Death and Babysitters

This is a few excerpts from Pema Chodron's writing. I wrote a lengthy analysis on how this relates to Jesus, and I believe it does on a deeper level than most things I've heard, but I had a great deal of difficulty putting it into clear and meaningful language for you, so I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions instead:

“Nontheism [as opposed to atheism] is finally realizing that there’s no babysitter that you can count on. You just get a good one and then he or she is gone. Nontheism is realizing that it’s not just babysitters that come and go. The whole of life is like that. This is the truth, and the truth is inconvenient.

This is where renunciation enters the picture—renunciation of the hope that our experience could be different, renunciation of the hope that we could be better. The Buddhist monastic rules that advise renouncing liquor, renouncing sex, and so on, are not pointing out that those things are inherently bad or immoral, but that we use them as babysitters. We use them as a way to escape; we use them to try to get comfort and distract ourselves. The real thing that we renounce is the tenacious hope that we could be saved from being who we are.

What happens with you when you begin to feel uneasy, unsettled, queasy? Notice the panic, notice when you instantly grab for something.

Renunciation is a teaching to inspire us to investigate what’s happening every time we grab something because we can’t stand to face what’s coming.

All anxiety, all dissatisfaction, all the reasons for hoping that our experience could be different are rooted in our fear of death. Fear of death is always in the background. As the Zen master Shunryu Suzuki Roshi said, life is like getting into a boat that’s just about to sail out to sea and sink. Bu it’s very hard—no matter how much we hear about it—to believe in our own death. We don’t go so far as to say, “No way, I’m not going to die,” because of course we know that we are. But it definitely will be later. That’s the biggest hope.

Trungpa Rinposhe once delivered a lecture entitled “Death in Everyday Life.” We are raised in a culture which fears death and hides it from us. Nevertheless, we experience it all the time. We experience it in the form of dissapointment, of things not always working out. We experience it in the form of things always being in a process of change. When the day ends, when the second ends, when we breathe out, that’s death in everyday life.

Having a relationship with death in everyday life means that we begin to be able to wait, to relax with insecurity, with panic, with embarrassment, with things not working out. As the years go on, we don’t call the babysitter quite so fast.”

The New American Empire

President George W. Bush maintains that we're 'kickin' ass' in Iraq while thousands of other people die for an idea he can't admit was wrong, and won't stick his own neck out for. Why don't we send the suits to war? They're the ones who want it so bad. Regardless of General Patreus's testimony that we are seeing military success and moving closer to reaching coalition military goals, these are just that, military goals, and do not speak largely to the overall situation in Iraq. It was stated, among a slew of other half truths by the crooked smirks of our country's administration, that our overall goal was a self governing and free Iraq. This implies that the Iraqis would be free to choose their own government, and that the Iraqi people would be autonomous over their own country, without the rule of despots or occupying foreign nations. Yet today, seventy nine percent of Iraqis disapprove of the presence of American troops, while fifty seven percent call attacks on American soldiers 'acceptible.' And still we hear the languid cries of 'stick with it' emanating from the whitehouse. It seems to me that this absolute lack of responsiveness to the wishes of Iraqi civilians flies entirely in the face of the idea that we were ever there to create a free and independent Iraq. It exposes yet another lie by a group of people who have created a situation to which there is no good way out, and have done so with repeated lies and slanders in the name of the American people. George W. Bush is a textbook war criminal, and a menace to the national security of the United States.

This from 'The Carpetbagger Report' as of September 10, 2007:

"Seventy-nine percent of Iraqis oppose the presence of coalition forces in the country, essentially unchanged from last winter — including more than eight in 10 Shiites and nearly all Sunni Arabs. (Seven in 10 Kurds, by contrast, still support the presence of these forces.)

Similarly, 80 percent of Iraqis disapprove of the way U.S. and other coalition forces have performed in Iraq; the only change has been an increase in negative ratings of the U.S. performance among Kurds. And 86 percent of Iraqis express little or no confidence in U.S. and U.K. forces, similar to last winter and again up among Kurds.

Accusations of mistreatment continue: Forty-one percent of Iraqis in this poll (vs. 44 percent in March) report unnecessary violence against Iraqi citizens by U.S. or coalition forces. That peaks at 63 percent among Sunni Arabs, and 66 percent in Sunni-dominated Anbar.

This disapproval rises to an endorsement of violence: Fifty-seven percent of Iraqis now call attacks on coalition forces “acceptable,” up six points from last winter and more than three times its level (17 percent) in February 2004. Since March, acceptability of such attacks has risen by 15 points among Shiites (from 35 percent to 50 percent), while remaining near-unanimous among Sunnis (93 percent)."