TIBETSPACE

EVEN T.S. ELIOT THINKS TIBET SHOULD BE FREE, AND HE'S DEAD.

In "Little Gidding," the last section of TS Eliot's Four Quartets, one of the greatest poems of the last century, now under-appreciated, under-read, and under-taught, Eliot closes by writing:

Quick now, here, now, always—

A condition of complete simplicity

(Costing not less than everything)

And all shall be well and

All manner of things shall be well

When the tongues of flame are in-folded

Into the crowned knot of fire

And the fire and the rose are one.

Every time I read this poem—quite a lot recently—I am reminded of the "complete simplicity" of human freedom and the Tibetan's will to achieve it; I see in Tibet through our realtime media a "crowned knot of fire" that the Chinese cannot unravel and will not unravel.  

But I don't see a "rose" when I look toward Tibet; I see a lotus flower, the symbol of compassion and His Holiness the Dalai Lama's great benevolence, and I feel that this "fire" in Tibet is serving this lotus, and that one day, the fire and the lotus shall indeed be one.  And His Holiness and all Tibetans will return to their homeland and to their family and once again regain their soveriegnty and independence.  

CHINESE PERSECUTION IN NGABA—MONKS FLEE TO THE MOUNTAINS

Phayul recently reported that the monks of Samdrupling Jonang monastery of Ngaba, Tibet have fled to the mountains.  Why?  Simple.  They fear for their lives.  Besides, all religious activities and ritual ceremonies have been banned by the Chinese—the essence of a monk's life.

I bring this up only to point to the obvious:  the Chinese occupation of Tibet has been rocked by the self-immolations of the Tibetan patriots who are struggling to secure their independence. The Chinese are responding with what they judge to be an equal and opposing force:  a denial of rights, incarceration, torture, starvation, re-education, forced labor.

Make no mistake about it—we are watching an authentic nonviolent revolution.  The Tibetans are carrying on their shoulders an ancient tradition of resistance that in America has gradually disappeared from the public stage—although it's making a come-back—since Martin Luther King's assassination. 

The Tibetans deserve our support.  At least.  Awareness now is crucial.  The Chinese have been seduced into commiting inhuman acts of brutality, and our task is simple:  expand the circle of awareness, gradually, one person, one friend, one blog post at a time.  

The front lines of compassion and justice happen to be precisely where you are standing.

A BIG-THOUGHT INFO-VIDEO THAT MAKES YOU THINK BIG THOUGHTS

Have a look at the video below when you get eleven minutes to yourself.  You're going to like it.  It's one of those speeded-up, hand-sketched, animated graphics that's capable of presenting, like, the entire history of the world in several easily digestible moments.  And the narrator, Matthew Taylor, has a British accent to boot, so Americans are persuaded he's smart from the get-go because we figure if you're articulate, you're also intelligent.

Here's ten things he says that you'll agree with:

1. We're going to have to live differently in the 21st century.
2. Most of our insights into human nature are going to be counter-intuitive. The true stuff about ourselves won't, on the face of it, make much sense.  Like, I'll be very happy if I spend my time making others happy.  Sounds good, admire the ideal, but really?  Come on.
3. If you want to be a happier person, don't read a self-help book, just have happier friends. He means by that, just connect!
4. What we want now is a more self-aware, socially embedded model of autonomy.
5. Let's start thinking about the hubris of individualism, and all the problems its caused us.
6. Can we develop a relationship to our reactions rather than be captive to them?
7. Things are getting better regarding person-to-person violence; realtime social media brings social problems into our living rooms.  We have data now.
8. Inter-personal, communal, global—three adjectives you're going to see hooking up everywhere.
9. Stop thinking about big plans and start figuring out the nature of empathy within each of us.
10. You knew there was going to be a big phrase that solves our problem.  Here it is:  empathic capacity.

There's a lot to digest in this little video, and it's a helpful video. But like all films of this genre, it's an inspirational video, which means it's short on solutions because, well, because the point of the video is that each of us has to come up with our own solutions and make our own contributions, and the film wants inspire us to do that.  Good.  But you knew that, right?

So where do we go from here?  The film kinda sorta hints at a solution in the Copernicus passage that claims it doesn't seem like the we go around the sun, but in fact we do.  

Here's our homework assignment:  realize that the structure of our individual personality is set up to process incoming data in fraudulent, self-serving, and ultimately destructive ways, and also remember that the consumerist culture that nurtures that personality has silently agreed to take advantage of our personality's tendency to misrepresent things, and the two forces—misrepresentation and consumerism—have quietly signed a pact that gets us to buy stuff—literally and figuratively—that we don't need.

Our task? Dissolve that pact. And let me know how you're doing with that.

WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT TIBET. SERIOUSLY.

You might have read about the most recent self-immolation in Tibet: an eighteen-year- old monk who, as he was burning, exclaimed, "May His Holiness the Dalai Lama live thousands of years." And then he screamed, "Freedom for Tibet."

Note:  As the flames enveloped him, he did not scream, "Meaningful autonomy for Tibet." This is an important point because many Americans, rightfully respectful of His Holiness's opinions on all matters sacred and secular, have come to embrace autonomy as the only workable solution for the future of Tibet.  

But I believe we must exercise caution here.  Americans are accustomed to forming opinions about the development of other countries because we are accustomed to having a military that has traditionally made the development of other countries its major business.  

But take a moment and look around you.  Are you doing something now that Tibetans in Tibet cannot do?  Do you plan on shopping freely at the market?  Reading what you want to read?  Exercising your religious preferences as you wish?  Are you employed? Do you speak the language the police and  the military speak?  Examine your own freedoms, and the heavy price we paid for them.  

And then consider:  when we have strong evidence that many Tibetans within Tibet, as well as many of their brothers and sisters living in exile, are daring to dream of freedom, and are giving their lives with calls for that freedom on their lips, Americans must honor this very human urge:  to live in freedom and independence and to determine our own future.

And we must extend the same privilege to the Tibetans.  Their resistance to the Chinese oppression now is fierce.  Thupten Jinpa, the main translator for the Dalai Lama, recently tweeted that he felt a threshhold had been crossed.  And as we know, threshholds can be dangerous places.  But many Tibetans have obviously judged that crossing that threshhold is worth the risk.  And they, at least, deserve our support.

USING THE MIND TO TRANSFORM THE MIND

Shantideva, in A Guide to the Bodhisattva's Way of Life, reminds us in the final "Wisdom" section that "for as long as the necessary conditions are assembled, for that long even illusions will occur."  

It seems simple enough, right?  Whatever experience we're presently having arises from specific conditions that immediately preceded that experience.  And those conditions arise, accordingly, from those that preceded those.  And so forth and so on.

For Westerners, two issues occur here that are worth examining.  First, once we get the point that the present arises from specific causes and conditions, it occurs to us that we might have a little more say in fashioning our present life by generating those conditions that we find most supportive of the goals we wish to achieve:  happiness, compassion, altruism, the mind of enlightenment.  Fine.  We are responsible for our happiness.

But second, Shantideva implies that our conventional mind is fundamentally a set of causes and conditions that generate themselves perpetually over many lifetimes.  That's troublesome to most of us because we've grown up thinking of our minds as solid entities that are occasionally afflicted with unhappiness or depression and blessed at times with happiness and joy.  But there is a core, we assume, that entertains these emotions, and this core has something to do with our personality.

To give up this core, then, or to see it as an assemlage of causes and conditions, is to give up our personality.  And that's hard for a Westerner to do.

But it gets easier if we understand that harboring these notions of personality are cultivating in turn the very delusions that give rise to our suffering.  What we learn from Shantideva is that we can, in fact, change things at such a profound level that our very conception of mind will be transformed.  Shantideva teaches us a very simple but profound truth:  We must use the mind to transform the mind.  

And that is the mind's major purpose—to transform itself.

HOW TO RAISE AWARENESS ABOUT TIBET—STICK TO THE FACTS, WHICH IS NOT AS EASY TO DO AS IT MIGHT SEEM

Awareness is a tricky thing.  We grow up with images in our heads of the great leaders of the modern era, from Gandhi through Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Dalai Lama, and we sometimes feel that unless we're moving masses of people we're doing nothing.  And nothing could be farther from the truth.  

Great leaders raise awareness of the issues that engage them within a gradually increasing circle of advocates.  But they all began by raising awareness within themselves first. And we can do the same thing.  

In fact, it's the only thing that we can be assured of doing.

With Tibet, we begin by looking closely at the map above (thanks to tibettruth for posting it).  Take a close look at where Tibet really lies, how its borders have been circumscribed, and its land mass reduced over the years.  

And then you will begin to notice that the Western media continually talks about the current self-immolations that are occurring in Western China or Sichuan.  Now, having seen this map,  you know that they are occurring in Eastern Tibet and Kham.  There are no large concentrations of Tibetan people living in Western China.  There are, however, Chinese currently occupying Eastern Tibet. 

Does this seem a small thing?  It's not.  Because to make these micro-corrections within ourselves about the cultural and political geography of the Tibetan plateau turns our awareness toward the truth just a bit more than it had otherwise been turned.  

Raising awareness corrects a lie; it privileges the truth.  And we know the power of the truth because the Chinese fear it so deeply.

A LOSAR MESSAGE

A Facebook friend of mine, Sonam Zoksang, posted a Losar message today that seems right and fit, so I share it here:

Happy Tibetan New Year to all my friends, even though we are not really celebrating this Losar. However, on this New year occasion, let us remember and keep in our prayers those brave brothers and sisters who gave up their precious lives fighting for the cause and those who are dying and being tortured in Chinese prisons. Sad and frustrating it may be when the world knowingly chooses to ignore our plight and sufferings, and fails to stand up to the Chinese government. But the truth will prevail if we fight for it with firm belief and never give up our hopes and determination.  Tashi Delek!!!

Thanks, Sonam, for the timely reminder.  

NONVIOLENCE IS A WAY OF LIVING: IT'S NOT A WAY OF LIFE

Nonviolence is a way of living. It is nothing more than that, nor is it anything less. Because our ways of living create for us the culture that we deserve, nonviolence stipulates specific ways of doing things that have been designed by specific groups of people who have imagined for themselves a specific future.  A nonviolent future.

It is very easy to understand violence as a biologically determined default setting that we cannot reset. Turn on the television, for example, and  watch one of those nature shows where a lion—always in slow motion with an orchestral soundtrack—runs down a gazelle, and we say, "Look!  Even the noble lion kills the beautiful gazelle. Violence is part of our nature!"

It never occurs to us at these moments that lions don't have Wal-Marts and that they can't plant soybeans.  

They can't make the decision to be nonviolent.  We can.

Nonviolence is way of living.  It is not a way of life.  It is a way of living because nonviolence involves making decisions every second of our lives that will create the causes and conditions that give rise to the causes and conditions that we want, the ones that will nourish the conditions for peace within ourselves, within our families, within our communities.  

So nonviolence is not a life; it is not a seamless coat that we put on, a one-time decision we make, and become nonviolent.  It is a process of living, of negotiating, of trying one thing and watching closely the results that arise as a result of having tried that one thing, and then deciding whether or not that one thing increased the peace dividend within ourselves, our families, our communities. 

We make choices every second either to indulge the thoughts and emotions that give rise to nonviolence or to linger on those that cultivate violence.

Nonviolence is a choice, and it is made very second of the day.

And what is violence?  More on that later.

 

 

NONVIOLENCE: BRIEF THOUGHTS ABOUT PRACTICE

To imagine nonviolence in its singularity is to imagine a nonviolent community united by the principles it holds in common.   And when a group of people holds commonly the values that arise from nonviolence, when they embody the ways of being associated with an authentic nonviolent practice, change occurs. 

This should surprise no one because commonly held values, whether they are violent or nonviolent, typically give rise to change.  It is more difficult to embrace nonviolence only because the default setting in most cultures is “violence,” and so embracing nonviolence involves rewriting some inherited software.  And as we shall see, that is not an easy thing to do.  But those people who have most obviously succeeded in doing so turn out to be highly respected for a very long time:  Buddha, Jesus, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Thich Nhat Hahn, and the Dalai Lama.