The View From Here

We arrived in Mexico City yesterday about 4 PM, took a cab to our inexpensive “ejecutivo” – i.e., executive hotel near the intersection of two enormous avenues in the centre of the city: Insurgentes and Passeo de la Reforma, had a sandwich in their cafe because though late in the afternoon our room was still unready, took the elevator to our 13^th floor room to relax for a couple of hours, and then found our way to the enormous multi-story mall a few circuitous blocks from here for gelato and a movie – American Hustle – pleasantly pleasing in its cynicism and wit. This morning my eyes awoke to Mexico City’s brand of urban blight viewed from on high – the roofs of smaller buildings with their accumulation of mechanical apparatus and other unsightly objets. After three months of being imbued with a vision of paradise from the ninth floor of Vista Del Sol, I fully experienced the loss of Eden and the fall from grace. This in turn led me to a contemplation of my own version of stoicism, nurtured over time in reflections on my experiences and bolstered by what I understand in the philosophy of the kind of Buddhist who does not believe in or hope for reincarnation.

Shunryu Suzuki-Roshi whose book Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, I closely studied for about two years, said in a variety of ways: things just are what they are; and, everything changes all of the time. Find peace in a recognition of these truths and enjoy your life. This does not imply quietism – leaving aside the tasks of whatever nature that come to hand, including the struggle to lead a decent life and to be helpful to others if one can.  But it does involve giving up delusions about ourselves as individuals and as a species. I don’t “believe” in good and evil as entities or as embodied in certain groupings or people. I think that all humans have the capacity for acting in what we view as good and bad ways. Much of our “civilized” behaviour has evolved from the necessity of preserving human existence as we have gradually become so populous that we have taken over the world. Tribes like the Apache warriors in the southern USA believed that a boy did not become a man until he had killed someone in battle. The Aztecs made war on outlying tribes, specifically to garner hordes of participants for their blood sacrifices to their gods. The early history of any isolated group – for example, the Scots and the Irish -- reveals the perpetual state of war that existed between one family clan and another. We would view the horrors inflicted by any one of these peoples upon another as evil, though to them their actions represented “the good” as they understood it – putting their own lives on the line for the survival and the prospering of their family, clan, tribe, and later, nation state.

We view animals as simply a part of nature, unevolved morally as are we. I don’t see a big difference myself. Social animals in their own groupings can be loving and nurturing but will fight to the death for scarce resources – whether these are for food, territory, or sexual domination. They act out of instincts and needs as do we but are not bothered by questions of morality about their behaviours. Most people that I know fear what they would consider their own “dark side,” – anger, hatred, and jealousy, for example. They feel guilt when coming up against even an inner movement of this nature. I think all these feelings are normal, just a regular day-to-day experience of being a human being, a mammal that has won out in the sweepstakes of being the current dominant power on our planet, but still in terms of “primitive” reactions, a mammal like every other. Feeling guilt about normal reactions to frustration or fear, like those listed above, makes no more sense than being proud of our feelings of love and desire to be helpful to another. If we embrace the full scope of our humanity in a realistic fashion, we are better equipped to acknowledge those aspects of ourselves that can lead to harm to other people or to ourselves, and, to make conscious decisions about whether or not to act on them.

When I was in graduate school a few decades ago we read and talked about a book on entropy – the fact that all systems gradually come to an end. Our bodies wear down and die; stars burn themselves out, as will our own sun; at every level everything has a limit built in to its very nature. I found the contemplation of this idea to be profoundly depressing even as I was unable to escape its logic. Now it is a truth that to me is axiomatic. I can well understand why most human religions have posited an existence entirely other than that of the corporeal, one that promises a way of being that is not subject to the laws of entropy, one that makes comforting sense of so many of the perplexing aspects of our lives. I can make no comment on these approaches as they do not enter into the way that I approach my own life and death.

I look upon our beautiful, miraculous planet that we call Earth and think about its long history: the formation, the geology, the first stirrings of life, the evolution of larger animals. And then there were dinosaurs: they ruled the ecosystem until, as I understand it, an enormous meteor slammed into an area that we call the Gulf of Mexico, creating such heat, fire, and ash clouds that most vegetation on the earth was destroyed within the next few years – and with it, the dinosaurs. A happening, entirely outside of the control of the rulers. After this cataclysm, the little guys, the mammals, were able to prosper and to evolve into larger species – all leading to our own. But we have become so populous, have taken so much control over the whole of the earth and of all other species, that with our technology and our still-in-operation “primitive” reactions to threat and our desire for control and dominion, we stand in many ways at the brink of creating from within the planet itself, conditions that will end our own supremacy and even our existence, giving way to other species to develop and to take what is left of the earth’s ecosystem in other directions.

Well, from the viewpoint of us humans, not a pretty picture, but it may be that things, including us, may just be what they are. My friend, Mary, has been working with her medical team in Montreal for several years to stem the inevitable consequences of her cancer. She has endured heroic procedures in order to go on enjoying the life that she has and connecting with the people that she loves. We have known each other for over fifty years and though our lives have taken different directions and though we view much from different perspectives, we continue to care for and respect each other. Like Mary, I also am ready to bear whatever “slings of outrageous fortune” assail me in order to continue and to enjoy this precious life that we share.