Musings on the Path

In the last election, the winner in most races was fear, aggression, and greed.  Those who appealed to the hopes of the voters usually lost.  This dynamic is happening again this election cycle.  In the Republican primaries, hope was quickly eliminated.  Bernie Sanders tried but sometimes slid into fear et al.  Hillary tries both.  And I am losing hope sometimes in hope.  I know I will vote against fear, aggression, and greed in the fall.  I just wish I had more hope to vote for.

He has shown you what is good. … To act justly and to love mercy

Mercy is in many ways the opposite of greed. Greed is taking all we can get, by law, by force, by whatever means. Mercy is leaving something, maybe everything, for others.

A judge knows all the punishments (s)he can give to a convicted person. Conversely, (s)he knows all the rights (s)he can take away: life, liberty, money, possessions. A judge who shows mercy leaves some or all of that to the convicted.

A land owner may leave some of the harvest for birds, animals, human gleaners. (S)he does not take all (s)he can.

An ungreedy (merciful) person making a business deal can leave something on the table.

Mercy builds a more robust community. People don’t have to beggar their neighbor in their everyday dealings. That spreads the resources around for when there is a crisis. Bitter, impoverished people are unable to help each other.

It would be good if we had mindful, compassionate soldiers.  It is vital that we have compassionate, mindful public safety officers, AKA police officers.  Part of why our society is coming apart is that in too many places, the police act more as an occupying army enforcing the privilege of the rich.  Read A Buddhist cop’s approach to justice for one police officer’s experience on the beat and in social justice work.  It’s good.

Everything that ascends must converge.
— Teilhard de Chardin

The spiritual quest has been compared to climbing a mountain. Some question whether we are all climbing the same mountain. I don’t think this can be proven or disproven, but I find the metaphor useful and encouraging. When I read the mystics, regardless of tradition, I find most of them sound remarkably similar underneath the metaphors.

We all start down in the flatlands and travel up into the foothills. What we see depends largely on where we started. But as de Chardin points out in the quote above, as we ascend we come closer together and the landscape looks more the same than where we individually started from.

Meister Eckhart, Richard Rohr, and other Christian mystics sound more like some of the Buddhist and Hindu writers, both ancient and modern, than anything coming out of the Christian churches. Now there are occasional exceptions, Pope Francis sounds more like his namesake saint than his predecessor pope.

Recently I started re-reading “The Enlightened Mind”, an anthology of sacred prose, edited by Stephen Mitchell. It is arranged chronologically, starting with the Upanishads (8th-5th century BCE, Hindu) and the Hebrew Scriptures (7th-3rd century BCE). I may not be there yet, but the landscape they are describing is visible from where I am.

However, some of the Chinese writers I don’t understand at all. What they describe is too alien. They are standing on a mountain either too far away or too high. I don’t recognize what they see.