My Dharma practice has some subtle effects. After five years of consistent daily practice, I am starting to see some true changes in my relationship to life. A few days ago, I realized that I despise the "Coexist" bumper sticker that seems to be de riguer for proponents of the New Age, the terminally Politically Correct, and TwentySomething drivers of hybrid vehicles. You know the bumper sticker I mean. The word "Coexist" is spelled out by a series of symbols, including the Muslim crescent, the Christian cross, and the Jewish hexagonal star against a blue, star-speckled background.
I used to wonder where people buy them, but seeing one the other day, I suddenly wondered why people them. After all, "Coexistence" really isn't that advanced an idea. Human beings coexisted with Woolly Mammoths and Sabre Toothed Tigers for about 90,000 years before climate change and overhunting eliminated two of the three aforementioned species. Homo Sapiens coexisted with Homo Neanderthalis for most of that same era, and the only H. Neanderthalis of our present-day acquaintance now work for GEICO, along with a talking gecko who is more technologically advanced than the Neanderthals---Martin the Gecko learned how to drive, owns a cellphone, and dates hot blondes (don't tell me he isn't really Stanley!)
"Coexistence" implies a very un-Bodhisattva-like attitude of "You go your way and I'll go mine," in which the whole world gets turned into a gated community and the United Nations becomes a supra-Condo Board that settles disputes by fiat without ever resolving any underlying problems. Sure, I can "coexist" with people of different creeds and skin tones, but is that really what we need to do on this planet in the Twenty First Century?
It seems to me that "coexistence" has a strong element of disinterest in it (at best) and disdain in it (at worst), that allows us to focus on our differences, ignore our similarities, and condition our sharing of this planet's resources on points of thought that are fundamentally emotive. It's the ultimate in primitive "Us and Them" thinking. I can argue that White South Africans and Black South Africans "coexisted" peacefully, just as White Southern Americans and Black Southern Americans did for centuries, albeit under a pathological social system.
The same can be said of the Germans and the Jews in the prewar years of the Nuremburg Laws. I have to wonder: Had Hitler been satisfied with German/Jewish "coexistence, " had he gone no further, had he not predicated his Nazi Empire on the extermination of Jews everywhere, had he not started a world war, would Germany's Jews still be living under a cloud of repression today? It's likely.
I used to wonder where people buy them, but seeing one the other day, I suddenly wondered why people them. After all, "Coexistence" really isn't that advanced an idea. Human beings coexisted with Woolly Mammoths and Sabre Toothed Tigers for about 90,000 years before climate change and overhunting eliminated two of the three aforementioned species. Homo Sapiens coexisted with Homo Neanderthalis for most of that same era, and the only H. Neanderthalis of our present-day acquaintance now work for GEICO, along with a talking gecko who is more technologically advanced than the Neanderthals---Martin the Gecko learned how to drive, owns a cellphone, and dates hot blondes (don't tell me he isn't really Stanley!)
"Coexistence" implies a very un-Bodhisattva-like attitude of "You go your way and I'll go mine," in which the whole world gets turned into a gated community and the United Nations becomes a supra-Condo Board that settles disputes by fiat without ever resolving any underlying problems. Sure, I can "coexist" with people of different creeds and skin tones, but is that really what we need to do on this planet in the Twenty First Century?
It seems to me that "coexistence" has a strong element of disinterest in it (at best) and disdain in it (at worst), that allows us to focus on our differences, ignore our similarities, and condition our sharing of this planet's resources on points of thought that are fundamentally emotive. It's the ultimate in primitive "Us and Them" thinking. I can argue that White South Africans and Black South Africans "coexisted" peacefully, just as White Southern Americans and Black Southern Americans did for centuries, albeit under a pathological social system.
The same can be said of the Germans and the Jews in the prewar years of the Nuremburg Laws. I have to wonder: Had Hitler been satisfied with German/Jewish "coexistence, " had he gone no further, had he not predicated his Nazi Empire on the extermination of Jews everywhere, had he not started a world war, would Germany's Jews still be living under a cloud of repression today? It's likely.
Bare naked "Coexistence" has been the rule of Shari'a Law for centuries, where Christians, Jews, Zoarastrians and Buddhists were and are subjected to discriminatory taxes and restricted rights by dint of their socially subsidiary status. Likewise, under the Papal Bull Cum Nimis Absurdum of the Sixteenth Century, Jewish residence in Catholic Europe was proscibed to ghettoes.
The call for "Coexistence" is a call to recognize the insanely obvious fact that we all live on this planet.
Yes, there are people out there who haven't grasped the obvious yet. The Facebooker who rants against "That guy in the White House who mocks my Cristian (sic) beliefs" and wants to "scrap that piece of crap in New York Harbor" is giving vent to a worldview based on fear and scarcity, and has a lesson to learn from the blue bumper sticker, but at least his explosions are merely verbal. The Palestinian Authority spokesman who called on Israel not to retaliate against Hamas rocket attacks because "the violence will only lead to more violence and there will be no gain in the end" needs to listen to his own advice. "Coexistence" under such circumstances would be a healthy first step.
But only a first step. It will take more to make this planet a truly livable community. We've done well at technologizing ourselves, to the point that we've become enslaved to our iPods, and iPads, and cellphones, and email. We've done very well at ordering the physical world into neatly surveyed lots with nicely squared-off corners. We call this "controlling our environment." All the while, the environment is a roiling unmanageable seeming chaos of tornadoes and floods and wildfires and hurricanes and tsunamis and avalanches and things that grow here when we want them to grow there, a fecund, constantly shifting setting which we fear and try to tame. The more taming we do, the more the unforeseen consequences mock us. And that's all right.
I have no desire to live in a sterile, compartmentalized world. Look at a world map and take note of the profusion of proper geometric shapes and lines that make up our political world (even within the United States). Inorganic, our politics avails us nothing in understanding: "I dare you to cross over this line!"
I prefer my lines squiggly, the endless, organic lines of rivers and valleys and footpaths beyond the Lost Horizon. In a world of endless squiggly lines, I can visit with the angry Facebooker or the suicide bomber perhaps to understand what motivates him. Because the lines are squiggly, because they do not imply fixedness, there is the further implication that neither he nor I are fixed, and that the reciprocal application of the Precepts is part and parcel of who we are. "Who we are" in the unfixed universe is a concept question with a singular answer:
I can't "coexist" in the unfixed universe.
I can't "coexist" in the unfixed universe.
In order to live in the unfixed universe, I have to live and love compassionately. Doing so is the only means for my own survival. It is not enough to acknowledge "those people over there" because "those people over there" are fundamentally identical to "these people over here." Except for some minor details, I can't even challenge myself to find differences between us, because there aren't any. I can learn French. I can drink Tibetan butter tea, and I can give rise to children whose mother may look very different from me, but in whose blood the hemoglobin carries oxygen and whose DNA is made up of the same essential proteins as mine. Somewhere, ten thousand generations ago, she and I share a parent.
This is a radical step beyond, but one which I have to take, not if I want to understand life, but because I must. I owe it to myself. I am the endless squiggly line.
Somewhere in the picture below there's a navy blue dot among the 10,000 pictured. Consider this: That single navy blue dot represents all the diversity in the human genome that gives rise to our individual uniqueness.
No comments:
Post a Comment