When I was a girl growing up in Syria and Saudi Arabia, I used to dream of someday living in the West, so I could experience all the freedoms that exist in Western societies, especially for women. When I finally got the opportunity to study in the West, my biggest disappointment was seeing how people squander their freedom of speech. There are so many things that one could talk about, but 95% of the conversations I heard among my fellow students were about food and sex and buying things. (Afra, a former student at McGill University, reflecting on her four years as an undergraduate)

Some of the most meaningless words are also the most emotionally charged. One of the most vacuous words commonly used in American society is also one of the most explosively emotional: “Freedom.” Anyone who has seen an automobile from the state of New Hampshire has witnessed the enigmatic slogan stamped on the license plates, “Live Free or Die.” The form of the phrase is that of an imperative sentence, a command that one must either live free or die. But if the only alternative to living free is death, then it is reasonable to ask whether while alive one has the freedom to choose not to live free. Apparently not, at least in New Hampshire. The command seems to be firmly rooted in self-contradiction and therefore meaningless, but that makes it no less capable of stirring emotions into a pointless frenzy of enthusiasm for an abstract idea that few people bother to think about beyond registering some sort of positive response. “Hooray for Freedom! Whatever it is, I’m all for it!”

Philosophers have traditionally distinguished between two kinds of freedom, often informally called freedom to and freedom from. In an article in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Ian Carter writes this about positive and negative liberty:

Negative liberty is the absence of obstacles, barriers or constraints. One has negative liberty to the extent that actions are available to one in this negative sense. Positive liberty is the possibility of acting — or the fact of acting — in such a way as to take control of one’s life and realize one’s fundamental purposes. While negative liberty is usually attributed to individual agents, positive liberty is sometimes attributed to collectivities, or to individuals considered primarily as members of given collectivities.

It seems fairly clear that when the authors of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States of America wrote of freedom, it was positive liberty that they had in mind. They were preoccupied with having the capacity to make decisions collectively that reflected the realities of life on the North American continent, and they hoped to make those decisions independently of the will of the King of England and the British Parliament.

Those early Americans who opposed the new constitution, on the other hand, were preoccupied with individual liberties, the negative liberties such as the absence of constraints on individual behavior. Those who opposed the ratification of the newly written constitution were called anti-federalists, and they had their greatest strength in New York, southern Virginia, and the Carolinas, but they were also well represented in New Hampshire and parts of Massachusetts (which in early days included the present state of Maine). The anti-federalists were vehemently opposed to the idea of a President of the United States, which they feared would evolve into a position hardly distinguishable from that of a monarch. They opposed a centralized federal government, favoring instead strong state governments, which were perceived as less likely to abridge the freedom of individuals to do what they wanted to do without governmental restraints. The anti-federalists tended also to oppose taxation, which they viewed as an instrument of tyranny, and therefore a threat to individual liberties. Many of the concerns of the anti-federalists found their way into the first amendments to the Constitution, called collectively the Bill of Rights. While initially skeptical of the prospects of successfully writing provisions that would limit the degree to which a government, whether at the federal or the state level, could interfere in the private life of a citizen, even such strong federalists as James Madison eventually came to see that without this concession to anti-federalists there was no hope of the new constitution being ratified. And so the Constitution originally written in 1787 came to have a Bill of Rights in 1789. (People who call themselves Constitutional originalists should probably take care to specify whether they favor the original constitution of 1787 or the amended Constitution of 1789. And when they heap praise on the so-called Founding Fathers, they should probably specify whether they mean strong-central-government federalists such as Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton or the states-rights anti-federalists such as Patrick Henry, George Mason, Robert Yates, Samuel Adams, Richard Henry Lee and James Monroe.)

Most of the religious systems that have evolved in India—Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism—are also preoccupied with freedom, but their focus is not so much on freedom from constraints imposed by governments as on limitations imposed by one’s own damaged psyche. The human mentality, they say, is damaged by vicious tendencies such as greed, hatred and delusion. These vicious tendencies imprison the person who has the them. One who is in the throes of attachment to acquiring and holding onto possessions, power, recognition and approval is no more free than an addict to walk away from the pursuit of these ultimately unsatisfactory commodities. One bound in the chains of hatred is not free to interact productively with other sentient beings (or with a God whose nature is supposed to be unconditional love. One wearing the fetters of unwarranted assumptions and prejudices is not free to explore avenues that lead to truth. As pitiful as the condition of one encumbered with greed, hatred and delusion may be, it is, say most Hindus, Buddhists and Jains, precisely the condition almost all human beings are in. As individuals, they say, most of us are in those conditions because we live in societies that are based on the cultivation of collective greed, hatred and delusion.

The kinds of social and political freedom that many modern Americans seek are diametrically opposed to the kind of psychological freedom that Indian religio-philosophical practices are designed to cultivate. For many modern Americans who are obsessed with freedom, what they seek is summed up in the words of a character played by Peter Fonda in a forgettable 1966 motion picture called The Wild Angels:

We want to be free. We want to be free to do what we want to do. We want to be free to ride our machines without being hassled by the Man. We want to get loaded. And we want to have a good time. And that’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to have a good time. We’re going to have a party.

Freedom, in this view, means not freedom from greed, hatred and delusion but exactly the opposite. It means freedom to act without constraints—even the constraints of self-discipline—on one’s greed, hatred and delusion. That this is so becomes clearer if one looks at the kinds of freedom from government interference that many people are calling for these days:

• Deregulation. The self-proclaimed freedom-lovers say they oppose governmental regulations that were designed to protect the environment from degradation wrought by the extractive and manufacturing sectors of the economy, regulations that were designed to protect consumers from unscrupulous business practices, and regulations that were put in place to protect the health and safety and economic viability of workers. Ridding the nation of environmental regulations, safety regulations and minimum wage and worker safety regulations would, so the argument goes, allow the economy to grow and provide jobs. In short, people who advocate for less governmental regulation are seeking to guarantee the right to be greedy, the right to acquire wealth without any regard whatsoever to the consequences that acquisition may have on others.
• Right to bear arms. It may have made sense in a time when people shot squirrels for their dinner to make sure that governments did not limit access to efficient methods of killing game, but it is dangerous and ridiculous to extend the right to bear arms to include assault rifles and semi-automatic firearms that are designed to kill human beings rather than squirrels. Some argue that the right to bear arms is meant to give people a method of overthrowing tyrannical governments. The assassins of Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley and John Kennedy no doubt thought in those terms. In her recently published autobiography, Condoleeza Rice staunchly supports the right of all citizens to bear arms with her claim that if the state of Alabama had required the registration of firearms, Bull Connor would have confiscated all the weapons of African Americans, thus making it much more difficult for them to achieve freedom from the limitations of racial segregation. Given that it is impossible either to shoot someone or to threaten to shoot them without wanting to eliminate them from one’s life, and given that the definition of hatred is the desire to eliminate what one finds unpleasant or obnoxious, those who cling to their second amendment rights are in effect seeking to guarantee the right to be hateful.
• Right to do what one wants to do. Not everyone wants to do stupid and dangerous things, but many do. While it may be quixotic to try to protect people from their own folly, many laws are designed to promote public safety. Laws requiring drivers and passengers to wear seat belts in cars and helmets on motorcycles are examples of such laws, as are speed limits, laws against driving while using cellphones, laws requiring pedestrians to cross at crosswalks, laws requiring vehicles to signal before making turns and so forth. Laws requiring people to carry various kinds of insurance (including health insurance) and to pay into the Social Security system are other examples. People who find such laws offensive are seeking to guarantee the right to be foolish. It may seem harmless enough to allow people to be foolish, but rarely is it the case that the fool is the only one who suffers the consequences of his own folly. Causality does not honor the fictitious boundaries of personal identity; the consequences of actions leak out into the world at large. While it is undeniably true that many governmental regulations seem stupid, it should be borne in mind that most of them came into being because there are so many dangerously stupid people to govern.

While I am sympathetic to those who would prefer not to live in tyrannies and totalitarian states, or even in small towns in Nebraska where one’s every move is monitored by well-meaning busybodies, I have not yet managed to be sympathetic to the American craving for undisciplined and excessive lifestyles. If demanding pointless forms of personal freedom to be greedy, hateful and deluded is un-American, then I am not at all unwilling to be considered un-American. My preference is the kind of freedom that the Buddhists (and sober-sided Quakers) have taught me to seek.

What are we doing to ensure adequate water, food, shelter, education and respect for those who do not have ready access to these blessings? Are we informed about the effects of our lifestyle on the global economy and the environment? (Faith and Practice. Intermountain Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends, 2009, p. 139.)

For the vast majority of Americans—I cannot speak for the people of other countries—the answer to the second question in this Quaker query is No. No, we are not informed about the effects of our lifestyle on the global economy and the environment. I would like to think that if we were informed, we would choose to live different lifestyles.

I have a hunch there are a lot of people who know that people would choose to live differently if they were better informed. How else can we account for the millions, even billions, of dollars that are spent every year to make sure that most people are misinformed? Just to tie one example, it is impossible to know for sure how many people are lured into believing that America’s economic future depends on finding and extracting petroleum, coal and natural gas in the United States and Canada, and that these extracting industries will create millions of jobs for Americans right here at home, and that the principal obstacles to America’s energy security and independence are regulations aimed at protecting the environment. Given, however, that Republican presidential hopeful Herman Cain has said that one of his first acts as president would be to dismantle the Environmental Protection Agency so that Americans could get back to work and become energy-self-sufficient, and given that Herman Cain according to USA Today is today the leading Republican candidate in Iowa polls, there seem to be people (at least in Iowa) who buy into the persistent efforts of such organizations as America’s Power to persuade Internet users and television viewers that deregulation and increased energy production is the only sure path to America’s economic recovery and future prosperity.

There are some questions that Herman Cain and his supporters are not asking but should be asking.

• What impact will it have on the health and wellbeing of Americans if we continue to burn coal to generate electricity?
• What impact will it have on the health and wellbeing of Americans if we continue burning oil to propel automobiles, airplanes, trucks, trains and ships over great distances?
• What impact will it have on the health of wellbeing of America’s closest neighbors and America’s more distant neighbors if we continue to consume energy at current levels?
• What impact is the way human beings are now living having on animals and plants?
• What will the planet be like twenty-five years from now, when today’s toddlers are young adults? What will it be like in fifty years, when today’s toddlers are middle-aged? How many of today’s toddlers will live to be seventy-five? What kind of future will there be for those who must live in the world to which the current generations are laying waste through our collective reliance on energy produced by something other than our own muscles?

America’s economy is fueled entirely by dissatisfaction. To some extent, dissatisfaction is natural for human beings; philosophers have been pointing out for millennia that being dissatisfied is one of the things we do best. But much of today’s dissatisfaction is carefully cultivated and manufactured. Every time, for example, that Apple produces a new operating system for its computers and mobile devices, the Apple Corporation extends an invitation to all users of Apple products to be dissatisfied with the toys and tools they already have. This year’s line of apparel is an invitation to be dissatisfied with what is already in our clothes closets. If people were to become satisfied with what they already have, quite a lot of the economy would collapse. Civilization as we know it would come to an end.

There are few things that I am more eager to see in my lifetime than the end of civilization as we know it, and the collapse of an economy based not on the provision of the necessities of life but on the creation of desires for goods and services we could all very easily live without, and without most of which we would in fact be much more content.

It is long past time for a revolution that brings capitalism to its knees and that utterly destroys the monstrous American culture of selfishness and greed that has grown like a cancer on this once-beautiful continent. The beginning of that revolution is not going to be the firing of shots or the planting of bombs, nor is it going to be the gathering of crowds shouting slogans and carrying banners. The next American revolution can begin only with a blossoming of individual personal contentment. Contentment with plain, nutritious, locally grown food. Contentment with plain clothing, sufficient to offer protection from the elements. Contentment with conversation and with singing with our own voices and dancing on our own legs. Contentment with watching birds and insects and plants being born and living and dying. Contentment with using our own bodies as our only vehicles. Contentment with talking to friends in the house next door. Contentment with our own breathing and the beat of our own hearts. Contentment with the laughter of children. Contentment with dogs and cats.

If a radical contentment with what is within our own bodies and right under own very noses would seize us all, we could give up our craving for laptops and mobile devices with their highly toxic lithium batteries. A joy with encountering reality would quickly replace our craving for virtual reality. If a content with moving at the speed of living organisms are to overtake us, we would quickly lose our craving for automobiles and airplane flight.

America has been conquered by barbarians driven by greed, who have enslaved us with their unnecessary toxic environment-destroying energy-consuming products. We are the barbarians who have conquered us. There is a way to get the country back. Stop buying their products. Start resisting their lies. Begin by taking a deep breath and looking around and noticing how much of what you have you could easily do without. Be free.

Ask: why did the author of this blog posting use a poisoned Apple MacBook laptop computer to send a message on the energy-wasting Internet to encourage people to consider simplifying their lives?

Successful graduates of all three traditions (Buddhism, guruistic Hinduism, and Sufism) will testify that there is a great “spiritual” opening-up that can happen when our own self-esteem and will are successfully defeated, even if the defeat is only momentary, and a rightly prepared student can grow tremendously at that time. All the crushing burdens of Buddhist monastic discipline and guruistic and Sufi disciplines seem aimed at bringing the student to that point.

It is true that there is no lack of testimonies to spiritual openings in various traditions that identify themselves as spiritual (in some sense of that bafflingly polysemous word). What is not entirely clear is whether there is any truth to the testimonies. Is there any truth to the matter of whether someone has had a spiritual opening, or is enlightened, or has been liberated from the world of suffering, or  is saved? And if there is some truth to the matter, then what is the criterion by which one can distinguish a true from a false claim about the matter? Who is it who is in a position to determine whether anyone (including himself or herself) has had a genuine opening, enlightenment, liberation or salvation? It seems to me that all these questions are so intractable that the best policy may be to set them aside altogether, and in setting them aside, to suspend judgment on all claims to spiritual attainment, whether one’s own or that of another.

At this year’s Summer Seminar on Buddhism, John Maraldo has been lecturing on members of the Kyōto school of philosophy. In the first lecture in his series of talks, Professor Maraldo read excerpts from letters written by Nishida Kitarō, regarded as the founder of what eventually came to be called the Kyōto school. Writing about his own Zen training, Nishida observed to a close friend (probably D.T. Suzuki) that he had seen many people who had passed through the rigors of Rinzai Zen training, which meant that they had passed through the curriculum of kōan, without showing evidence of being improved in any way at all. They still seemed as selfish as ever, as prone to moral peccadilloes as ever, and as subject to falling prey to painful mental attitudes as ever. He could not understand why their Zen master had passed them and certified them as having gained liberative understanding (kenshō). Nishida’s doubt about the efficacy of Zen training increased when he himself was deemed by his Zen master to have passed the hurdles and gained insight into the true nature of things. He admitted that he did not feel any wiser or any closer to liberation after successfully passing his kōan that he felt before passing them. If being authenticated by a Zen master as having had an opening or an insight produced no noticeable differences in mentality or behavior, mused Nishida, then how could one attach any meaning to what was putatively being authenticated?

Before dismissing Nishida as a hopelessly deluded fool for questioning the notion of enlightenment that is identified as the greatest good and the goal of all Buddhist practice—such a dismissal would be facile unless it could be shown to be warranted by some criterion—it should be asked in a more general way who decided that the Buddha was, well, a buddha. That is, who decided that Gautama was indeed awake (buddha) from his dogmatic slumbers? The Buddhist literature suggests that Gautama himself declared himself to be awake. The Buddhist literature also narrates that not everyone agreed with him. There were those who doubted his wisdom, questioned whether he was correct in claiming that he had been liberated from greed, hatred and delusion. And the Buddhist texts also narrate that Gautama’s own teachers declared him to have reached the goal of awakening, but that he himself knew that they were mistaken, for he knew that he had not reached that goal.

Having an opinion about someone else’s attainments is rarely a good idea. It is really not any of one’s business whether someone else has been enlightened, liberated or saved. I would be inclined to say that even when it is one’s business (which happens only when one’s own spiritual state is in question), it is probably not a good idea to have an opinion about this particular issue. Not much can come from thinking of oneself as enlightened except hubris and disappointment.

One of the most provocative stories in the Buddhist literature is the narrative about a monk named Channa, who was in terrible suffering from a disease that all the physicians he had consulted regarded as incurable. Seeing no point in being terminally ill with a painful disease, Channa told his fellow monks that he was going to take his own life. His friends examined him by asking all manner of questions, and on the basis of his answers they determined that he was an arhant. That is, he had eliminated all traces of greed, hatred and delusion and was therefore in no danger of being reborn in heaven or any other realm at the end of his current life. In short, he had achieved the goal of Buddhist practice. Following the custom of the day, his friends remained silent when he asked their permission to end his own life; in other words, they voiced no objections to his decision. Channa then cut his own jugular vein. As he was bleeding to death, says the story, he became afraid of dying. Fear of death is a sure sign that he was not an arhant. In short, Channa and his friends had all been wrong in their judgment that he was an arhant. Fortunately, the story continues, Channa drew all his resources together and overcame his fear of death at just the moment that he drew his last breath. When Channa had died, news of his death was relayed to the Buddha, who used his superhuman powers to determine where Channa had gone after his death. Seeing that Channa was nowhere to be found in any of the celestial realms or the hell realms and that he had not been reborn as a human being or an animal, the Buddha declared that in the very last moment of his life, Channa had become an arhant.

The story of Channa is as disturbing as it is dramatic. It raises the question: how on earth did the Buddha know that Channa died an arhant? Why did the Buddha believe that his inability to see Channa in any of the usual afterlife settings was sufficient grounds for concluding that Channa no longer existed and so had attained final cessation (nirodha), the summum bonum that is the goal of all Buddhist practice? Might the Buddha have been wrong? Is there any reliable way of answering the question of whether the Buddha was right or wrong in this matter? Is there recourse to anything but dogma and blind faith in such matters? Of course, I don’t know the answers to these questions. How could I? How could anyone?

Marshall Massey raises another interesting point in his comment to my previous posting. He says:

But if we reject the idea that it is merely a happy-puppey syndrome, then we have to accept that there is an important potential spiritual benefit to be gained from tough monastic discipline, alongside the undeniable abuses of the system and the undeniable psychological and social costs. And the question then becomes: is there a better alternative? Is there some other path to the same benefit, that doesn’t come at so high a price?

A lot of people — at least here in the West — say, yes, there is: we can defeat our own pride and will without entering a cult. And we point to some examples of success on that alternate path, including Gautama himself, Francis of Assisi, and to a lesser degree, a few of the Quaker giants. But the rarity of such successes is not encouraging.

It seems to me that this observation is based on a questionable premiss. The presupposition is that the legitimacy of monastic disciple, or the lack thereof, is determined by its consequence, and specifically the consequence of spiritual benefit. First of all, I doubt that there is any way of defining spiritual benefit that does not involve some form of circularity. If there is no non-question-begging way to determine whether there has been spiritual benefit, then that cannot be used as a criterion for deciding whether monastic discipline is worthwhile.

Here an important Buddhist text comes to our rescue, a text called Milindapañha (Milinda’s Questions). In this text a Bactrian king named Milinda asks Nāgasena, the most highly-respected Buddhist monk within his kingdom, whether it is necessary to be a monk to gain nirvana, that is, liberation from the root causes of suffering. Nāgasena replies that for every monk who attains nirvana there are one hundred ordinary householders who attain that goal. Then he corrects himself and says that in fact thousands—no, tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands—of  laymen attain nirvana for every monk who attains it. Naturally Milinda then wants to know what on earth the purpose of monastic discipline is, if it is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for freedom from suffering. Nāgasena’s answer, which might surprise some, is that the monastic life is pleasing to some people. It exists just for those people who find it a satisfying way to live, here in this world, independently of any other considerations. This seems to me just exactly the best answer one can give to the question “Should I be a monk?” The answer is “Suit yourself.”

I would suggest that exactly the same answer is the right response to a whole range of other questions. Should you meditate? Well, if you find meditation enjoyable, and if you can do it without harming anyone, then please yourself by meditating. Should you seek out a spiritual master who will dominate you and break your will, as if you were a wild horse that needs to be domesticated to be of use to someone else? If you find being dominated fulfilling, then please yourself by joining an organization that will break your will. One possibility is to join a Buddhist gang, whose members praise the Buddha for being anuttara purisadammasāratī (an unsurpassed trainer of the human beast). Or should you seek out the company of people who perceive social hierarchies as damaging and therefore try to avoid them? If that would please you, then by all means seek out such company. (Good luck finding it in any species in the order of primates!)

On this whole series of questions, I find that Van Morrison speaks my mind when he sings:

I’m in the here and now, and I’m meditating
And still I’m suffering but that’s my problem
Enlightenment, don’t know what it is

A pack leader, we were told repeatedly, calls all the shots. The pack leader says when it is time to play, which toys will be played with, when play time is over, when it is time for a walk, where the walk goes, when the walk is over, when it is time to eat, and when it is time to sleep. The pack leader must have completer domination over the pack. The pack leader must dominate both space and time. All this, we were told, is for the dog’s safety and happiness. A dominated dog is a happy dog. Being a pack leader is enormously stressful and leads to deep unhappiness. If you want a happy puppy, dominate her.

As puppy training progressed through each lesson of canine domination, my sense of uneasy déjà vu steadily increased. It was all too familiar. It was bringing back all kinds of unpleasant memories of various Buddhist gangs (sanghas) I have belonged to. It became increasingly obvious to me that Buddhist teachers, or at least all the ones I have ever caught in the act of playing the role of Buddhist master, operate on the principle that Buddhists all have dog-nature. Buddhist social training is all about domination. There is very little else involved.

Please don’t misunderstand me. I love the core Buddhist practice (by which I mean the ethical precepts). I can tolerate the theoretical dogmas on which the core practice is based (by which I mean the dogma of conditioned origination). I enjoy the meditative exercises that support the core practice (by which I mean the so-called foundations of mindfulness, smṛtyupasthāna). What I do not like, and have never liked, and have never believed promotes any kind of wisdom or compassion, is the social culture that almost always attends this practice and its attendant dogmas and contemplative exercises. I have never believed that a happy disciple is a dominated disciple.

The social culture of Buddhism is hierarchical from (if you’ll forgive the expression) top to bottom. The Buddha is described in the literature as the best of all bipeds. He is routinely described as the unsurpassed teacher of gods and men. He is never shown as being in the position of having anything whatsoever to learn from anyone else; everyone else has everything to learn from him. He makes all the rules. He decides which rules to discard. He decides who can bend the rules and to what extent and in what circumstances. He decides what happens to those who bend or break the rules without his permission. The Buddha decides. Period. (Don’t take my word for it. Read the sūtras.)

The Buddha is the top dog. This is no doubt why the Zen tradition typically gives a disciple the kōan “Does a dog have Buddha nature?” Until the Zen disciple realizes that he is a dog and that the Zen master is the pack leader, there can be no kenshō (seeing one’s true nature). The only route to satori (understanding) is to sit when told to sit, stand when told to stand, walk when told to walk, eat when told to eat, lie down when told to lie down, and to learn not to pee on the carpet. Failure to submit completely to the domination of the top dog is known in Buddhist circles as delusion. It is marginally better to be a criminal than to be found guilty of delusion.

The Buddhist masters I have seen in action all draw upon the standard techniques of dominating their disciples. One favorite tool is to have complete control of everyone’s time. The Dharma talk begins when the master begins to speak, and it is finished when the master stops speaking. The master, unlike everyone else, is completely liberated from the timetable. The timetable is, for the master, a mere conventional truth; it is only for the dominated disciple that it is an absolute truth. The timetable may say that a talk is half an hour long, but if the Buddhist master speaks for an hour of for ninety minutes (ideally pausing a few times to observe that everyone in the audience is showing signs of being tired, uncomfortable and bored), then the talk is an hour or ninety minutes long. If the disciple is not completely dominated, he will suffer the tremendous unhappiness that invariably attends the stress of having to think for himself. A dominated disciple is a happy disciple.

The control of time is attended by the control of space. There are certain places where only the master can sit or stand. The master never yields space to anyone, never has to walk around anyone or move for anyone; everyone in the pack yields space to the master. Only the master is allowed on the furniture. Everyone else must sit or lie on the floor. If it were not thus, the disciples would become anxiety-ridden and unhappy, perhaps even deluded. It is an act of supreme compassion on the part of the pack leader to make sure that no one in the pack forms the misery-producing delusion of thinking that he or she might be the pack leader, even for a moment.

There are numerous other ways that a Buddhist pack leader dominates the pack, most of which are obvious enough to need no mention. One method that has been brought to the awareness of the general public and mentioned and discussed often enough is sexual domination.  Sexuelle Hörigkeit (sexual bondage) is an important tool for liberating a disciple from the anxiety that attends the delusion of personal autonomy. Having conjugal rights with a disciple is a vital part of discipline, as is telling disciples whom they can and cannot be happy pairing up with. Buddhist masters, like dogs, dominate potential threats to the harmony of the pack by humping them.

Not being the cynical type—bear in mind that the word “cynic” derives from the Greek word for dog and is cognate with the Latin word from whcih we get the English word “canine”—I have never fared very well in a Buddhist pack. It has never felt to me as if I derived much benefit from being dominated, and watching others being dominated has always made me feel so sick that I have had to go outside and eat some grass until I threw up.  For most of my life I have entertained a fantasy of finding a Buddhist organization designed for human beings instead of for dogs. So far I have been disappointed. But then I have been equally disapponted in the search for a human society of any sort, whether religious or secular, that is made for human beings instead of for dogs.

I would say more, but my puppy is telling me it is now time to go play with her.

I know it’s going to be the private sector that leads this country out of the current economic times we’re in. You can spend your money better than the government can spend your money. (George W. Bush)

George W. Bush’s folksy encomium of the private sector and derogation of government echoes similar sentiments repeatedly voiced by Ronald Reagan, who said:

Entrepreneurs and their small enterprises are responsible for almost all the economic growth in the United States.

Government always finds a need for whatever money it gets.

Government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.

Such shallow one-liners managed to convince quite a few voters that they would all be much better off if private entrepreneurs were allowed to keep their money rather than being taxed. The assumptions behind this claim were 1) that wealthy people would invest their money in ventures that would employ people, and 2) that whatever money anyone has rightfully belongs solely to the person who has it. The first of these assumptions led to such incessantly repeated slogans as “job-killing taxation.” The second assumption led to the conviction that taxation is a kind of theft of honest people by essentially dishonest governmental policy makers.

Eight years of Reagan’s systematic dismemberment of the body politic showed how bankrupt the first of those two assumptions is. As commercial enterprises were deregulated and corporate taxation was reduced, the gulf between the wealthy and the poor increased dramatically. As predicted, wealthy entrepreneurs invested their money in ways that employed people. They showed a strong preference for employing people who lived in countries in which environmental regulations were feeble and where there were low standards for protecting the health and safety of low-wage workers. Workers in countries with laws protecting them from unsafe working conditions and assuring them a wage that did not keep them in perpetual poverty tended to be deemed greedy, and their skills were considered to be overpriced. The factories that used to employ them were moved to third-world countries. The majority of voters who swept Reagan into office, and then kept him there for a second term despite an unemployment crisis, were arguably not among those who benefited most from his faulty assumption. The minority of voters whose net worth placed them in the wealthiest 2% of the nation, however, fared very well under Reagan. They fared well again under Bush père and Bush fils. Even during the time of Clinton they did not fare badly. The extremely wealthy have been faring quite well in the United States since 1980.

The second assumption is that if money is in your bank account, or invested in your stock portfolio, then it is yours pure and simple. For a government to take it away from you is therefore a kind of theft. What this seductive assumption fails to take into account is that none of us would have any money at all if it were not for the social contract that forms governments and establishes currencies and regulates banks and investment institutions. All money is essentially social in nature, which means that none of us would have anything if it weren’t for the social fabric in which each of us is but a minor thread. Without the social conventions that underlie the monetary system, a $1000 bill is just a piece of paper with Grover Cleveland’s picture on it, and one’s balance in a bank account is nothing but a meaningless number in an electronic data base. Even if one’s life savings is in gold bullion or real estate, those things have only as much value as the rest of society agrees they have. Supposing one invests one’s money in the stock market and it increases in value, that increase would never have been possible without hundreds or thousands of other investors and the labor of a multitude of employees. That increase in the value of an investment no more belongs rightfully to the investor than to the host of people whose work and cooperation made it possible for the investment to increase in value. One of the most important factors that makes an investment possible is a functional government. So surely a substantial portion of what any investor considers his (or her) money in fact belongs to society at large, and to government in particular.

When one looks at the wide variety of ways that people choose to spend their money, some of them wise and many of them foolish, it is not at all obvious that George W. Bush was speaking accurately when he said “You can spend your money better than the government can spend your money.” Private citizens seem every bit as capable of squandering fortunes as governments. It is no less true of individuals than of governments that they find a need for all the money they get. Few people seem to feel they need less than they have. Even the very wealthy often seem to feel they need every bit of what they have; otherwise, they would not spend as much time and energy as they do to avoid paying taxes.

People who increase their wealth through investment, people who inherit wealth from their relatives, people who increase their wealth by selling goods and services for more than they pay for them—none of them can make the legitimate claim that their wealth is rightfully theirs alone. The wealth of all such people is conditioned by social mechanisms of which they are not fully in control and for which they therefore cannot claim full credit. Even those whose modest income comes to them as a result of selling their labor have what they have as a result of a social network that makes the selling of labor possible. The very idea that your wealth is really yours and that it need not be shared with the rest of society that made it possible is, when examined more carefully, a vacuous idea. Like all vacuous ideas, it makes a very poor foundation for a life worth living.

The shibboleths of the political and economic right in the United States are, with hardly any exception, the war whoops of plutocrats who are waging—and winning—a war against the middle-class and the poor. (Plutocracy is government of the people, for the wealthy, by the politicians purchased by the wealthy; it is the form of government now found in the United States, Saudi Arabia and Libya, and the form of government that used to be found in Tunisia and Egypt.) It is difficult to see the Wisconsin government’s newly passed law that strips public workers of their rights to collective bargaining in any other way than as a war on the general public by the plutocrats. It is difficult to see the proposed cuts in the public funding for health care, education, scientific research and public broadcasting in any other way. People who can think for themselves, and people who are well informed, and people who care about justice, and people who wish to have a voice in making decisions about policies that will affect their lives are not very good for a thriving plutocracy. Keeping people ignorant and complacent and so worried about their livelihoods that they will never speak up is what a plutocracy needs. And that is what an increasing number of elected representatives are delivering—policies that favor the wealthiest 2% of the population at the expense of the remaining 98%.

As long as we are remembering quotations by Ronald Reagan, it may be worth remembering that he said this:

We might come closer to balancing the Budget if all of us lived closer to the Commandments and the Golden Rule.

As far as I can tell, few of the ten commandments would have much impact on the budget. The only one I can think of is &ldquoThou shalt not kill.” If that were followed, the military budget would probably be about one-tenth its current size, and there might then be sufficient resources left over to enable us collectively to love our neighbors as we love ourselves and to do unto others as we would have others to unto us—such as take care of us when we are ill or when we meet misfortune or when we are struggling to make an honest livelihood.

An interesting chart on class warfare is furnished with statistics that make their point well. (Also interesting are a few of the comments supplied by admirers of the Reagan-Bush plea for minimal government.) An excellent analysis of the 2011 budget is available on the website of the Friends Committee on National Legislation.

But never get into your head that your faith alone is true and every other is false. (Śrī Rāmakṛṣṇa)

In the month of March 2011, the 176th anniversary of the birth of Śrī Rāmakṛṣṇa (Ramakrishna) is celebrated. During his lifetime Ramakrishna experimented with the devotional practices of Hinduism, Islam and Christianity and was convinced that the source of all the world’s religions is the same. Ignorance, he said, is the belief that God is outside oneself and far away. True knowledge is realizing that God is within oneself. When one has that true knowledge, and realizes also that God is within all living beings, then there is no longer any place for such concepts as “infidel,” “heretic” and “apostate.” There are no foreigners and no aliens; there are none who do not belong, none who cannot be forgiven, none who cannot be unconditionally loved.

On January 13, 2011, in Toronto, Shāh Karīm al-Ḥussaynī, the fourth Āgā Khān, the current imām of the Shia Imami Nizari Ismailis, delivered the Lafontaine-Baldwin lecture at University of Toronto. The lecture was broadcast on CBC Radio. In that lecture, His Highness made the observation that all the great empires in the world have thrived during the times when they have embraced what we now call multiculturalism and religious pluralism, and they have fallen when the inclusive attitudes of embracing all ethnic groups, all linguistic groups and all religions has given way to xenophobia and religious intolerance. Just one of the examples he gave was that of the Islamic empire of al-Andalus in what is now southern Spain. This nation lasted for more than 700 years, from 711 until 1492, and was a vibrant center of Muslim, Jewish and Christian cross-fertilization and exchange. In 1492, when the intolerant Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabel I of Castile recaptured Granada and began the reconquest of Spain, one of the most brutal and ugly episodes in human history took place. The Spanish Inquisition was a time when Jews and Muslims were required to convert to Catholicism or be expelled from Spain, and many of those who chose to convert were there examined by the Inquisition and found to be heretical. They were then handed over to the state and subjected to punishment, often in the form of being burned alive in public squares. The intolerance and brutality of the Spanish Inquisition set the tone for the treatment of native peoples in lands colonized by the Spanish in the Americas and Africa. Most of the shameful European conquest of the Americas can be seen as an aftermath of the collapse of morality in the wake of the descent from the spirit of multiculturalism and religious pluralism that began in 1492 and then gained momentum for several centuries afterward.

Intolerance of all kinds is contagious. Some have argued that it is innately human and that people are naturally disposed to be suspicious of outsiders and to blame them for nearly everything that has gone wrong in the world. Indeed, it is difficult to find any part of the world that has not at one time or another see manifestations of xenophobia. It does not follow from that, however, that people must be driven by suspicion and hatred. Nor does it follow that to be driven by forces other than suspicion, fear and hatred is to be somehow inhuman. Throughout history there have been people who have dedicated their lives to overcoming aggression, and the fearful mentality that gives rise to it. The Jina and the Buddha of ancient India, Laozi and Mozi and Mengzi of ancient China, Socrates and Aristotle and the Stoics and Skeptics of ancient Greece, and countless prophets and priests and philosophers and mystics since then have tirelessly articulated and lived the message of universal love—of loving one’s neighbor and loving the stranger just as one loves oneself and one’s own family.

In his address in Toronto, the Aga Khan observed that the world has become so interconnected through communication networks that whatever happens anywhere is soon known—and often imitated— everywhere, and social and political movements spread like wildfire. At the time of his talk, the protests in Tunisia were just beginning to be widely known, and the unrest in Egypt, Libya, Bahrain and Yemen had not yet unfolded, nor had the massive protests in Wisconsin—the largest since the protests against the Vietnam war in the 1960s and ’70s. Given how rapidly cataclysmic change can take place around the world, he said, we human beings do not have much time to learn the important message that love is a much better strategy for survival and well-being than animosity. Given the efficiency of the technology of destruction now distributed around the world, failure to find our way back to civilization could quickly bring our unruly species to an end.

As the celebration of the birth of Ramakrishna takes place in Vedanta centers around the world, it is a time to reflect on his words and deeds, and on the words and example of the Aga Khan, and on the words and teachings of all men and women who have lived and died to establish peace and harmony and justice for all living beings on this earth. In the spirit of Ramakrishna, I personally find myself reflecting on the words of George Fox, written in a letter from prison in England in 1656, a time when men and women lost their lives or, like Fox, were imprisoned for following the “wrong” sort of Christianity:

…be patterns, be examples in all countries, places, islands, nations, wherever you come; that your life and conduct may preach among all sorts of people, and to them. Then you will come to walk cheerfully over the world, answering that of God in every one; whereby in them ye may be a blessing, and make the witness of God in them to bless you: then to the Lord God you shall be a sweet savour, and a blessing.

As he was going out into the way, one ran to him, knelt before him, and asked him, “Good Teacher, what shall I do that I may inherit eternal life?” Jesus said to him, “Why do you call me good? No one is good except one—God. You know the commandments: ‘Do not murder,’ ‘Do not commit adultery,’ ‘Do not steal,’ ‘Do not give false testimony,’ ‘Do not defraud,’ ‘Honor your father and mother.’” He said to him, “Teacher, I have observed all these things from my youth.” Jesus looking at him loved him, and said to him, “One thing you lack. Go, sell whatever you have, and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me, taking up the cross.” But his face fell at that saying, and he went away sorrowful, for he was one who had great possessions. Jesus looked around, and said to his disciples, “How difficult it is for those who have riches to enter into the Kingdom of God!” The disciples were amazed at his words. But Jesus answered again, “Children, how hard is it for those who trust in riches to enter into the Kingdom of God! It is easier for a camel to go through a needle’s eye than for a rich man to enter into the Kingdom of God.” (Mark 10:17–25)

One of the many enigmas that we face as we enter into the year 2011 is the political alliance that has formed in recent decades between some evangelical Christians and the plutocrats who have seized control of much of the world and have waged—and for the most part won—a war on the poor. So successful has the campaign of the wealthy classes against the middle-class and the poor been that the political forces who promote the interests of the wealthy have even managed to stigmatize the expression “class warfare” by suggesting that anyone who thinks in terms of class warfare is anti-American and opposed to the ideals expressed in the Constitution of the United States and in the Declaration of Independence. Consequently, it has become almost impossible to have an honest and accurate discussion of the dynamics of American politics without immediately being dismissed as an extreme-left  ideologue. Fortunately, an increasing number of Christians, and followers of other religions, are speaking out and pointing out that the amassing of wealth—especially when this is done to the detriment of the general well-being of the rest of the human race—is contrary to the core values of nearly every religion and philosophical system in the history of the human race. (Just to give two examples, there is a website called Faithful America and another called Sojourners, on both of which one finds thoughtful and spirited critiques of mainstream American politics by mainstream American religious leaders.)

In his essay Creative Unity Rabindranath Tagore quotes the opening lines of William Wordsworth’s sonnet, The World is Too Much With Us:

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

Tagore comments on these lines,

But it is not because the world has grown too familiar to us; on the contrary, it is because we do not see it in its aspect of unity, because we are driven to distraction by our pursuit of the fragmentary.

Tagore’s conviction is that the world is a whole, a unity, an integer. To be driven to distraction by pursuing only a part of the whole is to miss the integer; in other words, it is to lack integrity. Lacking integrity by pursuing a part in forgetfulness of the whole is described in other terminology in the Abrahamic religions; in Judaism, Christianity and Islam such amnesia is usually called idolatry, the worship of some part of creation while neglecting the Creator. However one chooses to refer to it, the effects of being driven to distraction range from the merely wasteful to the disastrous.

Among the ways of being distracted from unity that engaged the attention of Rabindranath was nationalism, the favoring of one nation above all others. Who can help cringing every time a politician describes his or her country as the greatest nation in the world—or, worse, that some nation or other is the greatest that has existed in all of history? Those who believe (or at least say) that their own nation is the best (or most free, or most prosperous, or happiest, or has the best health-care system) in the world usually go on to show their ignorance in other ways, such as by suggesting that some peoples living and working within the best of all countries are doing less than others to promote the greatness of that blessed country than others, or are even diminishing the greatness of the country in some way. In India, which became an independent country a little less than a decade after Rabindranath’s death, one finds the disturbing Hindutva movement, which denigrates the contributions of Muslims, Christians and Sikhs to the greatness of India and challenges the painstaking research of all historians whose publications offer a nuanced picture of the cultural diversity and complexity of India.

In much of Europe one finds political movements dedicated to the proposition that Muslims have a substandard grasp of the theories and practices of the European enlightenment and thus pose a serious threat to modernity. In the United States one witnesses a persistent xenophobic current in which Muslims leaking into the country via Canada and migrants storming the borders from points south are targeted as alarming threats to the American way of life. (Muslims and Mexicans seem to have replaced Catholics, Italians and voting women as the greatest internal threats to the indivisible one nation under God that promises liberty and justice to all. No sooner is one threat domesticated, it seems, than another rises to take its place.) None of these social and political phenomena would have pleased Rabindranath Tagore, but probably none of them would have taken him by surprise either.

Probably the greatest single rupture of integrity in the current American way of life is the willful blindness to the damage the pursuit of comfort and convenience has done to the earth’s environment. As if to exemplify the words of Paul the apostle (in II Thessalonians 2.11) that “God sends them a working of error, that they should believe a lie,” coal and oil and gas providers have convinced a substantial number of Americans that there is truth in the lie that human behavior is not a factor in global warming. The commercial sources of opinion (often misleadingly called news) have been complicit in spreading the lie that experts are divided on the question of whether the burning of fossil fuels for energy has been a factor in the warming of the atmosphere and the oceans and the resultant extreme weather conditions that are being seen all over the planet.

Environmental devastation is the inevitable result of a way of seeing the world through the eye of a needle that allows people to focus only on what is of immediate utility to the comfort and convenience and maintenance of power of the most affluent human beings who happen to be alive right now, while ignoring the well-being of the majority of human beings who are not affluent, and while ignoring generations to come after we have all died, and while ignoring the welfare of non-human species of life. When one thinks about it for a moment, it is clear that the American political forces that are most loudly claiming to be aligned with God are doing the most to rupture the integrity of what they call the kingdom of God.

Hypocrisy, savagery and delusion are, of course, nothing new. Our generation has no monopoly on them. Ever since human beings have been recording their thoughts in writing, people of insight and integrity have been decrying the ways of the powerful who have lost sight of the Dao, the principles of Tian, the will of God, the unity of Brahman or the Buddha nature innate in all beings throughout the universe. That there is nothing new in the brutal assault on the fabric of being by those who lose sight of the whole makes that assault no less outrageous and heartbreaking.

There is an alternative to the blindness of power and partiality. It is often called love. Poets, philosophers, visionaries and psychologists have written about love in countless ways. Many call it atonement—at-one-ment, being at one with all there is. Rabindranath speaks of love as an essential feature of the harmony that characterizes the life lived well. He writes in Creative Unity:

The quality of the infinite is not the magnitude of extension, it is the Advaitam, the mystery of Unity. Facts occupy endless time and space; but the truth comprehending them all has no dimension; it is One. Wherever our heart touches the One, in the small or the big, it finds the touch of the infinite.

Being in touch with this infinite, Rabindranath goes on to say, is true joy, a happiness that can be neither compromised nor diminished. It is that joy alone that makes life worth living. It is the absence of that joy that makes living life worthless. It is a wish for just exactly that sort of integrated and harmonious happiness in 2011, and in all years follow, that goes to everyone out of the living silence.

The multitude of those who believed were of one heart and soul. Not one of them claimed that anything of the things which he possessed was his own, but they had all things in common. With great power, the apostles gave their testimony of the resurrection of the Lord Jesus. Great grace was on them all. For neither was there among them any who lacked, for as many as were owners of lands or houses sold them, and brought the proceeds of the things that were sold, and laid them at the apostles’ feet, and distribution was made to each, according as anyone had need. (Acts 4:32–35)

This description of the early Christian community makes it pretty clear that that community was committed to redistributing wealth. Those who had property divested themselves of it and gave to those who were in need. Ownership of property was communal, not individual. “Not one of them claimed that anything of the things which he possessed was his own, but they had all things in common.” This model of the early Christian community has been emulated repeatedly throughout the history of Christianity. Most monastic orders within Orthodox Christianity and Roman Catholicism have required a vow of poverty of those who are called to that life and have urged the laity to give ten percent of their income to charitable institutions that provide for those in various kinds of need. A number of Protestant communities over the years have favored communal to individual ownership. Those that have not insisted on communal ownership have emphasized the importance of living a life of material simplicity so that one does not waste resources on providing luxury to oneself while others are lacking the requisites of life. The system of social welfare in the United States and European countries was founded largely on Christian principles. The institution of the hospital, a place where the sick and injured could go to be healed, regardless of their ability to pay, has Christian origins. The notion that no one in need of healing should go unhealed lies at the heart of Christian culture.

Somehow, Christian values in the United States have taken a turn from a culture of providing for the poor, the oppressed, the sick, the injured and the needy to a culture of supporting plutocracy—a system of being governed by the wealthy. This change has been relatively recent. One of my grandfathers was a Congregationalist minister voted for Norman Thomas, who ran for president six times as the candidate of The Socialist Party. Norman Thomas, a pacifist as well as a socialist, was the son of a Presbyterian minister from Ohio, and he followed in his father’s footsteps by going to seminary and being ordained as a Presbyterian minister. As a Christian, Thomas felt called to advocate for workers whose lives were often miserable because of the policies of the companies they worked for. Like Norman Thomas, my grandfather espoused socialist ideals as long as he lived. He was not, however, a registered member of the Socialist Party. Rather, he was a registered Republican, for the Republican Party was for a hundred years or so the home of political and economic progressives, idealists and visionaries. It was also the party of theologically liberal Christians—those who welcomed the methods and discoveries of science and critical thinking and reading the Bible historically and critically and mythologically rather than literally.

As the Republican Party has drifted from its historical roots of compassion for the poor and the weak to an increasingly mean-spirited culture, so has much of American Protestantism.There are, fortunately, exceptions. Among Evangelical Christians, one finds such ministers as Jim Wallis and the Sojourners movement, which is in many ways a continuation of the Social Gospel movement of the late 19th and early 20th century. The Sojourners movement is in many ways the antithesis of a kind of Christianity that has evolved in the United States after the Second World War and which has come to be called the prosperity gospel, a theological view based on the conviction that God rewards the faithful with wealth and prosperity.

No doubt the conviction of Oral Roberts and other Protestant ministers of the 1950s that America’s post-war prosperity was a sign of God’s favor became combined with the conviction that socialism is just a step away from Communism and that Communism is anti-religious and ungodly. If Communism is ungodly, the logic went, then Christians, being godly, must be aligned with those who oppose Communism—and socialism. This has led to the paradox that American Christians following this doctrine must feel uneasy with the early Christian community, and with a great deal of traditional Christianity. It is not only the early Christian community that must bring discomfort; even Jesus Christ himself must be regarded with suspicion. Passages such as the following must be very worrying to many an American Christian:

18 A certain ruler asked him, saying, “Good Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” 19 Jesus asked him, “Why do you call me good? No one is good, except one—God. 20 You know the commandments: ‘Don’t commit adultery,’ ‘Don’t murder,’ ‘Don’t steal,’ ‘Don’t give false testimony,’ ‘Honor your father and your mother.’” 21 He said, “I have observed all these things from my youth up.” 22 When Jesus heard these things, he said to him, “You still lack one thing. Sell all that you have, and distribute it to the poor. You will have treasure in heaven. Come, follow me.” 23 But when he heard these things, he became very sad, for he was very rich. 24 Jesus, seeing that he became very sad, said, “How hard it is for those who have riches to enter into the Kingdom of God! 25 For it is easier for a camel to enter in through a needle’s eye, than for a rich man to enter into the Kingdom of God.” (Gospel according to Luke)

If one were in a mood to pray, the contents of a prayer in these times might be that Americans would find their way back to the essentially socialist values of Christianity and of much of early America. And, not forgetting to pray for those most in need of redemption, one might pray also for the repentance of billionaires who have taken control of what used to be a democratic republic. For, as Jesus said, “Children, how hard is it for those who trust in riches to enter into the Kingdom of God! It is easier for a camel to go through a needle’s eye than for a rich man to enter into the Kingdom of God.” (Mark 10:24–25)

Why do most people like the smell of a rose, but not the smell of a skunk? Why do some people enjoy the thrill of a scary movie, or the burn of hot pepper sauce? In this segment, we’ll talk about what’s known about the science of pleasure. What’s going on in the body and brain to make things seem appealing? (NPR’s Science Friday, July 23, 2010)

Ever since I first encountered the Indian Buddhist philosopher in 1969, I have not been able to leave him alone for long. I wrote my B.A. honours thesis on him, a 100-page essay that caused me more sleepless nights than anything I have ever done, and I returned to him in graduate school and have taught numerous courses on him. Although his presentation contains some faulty reasoning, his principal conclusion has always struck me as correct. One statement of his conclusion is that seemingly paradoxical claim that the essential nature of all things is that they have no essential nature. It is acting as if things have essential natures that occasions most of the avoidable kinds of human dissatisfaction with life.

While I think the conclusion that nothing has an essential nature is without a doubt correct, what has puzzled me about Nāgārjuna is his claim that one can be liberated from discontent by learning not to think that things have essential natures. One way I have articulated my puzzlement is to say that Nāgārjuna seems to be offering a cure to a disease that no one actually has. Who, I kept asking myself, would ever believe that things have essential natures? Since people are much too clever to believe in essential natures, it just cannot be the case that their unhappiness stems from foolishly believing in essences.

After listening to the Yale psychologist Paul Bloom being interviewed by Ira Flatow on the Science Friday mentioned above, I was intrigued by Bloom’s claim that a key factor in whether or not a person finds something pleasurable is the person’s belief about what the thing is. If one believes that a performer is famous or that a physical object has an interesting past, then one tends to find that performer’s singing or playing or acting more enjoyable than if one believes the performer is an ordinary person; if one believes a shirt used to belong to a celebrity, it becomes much more interesting than an indistinguishably similar shirt on the shelf of one’s closet. This all reminds me of something that people used to say about forty years ago, namely, that the most important part of the body for having pleasure is the brain. It may not be the case that pleasure is “ all in the mind,” but a great deal of pleasure is indeed in our thoughts about our experiences.

Also intriguing is Dr Bloom’s observation as a developmental psychologist that children begin very early forming notions that things have essences. Not too surprisingly, there is an intimate connection between the notion of essences and the use of language. It is Bloom’s contention that it is a person’s conception of a thing that influences whether the thing is found pleasurable. A child might, for example, form the idea that some things are dirty and disgusting—parents are often instrumental in the formation of such ideas—while other things are pleasant and fun. The notion that the child forms of a thing being pleasurable becomes part of the child’s idea of the thing’s essence. And these notions of the essential natures of things are very difficult to change, except through something dramatic, such as a traumatic experience.

Nāgārjuna and some of his commentators were convinced that one of the means of breaking the habit of thinking that things have essence is to break the habit of talking about things. More important than simply holding one’s tongue is to silence the mind, especially that part of the mind that is constantly trying to figure things out and understand how they work and how they came to be. Coming up with narratives is one of the things human beings do almost constantly. And once a narrative has taken shape, it is difficult to let it go. The narrative becomes not simply a story; it becomes the story.

The kinds of narratives that one allows to take shape in one’s mind has a great deal to do with whether one finds experiences pleasurable, disturbing, intolerably painful, frightening and so forth. The Buddhist philosopher Dharmakīrti tells the story of a man who hears something tapping on the outer wall of his hut and becomes so terrified that he dies. Investigation later reveals that the tapping was caused by a branch of a nearby tree bumping into the side of the house on account of the wind. A narrative can be fatal!

I find pleasure in standing corrected. For decades I have told myself a narrative about Nāgārjuna having some fanciful idea about people falsely thinking that things have essential natures. Now I am less convinced than before that his idea was fanciful. Perhaps people really do think in terms of essences, and perhaps this kind of thinking really is troublesome. It may be worth thinking about.

On the other hand, if Nāgārjuna is right about the pernicious effects of forming explanatory narratives, it may be best not to give the matter any further consideration.

manaḥ śamaṃ na gṛhṇāti na prītisukham aśnute
na nidrāṃ na dhṛtiṃ yāti dveṣaśalye hṛdi sthite

The mind does not attain peace, nor does it experience the pleasure of joy,
nor does it find rest or stability, so long as the arrow of hatred is stuck in the heart.

Those words from Śāntideva’s Bodhicaryāvatāra 6.3 are part of a chapter dedicated to the necessity of cultivating forgiveness and patience. Being the victim of someone else’s harmful behavior, whether the harm was deliberately engineered or the by-product of carelessness and negligence, is pain enough to deal with. Nothing good comes of magnifying the pain by harboring ill will or desires of revenge. When people are harmful to others, says Śāntideva, is precisely when they most need our compassion, our active attempts to alleviate their suffering. Given that contented people do not try to bring misery to others and indeed usually try to establish harmony with others, the best strategy for finding relief from those who are making others miserable is to help them find relief from what is making them miserable.

In the past few days statements have been made by well-known people that show very little understanding of the importance of forgiveness as part of establishing peace and well-being for everyone. One statement was Sarah Palin’s plea to Muslims to drop their plans to establish a mosque near the site of where the World Trade Center used to be in New York. The other was British Prime Minister David Cameron’s strongly expressed disagreement with the decision of the Scottish Parliament last year to allow Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi to return to Libya rather than die of a terminal illness in a Scottish prison. Mass murderers like al-Megrahi, said PM Cameron, do not deserve compassion.

Both Mrs. Palin and PM Cameron seemed to be voicing the views of those who say forgiveness of wrong-doing would add to the burden of pain borne by those whose loved ones died in the airplane bombed over Lockerbie or in the attacks on the World Trade Center or the Pentagon. What they apparently believe is that people are more likely to be pained and vexed by compassion than by their own inability to cultivate compassion. But that is surely not universally true. Without a doubt there are those who have found transformative comfort as a result of finding a way to love those who have harmed their loved ones, just as there are those who will carry their bitterly vindictive feelings with them to the grave. The range of response to deep misfortune is as varied as any other aspect of being human. There is a saying in Sanskrit that hardship is like a rapidly spinning grindstone; when clay is touched to it, it crumbles, but when gold is touched to it, it gets polished. When it was announced that al-Megrahi was being allowed to return to Libya on compassionate grounds, some Scots who had lost loved ones rejoiced at the nobility of the decision, while others ground their teeth and spoke venomous words. It is disappointing to see public figures who have attracted the attention of wide audiences siding only with those who are unable to find forgiveness in their hearts.

The displeasure that has been voiced by those who would like to prevent a mosque from being built in the neighborhood of what has come to be called Ground Zero is psychologically understandable, but it is such a raw emotion that it is difficult to know what kind of decision would not be offensive to those who harbor their unwillingness to forgive. The issue seems to be that placing a mosque near Ground Zero would be a desecration of the memories of those who died. But what distance would be far enough away for these people? Should the nearest mosque be at least a mile away? Or should it be off the island of Manhattan? Outside greater New York City area? One hundred miles away? There are probably some individuals so overcome with bitterness that they would like to see an America entirely free of any publicly visible signs of Muslim worship. Should they be the ones whose feelings determine public policy? If so, one can hardly imagine a deeper tragedy for American culture, since it would be a sure sign of the death of the values that lay at the heart of the formation of the American republic.

There is no calculus for compassion. No one is any more or less deserving of compassion than anyone else. Everyone who is in pain needs relief. Those who cannot forgive need the help of those who can. Those who blame others and attack those whom they blame need the help of those who have no need to find scapegoats. Those who suffer from the arrow of hatred stuck in their hearts need the help of those who have learned to love. Contrary to what some theology says, love is not a grace. It is not a gift that God gives to some and withholds from others. It is a skill. It is something one can learn to do. Like all skills, it is one that improves with practice. The more one loves, the more one can love. The less one forgives, the less one can forgive. The less one can forgive, the more unbearable becomes the burden of life.