Foreshadowing

I'm not sure when it became a common practice to announce spoilers to those who have not read a book, but this comment will contain spoilers to a Hemingway novel. I would assume that with the concept of foreshadowing a spoiler was lurking, but it never hurts to be explicit. Spoilers ahead.

I'm reading The Sun Also Rises for the 6th time. I love Hemingway in college, and I've reread TSAR because it's my favorite. I loved the partying, the respite in nature, and then the terrible tragedy, the horribleness of it all. 

Montoya the hotel owner loves the bull fighting like Jake does. They point out that there are women who sleep with the young bullfighters because they want to. Lady Brett Ashley enjoys life and sleeps around, though she's married, and about to remarry perhaps, engaged to marry. They call her Circe because she makes men into swine. Poor Robert Cohen is bewitched by her because she slept with him. He hangs around her like a puppy dog. 

Montoya asked Jake if he should pass on a message to the young promising bullfighter. Don't do it, don't let those American women who sleep with the bullfighters get into these guys are ruin them. 

That's foreshadowing. Of course Lady Ashley is going to sleep with him and ruin him. I know because I've read the book. Is it cherry picking to say that that scene with Montoya asking Jake advice is foreshadowing? I don't think so. Foreshadowing is when someone can grok the consequences of personality momentum and you can predict how things will turn out in a way. A Buddhist who meditates and reveres the dharma and sangha will see the future, not exactly, but enough in a way to see disasters coming. I would argue that the ten precepts are about avoiding those disasters. 

The ten precepts are very rough guides. You can find more explicit ones, more elaborate applications of them, but they're not from the Buddha and the Buddha said to get rid of the lessor rules. What that means is the difference between the Theravada tradition and Mahayana tradition in a way. 

And the very rough ethical guidelines are just a skeleton of the ethical considerations. The goal of the Buddhist is to move towards enlightenment, and there are very real and achievable markers along the way so that it's not quite the abstract negation of a concept it seems to be. When you don't follow the ten precepts, it hinders your path toward. Anticipating and foreshadowing helps us along the way, by following the really rough guidance by the elders in the ten precepts. 

KWL: Nonduality

"The fundamental dharma of the dharma is that there are no dharmas, yet that this dharma of no-dharma is in itself a dharma; and now that the no-dharma dharma has been transmitted, how can the dharma of the dharma be the dharma?"

That's got to be the logic smashing statement.

Picture of the book.

Hung Po or Huangbo Xiyun from the above quote. Amazing we even have a drawing of someone from 850.

KWL: Nonduality

Sounds like an ambitious project to synthesize east and west ideas about nonduality, reading David Loy's Nonduality (1984).

"In my opinion, the nihilism of present western culture means that we cannot afford to ignore what the greatest philosophical tradition of India and China may have to teach us." (p. xxix)

I ranted about the nihilism I was witnessing in America yesterday.

"Nagarjuna's argument is that attempting to live a pure life involves preoccupation with impurity."

I'd say this kind of thinking is used in psychoanalysis. When someone says, "I'm not a diddler," there somewhere lurking is a diddler. (My favorite episode of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, the Danny Devito character is running a child beauty pageant, and him being small, walking around saying, "I'm not a diddler," leads to the, "me think he doth protest too much" thinking.

When I think about spiritual, I think spiritual is everything, in the mundane, and therefore everything is spiritual, nothing is not spiritual, and therefore there is no such thing as profanity. For me though profane is a way of being that isn't empathetic and doesn't understand nonduality, how we're all connected and possibly only one thing in separate parts. 

The us/them or us/other duality is particularly upsetting when I begin to think about immigrant children separated from their family. I can't imagine any justification for that aside from: Let's make things really shitty so people don't come to this country. Forget that they're fleeing violence and economic injustice. Who doesn't want to improve their lives. 

Immigrants are the lifeblood of America. Supposedly California hasn't replaced it's population, it's on a downward trend. People in poverty have lots of children. Affluent countries don't have children and their population is going down. I'm not saying we need to keep our population steady. I think the environment could stand a little population decrease. People get anxious about the trends, while others on non-natalists, think it's unethical to have children given the crisis the world is in. There's a say, "the wrong kind of people are having children." I think that captures a rancid kind of thinking in America, that fancies itself as European in ancestry, instead of drawing from all over the world. A bit snooty if you ask me. People were fleeing there for another world, lest you forget that.

I just saw a video that the biggest factor of counties that sent people to the violent coup attempt on January 1st 2021, was that they came from counties where the white population was decreasing. And that there are about 10 million people in similar counties that aren't prepared to do something violent, but feel similarly.

quote

“Of supreme serenity, with extensive wisdom, A man of great wisdom, devoid of all greed; He is the Tathagata, he is the Sublime One, The person unrivalled, the one without equal, He is intrepid, proficient in all: The Blessed One is he, and I am his disciple.” ~ (Upali Sutta – Majjhima Nikaya) (Colombo Telegraph)

Vesak Day, the holiest of the high holidays for Buddhists was yesterday. I celebrated by taking refuge in the Knicks, the local basketball team. I'm only slightly ironic in my taking refuge in watching sports, it's a vice I want to grow out of. I hope someday. But not last night. 

My local Sri Lankan temple is celebrating this weekend, online, so I can catch their chanting in Sinhala and Pali, which won't do much for me. There have been other celebrations online.

I always remember Sangharakshita saying it should be a happy day, a day of joy.

Hopefully with the vaccinations, we can get back to meeting together. 

In other news, the White House celebrates Vesak with the second gentleman.

KWL book club

Nonduality: "In spirituality, nondualism, also called non-duality, means "not two" or "one undivided without a second".[1][2] Nondualism primarily refers to a mature state of consciousness, in which the dichotomy of I-other is "transcended", and awareness is described as "centerless" and "without dichotomies". Although this state of consciousness may seem to appear spontaneous,[note 1] it usually follows prolonged preparation through ascetic or meditative/contemplative practice, which may include ethical injunctions."

That gets me thinking about Monism, the idea that there is one thing, and everything is an aspect of that one thing.

That also gets me thinking about Heisenberg Principle, and the limits of what we can know and measure. That gets me thinking about Godel's Theorem. 

Loy first quotes Plotinus (204 – 270), a Roman philosopher who lived in Egypt. "His metaphysical writings have inspired centuries of Pagan, Jewish, Christian, Gnostic, and Islamic metaphysicians and mystics, including developing precepts that influence mainstream theological concepts within religions, such as his work on duality of the One in two metaphysical states." 

I'd like to add Buddhism, but I think he's a western example, and I think the Buddhists pondered over this before him.

Loy writes: "The nonduality of the seer and the seen: there is no philosophical or religious assertion more striking or counterintuitive..." (p. xv) Apparently William Blake noticed this, and others of note.

"The farthest we can remove ourselves is to "forget" this metaphysical understanding..." (p. xvi)

Western aren't nondoul. The eastern systems of Buddhism, Vedanta and Taoism allow it. In Buddhism, enlightenment is seeing nonduality.

"...the dualistic nature of conceptual knowledge means the nondual experience, if genuine, must transcend philosophy itself and all it's ontological claims." (p. xix)

I have had this experience. I experienced the wind, the tree blowing in the wind, the soil holding the tree, as one thing with me and everything else in the universe. I thought it was derealization, a kind of hallucination, and didn't talk about it until much later. Perhaps it was a moment of truly seeing reality for how it really is. In Zen this is called Kensho, I just learned reading this book.

There's a culture of not talking about deep experiences except to close spiritual friends. I believe in a more open source Buddhism, where you can talk about things in public. I like the funny story where the meditator thinks they're enlightened, and then say oh no, I can't be because I'm still thinking about me, enlightenment experience isn't like that supposedly. 

Deep meditative experiences have been similar to what my friend go in taking hallucinogens. He says he somehow can't meditate. I don't recommend hallucinogens because I haven't taken one and had a good experience or a spiritual experience, it was just drug using. I ended up writing on the dining table and using the word, "so-called" quite a lot. Then I kind of slept through a friend's visit, a missed opportunity I regret. I think in a spiritual retreat setting, it could be beneficial if you have the disposable income for some. People do all kinds of things. I also felt the great wave of love from the Buddha once when on a day retreat, it was really weird. My friend who did hallucinogens saw a green cloud of love. He has also made connections that I have made in therapy. 

There's no real telling what's going to happen to you when you meditate. Some get wild experience, and some get nothing. Please don't imagine nothing is happening if you put in the work. Even if you're just a little bit more centered, it's worth it, in my opinion, because those kinds of things are so hard to come by. I know people who refuse to meditate, and there are people who have bad experiences, and breaks with reality, negative mental events, and for that perhaps you need to work it through with a mental health professional. You are the owner of your spiritual life and you also know what is going on so you need to be the one who protects yourself. The people who have challenging mental events need a lot of support and they need to communicate with others. There are also people who just don't want to have to meditate at work, and don't join in the group meditation at work and I think that is OK.

Joanna Macy talks about systems theory, that even the smallest person can influence the systems. That you can influence the world, there is no excuse for political apathy perhaps, to say, "who am I, I am just a small person." 

I would also wonder how you would know that an intervention would be good, but we think of heroes like MLK or Harriet Tubman or Frederick Douglass just telling his story or maybe even violent John Brown, unwilling to allow the immorality of slavery to continue, in terms of working on racial justice, and their influences were quite big. 

Today we think about Greta Thunberg and her pointing out how inept our current thinking is, and that her autism has given her a kind of clarity about the dangers we are facing by our actions towards the environment. Meanwhile China tries to fat shame her (Independent)

It's hard not to see most politicians as a bunch of compromisers or if they're a little bit more clear like Obama, then the opposition sets up to just obstruct them, constantly negatively spin everything against them. The promise of Obama's campaign and the reality of his presidency are at stark contrast. He's the only president I thought to read his memoir because he wasn't a complete weasel. 

Clinton was more right wing than Nixon, and fell into the mythology of Kennedy, and didn't notice we don't allow presidents to get away with promiscuity any more. The right will do anything now, they are ruthless to the point of nihilism, cultism and out and out lying because nobody is paying attention. 

All politicians fib and slant the truth, but lying as a strategy to obstruct, distract and confuse the populace feels like the legacy of Trump that is being carried forward today by disgusting politicians: Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz, Ted Cruz--I almost don't want them getting attention because they seem to thrive off the lurid exposure of their horrors.  Green says Jews shoot lasers from orbit. Gaetz has copied Trumps egregious sexual misconduct and participation in sexual slavery, and Ted Cruz flew off on vacation when his state was in crisis, among other things like regurgitating Russian political talking points as if he's part of Russia, not representing America. It's hard to imagine with the hysteria of anti-communism history in America, how he can be such a shill for Russia. Nobody has any memory, nobody is paying attention, that's how they get away with this. 

At least to me. 73 million Americans did not find the disgust I did when they voted for Trump in 2020, who argued with Epstein about who raped the 16 year old girl tied up in the bedroom, first (Mother Jones). 

They are more disgusted by the liberal imagination then all the people that died from Covid necessarily (New Zealand had 35 deaths), and will do anything it seems to stymie it, not it get a foothold, even if on the raw category of just saving lives, it would be more utilitarian. There are already enough people, they would cynically point out, too many liberals and voting democrats. In all these big systems it's hard to see what I could do beyond the rather impotent act of voting and paying attention, but actually voting and paying attention is quite a big political act in this day and age. (Here is a list of elections that turned on one vote.)

There's a subreddit called r/againstpolarization. I got into what I thought was a debate about being against polarization that was too polarizing. I've also been permanently banned from r/socialism because I used the ironic "commie", and been muted from complaining to the mods for a day and then a month. It's really hard to discuss things even online anonymously.

What does this all have with nonduality? I'd say a fundamental feeling of lack of connection to the world is the nihilism behind all these shenanigans. They imagine they can do this harm and not be affected by it. Like they all won't have deathbed confessions like Lee Atwater, or the recent ones of a police officer who admitted to being involved in killing MLK and Malcolm X (Gothamist).

KWL Book club on going for refuge blog

I just got David Loy's Nonduality from the library.

KWL is a way of attacking books. What do I already know? What do I want to learn? What did I learn?

What do I already know?

I've read David Loy's book Money, Sex, War, Karma: Notes for a Buddhist Revolution from 2008. He pointed out that the corporate system in the USA is geared towards greed. When a business has a question, the usual question is what will make more profits? So dump pollutants into the river? Yes, gives the shareholders more money than treating it. Loy favors the Zen sect, been authorized to teach since 1988. his teachers were Yamada Koun and Robert Aitken.

Wikipedia says about the book: "Nonduality focuses on the nonduality of subject and object in Buddhism, Vedanta, and Taoism, with reference to several Western thinkers including Wittgenstein and Heidegger. The main argument is that these three Asian systems may be different attempts to describe the same (or very similar) experience. The categories of Buddhism (no self, impermanence, causality, eightfold path) and Advaita Vedanta (all-Self, time and causality as maya, no path) are "mirror images" of each other. Ultimately it becomes difficult to distinguish a formless Being (Brahman) from a formless nonbeing (shunyata). Buddhism can be understood as a more phenomenological description of nonduality, while Vedanta is a more metaphysical account."

What want to learn: I wish to become more adept with the term "nonduality" and be able to use it.

Learned: This is his reworking of his dissertation at National University at Singapore 1984. More to follow.

Also I rely in reader response to express my learning experience. The following blog entries entitled KWL will explore my responses to the book, based on what I know, what I want to learn and what I have learned. I always loved the assignment of writing a journal and responding to a text. There was no need to grade just prove you're moving yourself through the material. Grades are a way of sorting out the quality of ideas, arguments and presentations, so we can keep lesser people out of say medical school or law school. We don't want people who don't deserve to be there, be there. How they come up with this judgments is perhaps based on knowledge, or maybe it's just sorting hat magic.

 

Asceticism, renunciation and strictness

When you come at things from not having them, it's easy to be more mindful for a little while.

I know how easy it is to be vegetarian because I've been vegan for long periods of time.

I know what hunger is because I have fasted for more than a day. I honestly never really faced hunger, even though I have food insecurity. 

I know how to free form meditation because I kept to the structured meditation I was taught for 20 years. I am grateful for the efforts of others to make the Dharma available.

I know what tiredness in meditation is because I stayed up all night meditating. Restful sleep is such a comfort.

I know what the pull of the internet is because I have not used the internet for 24 hours. Books are the original amazing technology.

I know what it is to apply your mind to learning because I have a home full of books I need to get rid of. Public libraries are glorious!

I don't need to take hallucinogens because I've gotten everything everyone brags about use through intense meditation retreats.

I know the convenience of a toilet because I've lived without for weeks. 

I have a feeling I could do without because of these experiences. Novel experiences are scary, not having a partner for the first time in almost 40 years is scary because it's new. Maybe I don't want a romantic partner, I could live more simply without one. It's just an urge to couple. 

I'm not saying cut everything out, willy nilly, that's just not possible. But these challenges make you see how your mind operates and you can be creative instead of reactive. There's a silver lining in most situations. My goal is to live with stillness, simplicity and contentment.

Kalamas Sutra

"Don’t go by reports, by legends, by traditions, by scripture, by logical conjecture, by inference, by analogies, by agreement through pondering views, by probability, or by the thought, “This contemplative is our teacher.” When you know for yourselves that, “These qualities are skillful; these qualities are blameless; these qualities are praised by the observant; these qualities, when adopted & carried out, lead to welfare & to happiness." (Kalamas Sutra)

If the Buddha doesn't "exist" anymore, what am I taking refuge in?

If you compare Buddha to God, then he looks human and mortal. Though how you get to God existing more than the Buddha, I don't know. Nothing is eternal. In the Buddha's cosmology he can teach the gods to work towards waking up.

If you compare Buddha to humans, he's awesome. He did something first, he figured out something amazing. Even if that thing is just you becoming more mindful and moving to deepen that, his example, the teachings and the community of elders helps you on that path

Taking refuge in the Buddha, Dharma and Sangha, you bow to the example of enlightenment, the ideas that get there, the ways of being, and the community that supports that orientation. That is the act of being a Buddhist. No god is going to strike you down if you don't, or do for that matter. It's just a matter of mental commitment.

It means I won't try to use myself as the center of everything. It means I will seek to do things on the path that the Buddha suggested will be beneficial. It means I can follow the teachings to the best of my understanding of them. I can follow the 10 precepts. I can avoid intoxicants, which given my history, isn't easy. It means I shall try to avoid harming others. It means I won't steal from anyone, and I will try to practice open handed generosity. It means I will try to live with stillness, simplicity and contentment. I will strive for kind thoughts and ways of being.

If you need to take refuge in the god of your imaganings, that's OK. Just know the mental choices you make will have consequences, and anything off the path, will be off the path laid down by the Buddha, and where that leads. If you don't think it's the best path, by all means seek another one. There is no extra source out there to punish you or bully you into their path, it's just you and your life.

The imaginings of Abrahamic religions can be beautiful and lead to great things too. Even though in the west there's a lot of peer pressure and hype to believe in Christianity, that doesn't mean you don't have a choice. You can choose the best path for you. If you need some made up enforcer to a moral order or else you are a nihilist, then maybe you need that extra umph, if you can believe in it. I can't so the Buddhist path works for me. I can also combine that with what makes sense for me.

Syncretism allows me to use all the modern ideas around me in service of the goals of Buddhism: vegetarianism, environmentalism, liberalism--these all help me to be kinder towards others. You can focus on conservatism or whatever makes sense for you in your environment. I can study the beautiful in art as a guide to striving for the ideals if I want. I know some communities push to avoid having fun with art, but I see ecstatic dancing joyful and connects me to what is great. Great literature calls me to the spiritual life. Great music shows me there is something transcendental. Being in nature helps me to understand the many webs of consequences, to see out the beautiful. For me the path is beautiful.

Someone pointed out that the Buddha taught gods the way. So maybe that is more awesome than being a god, if gods don't know the path.

And if you need something extra, read the post on the Dharmakaya.

There is a sutta that is very insistent that the Buddha doesn't not exist. It feels weirdly insistent, and feels like it drifts into perfection of wisdom style text. It makes me wonder if there's a sort of platonic element, maybe the forms that don't change partake in reality. Maybe the Buddha still exists in the Dharmakaya. In the end, I think it's above my pay grade.

Poem

How to drink water when there is wine by Barbara Kingsolver

How to stay at this desk when the sun  

is barefooting cartwheels over the grass —

How to step carefully on the path that begs  

for the fleet unfettered gait of a deer —

How to go home again when the wood thrush  

is promising the drunk liquid bliss of dusk —

How to resist the kiss, the body forbidden  

that plucks the long vibrating string of want —

How to drink water when there is wine —

Once I knew all these brick-shaped things, and how  

they protract the striving and virtuous life.

Now I have lived long and I know better.

 

 

Dhammapada quote

 

They quote

 

Book by Margret Grebowicz

 

Margret Grebowicz has a 96 page exploration of the many meanings of mountaineering. Just as you can be an internal adventurer with meditation, you can be an external adventurer and climb mountains. There can be evocation of purity in both. Fascinating little book.

I've been fascinated by mountain climbing, but I missed the wall climbing phase at gyms, and have a middle aged body now that would be lucky to summit Marcy in the Adirondacks again. I've been to the snow line of Cotopaxi in Ecuador. The air was really thin and it took me a long time to get there. I've read Into Thin Air and the Russian guy's book about the same climb, and a book about discovering a body on the mountain. There's something of an adventure to these projects that I like. 

Grebowicz is interesting. PhD in philosophy and a jazz singer! Listen to her CD. She was born in Poland and sings in Portuguese. 

Impermanence

I've been going to the park with my daughter and I see people aging before my very eyes. I guess I didn't notice it until I started feeling old. 

I don't really look in the mirror much any more, but I do occasionally and I see photos of myself. Turns out I've aged too.

My daughter asked where the ice cream truck went. I told her impermanence. At 5 she's not really into my cryptic explanations. 

It's a question to me whether I'm adopting a paradigm because I'm suggestable, or whether the paradigm really is true. It really feels true, so I guess it's a development of Śraddhā. 

Dante’s old man of Crete

Dante writes about the old man of Crete. He starts out in gold at the top of his head. It changes to silver, brass going down. Lower trunk of brass, legs of iron and a right foot of clay.

Maybe it’s a description of mappo. In Christianity is about the degeneration as Christianity gets older and older.

My therapist loved the metaphor of learning of people’s clay feet. When I read about Jung’s affair with his patient, my therapist pointed out that the theme of finding clay feet seems important to me. His clay feet was that he said he was going in for surgery, not to worry and he died. That was years ago. Feels fresh right at this moment. I can’t tell him about my finding. 

Links

INFERNO XIV – THE OLD MAN OF CRETE

When the sangha has your back

Dante Alighieri

 

The above is from my translation by Nichols. 

I've been reading The Divine Comedy through Buddhist eyes and ethics. They way he tells the story, the language, the translation, the word images he creates. I kind off feel like he's punishing people that have done him wrong. I really hope to not do that. Even my ex-wives who have pained me greatly, I can't be angry at them. Friends have greatly disappointed me, but I tend to take the blame except when they claim not to have choices. But there is one person he liked who he finds in hell, a mentor, who was there for sodomy. I can't imagine God cares where you put or get your excitement (between consenting adults). Seems kind of petty. I get it that they want to grow the religion by having lots of children. 

I think Dante was like me, idealistic and he didn't worry about wrong perceptions of himself--he perhaps could have been more political or Machiavellian regarding not getting exiled from Florence. Or maybe it was bound to happen. One of the things I've become interested in while reading The Divine Comedy is why and how he was exiled. Machiavelli was also exiled 200 years later for all his realpolitik. His birthday is May 3rd. 

Lust: I'm in this circle of hell. I have not lived with simplicity, stillness and contentment enough. I think of all the sexual misconduct in the Buddhist community coming out of the 60's and the ripples that go on after that. Easily the clay feet exposer extraordinaire. I see Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump arguing about who raped the 16 year old tied up in the other room first. I'm not sure why people don't talk about that happening more. Read that in an article by a guy who called everyone in Epstein's book of phone numbers.

"Dante sees Semiramis, Dido, Cleopatra, Helen of Troy, Paris, Achilles, Tristan" (Wikipedia). I guess you could add Leander of Hero and Leander. Leander tries to swim Hellespont to be with Hero and drowns. My mistakes took up a lot of time in my life, but I wish I could think less about that stuff. I suppose like all intrusive thoughts, the trick is to just not pick them up and turn them over in your mind.  

Gluttony: I can't help but see this connected to greed. The gluttony and greed of humans is destroying the earth, allows us to not focus on equal distribution of resources leading to starvation, sickness and harm to our fellow human beings. There's a kind of fundamental opposite of asceticism that misses the middle way. "Dorothy L. Sayers writes that "the surrender to sin which began with mutual indulgence leads by an imperceptible degradation to solitary self-indulgence"."

Greed: The USA military creates a lot of environmental harm, wastes money, and profits the rich. The image of the man on a golf course sending youth off to die in wars comes to my mind. I see corporations dumping toxic waste into rivers so they can give more money to shareholders. I see the rich fleeing India during a pandemic they could stay and fight it with their resources. 

You can read some more about the rich in this subreddit post. I read that the Pope is trying to decrease "envelope culture." 

I think about Peter Singer donating a fifth of his wealth to poverty issues in Africa. That is the opposite. David Loy is a really good writer who articulates this topic. 

Wrath: Included in this one is depression, anger at the self. The image of mud blocking the mouth muting the cries. Not sure if I can get rid of that image. 

Walking to the library I was crossing the street and a car almost his me doing an illegal u-turn. The person yelled out, "I told you so, asshole." I didn't really hear him before, so it's hard to understand that comment, but it seems like he anticipated my move, but his being illegal, I didn't anticipate his--but he did and told me so. The incoherence of wrath can be funny. 

Dante talks about Medusa, the angry woman. Uma Thurman plays it well both in Percy Jackson and Nymphomaniac. The idea that you can't look at women's rage in Medusa is perhaps a male defense. We need to look at women's anger in our society, listen to it. I like Greta Thunberg's rage, "How dare you!"

Heresy: Buddhism isn't as obsessed with theology, unless you're reading r/Buddhism on Reddit. For me it's more about what you do, and focusing on your spiritual life and what you do. 

Violence: Dante categorizes sin into three categories: incontinence, violence and fraud. Obviously violence is terrible and life stealing. Not harming anyone, including animals is pretty good, but not easy. There is emotional violence, sexual violence, and our favorite form of violence, movie violence. 

I can still see the image of Frederick Douglass standing on the bank of a river, after seeing another head shot off by a frustrated slave owner, sinking into the river. 

Once again I thought Dante was good on violence towards the self--suicide, these section have a real power as well.

Fraud: Fraud steals your power through stealing the truth, by presenting oneself as something that one is not. 

Treachery: I know we're not supposed to be too political as a Buddhist. But I can't stop thinking about Russia helping Trump get elected and his thinking not doing anything to prevent deaths from Covid as a political strategy to win an election is quite treacherous. In the end political ideas are projections of psychology and personality, and you can't legislate the mind easily yet, but I think the raping of America by Trump was pure treachery (betrayal of trust; deceptive action or nature.). His complicity with the coup attempt also. Around him were gross flatterers. 

Going into government to prove it doesn't work and to wreck it up is the ultimate in unpatriotic activity for an American. Like MTV doesn't play music any more and Christians aren't really into helping others, Republicans lost their way. Any republican with integrity quite the party like George Will. Those who went along for the ride are guilty of treachery.

There's a certain amount of treachery in sexual misconduct, greed, wars and fraud.

In the end, I don't like boxing people up and judging them. The most evil person in my lifetime, Donald Trump is more human than inhuman, more like me than I care to admit. 

They say, hate the sin, but love the sinner. I wish I could do that with myself. Turns out what you do is who you are. Our lives are so short, every single thing we do matters. Our lives are so long, it's hard not to lose the intensity and preciousness of it all. The unbearable lightness of being. Perhaps it's just fluctuations in my energy.

Looking forward to Purgatorio next.