Dr. Carl Gustav Jung held the view that consciousness is “a very recent acquisition of nature.” He described consciousness as “frail, menaced by specific dangers and easily injured.” Jung studied and treated the vulnerabilities of the human psyche, which he saw as encompassing far more than human consciousness and its contents, with the humility and reverence of a man who realized that no man ever “perceives anything fully or comprehends anything completely.” Though many scientists and philosophers deny the existence of what is termed the “unconscious,” Jung considered them naïve, doing nothing more (or less) than expressing “an age-old ‘misoneism’—a fear of the new and the unknown.”
He wrote, “Man has developed consciousness slowly and laboriously, in a process that took untold ages to reach what human hubris terms ‘the civilized state’ (which is arbitrarily dated from the invention of script in about 4000 B.C.). And this evolution is far from complete, for large areas of the human mind are still shrouded in darkness.”
Shrouded in darkness.
As a friend is fond of saying, there you have it.
Shrouded in darkness.
Such dark thoughts arise in these dark international times because it’s not always just the unknown, the unconscious that is shrouded. Several years ago I was discussing nuclear armaments in the world with one of my hawkish friends, a retired military officer. I argued in favor of on-going reduction to elimination of nuclear weaponry among the super powers as the first step to persuading less powerful nations to abandon their nuclear arsenals. It is unreasonable, hypocritical and impractical for any powerful nuclear armed kingdom to ask a weaker nation (India, Pakistan, Israel, Iran, North Korea or shadow nations lacking geographic boundaries or even coordinates) to forego nuclear weaponry. I argued that it is the powerful and strong who set the example by which the weaker model their actions and values. My friend the hawk, his memory of history as well as the foundation of his moral high ground shrouded in darkness, argued that weaker countries couldn’t be trusted but that the U.S., morally superior to and the protector of the rest of the world, could handle being the possessor of superior levels of nuclear weaponry because, among other reasons, “…we would never be the first to use the atomic bomb against another country.”
In the context of a debate between friends, I enjoyed pointing out his invalid argument and reminding him that the U.S. already has been the first to drop an atomic bomb on another country—twice, but that reminder and its larger point was disturbing and not at all enjoyable. His consciousness had completely blocked out the realities of history in the interests of a particular (and popular) military/political/ economic belief system. My friend, an honest man, was good enough to rethink the point and recognize that perception and comprehension are frailer than any political/military/economic dogma would have us believe. None of us ever perceives anything fully or comprehends anything completely. One of the many problems with the linear path of thinking that comprises any dogma (religious, political, social, economic, military or even personal) is that it tends to ignore or relegate to insignificance or the realm of evil whatever is too organic or presumptuous to fit on the line.
However, lines are inherently narrow and, as Gertrude Stein observed so succinctly, “There are no straight lines in nature.”
This includes the nature of man, a far more mysterious, unknown and unpredictable beast than human linear thought can appreciate. Jung, who studied the human mind more than most, pointed out that large areas of that mind are shrouded in darkness. Though for the most part they would have you believe otherwise, this includes the minds of most but not all political, military and economic leaders of the world who are fond of talking if not always walking their particular line.
Walking the line, shrouded in darkness.
How else explain the refusal of the U.S., the largest nuclear nation which sets the standard for the world in all things military, to reduce its nuclear arsenal? Nuclear weapons research and development budget has more than doubled. More than half of the tax dollars U.S. citizens pay to their government goes to the military (mostly to the benefit of ‘the military-industrial complex’) and the U.S. is assigning a larger role to nuclear weapons in its military strategy and expanding the infrastructure of the nuclear weapons complex in America.
Several decades ago Jung wrote that the west has “…begun to realize that the difficulties confronting us are moral problems and that the attempts to answer them by a policy of piling up nuclear arms or by economic ‘competition’ is achieving little, for it cuts both ways.”
And in 2019, this administration, which has never encountered a moral/ethical/practical/real problem it couldn’t spin, ignore or falsify, the bomb continues walking the line, shrouded in darkness.

A LETTER TO ED ABBEY
(Recently found in one of my journals)

May 21, 1989
Aspen, Colorado

Dear Ed Abbey:

Just a few hours ago I returned from a fine three day trip to Moab and its environs, some of your favorite desert land. I’ve been thinking quite a lot about you, your work, your thought, what you meant to me and others and many things about—you—since you died two months ago. That’s not really unusual. I thought a lot about you, and of you, over the years. I even got to tell you something about it in the few exchanges of letters we had several years ago. I’m glad I initiated that exchange and told you how much you helped me and that I was able to recognize and appreciate it. I am grateful that you took the time to reply. I’m sorry we never met and had the chance to get to know each other. I suspect we would not have been in agreement on all things, but I always felt we would have liked each other quite a lot.
What is unusual is that I didn’t know until driving back to Aspen this afternoon that I was going to write this.
I went to Moab on the night of the 18th with my friend Marilyn, who is reading “The Monkey Wrench Gang”, her first Abbey book, which I gave her a couple of weeks ago. She’s a very sexy woman and a great traveling companion and I thought she could use some time in the vast, open desert that you loved and wrote about so well. She’s a divorce case, and you and I know that one all too well, and we both know how a perspective of wide open spaces can be healing to the perspective of the inner spaces. We slept by the Colorado River at Big Bend and the moon was bright.
The morning of the 19th Marilyn and my young climbing friend Joel and I hiked up to Castleton Tower. Joel and I climbed the North Chimney and it was a beautiful climb on a lovely day. The 19th is my youngest son Jason’s birthday. He was 18 and in California and though you are gone and I am going Jason is still coming, and I often wonder about the sort and quality of life that will be his. After the climb Joel, Marilyn and I went to the Pizza Hut in Moab for the salad bar and garlic bread after showering under the leak in the water pipe just off the Castle Valley Road. When we got back to the camp at Big Bend the Mormons had invaded. About 200 BYU students, the rudest, most brain dead, spiritless people sort of alive on earth. The same thing happened to us last year and I wrote a column about them that I called “Locusts in the Desert.” I wish you could have read it. I think you would have laughed and I certainly owe you a few of those. We broke camp and slept on a road near the bridge over the Colorado just north of town. We could hear the trucks and other traffic and it was not a restful night.
Still, we got up early and made it to the May 20th sunrise memorial for Ed Abbey held north of town up a dirt road. I don’t have to tell you what went on there. You were there. I’d never heard of Terry Tempest Williams before, but she is very impressive and her love for you and grief at losing you were powerful reminders of the durability, fragility and uniqueness of each human. She drew up to the surface some deep grief and sorrows and lost loves of my own. She reminded us of the importance of keeping in touch with one another, with those we love and care about. She got that from you and passed it on to us at a memorial gathering for you. Keep in touch.
Ken Slight and Doug Peacock must have been wonderful friends for you to have. They were lucky men to be your friends and they knew it. You were lucky too, and I bet you knew it.
Dave Foreman says Earth First the same way Adolph Hitler said “Lebensraum.” Germany First. I met Foreman a few summers ago up Trail Creek outside Sun Valley in Idaho at an Earth First gathering. He was talking about how his friend Ed Abbey might show up for the meeting, but I didn’t believe him and you never showed up. I don’t know if Foreman and you were friends. I don’t think Earth First represents your spirit or thoughts, but Foreman tried to make of the memorial service for you a rallying call for Earth First. I did not like it, a discordant note to a fitting morning in memory of Ed Abbey. But maybe any proper and loving memorial to you needs to include a discordant note. A part of you enjoyed the fart in polite company. Foreman filled that role, but he smells bad to me.
Ann Zwinger was sweet and bright.
Wendell Berry, like you, is a man of honesty and integrity. He is a model and great artist.
Barry Lopez said it best and I think you would have approved. He has been out and about in the world, listening, observing and talking to people. He said, “The news is heavy, but we are heavier.”
My friend, Burnie Arndt, was there, stopping by on his way back from California where he had buried his sister. After the memorial he said that a lot of feelings were still real close to the surface and the morning was hard for him. Humans can only take so much grief and pain, as you know. I haven’t lost anyone lately, but I had to wipe tears from my eyes and hold back many more (for reasons that are for another writing another time) and the memorial for Ed Abbey was hard, poignant and moving for me as well.
While driving back to Colorado today Marilyn asked me why the memorial service for you touched me so deeply. I didn’t know until she asked me but I knew when she did, and I told her I have a lot of old sorrows that are still in there, and Ed Abbey was a bigger influence and closer to my thought and heart and work than I had realized. I didn’t really feel your death and how much I have lost in your passing until the gathering of your friends and admirers north of Moab yesterday. I know you understand the interconnectedness of all love, all joy, all sorrow. You were a big man, Ed Abbey. Thanks for what I will miss. Thanks for what remains.
Go in peace.

DD

(This was written many years ago before the democratic draft ended and all able-bodied American males were required to serve in the U.S. military. It was replaced by a voluntary system attractive to those young men and women for whom life in the military is a better option than the life they are living and looking forward to as civilians. I put it here as a reminder that the courage of people like Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange and Edward Snowden is a continuation of the valor of the conscientious objector of old.)

Tom was older and never a close friend but he was a friend I admired and enjoyed in part because he lived a long and rich life of his own choosing. I mean, he was his own man. Tom was the first conscientious objector I ever knew. Actually, he was the first CO or “conscie” I ever knew about. Before him I had not heard the term or realized that one could honorably oppose the majority’s viewpoint of the day or maintain personal integrity by standing one’s ground against the sycophantic if passionate flow of social conformity.
Tom had been a CO during World War II, a time and war when that status was accorded less merit and social respectability than it later acquired. During World War II more than 5000 people went to prison for their CO beliefs, though Tom served in a non-combative role. I first met him when I was a high school student in Reno, Nevada in the mid 1950s, a time of Eisenhower blandness, McCarthyinsm, atomic bombs being detonated in the Nevada desert, uniformity, conformity, consumerism and a national fear of communism not too unlike the current fear of terrorism. It was a time, like now, when questioning authority was unlikely to result in rational discourse. Tom was older, an artist by nature, an English teacher in my high school by trade, and a fellow skier. He never talked with me about being a CO, but we all knew he had served in a non-combative role during WWII, and we knew he wasn’t afraid of authority, unpopularity, non-conformity or the dictates of his own conscience, which, it always seemed to me, was both clean and courageous.
Since the time of the Colonies, before there was a Constitution, the conscientious objector has had rights in this country. Subsequent U.S. law does not “require any person to be subject to combatant training and service in the armed forces of the U.S. who, by reason of religious training and belief, is conscientiously opposed to participation in war in any form.” However, the law states that “the term ‘religious training and belief’ does not include essentially political, sociological or philosophical views, or a merely personal moral code.” But in 1965 and in 1970 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the words “religious training and belief” must now be interpreted to include personal moral and ethical values that have the same force in people’s lives as traditional religious beliefs. That is, sincere personal moral and ethical beliefs in opposition to personal participation in war has the same legal standing as does believing in the authority and teachings of an organized and established religion. The operative word in the last sentence is ‘sincere,’ and for a CO to establish such sincerity is not an always easy task.
During the Viet Nam War (known as the American War in Viet Nam), the two best known of thousands of American conscientious objectors were Muhammad Ali, the boxer, and David Harris, the political and environmental activist and writer. Harris, who was married to Joan Baez at the time, went to jail for his beliefs. Ali, who was stripped of his world heavyweight boxing title because of his beliefs, fought in the courts for five years until he won in the U.S. Supreme Court. After this victory, Ali returned to the ring and won back his heavyweight title. His 1966 explanation for refusing to be drafted into the U.S. military has been much quoted and said it all: “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong.” He also said, “No Viet Cong ever called me ‘nigger.’” While Harris and Ali were well known and received a great deal of publicity in the mainstream media (most of it negative), the courage they exhibited and the price they paid for living according to their beliefs was no greater (and certainly no less) than that of many others. No one who ever saw him fight (much less those who got in the ring with him) could justify questioning Ali’s courage or calling him a coward, the usual knee-jerk reaction to the conscience in action of a conscientious objector.
Some believe they should and would fight in a war for a just cause, but insist that they be allowed to refuse to fight wars they think are wrong. These people are called “selective conscientious objectors,” but under U.S. law one cannot pick and choose between the “just” and “unjust” war. The current statute states that CO claimants must object to “participation in war in any form.” How to differentiate or define a “just” and an “unjust” war is an interesting if probably unanswerable problem, but some selective Cos believed that the conditions for a “just war” cannot be met in modern times.
A CO need not believe in the principle of nonviolence or to be opposed to all forms of violence, the use of force, police powers or even the taking of human life. The law requires only that a person be conscientiously opposed to the planned and organized killing of combatant and non-combatant alike that takes place in warfare. One can be a CO and still be willing to use violence against another individual in order to protect yourself or your friends.
People don’t, and don’t like to, talk about the CO. The topic raises a myriad of uncomfortable issues, most notably for Christians the fifth commandment, but also such tangential issues as whether the state exists for the sake of the people or the people for the sake of the state (or, even, whether they both exist for the sake of the corporation), the influence of the military-industrial-complex on American economic and foreign policy and individual responsibility for personal conscience.
He was hardly the first, but Tom was the first person I knew who confronted these issues, stood against the impetus to war, and had the courage to abide by his conscience and his conviction that there has to be a better way.

(And all these years later we are still searching for it.)

In 1724 the Japanese Zen Buddhist monk Gekkai Gensho left the temple where he had lived and served for nearly 40 years since he was a child. He was not yet 50 years old. He became a wandering monk who lived in the traditional manner—that is, from the charity of the lay community and, when times were tough, begging. At the age of 60 he quit wandering and began living in a small dwelling on the banks of the Kamo River in the town of Kyoto, some 500 miles from the temple where he had spent most of his life.
He opened a shop in that dwelling and began selling a new type of tea called sencha. He adopted the name Baisao, “the Old Tea Seller.” In addition to selling tea from his shop, Baisao took his tea equipment in large portable bamboo wicker-baskets balanced on the ends of a carrying pole to gathering spots in town and in the surrounding hills. He became a familiar and popular figure among the general populace, including many of the leading poets, writers, painters, calligraphers and scholars of the time, some of whom became his friends and remained so until he died at the age of 87 in 1763. Though he never took on the mantle of teacher or master, a visit to his tea shop and a conversation was considered a religious experience by many of his clientele.
Baisao was an accomplished poet, writer and thinker and has been described as “an inspirational and unconventional figure in a culturally rich time in Kyoto.” Though selling quality tea to the general public might not seem radical behavior, Baisao was breaking the mold. In that time and place most tea sellers were elderly men from the uneducated, lowest levels of Japanese society. Buddhist priests were among the best educated, most cultured citizens of the society, and it was unheard of for one of them to live such an itinerant life. More, he was violating a precept prohibiting members of the priesthood from earning a living. According to the precept monks could only maintain purity of mind when they begged for food, a concept with which the Old Tea Seller reluctantly took issue.
It is worth pointing out that Baisao’s path in life was revolutionary, not reactionary, with mental clarity, not material acquisition, the goal. He not only made a meager living selling tea, but he did not charge a set fee, allowing his clients to pay what they felt his product and service was worth. If a client didn’t pay, the tea was free.
In “A Statement of Views in Response to a Customer’s Questions” Baisao explained his perspective after a customer called him out for violating the precept.
His answer included, “I am well aware of the objection you raise…..Remember what Confucius replied upon once being asked to explain a desire he had expressed to go and live among the uncivilized tribes of the east. ‘If men of superior attainment went and dwelt among such people,’ he said, ‘they would not remain uncivilized.’”
Baisao continued, quoting an old, Japanese verse:

“Though a contented mind brings physical
contentment with it,
Physical contentment also may occur when the
mind is ill at ease.
When the mind is truly at peace, wherever you are
Is pleasant,
Whether you live in a marketplace or in a mountain
Hermitage.

That is, the mind at peace is more valuable than the spoils of the marketplace or the solitude of hermitages. Baisao saw that exaggerating the virtues of priesthood to obtain the devotion and charity of lay followers corrupted both. He wrote that the relationship caused priests “…to seek greedily in every way and at every opportunity to obtain donations from followers. When they are successful they toady to their new benefactors, wagging their tails and showing them more respect and devotion than they do their teachers or own parents.
“Donors, for their part, pride themselves on their virtue, and on the strength of a small donation fancy the recipient now owes them a deep debt of gratitude. They end up regarding the priest with contempt.”
This dynamic, of course, encompasses a much wider range of circumstances and people than those involving religious institutions and donors.
Baisao, the Old Tea Seller, found a mind truly at peace by nothing more complicated (or complex) than selling a quality product to ordinary people in exchange for whatever those people felt it was worth to them. A key ingredient of the product was the mind at peace of the seller which could not but have some small or large effect on the buyer, who, in some small or large way, could not help but pass on to others.
Like all true revolutionaries for the common good, the Old Tea Seller sold a timeless product that never loses its flavor, is always in demand and quenches a multitude of thirsts.

SOMETHING WILL HAPPEN WHEN YOU LET GO
(From a book in progress)
“You do not have to change to awaken, you need only awaken to change.”
Adyashanti

‘Awaken to change’ is a useful thought to keep in mind as every instant of our lives change appears. We are not always aware of those changes, and, all too often, not being awake to change causes suffering. Expecting things not to change is what Buddhists know as attachment. One way to express the dilemma of our relationship to change is the quip: “Let go or be dragged.”
The dharma is not going to stop because of change. Change is the dharma, and the more awake we can be to change the less suffering there will be. Those who are awake to the change from pleasure to pain, happiness to sadness, health to sickness, youth to old age without trying to hang on to pleasure/happiness/health/youth are awake to changing. From one perspective, our practice began about 2500 years ago when Buddha decided to sit under a bodhi tree until he got it right, whatever ‘it’ was. There have been a lot of changes, suffering and awakening between Buddha’s sitting under the bodhi tree and our most recent sitting, and even that significant event more than 2000 years ago was not the beginning. It was part of the change.
From another, much closer perspective, each of our individual practices, whether began a day or fifty years ago, has been filled with change, both ignored and awakened to. All of it is part of the dharma, part of the awakening. During that time some people dropped out of the practice, others expanded theirs’ both within the sangha and on their own, though, of course, even solitary monks and nuns in the caves of remote mountains are never entirely on their own as they awaken to change.
My old friend Lito Tejada Flores has written a lovely book titled: Four Noble Truths, Almost Buddhist Poems, which ends with this:

Four Noble Truths – OK, I think I get it, but
why noble? Why not four simple truths?
They do seem pretty basic, don’t they?
Who can argue with the Buddha? Not me,

not you. Buddhism came afterward, didn’t it?
Noble came afterward. Four simple truths
that (maybe) add up to one. Pogo said it,
I think the Buddha would have agreed:

“We have seen the enemy, and he is us.”
We are the source of our own suffering,
our discontent. The harder we cling

to what we think we want, the worse
we feel, the harder it is to let go.
Four simple truths in one? Let go?

“One kind word can warm three winter months.”
Japanese proverb

Yes, and a hard one can freeze three in summer. A dishonest one can keep the flowers from blooming in spring. And an ignorant one can take the colors out of the most vibrant autumn.
Words matter on both the obvious plane and in the private psyche of each person. It is important to get them right, whether speaking, hearing, writing or reading. Though I have seen it attributed to both Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway, the maxim “The difference between the right word and the just right word is the difference between the firefly and the fire” reiterates the power of the word.
Words are used to justify war, in pursuit of love, to sell automobiles and hamburgers, to describe the mechanics and consequences of governments and nuclear reactors and to make understandable to laymen the work of brain surgeons and philosophers. The job of words is to tell a story, and, keeping in mind that a word is not the thing described in the same way that a map is not the terrain itself, words do their job, though often the story told is not the one the story teller intended.
U.S. Presidents have been masters of the word telling the unintended story. None, perhaps, have surpassed Bill Clinton’s near Haiku “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is,” though George W. Bush made up in quantity of unintended stories what he lacked in quality, though his “You can fool some of the people all the time, and those are the ones you want to concentrate on,” is pretty good by any standard. But American politicians get picked on and picked apart all too often and easily for the words they use and misuse and misspeak and can’t recall. Catching politicians and other public figures telling the unintended story is, as the old idiom has it, “Like shooting fish in a barrel,” which might be necessary and can be fun but it kills the fish. And in a democracy the metaphorical fish and the shooter are not separate, a point deserving of more contemplation than, in my view, it appears to be getting. The current President of the U.S., Donald Trump, is a fish in a barrel all his own, one that has no room for any others.
Each person—you, me and the nearly eight billion people and growing by more than 160,000 a day on this earth—has far bigger fish to fry, so to speak, than the politicians of the day in his sights. As one who writes, it seems to me that choosing one’s own words while at the same time noting those of others carefully is a good place to start…..anything.
Keeping in mind Rita Mae Brown’s observation that “In America the word ‘revolution’ is used to sell pantyhose,” the just right word(s) have the capacity to start more traditional revolutions, even personal ones.
The phrase ‘Say what you mean and mean what you say’ is an excellent modus operandi when speaking or writing, assuming, of course, that reality and meaning are somehow connected and that all involved acknowledge and understand things like irony, satire, understatement, exaggeration and nuance. Also assuming that you have the courage of your words and are not hiding under the coward’s cloak of anonymity and being mean rather than saying what you mean.
A few years ago an American citizen was murdered by pirates while jet skiing on Falcon Lake on the Texas/Mexico border. People had been robbed on Falcon Lake before, but this was the first murder. Not long after this event I wrote a column in praise of a politician I admire but who is not admired by all. What politician is? One of the comments to the on line version of the column from someone who called him or her self Taco, suggested the politician and her husband should both jet ski to Mexico.” In other words (sic), what this writer means is that they should be murdered because the words they use are not in accord with Taco’s worldview, or, at the least, political persuasion. I, personally, professionally, philosophically and politically am not in favor of murder in any circumstance, but advocating it for exercising a citizen’s rights (and, in my view, duties) as spelled out in the words of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution courageously accompanied by the authors’ real signatures, including George Washington and Ben Franklin, is troubling.
To be kind, perhaps Taco just had a bit too much hot sauce and sees humor in spewing easy if thoughtless, anonymous words about hard realities. Taco wouldn’t be the first and isn’t the last.
Emily Post advised never discussing politics or religion at the dinner table. That’s a good guideline at most but certainly not all dinner tables. It can sometimes be easier on everybody to not let food for the body be compromised and upset by food for thought.
But if there’s no way around discussing politics a good set of words to stick with is the Bill of Rights, particularly the first Amendment which, in my view, is composed of kind words of the tough love variety. The First Amendment will warm the coldest winter.
And if religion arises remember the Dalai Lama’s words: “My religion is very simple. My religion is kindness.”
Words to take and freely speak and write through a long, cold winter: My religion is kindness.