Dan Pallotta

12.20.2003

Saturday, December 20, 2003

Yesterday I was talking to a cab driver from India. He was Hindu. He said he didn't like Gandhi. He said that when the lines were drawn that created Pakistan, the Muslims in Pakistan told all the Hindus to leave, but Gandhi, on the other hand, said that India would welcome Muslims and Hindus alike. His take on it was that if Pakistani wouldn't allow Hindus, India shouldn't allow Muslims. He was actually a very thoughtful, nice guy, this cab driver.

He then asked me what I thought about the World Trade Center disaster. Did I agree with what President Bush did? "I don't know," I said. "Gandhi and Jesus taught that we should turn the other cheek, but that is a difficult thing to do," I said. "Yes, you can turn the other cheek - but how many times are you supposed to do that? If a person hits you once, you turn the other cheek. If he hits you again, you turn the other cheek. But what if he hits you a third time?" he asked.

The question of non-violence is an extremely difficult one. You read in the papers this morning that Libya has agreed to dismantle its weapons of mass destruction. Is this a direct result of the Bush foreign policy? Is it a direct result of Libya seeing what happened to Iraq, and fearing that it could be next? Probably. Does that mean the Bush foreign policy and doctrine of the use of violence to bring down violent regimes is succeeding, and that the Jesus doctrine and the Gandhi doctrine are less practical than the Bush doctrine? Clearly, we can say, they are at odds with one another.

I ask these question seriously, as I have before. I don't know the answer, intellectually. But somewhere in my heart - in my intuition, there is a voice that tells me that violent means will result, ultimately, in violent ends. The Einstein statement that, "you cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for nuclear war," seems to be a deep truth. The evidence in the newspapers seems to be giving us the opposite data, and that cannot simply be dismissed, or worse, denied. We must engage this type of inquiry with great rigor. But we must engage it with our minds and with our hearts.

There is the Biblical axiom that "he who lives by the sword shall die by the sword." The logic of this is that if you use violence then violence will be used against you. And then, in turn, the person that uses that violence against you will have violence used against him. And so on, and so on until we have destroyed one another. Violence is a self-perpetuating system.

Then you read about the absolute brutality of Saddam Hussein - the way he tortured people mercilessly - the way he brought their family members in and tortured them in front of them - the way he manipulated people with the most gruesome intimidation and fear. Your blood boils, and you want to kill the guy yourself. You wouldn't be human if you didn't want to. You want to absolutely destroy the son-of-a-bitch. And you feel this hatred rise up inside yourself. What do you do with that? What do you do with your desire to rescue those he is brutalizing? That too is your human nature - to come to the aid of those in distress - to measure out justice to those who brutalize the weak. What do you do with your own desire for justice? Set it aside? Or is this where you pray - muster the faith to believe that God, not you, is the one who must bring justice? Is this love or is this cowardice? Is this courage or is this its opposite?
Can Jesus and Gandhi simply become convenient excuses for not acting at all?

We know that Jesus and Gandhi did not lack courage. Gandhi tore up his pass card in a public display in South Africa, at great personal risk to himself. He led the Salt march at great personal risk to himself. Jesus did not run when he heard the Roman guards were coming for him.

So perhaps the gauge by which we must measure ourselves is the courage with which we exercise our convictions. And perhaps the way we arrive at our answers about violence and non-violence is to see for which position it is that we are willing to exercise courage, and to know that, if we are unwilling to exercise courage on behalf of the things in which we say we believe, then whether we believe in them or not is quite beside the point.

Confusion and boredom, the zen masters say, are the two guardians of the truth. So if we are confused about whether Jesus and Gandhi were right, perhaps it is because we do not want to confront the truth. Or if we have developed a false confidence, either in our pacifism or our violence, perhaps it is simply because we do not want to confront our confusion. We need not get down on ourselves about this, for it is a problem from which probably all but one or two human beings on the planet suffer. I have no idea who they are, but they must be out there. We are weak. We are cowardly. Some of us by rushing to a pacifism that we have not truly explored or embraced. Others by rushing to a violence that we have not fully explored and that is fundamentally at odds with the tenets of the faith in which we say we believe, and still others by remaining in a constant state of confusion on the matter.

So perhaps we are putting the cart before the horse. Perhaps before we decide whether violence or non-violence is the answer we must become real human beings ourselves - authentic to ourselves, rid of our masks and our exteriors and our desire to be liked by everyone and to agree to things we don't necessarily agree with simply because we want to fit in. Perhaps the search for truth in ourselves must come before we tackle these truths about things as far-reaching as the use of violence against entire nations. Perhaps it is the absence of truth in ourselves that leads us to violence against entire nations. Perhaps that is the greatest distraction of all. We want to create peace and liberty around the world before we have achieved it inside the self.

12.19.2003

Friday, December 19, 2003

In these days when the experts are so sure that they have all the answers - about Iraq, about the economy, about how to stop terrorism, about Medicare, and about nearly everything else, I am reminded of what Albert Einstein thought about the power of knowledge versus the power of ideas - "Imagination, " he said, " is more important than knowledge."

12.17.2003

Thursday, December 18, 2003

The mind is like water; when it's still, there is reflection; when disturbed, no mirror. Muddled by folly and craving, fanned by misleading influences, it surges and billows, never stopping for a moment. Looking at it this way, where can you go and not be mistaken! It's like trying to look into a flowing spring to see your own appearance - it never forms. Seng-Chao

Wednesday, December 17, 2003

Today is the 100th anniversary of the Wright Brothers turning their groundplane into an airplane. You may not be aware of it, but there is a courageous man named Peter Diamandis who launched an initiative several years ago called the X-Prize - a $10 million prize for the first civilian team that can launch human beings into space (at least 60 miles above the earth), return safely, and then repeat the light within two weeks. There are now nearly half a dozen well-financed teams competing for the prize. One or two are in the final testing stages. Peter based his idea on the aviation prizes like the one that inspired Charles Lindbergh to make his historic trans-Atlantic flight. Peter's inspiring thinking - if the government won't move faster to get civilians into space, then civilians are going to have to do it themselves. He is an incredible dreamer. Click here to visit the X-Prize.

When we talk about going to the moon or to Mars, the mass mind always frames it in a context of scarcity, that is, that we can't afford it. The cynical mind says, "we shouldn't be launching people to Mars when people are starving here on earth." It is interesting to note that these people were not particularly concerned about the hungry on earth until they heard that we want to go to Mars. Then, all of a sudden, hunger becomes their cause. It is a pathetic exploitation of the poor in the service of their own cynicism.

Where is it written that we cannot have it all? Where is it written that we cannot end hunger, go to Mars, and achieve world peace all at the same time? In fact, I believe the only way to achieve these things is to go for them all at the same time - to dramatically shift our way of being in the world - to transform ourselves from a people who see a limited horizon to a people who see an unlimited horizon, given to us by God, at every level and on every issue of human concern.

We need great dreams for the future. Not great limitations. We are constantly being told what cannot be done. If we took all of the human energy that goes into explaining why exciting things cannot be done and preventing marvelous things from being done and instead put it into getting things done we would have been to Mars already. We would have ended world hunger too.

We must get beyond this fear of achieving our most fantastic dreams. There is a world out there that awaits us, where the most fantastic things occur, where compassion and ideation abound, and where the outer reaches of our potential are made manifest. It is ours if we will let go of this puny, limited, fear-driven, existence in which we are so comfortable and to which we have become so attached. It is time for us to leave the ground and set to the air with our thoughts and with our dreams, not knowing whether we will fall or whether we will fly.

We do not celebrate the 100th anniversary of flight because we do not love to fly. We celebrate it because we do.

12.15.2003

Tuesday, December 16, 2003

I would like to suggest a new measurement for the health of the economy. I don't think the little kids in Appalachia care much whether the Dow goes up over 10,000. I don't think the kids in South Central who are getting a sub-standard education feel much more prosperous now than they did when the Dow was at 9,200. I don't think the Mexican immigrants working two jobs and still living below the poverty line think the Dow measures their economy. I don't think the people working in the sweatshops in downtown L.A. think it's measuring theirs. I certainly don't think the 35,000 people living on Skid Row saw any noticeable improvement in conditions when the Dow topped 10,000.

We are all conditioned to think that when the Dow goes up the economy's getting better. Well, it's definitely getting better for the wealthy. But the poor get left behind, no matter how well the Dow's doing. And incumbent President's get re-elected and people sing prosperity when the Dow is on the rise. But not everyone has cause to rejoice. The Dow measures changes that do not typically benefit the poor in any way.

We ought to have a morality measure for the economy, and it ought to tell us how many people are still living in poverty, and we ought to wait until that number is going down before we start re-electing Presidents and singing "Happy Days Are Here Again."

A society that measures its prosperity by how well the stock market's doing, without any regard whatsoever for how well the starving children are doing, is flat out measuring the wrong things. And maybe it's measuring the wrong things because it values the wrong things. We need a compassion index on the front page of the paper every day. We need seven pages of ticker tape statistics on a kindness index. We need the Wall Street Journal to track a suffering reduction index. These are the things that are important, not how much more money Wal-Mart investors made today. These would be the signs of a visionary society. And America has the ability to be that. Can you imagine an America where every newspaper carried a front-page index on the reduction in poverty for the month?

This is the kind of compassionate society we all want to live in. Not a society whose measures leave out the neediest of the needy. It s not difficult to create this society. We just need to begin doing things differently. But we keep doing things the same and wonder why the world isn't getting any happier. In AA, doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result is what they call insanity.

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12.14.2003

Monday, December 15, 2003

There is a heart-breaking saying I have always loved - "Every new child born is a sign that God has not yet grown discouraged of man."

Saddam Hussein was once a new child.

I look at the pictures of that broken man on television and wonder what happened to him - what engendered so much fear inside of him to do the horrible things that he did over the course of his life. And what caused the self-hatred that would have him hiding with rats from the rest of the world. It is such a powerful metaphor. Hiding from the entire free world in a hole underground full of rats. We must not overlook the fact that this is a man who hates himself with an intensity most of us could not imagine. That is the kind of self-hatred it takes to inflict the violence on people outside of himself that he found himself able to.

Carl Jung wrote about the power of the rejected shadow - about what happens when we project our own evil onto our enemies. On a day like today, when we see the awesome destructive power of the shadow that Saddam Hussein rejected in himself and projected onto his enemies, we would be wise not to be partying in the streets, but to beware of the shadow inside ourselves that we have projected onto him.