"But when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth..."


It is not easy for us to reach the ancient Eastern ways of thought, the non-dualistic thought, the intuitive earth-based logic that Western Rationalist thought has difficulty with.

In the Western world, every morning we wake and judge ourselves, not least as based upon our economic well-being and standing.

(Has the East itself has embraced the power and economic might, the ways of the modern Western Capitalism, perhaps by doing so, provoking an inevitable turn in the Western mind to see the err of its own ways...)


After the work week's efforts, its implicit terms, the hack writer wakes from his other life of the worker bee, and finding him not knowing what to think.  He has the gut sense of Buddha's truths, but has no immediate model by which to incorporate them, and if he did, what would he then do for a living and a future....  He cannot know or understand any of this.  How could he?


To embrace non-dualistic thinking would be then to see, the thingness of things, that the events that have brought you to where you are are not always to be labelled as mistakes, other such things as that.  Things are as they are merely because that's how they turned out.  And rather for searching, rationally, logically, analytically for the cause, for the mistakes that have led to a supposedly unhappy condition, turn the whole thing around, and think in a different way.  Meditate, compassionately.


So it is that Westerners have a hard time with Christian thought.  They can only find the term Socialism to describe Christian views and values.  No wonder, the Conservatives at EWTN, who are friendly with free-market capitalism,  do not like Pope Francis's general attitude, widely embracing, of the poor, of the divorced, of the LGTBQ community...


Mara, ruler of the world of Desire, appears to Siddhartha, to challenge him just before his enlightenment.  What right have you to claim freedom from my world of desire and temptation?  Who is your witness, your confirming partner in all this?

Facing all of Mara's powers, the Prince puts his hand down to touch the ground, the Earth has Buddha's witness, to say, I have a right to be here, at which point Mara with all his powers, vanquished, disappears.

The Sermon on the Mount...  the poor, the sick, the mournful, the poor of spirit, they have a right to be here.  The poor have a right to live.  The Western interpretation of the best of Eastern philosophy...

(The West has yet to live up to it.)



And the more I look at it, the more it is the same.  Blessed are the poor and meek and the ones who do not claim anything but the ground they stand on, the right to exist.  For the world to be as it is, as it was created to be, as it must be, the human being has this right to a life, a noble way, replete with the act of spirituality, enlightenment, love, nirvana, and so forth.

The Buddha touches the ground with his finger, and the earth reverberates.  He becomes one with all existence.


After his week of struggling, largely in vain, but with at least a small paycheck to show for it, with his chest cold exacerbated once again, taking his depression and sense of worthlessness and uselessness on a daily basis, not having to have seemed to find his way in the flow of life of the city, after a day of tiredness, the man rose early again, as he had a few days before.  For the mere fact that he was awake, as much as anything else.  His glasses again had light smears of Vapor Rub on them, and he took a pill for chest congestion, finished the pot of green tea left out, and brewed a fresh one.

He had dreams from deep naps the day before, and now it was light out, early, thunderstorms called for later in the day.

Remarkable, frightening, scary.   How else could you take The Sermon on the Mount, the right for the poor and the meek and the mournful and those feeling down about things to have the same entitlement to life as the over-achievers, as the city and its movers and shakers.   No wonder they strung him up, for threatening the very economic realities upon which the modern world was based on.  Jesus Christ.  They had the Cross for him, the city dwellers, the modern people, from whom taxes were collected to feed the Empire...

Buddha, the teacher, the story is happier, and more real.  Instead of dying on the Cross, his victory over the temptations to lead a decent life, Prince Gautama, formerly a wandering ascetic seeking wisdom, having taken the benevolent rice milk from the maiden by the river (in his own state of exhaustion) sits peacefully under the Boddhi Tree, understanding that here in this spot he will achieve what he has been striving for all along.   And it is earth-shaking.


There's not a lot to see, folks, in the life and daily events of a hack science fiction writer bent on grand spiritual enterprises.  He had turned on the flat-screen television beneath the hanging Irish rug of the Apostles, vaguely distracting himself with an eye toward the Weather Channel, mildly imagining a gentle pornographic Saturday Night Live kind of a skit, Hurricane Normal spinning red on a large screen behind a blown-dry woman dwarfed by weatherly events.

Stations of the Cross and the Holy Rosary from the Holy Land on EWTN, and the powers that be at EWTN were in the midst of a campaign against Francis the humble reformer and proponent of socialism, backing on their news shows a bishop of intrigue.   Negative emotions.  Maybe the Daily Mass would be untouched by such politics.


If you get the Buddha, and the Sermon on the Mount, you get a bit of a new lease on life.  Things that did not seem appropriate in the slightest are seen in a different and more forgiving light..  The poor worker beleaguered has a right to live a simple humble life.  And no one ever really said otherwise.  And really you lived that simple life, as best you could, as a way to prove, as it were, in your own small way, the strange and wonderful things Jesus said, the whole logic of it.  To understand what the Buddha is talking about...


It is as if for years you live in a church, or a monastery, or a temple, and do not understand what you seek to understand.  You sense the understanding as a birthright, from the tradition of your own father and his teachings, of your family, of those who become your family through the twists of life's fate.   You're going to feel stupid, like an imbecile, and ask yourself, "why didn't I get it?"

But these things are hard to get.  Give yourself some credit.  They are not easy things to get, and there are lots of pressures against them, and the vast majority wish not to take the things into daily life, but rather banish them from all daily conversations, which, of course, is very sad.

Actually, without knowing it, the things you had engaged upon, in this long strange trip of being a friendly barman and private sack of various moods and emotions, was a good a preparation as any.

The problem, now, emerged, what to do now?   How do you reform your life in accordance?  How do you gain an action based on The Sermon on the Mount and the words to the tax collector and to the Roman with the coin and the Pharisee and the fisherman.

The Buddha is far more prepared, to fish self and people out of the morass of dark emotions and negative thoughts.  No longer a panacea, but a cure...  A cure for fear and paranoia, as long as reality itself is willing...

And so, yes, the hack science fiction writer went to his therapist and talked as best he could.  The Sermon on EWTN was green-robed and lackluster, so it seemed.  And he wished to take a walk, as if to continue his rebellion against the known western world of capitalism and banishment of the spirit.




It was simply nice to get out into the woods, and I thought of something Vonnegut said in an interview, about the amount of anxiety that waiting out the writing of Slaughterhouse Five had caused him.   As if he'd had to wade into another world to bring something back.  And I knew how he felt.  And what he had brought back was, indeed, something special, something different.  In the interview he could laugh about it, but I had some idea where that jolliness might have come from.

In the state of anxiety that comes along with slowly figuring something out and putting it into some form of record, one can get into things, like wine, that ease your own nerves for a while.  But in the long run, wine, at least too much of it, is not good for your nervous system.  Thus it was good just to be walking quite slowly and meditatively, in the woods, the traffic and noise at a good distance, the creek running just fine nearby, the trees providing clear clean air and shade, and my trekking shoes feeling the ground.  I felt very light, as I would imagine a deer might, on tip toe, ready to spring away.  It was funny how the whole system worked, and I felt really good about my body, and maybe it was the sugar content in the little cans of V8 that, along with the dough, had put a belly on my slender frame.  I'd started doing yoga again, gone back to the Buddha truths, and I felt good, even as the city makes me nervous.

So, I said to myself, why, why would I do anything to my nervous system, realizing how now broadly it could see and sense, even into the Void, free from dualistic thought.  And I felt myself gaining in strength and direction to take positive steps.  Even as a writer has hardly any idea what to do with himself.



By the time I got back from the woods, stopping to talk to a grand dame in Kalorama with a  beautiful wild garden spreading everywhere, as dark storm clouds commanded with the sky to the west, I was very tired, and barely up for doing some yoga.  Meditation became a nap.  I took a shower, and made some scrambled eggs.  I called mom, as I had from the woods.  And then, in the afternoon, I went to bed for a nap, and ended up sleeping straight through, the body trying to shake the chest cold that had lingered.  It wasn't until two in the morning that I finally stirred, and yes, the ragweed pollen had come.

It had been a decent day, and I rose and did the dishes, tea cups, water glasses, the stainless steel bowl I'd mixed the eggs in and the small plate I'd cracked the eggs on and the pan, a small wine glass, silverware, spoons that had stirred in various nostrums into tea and hot water...  It had been a day of some relaxation and perhaps some epiphany.

No, I am not of the free-market capitalism reconciled with Catholic charity model, but rather of a school so "socialist" as to be revolutionary, I suppose, and I am not for revolt.  To implement a system would require a completely spiritual informing in all its directions.    And who could one trust with that?  I would say the Buddhists, more than the Christian, but Jesus is, so far, to my mind, the best interpretation of the Buddhist legacy, making it available for the dulled Western economic mind.

The Christians are good in that they believe in the value of human life, the individual.  But again, put in such Western terms, which are necessarily economic, the daily messages of news blighted with talk of the markets.

Kurt Vonnegut is right about the people of a midwestern town taking the hack science fiction writer Kilgore Trout as their DaVinci, having tired themselves out on real estate, automobiles, booze, sex, etc....

Vonnegut suffered his great anxiety, spoke with great humor and jolliness, for having spoken to the darkest aspect of humanity, its absolute dimness as to measuring the worth of the people in the world and how to take care fairly of people, its absolute blindness toward fairness and justice.  Humanity, such as it is now, will always make a scapegoat, make the Somali fisherman destitute without caring, not until that fisherman becomes a gun-wielding pirate.

It's really quite a shame.  And how much to blame is any old sect when they are screwed down by such global world wide all reaching completely invasive economic judgments, so that Buddhists can no longer be Buddhists.  One wonders, in whose economic interest is it to put all peoples against each other.

The mosque was originally meant to be the most inclusive and welcoming places in all the world, having given birth to a great religion with a great story, one of equanimity, looking to the positive of bringing a civilizing influence to a hard place in the world.

Now, because of petro-dollars and petro-politics, the mosque has been infiltrated by non-native pressures, not least, war on large scale, to say nothing of age old imperial efforts.

And in America now, who is the last free person?  Who is the last person trying to be free--whether it suits or is good for him--but the strange hack science fiction writer who believes in Christian messages, in Buddha, and in all the poor humble writers who have secretly taken it upon themselves to tell a few tales, the Twains, Hemingways, Turgenevs....  Vonnegut is correct.  Let that marinate in your mind.  A writer deserves, sometimes anyway, to be a Leonardo.