The Way of the World: Dalai Lama vs China's Factories

By Richard Ammon
GlobalGayz.com

The following bit of news was written by Jamie Johnson and published in Vanity Fair magazine July 19, 2011
(http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2011/07/harmonic-divergence-wealthy-dropping-the-dalai-lamas-name-literally.html)

"It was big news last weekend when President Obama refused to let journalists into his private meeting with the Dalai Lama. The maneuver reflects increasing concerns in the U.S. that emphatic public support for the Tibetan leader will alienate Chinese officials, and in turn jeopardize our strategic interests in the world’s fastest growing economy... a rising number of international billionaires have begun to worry that backing the Dalai Lama could pose a risk to their personal wealth by potentially limiting access to lucrative markets in China... now that the seat of financial power has started shifting eastward, patronage of the Dalai Lama can come at a considerable cost. Sadly, China’s increasing sway over our economy compromises the Dalai Lama’s ability to attract wealthy American patrons...

The opportunity to make money is something billionaires simply can’t resist—even if giving in to that persistent urge means shunning an enlightened spiritual guru."
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Thus we have the way of the modern world. Not that I'm a spiritual follower of the Dalai Lama's Buddhist beliefs--not the issue here--but I do care that an intelligent and enlightened man (a lot more than most) is seen as losing traction to spiritless commercial forces of low-tech wage-earning and hi-tech investment profiteering. China is a factory producing infinite 'stuff' and the West is a hungry consumer of those goods, insatiably starved for more things, countless baubles, Wal-Mart discounts, stock deals... spending and getting.

Where is all this taking us? What human desire is being met by plastic bottles, credit cards, shiny cars, sugared food, clever-tech toys, FaceBook popularity, political positioning...?

What is the need we are trying to assuage? Some have suggested existential ennui, listless boredom, hollow spiritual life, loneliness... that we buy more and more stuff for our emotionally impoverished hovels and grand mansions. No matter the level of financial status, most of us in this 'advanced' country are addicted to a richly materialistic/monied throw-away lifestyle surrounded by noise (iPods, radios, TV, computers) that we no longer can see outside the cage.

At my local dump/transfer/recycle station in a rural town in western Massachusetts (population 1800) purchased goods become discarded goods: coffee-makers, children's books, dinnerware, air conditioners, stereo sets, microwave ovens, portable BBQs, baby strollers, sofas, pill bottles... off loaded to the recycle shed to be picked over with the leftover tossed over the edge into the dumpsters. (Some plastic, metal, glass, paper is recycled in a separate dumpster.)

But the volume of discards increases monthly, yearly. What is this? What is being thrown away besides stuff? I think at least part of our cultural soul goes out with the trash. We have become mis-users of the land, the planet. We have lost our feeling for our earth home.

After a recent festive party to celebrate a two-year-old's birthday, I watched as dozens of plastic cups, spoons and forks, plastic plates, paper napkins, extra cake, pretty gift wrapping and ribbons were tossed into plastic bag-lined trash cans then tied up and tossed in the back of a pickup truck on its way to the dump the next day.

What is the gift here? (Most of the plastic gift toys to the to birthday toddler will end up as toss-outs within a year.) What is really being thrown away?

I think the message of the Dalai Lama is being lost: compassion kindness and mindfulness beyond our immediate pleasure and families, compassion kindness and mindfulness toward the green planet, toward the needy world of other tribes suffering poverty and hunger, and toward our own 'being'. We have become saturated homo sapiens drowning in our own foreign-made abundance.

Is this the purpose of our being here? To make stuff and make profits? At what cost? What does China offer us beyond it's factories? What is the future the Chinese are leading us to?

I think it is not compassionate, kind or mindful.

A Child is Born, the Torch is Passed

By Richard Ammon
GlobalGayz.com
May 15, 2011

Within 24 hours last week a dear friend's mother died of old age and my nephew and wife gave birth to a baby boy. There may be something profound in this cycle of life and death but I'm not sure. Is it just human anatomy changing forms? Is it an exchange of energy fields unknowable to us? Is it anything at all beyond itself?

Wiggly considerations aside, it all seemed irrelevant for a while this afternoon as I held the three day old critter in my arms, holding his little softball-sized head from flopping to the side, his sweet lips puckering and pursing, tiny nostrils breathing in the spring air, an occasional lifting of his lids to reveal his blue eyes not yet focused on what's around. His tiny fist held close to his mouth--the mouth that sought lunch from mom a while later, first from the left breast then the right. Suckling silently.

So incredibly vulnerable is the birthing days of a human being, the most endowed creature on the planet but the most helpless to start. And, ultimately and not sadly, helpless as the rest of us breeding and feeding, making and thinking, learning skills and gaining wisdom on the planet.

In an ideal world I would feel hope for this child to be nourished, directed and able to choose honesty and compassion as his life motifs, but the world he is headed into gives me pause. For all the wonderment of his birth there is caution in his future as I could feel it in my heart as I held his soft pink head.

As a 'gay uncle' I know first hand the evils that overtake once-healthy youthful minds and bend them into hateful homophobia. I hear the twisted talk of many (not all) religious leaders who are supposed to guide us toward a more loving world while declaring my personal way of being as an "inherent moral evil." I see the blindness of ethnic and racial madness that slaughters millions. I read of the cruel financial corruption in big enterprise. I know the ferocious humiliation of poverty and the toxic indifference of wealth.

This is not the world I want my nephew to learn from--yet he will.

As an antidote, I want him to learn the names of the trees around him (as my grandmother taught me) to study the planets, to learn the language of the sea, the sounds of the forest on a rainy night, the adagios of Mahler, the vibe of OM, to learn stillness in the great arc of his life and his death.

William Wordsworth's 1802 sonnet 'The World is Too Much With Us' laments the crushing world of materialism and cynicism then--and marks our present civilization:
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon...
The poet's great lament is today's lament. He longs for a more natural way of being, in harmony with nature, adorned with benevolent mystery.

So too will I, as I can, lean this new child toward benevolence and nature and great art--but also advise him how to be wise in the world, to defend again too much "getting and spending". And own a good dog, like Heather and Bing.