Disqus - Latest Comments for knowbuddhau

Re: What’s in a Word? Emptiness

knowbuddhau — Thu, 17 Jan 2019 20:37:07 -0000

My favorite subject, thanks for the illuminating article. Any thoughts on Daniel Palmer's report of Masao Abe's take on sunyata?

http://www.thezensite.com/Z...

Abe translates that most pivotal word not in the nominative: not as a -ness thing, as in emptiness; but as a gerund: an -ing thing, with a rather kenotic twist: self-emptying.

Taking a radical translation of dharma, the pivotal sentence of that pivotal sutra sounds to me like, 'All holding or carrying is essentially self-emptying.'

The principle of the self-emptying vessel is found embodied everywhere: your* beating heart is filling/emptying arteries and veins, your breathing lungs filling/emptying, and so, so so on.

In fact, even your mind: neuronal models of stimuli are the self-emptying vessels of mind, into which experience is pouring; from which awareness is arising; and out of which we are flowing.

So, that proverbial glass is neither half-full nor half-empty. It's sunyata. And so are u.

*Just a figure of speech.

Re: "Occupy Love" Documentary Asks "Can Crisis Be Turned into a Love Story"

knowbuddhau — Wed, 05 Jun 2013 14:39:53 -0000

Best part of the interview comes near the end. Ripper is saying, there's a growing realization that our old way of thinking about problems isn't working anymore. That's what I'm on about.

For the longest time, we've dealt with problems by invoking the magical concept of 'away.' We've been able to pretend that there's this place, called 'away,' where we can send threats of all sorts: trash, toxins, people, what have you, that we don't want to harm us.

"There is no away anymore," he says. Truer words we're never spoken.

Re: Hagel Nomination Defies Neo-Cons and AIPAC; Brennon at CIA will Expand Drone Assassinations

knowbuddhau — Wed, 09 Jan 2013 19:48:46 -0000

I think it's a measure of how far off the rails we've been for so long (ever since our slaving start, IMO) that volunteering to fight in an imperial war of aggression -- does anyone remember that Johnson & McNamara faked the details of the Tonkin Gulf incident explicitly to jack us into it? -- is taken as the sine qua non of a pol's bona fides to be SecDef.

Shame on you, Ray McGovern. Shame on the whole damn Establishment.

Re: Fiscal Cliff "Crisis" Manufactured to Prey on the Weak

knowbuddhau — Thu, 13 Dec 2012 22:13:21 -0000

Great first report, Dr. J. Thanks especially for mentioning the Shock Doctrine. (And thanks to TRNN for another great regular report. Well worth monthly support. Hint hint other viewers!)

I don't know which is the more shocking: the brazenness with which they're doing it, or how maddeningly well it always seems to work. It's like that "flashy thing" in Men In Black.

http://www.youtube.com/watc...

Also appreciate the health care comparisons to other countries. Comparing America the Exceptional to other nations is something you never see in the MSM. As with debt reduction, we can see what the real aims are despite the deceptive rhetoric.

Re: The Zen of zero desire as millions die, billions suffer, trillions looted

knowbuddhau — Thu, 13 Dec 2012 15:51:27 -0000

Thank you immensely for this. I bow in your virtual direction. ;-}

From the video: "Likewise, do not differentiate yourself as apart from others, or from the world outside." (2:45). Aye, here's the rub. Speaking as a Westerner who has become a Zen poet, this is exactly what we've been doing for thousands of years. Since the time of ancient Greek philosophers, who studied the world *as if* it were a mechanism, we've been reducing our selves to mechanisms operating in idealized, unnatural settings.

Here's a simple test: can you put your finger on the boundary between your self and the rest of the universe? Can the dividing line, between your self and any other thing, be localized, described, and analyzed? What does it look like? Of what is it made? How does it function?

Likewise, if one takes a close look at the cells from which our awareness is arising right now, one will see that the cell membrane is necessarily semi-permeable; at all times, there is much traffic through their many pores. The extra-cellular is always in the process of becoming the infra-cellular, and vice versa. So where is the line? Can you see that it's not so much found in nature as it is imposed by our methods of analysis and speech?

I repeat: There is no such absolute, permanent line as is suggested by the self/other divide. In today's modern, industrialized, "advanced" society, though, we believe the opposite to be true. If we didn't, there would be no surprise in the verse from "I Am The Walrus" that goes: "I am he/ As you are he/ As you are me/ And we are all together." This spurious belief imprisons us in *cellves* of our own mistaken making.

Fortunately, there are many ways out of these hell-hole cellves we've mistakenly made for our selves. Here are but two.

Short way out (by yours truly):

KNOCK-KNOCK
(who's there?)
BUDDHA!
(buddha who?)
KNOW! BUDDHA YOU!

(IOW, we are the ones we've been longing for, the ones with astonishing powers to solve our problems, but being conditioned always to look outside of our selves for answers, we just don't realize it.)

Long way out (I can't recommend reading the entirety of the following article highly enough, esp. for those who consider themselves to be Buddhist):

Changing the Way Society Changes:
Transposing Social Activism into a Dramatic Key

By Peter D. Hershock
East-West Center
Asian Studies Development Program

http://blogs.dickinson.edu/...

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Abstract: While many Buddhists are rightly committed to working
in the public sphere for the resolution of suffering, there are very
real incompatibilities between the axiomatic concepts and strategic
biases of (the dominant strands of) both current human rights discourse
and social activism and such core Buddhist practices as seeing
all things as interdependent, impermanent, empty, and karmically
configured. Indeed, the almost startling successes of social activism
have been ironic, hinging on its strategic and conceptual indebtedness
to core values shared with the technological and ideological
forces that have sponsored its own necessity. The abovementioned
Buddhist practices provide a way around the critical blind spot instituted
by the marriage of Western rationalism, a technological bias
toward control, and the axiomatic status of individual human being,
displaying the limits of social activism's institutional approach to
change and opening concrete possibilities for a dramatically Buddhist
approach to changing the way societies change.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Formally established tolerance of dissent and internal critique has become
a mark of distinction among contemporary societies. Indeed,
with economic globalization and the rhetoric of democracy acting in
practically unassailable concert, the imperative to establish and maintain

Journal of Buddhist Ethics 6 (1999):154-181

Changing the Way Society Changes:
Journal of Buddhist Ethics 6 (1999): 155

the conditions under which political protest and social activism are possible
has become the keystone challenge to developing nations throughout
Africa, Asia, and Central and South America.

It is not my intention here to question the legitimacy of this challenge.
The possibility of dissent is crucial to realizing a truly responsive society
capable of correcting its own errors of judgement and organizational practice,
and institutional changes of the sort brought about by political protest
and social activism have undeniably been instrumental in this process. What
I want to question are the prevalent strategies for bringing about such corrections
and the axiological presuppositions on which they pivot. Although
it may be true that "nothing succeeds like success," it is also true that nothing
more readily blinds us to inherent flaws in the means and meaning of
our successes than "success" itself. Critical inattention to the strategic axioms
underlying the successful engineering of political and social change
might, in other words, finally render our best-intended efforts self-defeating.

My thesis, then, is a disquieting one: social activism's successes have
hinged on its strategic and conceptual indebtedness to core values shared
with the technological and ideological forces that have sponsored its own
necessity. That is, the same conditions that have made successful social
activism possible have also made it necessary. With potentially tragic irony,
social activist practices and theory have been effectively reproducing
rather than truly reducing the conditions of institutionalized disadvantage
and dependence.

In a liberal democratic context, such a thesis verges on political and
philosophical heresy, and if we are hard pressed to take it seriously, it is
only because the positive and progressive nature of the changes wrought
by social activism are so manifestly selfevident. Unfortunately, if our prevailing
standards of reason and critical inquiry are not entirely neutral, the
manifestly positive and progressive nature of social activism's history might
be the result of a critical blindspot. In that case, the ironic nature of social
activist success would be effectively invisible.

As a way around any such critical lacunae, I will be appealing to such
core Buddhist practices as seeing all things as impermanent, as karmically
configured, and as empty or interdependent. These practices and the theories
adduced in their support mark a radical inversion of the critical and
logical priorities constitutive of the philosophical, religious, and political
traditions that have governed our dominant conceptions of freedom and
civil society. By systematically challenging our bias for subordinating values
to facts, relationships to the related, uniqueness to universality, and
contribution to control, Buddhist practice makes possible a meaningful as-

Peter D. Hershock
Journal of Buddhist Ethics 6 (1999): 156

sessment and revision of social activist strategy. Importantly, it also opens
the possibility of critically evaluating the phenomenon of 'engaged Buddhism'
and its ostensibly corrective relationship with the root conditions
of suffering.

http://blogs.dickinson.edu/...
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Re: Obama Wins, the System is Broken

knowbuddhau — Wed, 07 Nov 2012 14:13:15 -0000

Right. Calamity never happens. Nor does blowback. We're all atomized individuals, each existing apart from the environment we live in. Such a rugged individualist you are! Bully!

Odd that you have the time to take away from growing all your own food and textiles, building your own roads, your own schools and universities, your own hospitals, your own power stations and distribution grids, your own car, your own state legislature, etc. etc. etc., to use a government-sponsored technology (the Internet) to complain about people petitioning their government for redress from wrongs.

Re: Obama Wins, the System is Broken

knowbuddhau — Wed, 07 Nov 2012 11:34:49 -0000

Thanks for the election night live coverage. It's such a relief to find balanced, nuanced coverage from a source that isn't in the tank for any party.

BTW, the tech issues didn't bug me at all. I listened to the show while browsing Twitter. In fact, I kinda like the warped lead-in/lead-out music. ;-)

Re: The Black Financial and Fraud Report: Agency Says No to Mortgage Relief

knowbuddhau — Wed, 01 Aug 2012 13:26:35 -0000

I'd love to hear Prof. Black discuss Perkinsian economics. Was Perkins right? Are there Economic Hit Men among us? What might be the distinguishing characteristics of EHM and their covert ops?

Over and over and over I hear the same formulation: data are faked to justify building monstrosities that induce irredeemable debts that are then used to subvert and control whole nations. Time and time again we see gov't officials colluding with fraudsters, instead of investigating and prosecuting obvious crimes.

It's hubris of the highest order to think "it couldn't happen here."

See also "Ecuador: Failed Coup or Institutional Crisis?"
http://therealnews.com/t2/i...

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
http://www.democracynow.org...

AMY GOODMAN:
Well, before we go further, "economic hit men" — for those who haven’t
heard you describe this, let alone describe yourself as this, what do
you mean?

JOHN PERKINS:
Well, really, I think it’s fair to say that since World War II, we
economic hit men have managed to create the world’s first truly global
empire, and we’ve done it primarily without the military, unlike other
empires in history. We’ve done it through economics very subtly.

We work many different ways, but perhaps the most common one is that
we will identify a third world country that has resources our
corporations covet, such as oil, and then we arrange a huge loan to that
country from the World Bank or one of its sister organizations. The
money never actually goes to the country. It goes instead to US
corporations, who build big infrastructure projects — power grids,
industrial parks, harbors, highways — things that benefit a few very
rich people but do not reach the poor at all. The poor aren’t connected
to the power grids. They don’t have the skills to get jobs in industrial
parks. But they and the whole country are left holding this huge debt,
and it’s such a big bet that the country can’t possibly repay it. So at
some point in time, we economic hit men go back to the country and say,
"Look, you know, you owe us a lot of money. You can’t pay your debt, so
you’ve got to give us a pound of flesh."

AMY GOODMAN: And explain your history. What made you an economic hit man?

JOHN PERKINS:
Well, when I graduated from business school at Boston University, I was
recruited by the National Security Agency, the nation’s largest and
perhaps most secretive spy organization.

AMY GOODMAN: People sometimes think the CIA is that, but the NSA, many times larger.

JOHN PERKINS:
Yeah, it is larger. It’s much larger. At least it was in those days.
And it’s very, very secretive. We all — there’s a lot of rumors. We know
quite a lot about the CIA, I think, but we know very, very little about the NSA.
It claims to only work in a cryptography, you know, encoding and
decoding messages, but in fact we all know that they’re the people who
have been listening in on our telephone conversations. That’s come out
recently. And they’re a very, very secretive organization.

They put me through a series of tests, very extensive tests, lie
detector tests, psychological tests, during my last year in college. And
I think it’s fair to say that they identified me as a good potential
economic hit man. They also identified a number of weaknesses in my
character that would make it relatively easy for them to hook me, to
bring me in. And I think those weaknesses, I [inaudible] might call, the
three big drugs of our culture: money, power and sex. Who amongst us
doesn’t have one of them? I had all three at the time.

And then I joined the Peace Corps. I was encouraged to do that by the
National Security Agency. I spent three years in Ecuador living with
indigenous people in the Amazon and the Andes, people who today and at
that time were beginning to fight the oil companies. In fact, the
largest environmental lawsuit in the history of the world has just been
brought by these people against Texaco, Chevron. And that was incredibly
good training for what I was to do.

And then, while I was still in the Peace Corps, I was brought in and
recruited into a US private corporation called Charles T. Main, a
consulting firm out of Boston of about 2,000 employees, very low-profile
firm that did a tremendous amount of work of what I came to understand
was the work of economic hit men, as I described it earlier, and that’s
the role I began to fulfill and eventually kind of rose to the top of
that organization as its chief economist.

AMY GOODMAN: And how did that tie to the NSA? Was there a connection?

JOHN PERKINS: You know, that’s what’s very interesting about this whole system, Amy, is that there’s no direct connection. The NSA
had interviewed me, identified me and then essentially turned me over
to this private corporation. It’s a very subtle and very smart system,
whereby it’s the private industry that goes out and does this work. So
if we’re caught doing something, if we’re caught bribing or corrupting
local officials in some country, it’s blamed on private industry, not on
the US government.

And it’s interesting that in the few instances when economic hit men
fail, what we call "the jackals," who are people who come in to
overthrow governments or assassinate their leaders, also come out of
private industry. These are not CIA employees.
We all have this image of the 007, the government agent hired to kill,
you know, with license to kill, but these days the government agents, in
my experience, don’t do that. It’s done by private consultants that are
brought in to do this work. And I’ve known a number of these
individuals personally and still do.

Re: Reader Comment: The Rich and the Power of Myth

knowbuddhau — Fri, 15 Jun 2012 21:48:37 -0000

"Going off plantation, being without a job, or complaining about conditions are sure signs of allegiance with the Devil."

(See also the February, 2012 PBS special, "Slavery by Another Name" | "'Slavery by Another Name' explores the new forms of slavery after the Civil War."

http://video.pbs.org/video/... )

And for the hell of it, just to show I did not invent this idea, see also The Who: Eminence Front http://www.youtube.com/watc...

Re: Objective of US and Israeli Policy is Economic Warfare Against Iran

knowbuddhau — Thu, 07 Jun 2012 09:07:52 -0000

Is this your first time at TRNN? If you had been paying attention, you'd know:

1) "Iran" never said it, and neither did Ahmadinejad. 2) Unlike the US and Israel, Iran has no nuclear weapons factories. 3) The US is the greatest exporter of terrorism.

Re: Objective of US and Israeli Policy is Economic Warfare Against Iran

knowbuddhau — Thu, 07 Jun 2012 09:03:20 -0000

Porter's articles and interviews are always appreciated. It's refreshing to hear someone cut through the bs so incisively.

There's another reporter from whom I'd like to hear, one who used to be a regular here at TRNN. Why doesn't TRNN ever feature Pepe Escobar anymore?

http://therealnews.com/t2/i...

Re: Praying at the Church of St. Drone: The President and His Apostles

knowbuddhau — Tue, 05 Jun 2012 16:29:48 -0000

I love it when you highlight the confluence of religion and power at the highest levels of our government. Reminds me of "Crusading in the Arc of Instability: George Bush's Crusading Scorecard (2001-2007) The Look of a War against Islam" (http://www.tomdispatch.com/.... That said, I think you could take it one step further.

The Church of Our Man of Global Domination

So think of this as Bush's crusading scorecard for the years 2001-2007 -- this record of barbarism with its guarantee of a "whirlwind of blowback," as Pepe Escobar of the Asia Times puts it, and the unmistakable look of a war against Islam.

In truth, the most obvious factor linking all of the above together, however, the real thing they have in common, is not, in the normal sense, religious at all. If there is a religious war going on, waged by men (and a few women) of faith, then that faith is neither Christianity, nor Judaism, nor is the war against Islam per se. It comes instead from the fundamentalist Church of Our Man of Global Domination and at its heart is the monotheistic religion of Force. If the arc of instability were inhabited by recalcitrant, angry, sometimes armed, and sometimes destructive Buddhists, sitting on vast energy reserves, this war would look like a war against the Buddha himself.

The essential doctrine of faith that ties all the disparate foreign-policy acts of this administration together is the belief that to every global problem, to every difficult situation, there is but a single striking and uniform response -- not the application of democracy, but the application of force.

In its pursuit of force as a faith, the Bush administration has managed to lower the bar on all applications of force by any state (just as it has raised the value of a nuclear arsenal and so, despite its threats of war, lowered the bar on the proliferation of those weapons). This is but a small part of the price a regime of force must pay when force is such an inadequate instrument in our world. The single most striking aspect of Bush foreign policy is that, over and over, it is revealed to be a quiver with but a single arrow in it. If things are going well, you reach back, take that arrow of force, or the threat of it, and notch it into your bow. If things are going badly, you do the same. For an administration so focused on the domination of planetary resources, its officials have, in fact, proven themselves remarkably resourceless.

The sort of eternal global military domination imagined in the National Security Strategy document they issued with great fanfare in 2002 is, of course, long gone. The sort of domination in Iraq and other lands in the arc of instability of which the neocons dreamed so fervently is no longer at issue either.

The religion of Force has proven itself a remarkably weak reed in our complex and difficult world, but that doesn't matter to them. Like many cultists, deeply imbued with their own way of looking at life, our President, our Vice President, and their dwindling band of compatriots can still imagine no other solutions than force, whatever the presenting problems. Not only can't they think outside the box, but the box itself is narrowing around this Presidency and Vice Presidency -- and believe me, given their crusading record, that's dangerous indeed.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I was raised Christian. Now I'm Zen. This gives me an unorthodox perspective on the role of religion in politics.

If Bush's prosecution of the GWOT had the look of a war against Islam, what to make of Obama's use of drones?

This Crusade isn't based in Christianity in the same sense that critics say that al-Qaeda isn't based in genuine Islam. I'll bet the people participating in those "terror Tuesday" conferences feel they're doing God's work. It's no coincidence that dark-skinned Muslims are being nominated for extrajudicial killings by light-skinned Christians, Jews, and those most bizarre of all credo creatures, Christian Zionists.

It's not fair to absolve the three very closely related religions of their own roles in the long history of Crusades and counter-Crusades they've visited upon the rest of us. They all believe that a male being, all by his lonesome, manufactured the cosmos by force and fiat, making the cosmos - and especially us - his personal private property, to be disposed of as only He can see fit. Coming out of that context, Obama's use of drones to kill "evil-doers" makes perfect sense.

It's like what Bill Cosby used to say that his own angry father would tell him: "I brought you into this world. I can take you out, too."

When viewed through the lenses of comparative mythology, there's a perfectly apt name for what's being practiced in "terror Tuesday" conferences, and it's definitely not law enforcement. It's human sacrifice (by remote control) on the altar of full-spectrum dominance.

After all, it's what (their idea of) God would do.

Re: Reverend Billy Thanksgiving in Bank of America with #OWS and Picture The Homeless

knowbuddhau — Wed, 30 May 2012 15:54:51 -0000

Where we go homeless one, we go homeless all. Just the same, where we defy the banksters one, we defy the banksters all. Kendall Jackman, Rev. Billy, OWS, Picture the Homeless: I bow in your virtual directions.

Re: Rich Guy on How Middle Class Are the Job Creators

knowbuddhau — Sun, 27 May 2012 14:09:37 -0000

(Pardon my enthusiasm, but this is my favorite topic.)

Campbell's basic argument, with regard to the ills of society today, is that the old metaphors are broken. Living within the cosmos so conceived is only making things worse.

As Hanauer eloquently demonstrates, the greatest power of OWS is to be found in its refashioning of the metaphors through which we experience daily life.

The best thing we, the 99%, can do, to bring about the changes we seek, is deconstruct the old metaphors in the process of creating new ones. The power of that metaphor itself, of the 1% vs the 99%, is already doing just that.

That would be true enough, in a general sense, but it's all the more true for us Americans. Why?

Because Campbell himself lectured for the State Department's Foreign Service Institute for decades, beginning 1956 (http://www.pacifica.edu/inn.... That tells me that, ever since, the greed-heads and war-mongers at State and elsewhere have been steeped in a perverse reading of Campbell's work. They read it for it's utilitarian value in pursuing "national security." And the "successes" of the feds are envied and emulated in the world of corporate propagandizing (as in the myth of "job creators"). As a poet, I can't imagine a worse tragedy.

It's my firm belief that they think they have mastered the ultimate power in the human world: the weaponized power of myth. Just look at the USG's use of religions as weapons.

It's not that it was invented post-WWII. But I do fear that the process was systematized at that time. Just as APA and DOD systematically weaponized psychology into PSYOP (http://psychoanalystsoppose..., I fear they've systematically weaponized comparative mythology into MYTHOP.

Long ago, we sought to "put the fear of god" into "heathen savages." And that same bogus holy war continues to this day, eg the weaponized teachings about Islam offered to Air Force officers. http://agonist.org/steve_hy...

As Hanauer shows, the old metaphors will only take us where we've already been. Our challenge is twofold: to recognize and counteract MYTHOP even as we develop new metaphors for being human in today's world. Toward that end, allow me to offer the following suggestions.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Joseph Campbell's 10 Commandments of Reading Myth
Originally published Myths to Live By
http://www.trinity.edu/cspi...

1. Read myths with the eyes of wonder: the myths transparent to their universal meaning, their meaning transparent to its mysterious source.

2. Read myths in the present tense: Eternity is now.

3. Read myths in the first person plural: the Gods and Goddesses of ancient mythology still live within you.

4. Any myth worth its salt exerts a powerful magnetism. Notice the images and stories that you are drawn to and repelled by. Investigate the field of associated images and stories.

5. Look for patterns; don't get lost in the details. What is needed is not more specialized scholarship, but more interdisciplinary vision. Make connections; break old patterns of parochial thought.

6. Resacralize the secular: even a dollar bill reveals the imprint of Eternity.

7. If God is everywhere, then myths can be generated anywhere, anytime, by anything. Don't let your Romantic aversion to science blind you to the Buddha in the computer chip.

8. Know your tribe! Myths never arise in a vacuum; they are the connective tissue of the social body which enjoys synergistic relations with dreams (private myths) and rituals (the enactment of myth).

9. Expand your horizons! Any mythology worth remembering will be global in scope. The earth is our home and humankind is our family

10. Read between the lines! Literalism kills; Imagination quickens.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth with Bill Moyers | Star Wars | PBS

http://www.youtube.com/watc...

Re: Rich Guy on How Middle Class Are the Job Creators

knowbuddhau — Sun, 27 May 2012 12:30:54 -0000

@ 4:07 "It's a small jump from job creator to THE Creator. This language obviously wasn't [laughter] this language was not chosen by accident. And it's only honest to admit that when someone like me calls them self a job creator, were not just describing how the economy works, but more particularly we're making a claim on status and privileges that we deserve."

Well said. That's exactly what I'm always on about. That's the power of myth, baby.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Joseph Campbell’s “Four Functions of Myth”
From Pathways to Bliss (Novato, CA: New World Library), pp 6-10.
http://www.trinity.edu/cspi...

1. …the first function of mythology [is] to evoke in the individual a sense of grateful, affirmative awe before the monstrous mystery that is existence.

2. The second function of mythology is to present an image of the cosmos, an image of the universe round about, that will maintain and elicit this experience of awe. [or] …to present an image of the cosmos that will maintain your sense of mystical awe and explain everything that you come into contact with in the universe around you.

3. The third function of a mythological order is to validate and maintain a certain sociological system: a shared set of rights and wrongs, proprieties or improprieties, on which your particular social unit depends for its existence.

4. …the fourth function of myth is psychological. That myth must carry the individual through the stages of his life, from birth through maturity through senility to death. The mythology must do so in accords with the social order of his group, the cosmos as understood by his group, and the monstrous mystery.

The second and third functions have been taken over in our world by secular orders. Our cosmology is in the hands of science. The first law of science is that the truth has not been found. The laws of science are working hypotheses. The scientist knows that at any moment facts may be found that make the present theory obsolete; this is happening now constantly. It's amusing. In a religious tradition, the older the doctrine, the truer it is held to be.

In the scientific tradition, on the other hand, a paper written ten years ago is already out of date. There's a continuous movement onward. So there's no law, no Rock of Ages on which you can rest. There's nothing of the kind. It's fluid. And we know that rocks are fluid, too, though it takes them a long time to flow. Nothing lasts. It all changes.

In the social realm, again, we don't regard our laws as being divinely ordained. You still hear it from time to time, as in the current abortion problem: God is talking to Senator So-and-so, or Reverend Thus-and-such. But it doesn't seem to make sense otherwise. God's law is no longer the justification for the nation's laws. Congress decides what a decent aim for the social order is and what the institution is that should bring that aim about. So I would say that in this secular society of ours, we can no longer really think of the cosmological and sociological functions as a problem.

However, in all of our lives, the first and fourth functions do still play a role, and it's these that I will be addressing. We are going to find ourselves far away from the old traditions. The first is the problem of awe. And, as I've said, you can have one of three attitudes toward it.

The fourth function now is the pedagogical. Basically, the function of the pedagogical order is to bring a child to maturity and then to help the aged become disengaged. Infancy is a period of obedience and dependency. The child is dependent on the parent, looks to the parent for advice and help and approval. There comes a time, however, when the individual has to become self-reliant and not dependent but himself the authority. Now here we come to a distinction between the traditional attitude toward this problem and the contemporary Western one. The traditional idea is that the adult who has moved from dependency to responsibility should take over without criticism the laws of the society and represent them. In our world, we ask for the development of the individual's critical faculties, that you should evaluate the social order and yourself, then contribute criticism. This doesn't mean blowing it up. Nor does it mean blowing it up before you've found out what it is. ….
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Hanauer has pulled back the veil that masks the true intentions of our modern myth-makers.

Let's take the functions one at a time with regard to the loaded phrase, "job creator."

1. Look at the size of their mansions, private planes, and yachts! See what wondrous things a Bill Gates or Warren Buffet can do! They each have more money than God! They're gods among mere mortals!

2. The Biggest Man up the Highest Stairs (and let's be clear about this: God's got the biggest balls of them all) by force and fiat, personally created the cosmos, making it -- and us -- His personal private property, to do with as only He can see fit.

3. Since "job creators" are nearer to god than we, the 99%, are; we should bow down, avert our gaze, and let them have their way with society and us. It is right and proper that the 1% should lord over the 99%. It's what God would do.

4. The best the 99% can hope for is to be cared for, cradle to grave, on the plantations of our rightful masters. To work on the plantation of a a Job Creator is the next best thing to Heaven on Earth. Going off plantation, being without a job, or complaining about conditions are sure signs of allegiance with the Devil.

+++++++++++++++

Paraphrasing Shakespeare, the power of myth is to bring into being the world stage on which we play our ever more notorious parts. The metaphors with which we construct the cosmos, and through which we
enliven it, are the most powerful forces in the human world. It's bad enough that the power of myth is being perverted to serve economic interests. It gets worse.

The awesome power of myth is also being weaponized, putting, for example, the "awe" in "Shock & Awe."

Don't believe that the power of myth is that powerful? Still think myths are antiquated fancies, the best thing to do with which is to bust them? Still want to use myth as an intellectual's grandiose synonym for lie?

Riddle me this: which is more powerful: myths, or nukes?

Answer: We were jacked to war in Iraq by the power of myths about nukes. Nukes are nigh on useless, but myths about them are more powerful than the weapons themselves.

Just ask Iran. Or Japan.

Re: Occupy the DOJ: Activists Protest Injustice of Criminal Justice System

knowbuddhau — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 11:45:34 -0000

Great comment by Stephanie Renee Colonge, Stop Mass Incarceration Network (4:44-5:31). "It's equal to the slave treatment that this United States capitalist government is built on." Too true.

Watch the PBS special, Slavery By Another Name, and you'll see for yourself.

http://video.pbs.org/video/...

Re: Murder Is Not an Anomaly in War

knowbuddhau — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 11:47:06 -0000

Thanks for the powerful, moving, haunting words. I rarely read such pitch-perfect exposition of the power of myth in politics. I bow in your virtual direction.

The trillion dollar question becomes: whence comes our belief in war as the best of all possible ways of being human in the world? From our mythology.

War is our metaphor for how the world is made to work in our interest. Most Westerners (I'm Zen Buddhist, myself) believe in a cosmos that is the first-hand creation, thus the private property, of a tyrant-engineer who *makes* the world happen according to his will by fiat and "kinetic activity."

You are spot on, Mr. Hedges, in emphasizing that war is murder, and yet what we do on a daily basis. War is what most Westerners believe god himself would do. Indefinite detention isn't abhorrent to this way of thinking, it's what god *himself*would do: send "evil-doers" to hell forever and ever amen.

Even in this dire assessment, however, hope springs eternal. We can examine the metaphors we use in the process of being human. We can learn how they shape the world stage on which we're playing our ever more notorious parts, every day. We can change the world we live in by changing the metaphors with which we enliven it.

Re: Fracking and Psychological Operations: Empire Comes Home

knowbuddhau — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 12:45:55 -0000

Hot damn! What a great article, I'm blown away. And much obliged.

Still, not entirely pleased with the subtitle, "Empire Comes Home." The article itself shows that PSYOP were developed and deployed right here at home long before they were used in, eg, Iraq.

Better: "PSYOP-R-US."

Re: Moyers & Campbell on Star Wars’ Mythological Influences

knowbuddhau — Sat, 03 Mar 2012 18:03:57 -0000

Well then, let me take this opportunity to bow in your virtual direction, too.

Re: Moyers & Campbell on Star Wars’ Mythological Influences

knowbuddhau — Sat, 03 Mar 2012 17:59:21 -0000

Oh my metaphor! Can't thank you enough for those interviews.

Mr. Moyers, it may interest you to know, I was at the centennial celebration of Campbell's birth, held in 2004 at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, CA. As fate would have it, it was held during the week of my 40th birthday. Not for my sake, of course; Campbell used to lecture there every year during the third week of March.

So I flew my borderline-agoraphobic self all the way there, all by myself, to debut in public my Zen knock-knock joke. It was very, very well received. (If I had time, I'd tell the story of how I presented it to my roshi, marking the occasion of my satori, who had no idea what a knock-knock joke was at the time.)

KNOCK-KNOCK
(who's there?)
BUDDHA!
(buddha who?)
KNOW, BUDDHA YOU!

Jean Erdman-Campbell graced us with her presence, as did the crouching tiger/hidden dragon-man himself, Chungliang Al-huang. (The Joseph Campbell Foundation Web site used to have a picture of me and JEC at the cocktail party held in the lodge.) John Cleese was scheduled to speak, but had a terrible cold.

On one of the last mornings, Al lead us in tai-chi on the bluff overlooking the Pacific. He stood with his back to water as he greeted us, saying, "Metaphor be with you!" "And also with you!" I replied. I was surprised that no one else joined me.

But that's not what I began to write about. I'd like to know your thoughts, Brother Bill, on the most god-awful fear I have regarding Campbell's comparative mythology.

As you no doubt know, Campbell lectured for decades for the State Department's Foreign Service Institute, beginning in 1956 (as listed in his life's chronology on the Pacifica Graduate Institute's Web site http://www.pacifica.edu/inn.... Given the horrendous weaponization of religions all around the world that seems to be a hallmark of US foreign policy, I fear that, just as APA/DOD systematically weaponized 'Psych!' into psyop, someone has systematically weaponized Campbell's comparative mythology into mythop.

The political power of the power of myth is this: to bring into being the world stage on which we all are playing our notorious parts. This can't have escaped the notice of our homegrown hegemons.

Such a project seems to me to be behind things like http://en.wikipedia.org/wik.... But I'm not a journalist, though, and I'm really at a loss as to how to test this god-awful hypothesis.

But you, Brother Bill, were there. I'm most curious about that infamous bunch known in intelligence circles as the neocon "crazies."

How did they get to be called that, and why? Long before he was put in charge of the 9/11 commission, I read things by Philip Zelikow, on the importance of the power of myth in politics, that made my blood run cold.

I think the crazies take the power of myth seriously, unlike almost everyone else today, who think that 'myth' is a fancy synonym for 'lie.' What an advantage the crazies have! People barely take psyop seriously; they can't even imagine mythop.

To impart a feel for the political power of myth, I like to ask: which is more powerful, myths or nukes? Obviously, we were jacked to war in Iraq by mythical nukes.

The nukes themselves are well nigh useless, but myths about nukes are even more powerful than the weapons themselves.

Brother Bill, I bow in your virtual direction.

Re: Moyers & Campbell on Star Wars’ Mythological Influences

knowbuddhau — Sat, 03 Mar 2012 17:33:07 -0000