing the threats of DJT and covid and more clearly recognize the threat posed by the climate emergency.

 

We’ve gone through so many assaults on public education since President Reagan; but lately even more so, on what books can be allowed in a school library, and what courses can be taught. Whether the most accurate information on who we are as a species and who we are as a nation could be shared with students.

 

One question that was often asked by students then was: what are the roots of racism, sexism, antisemitism, etc.? That question is now outlawed in some states. Maybe the asking of all real, sincere questions will be outlawed next.

 

There’s been so much trauma over the last 6 or 7 years. Could the philosophy course even ask about death when we’ve seen so much violence and death? Or would it be even more important? In history class, would the teaching of the roots of hate be allowed? And what new questions would students have? One of the most frequently asked questions back then was How has our relationship to the environment changed over the years? And would the question today be, can we survive?

 

The more recent dream was even more dramatic….

 

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

The View of Oppression is “Nothing Will Work.” The View of Friendship is “Everything Matters”

There are crucial links between what is needed to stimulate political action to fight tyranny and what is needed to limit or reverse global warming.

 

The first lesson discussed by Timothy Snyder about fighting tyranny in his best-selling book On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century is “don’t obey in advance.” Don’t give up, don’t just give would-be tyrants the power they crave. The fourth lesson is “take responsibility for the world.” “In the politics of the everyday, our words and gestures, or their absence, count very much.” Everything counts, even our smallest actions, even what we imagine. But the tyrant tries to make us feel that nothing we can do matters.

 

In the beginning of a tyrant’s power, people can successfully resist without paying a big price. Our right to protest, vote, speak our feelings to friends and neighbors, write blogs, start local organizations are protected.

 

The same is true, now, with the environment. “If you’re doing nothing, you’re actually doing something”⎼ you’re helping the autocrat, or you’re assisting global warming. “Never consent to an authoritarian.” Never consent to simply allow the destruction of our world.

 

It is just over a week since The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published its report, saying the situation of our planet is dire, “code red,” but we can still do something to slow, minimize, or change it.

 

It is so easy to feel our actions won’t matter. We can worry that the problem is too big, now, or that we’re not sure what the most effective thing is we can do. We want to see a measurable response to our actions, to see an effect. This can be a sort of egotism. Sometimes, we must just do the right thing without knowing how much effect we’ll have, or without seeing ourselves acknowledged for what we’ve done. Sometimes, we must do little things just to know we can do anything. If we don’t act while we wait to find the most effective action to take, there’s a good chance nothing will get done. If we don’t act, why should anyone else? Fear spreads easily. So can hope.

 

Hopelessness is so easy to feel. It includes not only a sense of powerlessness but isolation. When hopeless, we don’t feel the rest of the 72% of the population that shares with us the understanding of the role we humans are playing in causing climate change. We feel the fate of the world is our fate, and at the same time we feel separate from others, unable to reach them or to convince them to act. Every breath we take is the world breathing.

 

It is like when we’re sick, and it’s difficult to imagine what it is like when we’re well. We suffer from a failure of imagination. Or when we’re depressed, we can’t hear or absorb information that speaks against depression.

 

In 2019, the Zen teacher, Norman Fischer, came out with a book called The World Could Be Otherwise: Imagination and the Bodhisattva Path. A Bodhisattva is someone who focuses on relieving the suffering of all people, not just oneself. And the imagination has a power larger than what we often realize. It shapes what we think is possible. “It leaps from the known to the unknown… It lightens up the heavy circumscribed world we think we live in.” Fischer says the world not only can be, but is more than the tangible, the knowable, the negotiable; more than the data which gives us the illusion we can know all there is to know….

 

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

What Do You Do When There’s a Bear in the House? – Getting the Grizzly of Ignorance and Malignancy Out the Door

Last night, in a dream, a black bear was somehow in our apartment. We were a bit freaked and didn’t know what to do. I had an idea of opening the sliding glass doors so he could get outside. Of course, we don’t live in an apartment and we don’t have any sliding glass doors⎼ but it’s a dream. After I snuck around the bear toward the doors, I realized our dog, about the size of a Lab, was asleep by the doorway and I feared waking him. I didn’t know what he would do. Then the bear noticed the dog and jumped up on top of the bookcase near me. By the way, we also don’t have a dog, although I have been wanting one.

 

Suddenly discovering we have a bear in our home would definitely constitute a dramatic change in our daily routine. But a black bear is one of the smaller, less aggressive bears. I always thought they were cute until I saw the mangled mess one of them made of our bird feeder. But let’s imagine it was a grizzly in our home, a truly dangerous creature. What then?

 

And we do have a dangerous creature in our homes now or are afraid of one. Or afraid of two. There is a meme going around that we are faced with two pandemics, COVID-19 and ignorance⎼ the virus and the ignorant, incompetent and malignant response to it by DT. Most people facing a bear in their dreams, or awake, would hopefully avoid panic and open that door, push the dog out of the way, and let the bear out. But right now, many of us are afraid and feel powerless and don’t know how to get the grizzly out the door. But maybe we can simultaneously take care of ourselves  as we take care of our world.

 

The Pastor Martin Niemoller wrote a prose-poem just after World War II about the Holocaust. Many of us know it. It was a confession of how German intellectuals and the Church stood by as one group after another was murdered by Nazis. “First, they came for the Communists, and I did not speak out because I was not a Communist… Then the trade unionists…then the socialists… then the Jews…Then they came for me.” The Nazis were the grizzly in the house of the Germans and instead of forcing the grizzly out, they invited it to stay. And millions were killed.

 

Today, DT is acting with almost as much evil as the Nazis, and the GOP is supporting what he does. But about 52% of us or more are quite aware of the malignant grizzly in our nation. Almost three years ago thousands, or hundreds of thousands spoke out when the GOP tried to end the ACA and destroy our health care system. We demonstrated in the streets and Congressional offices and called Congress. And we stopped that legislation. Of course, the pandemic greatly limits what political action we can take today to oppose him. But how many of us are calling Congress now?…

 

DT wants us to forget and feel powerless. We can’t give him what he wants. When we don’t act, we feel burdened by what we don’t do. When we act out of care and compassion, we feel strengthened. We protect not only ourselves but others. We push the grizzly of ignorance and malignancy out the door.

 

To read the whole post, go to The Good Men Project.

The Selves We Don’t See Walking Beside Us

We are all so much deeper than we usually think we are. Not only do we change physically, and constantly, but who looks out from our eyes at any moment of our life changes.

 

I look out my window and the scene appears to be one I’ve seen countless times before. It is familiar, almost banal. Or I walk down a street, in the town where I have worked, shopped, visited friends, and have lived for 45 years. I see shapes and colors, hear sounds, feel the hardness of the sidewalk beneath my feet, but rarely notice my personal or our collective past in the windows, trees, and buildings of the present. I don’t see Ancient Rome in the columns of storefronts or the Holocaust in the doorknob of my home. But it’s there.

 

I recently started reading Elizabeth Rynecki’s book, Chasing Portraits: A Great-Granddaughter’s Quest for Her Lost Art Legacy. The book helped me see how the past exists in and frames the present. The book tells a rich story of hunting down the extensive collection of over 800 paintings and sculptures created by her great grandfather during the 1920s and 1930s in Poland, until he was murdered by Nazis in the Majdanek concentration camp. His work was sometimes stolen, certainly scattered by the war and Holocaust. The art brings alive for us a world now almost entirely destroyed, and which only a few of us can see in our minds but all of us breathe.

 

At one point, Rynecki’s grandfather is telling her a story from the war, and she suddenly realizes “how important, and yet ephemeral” are his stories. She listens, she hears, and then she feels how tenuous the story is. It depends on memory, which can disappear as suddenly as it appears.

 

And I immediately thought of my Dad, who died recently. My Dad, like Rynecki’s grandfather, was not only a beloved person, but a gateway to another world. Not only to a different time but to a different way of being, a way of being that relatives of mine had lived. Just like Rynecki, I feared forgetting his stories and thus losing the connection to this other world.

 

My Dad, as he neared his death, shared stories more and more often, as if he wanted us to carry his memories for him. I think he knew the power of stories to assist recall and carry life beyond death. He told us about his own grandfather, a caretaker of a forest in a Russian land so cold in winter a naked finger would freeze in moments. He told us about an aunt and uncle who blew up trains in the early part of the Russian Revolution. He told us about working in the US war department, where one of his jobs was to write instruction manuals to help soldiers use radar equipment—yet he never, ever saw or worked any such equipment himself. He just read other manuals and used his reason and imagination to write more easily understood instructions.

 

He told us stories about protests during the early 1930s, during the depression, to push for federal programs like Social Security. He told us about how his love for my Mom began, when they were both in high school, and which continued even after her death 71 years later.

 

Such stories make the world come alive for me, make the depth of my history come more alive. Even when the reality is horrific, hearing of my connection to it wakes me up, gives me a sense of power, that somehow history is not just a collection of facts and dates but a current that runs through me and all of us.

 

The more depths we perceive, the more sources of strength we discover. Understanding or at least knowing of our past can free us, not by glorifying or trying to resurrect it or by letting it dictate our present, but by expanding how much of what influences us we perceive. Only by perceiving and knowing what influences our way of understanding the world can we begin to act with any freedom in it. Only with such understanding can we see how each moment of our life is born out of the womb of the past but lives, as a unique creation, as the present.

 

Rynecki’s story, as I read it, touches my own, yet is so different. It is familiar yet unique. It is her story, yet it is, in some mysterious way, my own. Not only because I, too, am Jewish, but because I, too, am human.

 

*For those who celebrate Passover or Easter, I wish you a great holiday.