Extremism and Fundamentalism

Ah... quoted by the beautiful Jay Smooth, or "Illdoc" (Ill Doctrine), an incredibly sexy, progressive, mix-race African American New York-based hip hop radio host and political commentator...

My deepest condolences to those of us who victimise with or are victimised by false extremisms, which co-opt our spirit in service of the closed, the dualistic and the ethnocentric over and above the porous, the integrative and the trans-communal.

What kind of extremism is needed in today's day and age?
What kind of extremists will we be?




Slavoj Zizek's take on fundamentalism

"...are the terrorist fundamentalists, be they Christian or Muslim, really fundamentalists in the authentic sense of the term? Do they really believe? What they lack is a feature that is easy to discern in all authentic fundamentalists, from Tibetan Buddhists to the Amish in the U.S.: the absence of resentment and envy, the deep indifference towards the non-believers' way of life. If today's so-called fundamentalists really believe they have found their way to truth, why should they feel threatened by non-believers, why should they envy them? When a Buddhist encounters a Western hedonist, he hardly condemns him. He just benevolently notes that the hedonist's search for happiness is self-defeating. In contrast to true fundamentalists, the terrorist pseudo-fundamentalists are deeply bothered, intrigued, fascinated by the sinful life of non-believers. One can feel that, in fighting the sinful Other, they are fighting their own temptation. These so-called Christian or Muslim fundamentalists are a disgrace to true fundamentalism."

- Slavoj Zizek from "Violence"

The Cleaning of Slates...

"Our body is the Bodhi tree,
Our mind is a bright mirror with stand,
Diligently we wipe them all the time,
And let no dust alight."
- Shin Shau

"There is no Bodhi Tree
Nor stand of a mirror bright,
Since all is Voidness,
Where can dust alight?"
- Hui Neng (6th Patriarch of Ch'an/Zen)


It is Hui Neng who becomes 6th Patriarch of Ch'an, Hui Neng whose explosive realisation cuts through Shin Shau's dualism. Yet Hui Neng's proposition (on Voidness) exists because of the form Shin Shau's proposition took...

Hui Neng's verse alone, un-juxtaposed upon the former verse which it is negating, is itself meaningless... Thesis, Antithesis, and the retrospective Synthesis of seeing both verses together... To see even the non-duality of Hui Neng and Shin Shau.

There remains:
The Dharma that is no-Dharma...
The realisation that is no-realisation...
No creed, nor point, nor path...
Nor any sentient beings to save

This elucidates precisely that which cannot be understood.
Further commentary is pointless.

Unimaginable

I have not watched any of the videos of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, and have even avoided looking at most photos, except the ones that happen to accompany the occasional news article that I read. Most of the news I have gotten about what happened has come from public radio. I prefer to hear description rather than see footage, prefer to receive analysis rather than breathless commentary.

A friend of mine has called some of the videos taken of the events "disaster porn". It seems this term was circulating at least since the early 2000s, and probably well before.

Like "traditional porn", "disaster porn" makes events in which huge amounts of human life and effort is lost into a just another visual confection in our oversaturated visual environment, and not a particularly layered one, at that. It performs the many functions of porn: commodification, desensitization, rendering virtual rather than real, titillation, fascination. Rather than allowing for reflection and genuine emotion, disaster porn, with its breathlessness and repetitiveness, promotes hysteria and numbness.

I invite anybody who has the experience of watching pornography and having sex to reflect on the difference between the two. Then think - how has pornography affected your sex life? Now ask - how does disaster porn affect the way societies prepare for and react to natural and human disasters?

creating change by transcending paradigms

beautiful passages from Donella Meadows, "Thinking in Systems" (2008).


There is yet one leverage point that is even higher than changing a paradigm. That is to keep oneself unattached in the arena of paradigms, to stay flexible, to realize that no paradigm is "true," that every one, including the one that sweetly shapes your own worldview, is a tremendously limited understanding of an immense and amazing universe that is far beyond human comprehension. It is to "get" at a gut level the paradigm that there are paradigms, and to see that that itself is a paradigm, and to regard that whole realization as devastatingly funny. It is to let go into not-knowing, into what Buddhists call enlightenment.

People who cling to paradigms (which means just about all of us) take one look at the spacious possibility that everything they think is guaranteed to be nonsense and pedal rapidly in the opposite direction. [...] But, in fact, everyone who has managed to entertain that idea, for a moment or for a lifetime, has found it to be the basis for radical empowerment. [...] It is in this space of mastery over paradigms that people throw off addictions, live in constant joy, bring down empires, get locked up or burned at the stake or crucified or shot, and have impacts that last for millennia.

...

The higher the leverage point, the more the system will resist changing it—that's why societies often rub out truly enlightened beings. [...] In the end, it seems that mastery [of creating systemic change] has less to do with pushing leverage points than it does with strategically, profoundly, madly, letting go and dancing with the system.

Little poems

A fiery seed in a bursting pod's spray.
One brilliant silver fish in a flashing crowd,
Or a lonely, silent stranger, wanting to be held.