The Loose Thread

I don’t see any real disagreement here, John. Over the past 40 years America has moved steadily away from being a liberal democracy toward a neo-fascist, corporatist oligarchy ruled by members of the infamous “military-industrial complex.” The trend accelerated under Reagan and became an open power grab under Bush. For me, Clinton sought to ameliorate the effects and slow the momentum of the juggernaut, but I’m not going to argue too much on his behalf or take issue with a darker interpretation of what he was/is about. The DLC, definitely, is itself a corporatist organization, and I do hope we are seeing its demise in the authentically populist voices such as Jim Webb and John Edwards.

But for me a well-functioning liberal democracy is a system unable on its own to address the issues of social justice and environmental degradation that confront us. I am definitely NOT saying anything along the lines of “a rising tide raises all boats.” This is where medieval Buddhist iconography makes for problems - the metaphor of the “realms” for example. One bright spot in the contemporary landscape - and I realize it’s a very faint one - is the way Asian modes of thinking, Buddhism particularly, are filtering into the hyper-charged Western mind. This has been happening in psychology for many decades now and more recently it’s been happening in the harder sciences of Neurophysics and the study of the brain. I think it also needs to happen in the political arena, though it’s here that the religious trappings of Buddhist thought, along with the out-moded metaphors, create problems. Philosophically, though, Buddhism offers a compelling and complete critique of the “liberal” systems of thought that continue to underlie ALL political systems in the West. As I’ve written many times, Marx and Freud tabled what must be thought of as partial critiques of the liberal mindset, such that the social movements that emerged from their thinking have only had a limited effect when it comes to changing the trajectory of Western history, a trajectory that, it becomes increasingly clear, leads straight into an abyss.

So, the realms. The six realms of Samsara, as I understand them, are descriptions of the spectrum of ways we can relate to experience once we have succumbed to the lure of dualism. Once we have separate from our experience and reified a “self” that is “having” the experience, we have a set of basic choices about how to view that aspect of our experience as outside of ourselves. The “world” (or the “other”) is viewed, broadly, as a source of A) good things we want to have B) bad things we do not want to have and C) things that are value-neutral that we don’t need to worry about. The “self” is engineered to get more of A and less of B and C is pushed out of awareness altogether. Here we have the “three poisons” of greed, aggression and ignorance. If we want to know what they look like in an individual form, we can just look in the mirror. If we want to know what they look like in an institutional form, we can look at the modern corporation. Greed is the profit motive. Aggression is the competitive drive. Ignorance is the ability of the modern corporation to ignore all of the hidden costs of their behavior, including environmental degradation and human injustice.

The “realms” are six modes of relating to the world we have artificially separated from. In the field of desire we believe the world to be either a source of things we want (the Human realm) and we devote ourselves to a lengthy negotiation for the best deal possible…or we believe the world to be a source of things we desperately need but have been denied, and we devote ourselves to humiliating compulsive craving and addictive behaviors (the Hungry Ghost realm). In the field of aggression, the world is viewed as defined by (evil) opponents who must be destroyed (the Hell realm) or by stronger Others who must be competed with (The Realm of the Jealous Gods.) Under the sign of ignorance, the world is viewed from the perspective of superiority and pride (the God Realm) or as a place of endless bewilderment (the Animal Realm). All these realms are viewed as the source of endless suffering (”lack”) because they rest equally on a fundamental error, the error of separating from experience and then re-ifying a self that longs for a “ground” that it will never find. Driven by this basic suffering we pass around this wheel of Samsara, the different realms leading one into the other as we search for a “style” of relating to experience that will deliver the desired result…and meanwhile our actual lives are actually passing.

In the classic depictions, Buddha sits apart from the wheel of suffering looking down from his seat on a lotus blossom. The stem of the lotus extends down, meeting the wheel in the Human realm. Though it’s as rooted in delusion and leads to the same kind of suffering as the other realms, the Human realm - the realm ruled by everyday desires - seems to open the door to a possible (immanent) transcendence of this bad dream. In my view the socio-political equivalent of the Human realm is a modern liberal democracy supporting a consumer economy. We all want the two cars in the garage of our three bedroom home in a nice suburb and that is how we define what our role is here on earth and we are committed to ignoring all aspects of experience that do not mesh with this basic mindset. It’s interesting to speculate about why this mode of existence might lead to the “stem of the lotus.” To me, it’s that the endless proliferation of products and the endless meeting of endlessly particularized desires generates a visceral experience of “emptiness.” It is the specific anomie, in other words, that accompanies endless gorging at the trough of minor desires that leads one to notice how the entire set up is somehow rigged. In the relative calm over the lip of the trough, in other words, the first glimmers of awareness begin to bleed through. No matter how freely one gorges at the trough, one realizes, satisfaction will not take place. And so, perhaps, one begins to ask questions…the tapestry now has a loose thread…