A unique financial institution helps Indian women break loose from a debilitating and demeaning profession
Kolkata-based Aditi Biswas, 29, was keen to turn entrepreneur and run her own grocery. There was one problem. Aditi was working as a prostitute and the neighborhood banks she approached for loans turned her down flat.
Enter the Usha Multipurpose Cooperative Society, a bank that caters exclusively to the financial needs of Kolkata’s sex workers. The society offered Aditi seed capital of Rs100,000 ($2500) for her business, with minimal fuss and nominal interest. Away from the sleaze of her previous profession, Aditi is now an entrepreneur who not only sends her children to a good school but also just bought a one-bedroom house. “The bank has turned my life around 180 degrees,” she exults.
http://www.asiasentinel.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=968&Itemid=34
Saturday, January 05, 2008
Tuesday, December 04, 2007
War critics astonished as US hawk admits invasion was illegal
Oliver Burkeman and Julian Borger in Washington, Thursday November 20, 2003
nternational lawyers and anti-war campaigners reacted with astonishment yesterday after the influential Pentagon hawk Richard Perle conceded that the invasion of Iraq had been illegal.
In a startling break with the official White House and Downing Street lines, Mr Perle told an audience in London: "I think in this case international law stood in the way of doing the right thing."
President George Bush has consistently argued that the war was legal either because of existing UN security council resolutions on Iraq - also the British government's publicly stated view - or as an act of self-defence permitted by international law.
But Mr Perle, a key member of the defence policy board, which advises the US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, said that "international law ... would have required us to leave Saddam Hussein alone", and this would have been morally unacceptable.
French intransigence, he added, meant there had been "no practical mechanism consistent with the rules of the UN for dealing with Saddam Hussein".
Mr Perle, who was speaking at an event organised by the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, had argued loudly for the toppling of the Iraqi dictator since the end of the 1991 Gulf war.
"They're just not interested in international law, are they?" said Linda Hugl, a spokeswoman for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, which launched a high court challenge to the war's legality last year. "It's only when the law suits them that they want to use it."
Mr Perle's remarks bear little resemblance to official justifications for war, according to Rabinder Singh QC, who represented CND and also participated in Tuesday's event.
Certainly the British government, he said, "has never advanced the suggestion that it is entitled to act, or right to act, contrary to international law in relation to Iraq".
The Pentagon adviser's views, he added, underlined "a divergence of view between the British govern ment and some senior voices in American public life [who] have expressed the view that, well, if it's the case that international law doesn't permit unilateral pre-emptive action without the authority of the UN, then the defect is in international law".
Mr Perle's view is not the official one put forward by the White House. Its main argument has been that the invasion was justified under the UN charter, which guarantees the right of each state to self-defence, including pre-emptive self-defence. On the night bombing began, in March, Mr Bush reiterated America's "sovereign authority to use force" to defeat the threat from Baghdad.
The UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, has questioned that justification, arguing that the security council would have to rule on whether the US and its allies were under imminent threat.
Coalition officials countered that the security council had already approved the use of force in resolution 1441, passed a year ago, warning of "serious consequences" if Iraq failed to give a complete ac counting of its weapons programmes.
Other council members disagreed, but American and British lawyers argued that the threat of force had been implicit since the first Gulf war, which was ended only by a ceasefire.
"I think Perle's statement has the virtue of honesty," said Michael Dorf, a law professor at Columbia University who opposed the war, arguing that it was illegal.
"And, interestingly, I suspect a majority of the American public would have supported the invasion almost exactly to the same degree that they in fact did, had the administration said that all along."
The controversy-prone Mr Perle resigned his chairmanship of the defence policy board earlier this year but remained a member of the advisory board.
Meanwhile, there was a hint that the US was trying to find a way to release the Britons held at Guantanamo Bay.
The US secretary of state, Colin Powell, said Mr Bush was "very sensitive" to British sentiment. "We also expect to be resolving this in the near future," he told the BBC.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1089158,00.html
nternational lawyers and anti-war campaigners reacted with astonishment yesterday after the influential Pentagon hawk Richard Perle conceded that the invasion of Iraq had been illegal.
In a startling break with the official White House and Downing Street lines, Mr Perle told an audience in London: "I think in this case international law stood in the way of doing the right thing."
President George Bush has consistently argued that the war was legal either because of existing UN security council resolutions on Iraq - also the British government's publicly stated view - or as an act of self-defence permitted by international law.
But Mr Perle, a key member of the defence policy board, which advises the US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, said that "international law ... would have required us to leave Saddam Hussein alone", and this would have been morally unacceptable.
French intransigence, he added, meant there had been "no practical mechanism consistent with the rules of the UN for dealing with Saddam Hussein".
Mr Perle, who was speaking at an event organised by the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, had argued loudly for the toppling of the Iraqi dictator since the end of the 1991 Gulf war.
"They're just not interested in international law, are they?" said Linda Hugl, a spokeswoman for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, which launched a high court challenge to the war's legality last year. "It's only when the law suits them that they want to use it."
Mr Perle's remarks bear little resemblance to official justifications for war, according to Rabinder Singh QC, who represented CND and also participated in Tuesday's event.
Certainly the British government, he said, "has never advanced the suggestion that it is entitled to act, or right to act, contrary to international law in relation to Iraq".
The Pentagon adviser's views, he added, underlined "a divergence of view between the British govern ment and some senior voices in American public life [who] have expressed the view that, well, if it's the case that international law doesn't permit unilateral pre-emptive action without the authority of the UN, then the defect is in international law".
Mr Perle's view is not the official one put forward by the White House. Its main argument has been that the invasion was justified under the UN charter, which guarantees the right of each state to self-defence, including pre-emptive self-defence. On the night bombing began, in March, Mr Bush reiterated America's "sovereign authority to use force" to defeat the threat from Baghdad.
The UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, has questioned that justification, arguing that the security council would have to rule on whether the US and its allies were under imminent threat.
Coalition officials countered that the security council had already approved the use of force in resolution 1441, passed a year ago, warning of "serious consequences" if Iraq failed to give a complete ac counting of its weapons programmes.
Other council members disagreed, but American and British lawyers argued that the threat of force had been implicit since the first Gulf war, which was ended only by a ceasefire.
"I think Perle's statement has the virtue of honesty," said Michael Dorf, a law professor at Columbia University who opposed the war, arguing that it was illegal.
"And, interestingly, I suspect a majority of the American public would have supported the invasion almost exactly to the same degree that they in fact did, had the administration said that all along."
The controversy-prone Mr Perle resigned his chairmanship of the defence policy board earlier this year but remained a member of the advisory board.
Meanwhile, there was a hint that the US was trying to find a way to release the Britons held at Guantanamo Bay.
The US secretary of state, Colin Powell, said Mr Bush was "very sensitive" to British sentiment. "We also expect to be resolving this in the near future," he told the BBC.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1089158,00.html
Friday, November 23, 2007
The Paradox of our Age
We have taller buildings, but shorter tempers;
wider freeways, but narrower viewpoints;
we spend more, but have less;
we buy more, but enjoy it less.
We have bigger houses and smaller families;
more conveniences, but less time;
we have more degrees, but less sense;
more knowledge, but less judgment;
more experts, but more problems;
more medicine, but less wellness.
We drink too much,
smoke too much,
spend too recklessly,
laugh too little,
drive too fast,
get too angry too quickly,
stay up too late,
get up too tired,
read too seldom,
watch TV too much,
and pray too seldom.
We have multiplied our possessions, but reduced our values.
We talk too much, love too seldom and lie too often.
We've learned how to make a living, but not a life;
We've added years to life, not life to years.
We've been all the way to the moon and back,
but have trouble crossing the street to meet the new neighbor.
We've conquered outer space, but not inner space;
we've done larger things, but not better things;
we've cleaned up the air, but polluted the soul;
we've split the atom, but not our prejudice;
we write more, but learn less;
plan more, but accomplish less.
We've learned to rush, but not to wait;
we have higher incomes; but lower morals;
more food but less appeasement;
We build more computers to hold more information,
to produce more copies than ever, but have less communication;
we've become long on quantity, but short on quality.
These are the times of fast foods and slow digestion;
tall men, and short character;
steep profits, and shallow relationships.
These are the times of world peace, but domestic warfare;
more leisure and less fun;
more kinds of food, but less nutrition.
These are days of two incomes, but more divorce;
of fancier houses, but broken homes.
These are days of quick trips,
disposable diapers,
throwaway morality,
one-night stands,
overweight bodies,
and pills that do everything from cheer,
to quiet,
to kill.
It is a time when there is much in the show window
and nothing in the stockroom.
Indeed it's all true.
------------
http://www.ntu.edu.sg/home/hblim/passages/paradox.htm
wider freeways, but narrower viewpoints;
we spend more, but have less;
we buy more, but enjoy it less.
We have bigger houses and smaller families;
more conveniences, but less time;
we have more degrees, but less sense;
more knowledge, but less judgment;
more experts, but more problems;
more medicine, but less wellness.
We drink too much,
smoke too much,
spend too recklessly,
laugh too little,
drive too fast,
get too angry too quickly,
stay up too late,
get up too tired,
read too seldom,
watch TV too much,
and pray too seldom.
We have multiplied our possessions, but reduced our values.
We talk too much, love too seldom and lie too often.
We've learned how to make a living, but not a life;
We've added years to life, not life to years.
We've been all the way to the moon and back,
but have trouble crossing the street to meet the new neighbor.
We've conquered outer space, but not inner space;
we've done larger things, but not better things;
we've cleaned up the air, but polluted the soul;
we've split the atom, but not our prejudice;
we write more, but learn less;
plan more, but accomplish less.
We've learned to rush, but not to wait;
we have higher incomes; but lower morals;
more food but less appeasement;
We build more computers to hold more information,
to produce more copies than ever, but have less communication;
we've become long on quantity, but short on quality.
These are the times of fast foods and slow digestion;
tall men, and short character;
steep profits, and shallow relationships.
These are the times of world peace, but domestic warfare;
more leisure and less fun;
more kinds of food, but less nutrition.
These are days of two incomes, but more divorce;
of fancier houses, but broken homes.
These are days of quick trips,
disposable diapers,
throwaway morality,
one-night stands,
overweight bodies,
and pills that do everything from cheer,
to quiet,
to kill.
It is a time when there is much in the show window
and nothing in the stockroom.
Indeed it's all true.
------------
http://www.ntu.edu.sg/home/hblim/passages/paradox.htm
Monday, November 19, 2007
War’s a drug and I got hooked on the carnage of Chechnya
The author of an acclaimed memoir of his life as a Russian soldier, tells how combat and the brutality inflicted on him by his own side claimed his soul.
He is an unlikely hero, as heroes often are. Arkady Babchenko, born in Moscow, the only son of a middle-class family, wanted to be a lawyer. But in November 1995, in his second year of law studies, he was conscripted into the Russian army and sent to Chechnya.
There, as a soldier, he encountered killings, beatings, starvation and sheer terror, all the brutalities and humiliations of war. Yet a few years later, after graduating, he was irresistibly drawn back to fight a second time in the bitter conflict in the tiny republic in the north Caucasus that was trying to break away from the Russian Federation; this time he went as a volunteer soldier.
“Maybe war is the strongest narcotic in the world,” he says. He cannot otherwise explain why he volunteered. “Maybe because my past was there, a large part of my life. It was as if only my body had returned from that first war, but not my soul.”
In Chechnya something happened to him as he stood on the edge of humanity: the war was dehumanising but it moulded his manhood. It taught him to be a survivor and, he says, it made him a completely different person.
Related Links
* One Soldier's War in Chechnya
* One Soldier's War in Chechnya
“When I returned from the war, my mother did not get back her son,” he says. “The Arkady Babchenko who went to war does not exist any more. I am a new man with different interests, different friends, a different outlook on life. I am not happy that the war happened in my life, but I have no regrets.”
Chechnya cost thousands of lives on both sides. Horror was everywhere. Round the main square of one village were large crosses upon which Russian soldiers had been crucified and castrated.
In retaliation Russian troops herded all the men they could find into the square, threw them down in piles and hacked at them. In half a day the whole village was castrated, then the battalion moved out.
But many of Babchenko's comrades were killed, not by their Chechen enemies but by the brutal conduct of their own Russian officer corps who starved and beat the young conscripts, suppressing everything that was human in them, destroying their personality and individuality, treating them, he says, no better than slaves.
That Babchenko, now 30, is alive at all to tell this grim tale is a constant puzzle to him. Tall and slender, with stubble on his chin, he has melancholy brown eyes that still have the stare of a man who has seen death at close hand. He suffers survivor’s guilt.
He was having coffee in Soho last week after readings at London’s South Bank Centre from his acclaimed book on the conflict, One Soldier’s War in Chechnya, and admits that while he does not miss war, without its extremes of highs and lows it has left everything else flat.
“You would imagine that this trip to Britain would impress me and have an impact on me,” he says. “Yet it is not happening. Of course war was the lowest point as well as the highest in my life. Because I had buried all my sensations there I am totally immune to anything now. I have slowly regained some of the feelings but not all of them, so my senses are not all there.”
He thinks he is suffering from the same emptiness described by some survivors from Stalin’s gulags – “this totally destructive, negative experience which wipes out everything in you”.
More and more these days, Babchenko is recognising that just being alive is a gift. He was a colleague of the late Anna Politkovskaya, the renowned Russian journalist and fierce critic of President Vladimir Putin’s policies in Chechnya, who was murdered just over a year ago. He remains deeply affected by her killing.
Politkovskaya, 48, had been working on an article about torture in Chechnya. Her still unsolved murder – she was found shot dead in the lift of her Moscow apartment block – had all the hallmarks of a contract killing.
Like Babchenko she worked for the newspaper Novaya Gazeta (New Newspaper). Although he says that he has not received death threats Babchenko, also an ardent Putin critic, admits that he now wonders how safe he is in a Russia where more than a dozen journalists have been murdered in recent years.
This and more makes him fear for Putin’s Russia. “I think it is hanging on a brink of an incredible precipice,” he says. “It has not yet fallen to the bottom. But it has not quite got out.
“Russia’s problem is that it is too big. It is also its saving grace. There is so much inertia because of its size that the upheavals and perturbations are absorbed by this enormous body of the country.
“I do think it will slowly emerge. You can see the signs of an emerging civil society but Putin is pushing Russia down, trampling it into the mud even further. That is the logic of his actions.”
But, he says, the West should not be frightened of Russia, for all the aggressive rhetoric from the Kremlin. “Rather we, not the West, should be the ones to be frightened of Russia. No Russian tanks will ever enter London, Paris or Berlin.”
Moreover, he says that the Russian army is no longer a good fighting army. It was at its most professional, well trained and combat experienced in 1989 when it withdrew from Afghanistan. But the best army officers resigned over Chechnya after 1995. They felt betrayed that the high command had sold them and gone into the conflict just to make money. There were no high ideals worth fighting for.
In Chechnya, he writes, thieving was both the foundation of the war and its reason for continuing: “Ours is an army of workers and peasants, reduced to desperation by constant underfunding, half crazed with hunger and a lack of accommodation, flogged and beaten by all, regardless of the consequences, regardless of badges of rank, stripped of all rights. This is not an army but a herd drawn from the dregs of the criminal masses, lawless apart from the dictates of jackals that run it.”
He tells how the soldiers sold cartridges, the drivers sold diesel oil, the cooks sold tinned meat and the battalion commanders sold the soldiers’ food, while the regimental commanders trucked away vehicle-loads of equipment and the generals stole the actual vehicles themselves. Many Russian soldiers, he believes, were killed by bullets and guns that their desperate comrades had sold to the Chechens for food.
One day, he writes, two recruits were caught selling ammunition through the wire to Chechen children for vodka and came in for specially sadistic treatment. After a savage beating they were put in a pit for hours, then taken out, suspended by a rope from a makeshift gallows for a day and a half, then they had their toes wired to a hand-driven electric generator.
“Afterwards the armaments officer unties the ropes and they fall to the ground like sacks of flour. They can’t stand or lift their swollen arms. Their hands have gone black and their fingers are twisted,” Babchencko writes.
These days Babchenko does not maintain links or contacts with the comrades he fought alongside: “I don’t want to see the people whom I saw being beasts and they don’t want to see me because we both experienced this animal state back then in Chechnya. We have gone our different ways and the things that unite us are not the best things in our lives by far.”
But, in another way, he cannot completely let go of his military past. He runs a hugely successful website and a magazine written by Russian war veterans – a copy of which he has brought with him to London – that tries to reflect, analyse and do something about the war that so changed their lives.
The cover of its latest issue is the cemetery at Bogorodskoye, 30 miles from Moscow, where all the unidentified Russian soldiers killed in Chechnya are buried after years stored in a refrigerator. The magazine and website are filled with their stories, diaries and songs.
Paradoxically it is for these things and not his remarkable book, which has been so acclaimed in the West, that Babchenko is best known in Russia. Here his book is being compared with All Quiet on the Western Front and the best writings on war. In Russia, he says, no one cares. Nor perhaps should they.
“In war,” he writes, “there is a breed of people who, like bears that have tasted human flesh for the first time, will keep killing to the end. They look normal enough, but when it comes down to it all they can think about is plunging themselves into another slaughter.”
If another war happens, he says that he will go back: “But I will not be armed. I will go as a journalist. This is my work now.”
------
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article2889310.ece
He is an unlikely hero, as heroes often are. Arkady Babchenko, born in Moscow, the only son of a middle-class family, wanted to be a lawyer. But in November 1995, in his second year of law studies, he was conscripted into the Russian army and sent to Chechnya.
There, as a soldier, he encountered killings, beatings, starvation and sheer terror, all the brutalities and humiliations of war. Yet a few years later, after graduating, he was irresistibly drawn back to fight a second time in the bitter conflict in the tiny republic in the north Caucasus that was trying to break away from the Russian Federation; this time he went as a volunteer soldier.
“Maybe war is the strongest narcotic in the world,” he says. He cannot otherwise explain why he volunteered. “Maybe because my past was there, a large part of my life. It was as if only my body had returned from that first war, but not my soul.”
In Chechnya something happened to him as he stood on the edge of humanity: the war was dehumanising but it moulded his manhood. It taught him to be a survivor and, he says, it made him a completely different person.
Related Links
* One Soldier's War in Chechnya
* One Soldier's War in Chechnya
“When I returned from the war, my mother did not get back her son,” he says. “The Arkady Babchenko who went to war does not exist any more. I am a new man with different interests, different friends, a different outlook on life. I am not happy that the war happened in my life, but I have no regrets.”
Chechnya cost thousands of lives on both sides. Horror was everywhere. Round the main square of one village were large crosses upon which Russian soldiers had been crucified and castrated.
In retaliation Russian troops herded all the men they could find into the square, threw them down in piles and hacked at them. In half a day the whole village was castrated, then the battalion moved out.
But many of Babchenko's comrades were killed, not by their Chechen enemies but by the brutal conduct of their own Russian officer corps who starved and beat the young conscripts, suppressing everything that was human in them, destroying their personality and individuality, treating them, he says, no better than slaves.
That Babchenko, now 30, is alive at all to tell this grim tale is a constant puzzle to him. Tall and slender, with stubble on his chin, he has melancholy brown eyes that still have the stare of a man who has seen death at close hand. He suffers survivor’s guilt.
He was having coffee in Soho last week after readings at London’s South Bank Centre from his acclaimed book on the conflict, One Soldier’s War in Chechnya, and admits that while he does not miss war, without its extremes of highs and lows it has left everything else flat.
“You would imagine that this trip to Britain would impress me and have an impact on me,” he says. “Yet it is not happening. Of course war was the lowest point as well as the highest in my life. Because I had buried all my sensations there I am totally immune to anything now. I have slowly regained some of the feelings but not all of them, so my senses are not all there.”
He thinks he is suffering from the same emptiness described by some survivors from Stalin’s gulags – “this totally destructive, negative experience which wipes out everything in you”.
More and more these days, Babchenko is recognising that just being alive is a gift. He was a colleague of the late Anna Politkovskaya, the renowned Russian journalist and fierce critic of President Vladimir Putin’s policies in Chechnya, who was murdered just over a year ago. He remains deeply affected by her killing.
Politkovskaya, 48, had been working on an article about torture in Chechnya. Her still unsolved murder – she was found shot dead in the lift of her Moscow apartment block – had all the hallmarks of a contract killing.
Like Babchenko she worked for the newspaper Novaya Gazeta (New Newspaper). Although he says that he has not received death threats Babchenko, also an ardent Putin critic, admits that he now wonders how safe he is in a Russia where more than a dozen journalists have been murdered in recent years.
This and more makes him fear for Putin’s Russia. “I think it is hanging on a brink of an incredible precipice,” he says. “It has not yet fallen to the bottom. But it has not quite got out.
“Russia’s problem is that it is too big. It is also its saving grace. There is so much inertia because of its size that the upheavals and perturbations are absorbed by this enormous body of the country.
“I do think it will slowly emerge. You can see the signs of an emerging civil society but Putin is pushing Russia down, trampling it into the mud even further. That is the logic of his actions.”
But, he says, the West should not be frightened of Russia, for all the aggressive rhetoric from the Kremlin. “Rather we, not the West, should be the ones to be frightened of Russia. No Russian tanks will ever enter London, Paris or Berlin.”
Moreover, he says that the Russian army is no longer a good fighting army. It was at its most professional, well trained and combat experienced in 1989 when it withdrew from Afghanistan. But the best army officers resigned over Chechnya after 1995. They felt betrayed that the high command had sold them and gone into the conflict just to make money. There were no high ideals worth fighting for.
In Chechnya, he writes, thieving was both the foundation of the war and its reason for continuing: “Ours is an army of workers and peasants, reduced to desperation by constant underfunding, half crazed with hunger and a lack of accommodation, flogged and beaten by all, regardless of the consequences, regardless of badges of rank, stripped of all rights. This is not an army but a herd drawn from the dregs of the criminal masses, lawless apart from the dictates of jackals that run it.”
He tells how the soldiers sold cartridges, the drivers sold diesel oil, the cooks sold tinned meat and the battalion commanders sold the soldiers’ food, while the regimental commanders trucked away vehicle-loads of equipment and the generals stole the actual vehicles themselves. Many Russian soldiers, he believes, were killed by bullets and guns that their desperate comrades had sold to the Chechens for food.
One day, he writes, two recruits were caught selling ammunition through the wire to Chechen children for vodka and came in for specially sadistic treatment. After a savage beating they were put in a pit for hours, then taken out, suspended by a rope from a makeshift gallows for a day and a half, then they had their toes wired to a hand-driven electric generator.
“Afterwards the armaments officer unties the ropes and they fall to the ground like sacks of flour. They can’t stand or lift their swollen arms. Their hands have gone black and their fingers are twisted,” Babchencko writes.
These days Babchenko does not maintain links or contacts with the comrades he fought alongside: “I don’t want to see the people whom I saw being beasts and they don’t want to see me because we both experienced this animal state back then in Chechnya. We have gone our different ways and the things that unite us are not the best things in our lives by far.”
But, in another way, he cannot completely let go of his military past. He runs a hugely successful website and a magazine written by Russian war veterans – a copy of which he has brought with him to London – that tries to reflect, analyse and do something about the war that so changed their lives.
The cover of its latest issue is the cemetery at Bogorodskoye, 30 miles from Moscow, where all the unidentified Russian soldiers killed in Chechnya are buried after years stored in a refrigerator. The magazine and website are filled with their stories, diaries and songs.
Paradoxically it is for these things and not his remarkable book, which has been so acclaimed in the West, that Babchenko is best known in Russia. Here his book is being compared with All Quiet on the Western Front and the best writings on war. In Russia, he says, no one cares. Nor perhaps should they.
“In war,” he writes, “there is a breed of people who, like bears that have tasted human flesh for the first time, will keep killing to the end. They look normal enough, but when it comes down to it all they can think about is plunging themselves into another slaughter.”
If another war happens, he says that he will go back: “But I will not be armed. I will go as a journalist. This is my work now.”
------
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article2889310.ece
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
ZEN IS BORING
Let's face it. Zen is boring. You couldn't find a duller, more tedious practice than Zazen. The philosophy is dry and unexciting. It's amazing to me anyone reads this page at all. Don't you people know you could be playing Tetris, right now? That there are a million free porno sites out there? Get a life, why don't you?!
Joshu Sasaki, a Zen teacher from the Rinzai Sect, once said that Buddhist teachers always try to make students long for the Buddha World, but that if the students knew how really dry and tasteless the Buddha World actually was, they'd never want to go. He's right. Look at Zen teachers. Not a one of them has any sense of fashion. They sit around staring at blank walls. Ask them about levitation, they won't tell you. Ask them about life after death, they change the subject. Ask them about miracles and they start spouting nonsense about carrying buckets of water and chopping up fire wood. They go to bed early and wake up early. Zen is a philosophy for nerds.
Boredom is important. Most of your life is dull, tasteless and boring. If you practice Zazen, you learn a lot about boredom. I remember the first time I sat Zazen, I was real excited. I figured I'd be seeing visions of four armed Krishnas descending from the Heavens, or I'd be fading into The Void just like the old Beatles song, or reach Nirvana (whatever that was) or some great wonderful thing. But the clock just ticked away, my legs started aching, and stupid thoughts kept drifting by. Maybe I wasn't doing it right, I thought. But no, year after year it was the same. Boring, boring, boring. After almost 20 years it's still boring as Hell.
People hate their ordinary lives. We want something better. This, our day to day life of drudgery and work, is boring, dull and ordinary, we think. But someday, someday... There's an episode of The Monkees* where Mike Nesmith says that when he was in high school he used to walk out on the school's empty stage with a guitar in his hands thinking "Someday, someday." Then he said that now (now being 1967, at the height of the Monkees fame) he walks out on stage in front of thousands of fans and thinks "Someday, someday." That's the way life is. It's never going to be perfect. Whatever "someday" you imagine, it will ever come. Never. No matter what it is. No matter how well you build your fantasy or how carefully you follow all the steps necessary to achieve it. Even if it comes true exactly the way you planned, you'll end up just like Mike Nesmith. Someday, someday... I guarantee you.
Your life will change. That's for sure. But it won't get any better and it won't get any worse. How can you compare now to the past? What do you know about the past? You don't have a clue! You have no idea at all what yesterday was really like, let alone last week or ten years ago. The future? Forget about it...
People long for big thrills. Peak experiences. Some people come to Zen expecting that Enlightenment will be the Ultimate Peak Experience. The Mother of All Peak Experiences. But real enlightenment is the most ordinary of the ordinary. Once I had an amazing vision. I saw myself transported through time and space. Millions, no, billions, trillions, Godzillions of years passed. Not figuratively, but literally. Whizzed by. I found myself at the very rim of time and space, a vast giant being composed of the living minds and bodies of every thing that ever was. It was an incredibly moving experience. Exhilarating. I was high for weeks. Finally I told Nishijima Sensei about it . He said it was nonsense. Just my imagination. I can't tell you how that made me feel. Imagination? This was as real an experience as any I've ever had. I just about cried. Later on that day I was eating a tangerine. I noticed how incredibly lovely a thing it was. So delicate. So amazingly orange. So very tasty. So I told Nishijima about that. That experience, he said, was enlightenment.
You need a teacher like that. The world needs lots more teachers like that. Countless teachers would have interpreted my experience as a merging of my Atman with God, as a portent of great and wonderful things, would have praised my spiritual growth and given me pointers on how to go even further. And I would have been suckered right in to that, let me tell you! Woulda fallen for it hook line and sinker, boy howdy. If a teacher doesn't shatter your illusions he's doing you no favors at all.
Boredom is what you need. Merging with the Mind of God at the Edge of the Universe, that's excitement. That's what we're all into this Zen thing for, right? Eating tangerines? Come on, dude! What could be more boring than eating a tangerine?
Some years ago some psychologists did a study in which they sat some Buddhists monks and some regular folks in a room and wired them up to EEG machines to record their brain activity. They told everyone to relax, then introduced a repetitive stimulus, a loudly ticking clock, into the room. The normal folks' EEG showed that their brains stopped reacting the stimulus after a few seconds. But the Buddhists just kept on mentally registering the tick every time it happened. Psychologists and journalists never quite know how to interpret that finding, though it's often cited. It's a simple matter. Buddhists pay attention to their lives. Ordinary folks figure they have better things to think about.
If you really take a look at your ordinary boring life, you'll discover something truly wonderful. Our regular old pointless lives are incredibly joyful -- amazingly, astoundingly, relentlessly, mercilessly joyful. You don't need to do a damned thing to experience such joy either. People think they need big experiences, interesting experiences. And it's true that gigantic, traumatic experiences sometimes bring people, for a fleeting moment, into a kind of enlightened state. That's why such experiences are so desired. But it wears off fast and you're right back out there looking for the next thrill. You don't need to take drugs, blow up buildings, win the Indy 500 or walk on the moon. You don't need to go hang-gliding over the Himalayas, you don't need to screw your luscious and oh-so-willing secretary or party all night with the beautiful people. You don't need visions of merging with the totality of the Universe. Just be what you are, where you are. Clean the toilet. Walk the dog. Do your work. That's the most magical thing there is. If you really want to merge with God, that's the way to do it. This moment. You sitting there with your hand in your underwear and potato chip crumbs on your chin, scrolling down your computer screen thinking "This guy's out of his mind." This very moment is Enlightenment. This moment has never come before and once it's gone, it's gone forever. You are this moment. This moment is you. This very moment is you merging with the total Universe, with God Himself.
The life you're living right now has joys even God will never know.
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http://www.katinkahesselink.net/tibet/boring-zen.html
Thursday, September 20, 2007
How My Father Taught Me Non-Violence
Posted by Arun Gandhi on Sep 18, 2007
I was 16 years old and living with my parents at the institute my grandfather had founded 18 miles outside of Durban, South Africa, in the middle of the sugar plantations. We were deep in the country and had no neighbors, so my two sisters and I would always look forward to going to town to visit friends or go to the movies.
One day, my father asked me to drive him to town for an all-day conference, and I jumped at the chance. Since I was going to town, my mother gave me a list of groceries she needed and, since I had all day in town, my father ask me to take care of several pending chores, such as getting the car serviced. When I dropped my father off that morning, he said, 'I will meet you here at 5:00 p.m., and we will go home together.'
After hurriedly completing my chores, I went straight to the nearest movie theatre. I got so engrossed in a John Wayne double-feature that I forgot the time. It was 5:30 before I remembered. By the time I ran to the garage and got the car and hurried to where my father was waiting for me, it was almost 6:00. He anxiously asked me, 'Why were you late?' I was so ashamed of telling him I was watching a John Wayne western movie that I said, 'The car wasn't ready, so I had to wait,' not realizing that he had already called the garage. When he caught me in the lie, he said: 'There's something wrong in the way I brought you up that didn't give you the confidence to tell me the truth. In order to figure out where I went wrong with you, I'm going to walk home 18 miles and think about it.'
So, dressed in his suit and dress shoes, he began to walk home in the dark on mostly unpaved, unlit roads. I couldn't leave him, so for five-and-a-half hours I drove behind him, watching my father go through this agony for a stupid lie that I uttered.
I decided then and there that I was never going to lie again. I often think about that episode and wonder, if he had punished me the way we punish our children, whether I would have learned a lesson at all. I don't think so. I would have suffered the punishment and gone on doing the same thing. But this single non-violent action was so powerful that it is still as if it happened yesterday. That is the power of non-violence.
I was 16 years old and living with my parents at the institute my grandfather had founded 18 miles outside of Durban, South Africa, in the middle of the sugar plantations. We were deep in the country and had no neighbors, so my two sisters and I would always look forward to going to town to visit friends or go to the movies.
One day, my father asked me to drive him to town for an all-day conference, and I jumped at the chance. Since I was going to town, my mother gave me a list of groceries she needed and, since I had all day in town, my father ask me to take care of several pending chores, such as getting the car serviced. When I dropped my father off that morning, he said, 'I will meet you here at 5:00 p.m., and we will go home together.'
After hurriedly completing my chores, I went straight to the nearest movie theatre. I got so engrossed in a John Wayne double-feature that I forgot the time. It was 5:30 before I remembered. By the time I ran to the garage and got the car and hurried to where my father was waiting for me, it was almost 6:00. He anxiously asked me, 'Why were you late?' I was so ashamed of telling him I was watching a John Wayne western movie that I said, 'The car wasn't ready, so I had to wait,' not realizing that he had already called the garage. When he caught me in the lie, he said: 'There's something wrong in the way I brought you up that didn't give you the confidence to tell me the truth. In order to figure out where I went wrong with you, I'm going to walk home 18 miles and think about it.'
So, dressed in his suit and dress shoes, he began to walk home in the dark on mostly unpaved, unlit roads. I couldn't leave him, so for five-and-a-half hours I drove behind him, watching my father go through this agony for a stupid lie that I uttered.
I decided then and there that I was never going to lie again. I often think about that episode and wonder, if he had punished me the way we punish our children, whether I would have learned a lesson at all. I don't think so. I would have suffered the punishment and gone on doing the same thing. But this single non-violent action was so powerful that it is still as if it happened yesterday. That is the power of non-violence.
Saturday, September 15, 2007
Need Iraq suffer more if we pull out? By: Johann Hari
Bush's argument-by-analogy that the US was wrong to leave Vietnam because of the ensuing holocaust perpetrated by Pol Pot next door in Cambodia is so historically illiterate it's hard to know how to answer it.
http://comment.independent.co.uk/columnists_a_l/johann_hari/article2898415.ece
Thursday, September 13, 2007
Ten Rules for Being Human, By Cherie Carter-Scott
1. You will receive a body. You may like it or hate it, but it’s yours to keep for the entire period.
2. You will learn lessons. You are enrolled in a full-time informal school called, “life.”
3. There are no mistakes, only lessons. Growth is a process of trial, error, and experimentation. The “failed” experiments are as much a part of the process as the experiments that ultimately “work.”
4. Lessons are repeated until they are learned. A lesson will be presented to you in various forms until you have learned it. When you have learned it, you can go on to the next lesson.
5. Learning lessons does not end. There’s no part of life that doesn’t contain its lessons. If you’re alive, that means there are still lessons to be learned.
6. ”There” is no better a place than “here.” When your “there” has become a “here”, you will simply obtain another “there” that will again look better than “here.”
7. Other people are merely mirrors of you. You cannot love or hate something about another person unless it reflects to you something you love or hate about yourself.
8. What you make of your life is up to you. You have all the tools and resources you need. What you do with them is up to you. The choice is yours.
9. Your answers lie within you. The answers to life’s questions lie within you. All you need to do is look, listen, and trust.
10. You will forget all this.
2. You will learn lessons. You are enrolled in a full-time informal school called, “life.”
3. There are no mistakes, only lessons. Growth is a process of trial, error, and experimentation. The “failed” experiments are as much a part of the process as the experiments that ultimately “work.”
4. Lessons are repeated until they are learned. A lesson will be presented to you in various forms until you have learned it. When you have learned it, you can go on to the next lesson.
5. Learning lessons does not end. There’s no part of life that doesn’t contain its lessons. If you’re alive, that means there are still lessons to be learned.
6. ”There” is no better a place than “here.” When your “there” has become a “here”, you will simply obtain another “there” that will again look better than “here.”
7. Other people are merely mirrors of you. You cannot love or hate something about another person unless it reflects to you something you love or hate about yourself.
8. What you make of your life is up to you. You have all the tools and resources you need. What you do with them is up to you. The choice is yours.
9. Your answers lie within you. The answers to life’s questions lie within you. All you need to do is look, listen, and trust.
10. You will forget all this.
Saturday, August 25, 2007
Truth
Increasingly I am attracted to illustrations of the truth in text. This from What the Upanishads Teach Us: Discourse of Sathya Sai Baba during the Summer Course in Spirituality and Indian Culture held for College Students at Brindavan, Whitefield, Bangalore District in May 1972 Published by Sri Sathya Sai Books and Publications Trust.
Draupadi, after she had gone through all her troubles and tribulations, was sitting and talking to Krishna on one occasion in a pleasant mood. She addressed Krishna as her dear brother and asked: "What is the matter? I remember having been in great difficulties and having called you with the fullness of my heart and begged you to come and save me. But you came late. You never came in time. Can you explain to me what stood in the way of your coming in proper time?" Krishna then asked Draupadi: "You say you addressed me and called me. May I know in what manner you called me and how you addressed me?" Then she replied, "Yes, I said, Hai Krishna, Hai Dwarakavasa". The Lord replied "You addressed me as Dwarakavasa. Where is Dwaraka and where is Hasthinapura, to which place I had to come? That was a long distance. If only you had addressed me as Hridayavasi or as one who is living in your own heart, I would have appeared immediately. Because of the manner of your addressing I had to travel all the way from Dwaraka to Hasthinapura and how could I have come in time from such a long distance?"
Draupadi, after she had gone through all her troubles and tribulations, was sitting and talking to Krishna on one occasion in a pleasant mood. She addressed Krishna as her dear brother and asked: "What is the matter? I remember having been in great difficulties and having called you with the fullness of my heart and begged you to come and save me. But you came late. You never came in time. Can you explain to me what stood in the way of your coming in proper time?" Krishna then asked Draupadi: "You say you addressed me and called me. May I know in what manner you called me and how you addressed me?" Then she replied, "Yes, I said, Hai Krishna, Hai Dwarakavasa". The Lord replied "You addressed me as Dwarakavasa. Where is Dwaraka and where is Hasthinapura, to which place I had to come? That was a long distance. If only you had addressed me as Hridayavasi or as one who is living in your own heart, I would have appeared immediately. Because of the manner of your addressing I had to travel all the way from Dwaraka to Hasthinapura and how could I have come in time from such a long distance?"
Saturday, August 18, 2007
Thursday, August 09, 2007
Saturday, August 04, 2007
Friday, July 20, 2007
Media Culpa: Blaming the press for Iraq
"The forthcoming war was likely to be messy, Kennan sighed, for the people in need of liberation "are wholly unable to govern themselves" and Western-style democracy could not flourish where "the very prerequisites for a democratic political system do not exist among the people in question." But none of this was being debated and, to his mind, there hadn't been "proper public discussion, not even a Congressional discussion, of this undertaking." To do so now, after boots were on the ground, "would be received as something tending to demoralize the forces now in action...""
Michael C. Moynihan | July 17, 2007
Why could we not have had this insight 3915 (3,628 Americans, two Australians, 157 Britons, 13 Bulgarians, one Czech, seven Danes, two Dutch, two Estonians, one Fijian, one Hungarian, 33 Italians, one Kazakh, one Korean, three Latvian, 21 Poles, two Romanians, five Salvadoran, four Slovaks, 11 Spaniards, two Thai and 18 Ukrainians) + 67 265 (Iraqi) people ago?
Sources:
http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2003/iraq/forces/casualties/
http://www.iraqbodycount.org/
Michael C. Moynihan | July 17, 2007
Why could we not have had this insight 3915 (3,628 Americans, two Australians, 157 Britons, 13 Bulgarians, one Czech, seven Danes, two Dutch, two Estonians, one Fijian, one Hungarian, 33 Italians, one Kazakh, one Korean, three Latvian, 21 Poles, two Romanians, five Salvadoran, four Slovaks, 11 Spaniards, two Thai and 18 Ukrainians) + 67 265 (Iraqi) people ago?
Sources:
http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2003/iraq/forces/casualties/
http://www.iraqbodycount.org/
Saturday, June 02, 2007
Thursday, May 31, 2007
Canadian Omar Khadr
Omar Ahmed Khadr (born September 16, 1987 in Ottawa, Ontario), is a Canadian teenager who was captured by American forces in Afghanistan. He is among the youngest prisoners held in extrajudicial detention in the United States Guantánamo Bay detainment camps, in Cuba. Khadr's Guantanamo detainee ID is 766.
...Khadr was 15 when he was captured in Afghanistan during a firefight in which he allegedly killed a U.S. Army special forces soldier with a grenade.
"He doesn't trust American lawyers, and I don't particularly blame him," said U.S. Marine Lt. Col. Colby Vokey, who was taken off the case Wednesday. "The United States is responsible for his interrogation and his treatment under a process that is patently unfair."
-----------------
Khadr was a child soldier. How can after 5 years of the harshest imprisonment could the US find justice for that or any US Army soldier or their families?
This case seems less about justice and more about revenge.
References:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omar_Khadr
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/world/4850528.html
...Khadr was 15 when he was captured in Afghanistan during a firefight in which he allegedly killed a U.S. Army special forces soldier with a grenade.
"He doesn't trust American lawyers, and I don't particularly blame him," said U.S. Marine Lt. Col. Colby Vokey, who was taken off the case Wednesday. "The United States is responsible for his interrogation and his treatment under a process that is patently unfair."
-----------------
Khadr was a child soldier. How can after 5 years of the harshest imprisonment could the US find justice for that or any US Army soldier or their families?
This case seems less about justice and more about revenge.
References:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omar_Khadr
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/world/4850528.html
Thursday, May 24, 2007
Saturday, May 12, 2007
Friday, May 11, 2007
Saturday, May 05, 2007
I Believe
I believe in the supreme worth of the individual and in his right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
I believe that every right implies a responsibility; every opportunity, an obligation; every possession, a duty.
I believe that the law was made for man and not man for the law; that government is the servant of the people and not their master.
I believe in the dignity of labor, whether with head or hand; that the world owes no man a living but that it owes every man an opportunity to make a living.
I believe that thrift is essential to well ordered living and that economy is a prime requisite of a sound financial structure, whether in government, business or personal affairs.
I believe that truth and justice are fundamental to an enduring social order.
I believe in the sacredness of a promise, that a man’s word should be as good as his bond; that character -- not wealth or power or position -- is of supreme worth.
I believe that the rendering of useful service is the common duty of mankind and that only in the purifying fire of sacrifice is the dross of selfishness consumed and the greatness of the human soul set free.
I believe that love is the greatest thing in the world; that it alone can overcome hate; that right can and will triumph over might.
John D. Rockefeller, Jr., quotation as inscribed at Rockefeller Center, New York City
I believe that every right implies a responsibility; every opportunity, an obligation; every possession, a duty.
I believe that the law was made for man and not man for the law; that government is the servant of the people and not their master.
I believe in the dignity of labor, whether with head or hand; that the world owes no man a living but that it owes every man an opportunity to make a living.
I believe that thrift is essential to well ordered living and that economy is a prime requisite of a sound financial structure, whether in government, business or personal affairs.
I believe that truth and justice are fundamental to an enduring social order.
I believe in the sacredness of a promise, that a man’s word should be as good as his bond; that character -- not wealth or power or position -- is of supreme worth.
I believe that the rendering of useful service is the common duty of mankind and that only in the purifying fire of sacrifice is the dross of selfishness consumed and the greatness of the human soul set free.
I believe that love is the greatest thing in the world; that it alone can overcome hate; that right can and will triumph over might.
John D. Rockefeller, Jr., quotation as inscribed at Rockefeller Center, New York City
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