Support your right to arm bears

When I went to Japan in 1971 Gary Snyder had already left and was getting back to the land in Northern California but his presence was still strongly felt in the expat community of Zen wannabe's, beiheiren antiwar people, and Nihonteki back-to-the-land commune people. I was one of the latter, starting a pottery in the mountains of Gifu Prefecture, living in a community of woodworkers and organic farmers. Many times over the last 35 years I have been turning ideas and feelings over in my mind trying to find good concise ways to communicate them when I happen to run across something of Gary Snyder's that says exactly what I was trying to say, so I give up my clumsier words and use his. Here's something for today:

SMOKEY THE BEAR SUTRA
BY GARY SNYDER

Once in the Jurassic about 150 million years ago, the Great Sun Buddha in this corner of the Infinite Void gave a discourse to all the assembled elements and energies: to the standing beings, the walking beings, the flying beings, and the sitting beings--even the grasses, to the number of thirteen billion, each one born from a seed, assembled there: a Discourse concerning Enlightenment on the planet Earth.

"In some future time, there will be a continent called America. It will have great centers of power called such as Pyramid Lake, Walden Pond, Mt. Rainier, Big Sur, Everglades, and so forth; and powerful nerves and channels such as Columbia River, Mississippi River, and Grand Canyon. The human race in that era will get into troubles all over its head, and practically wreck everything in spite of its own strong intelligent Buddha-nature."

"The twisting strata of the great mountains and the pulsings of volcanoes are my love burning deep in the earth. My obstinate compassion is schist and basalt and granite, to be mountains, to bring down the rain. In that future American Era I shall enter a new form; to cure the world of loveless knowledge that seeks with blind hunger: and mindless rage eating food that will not fill it."

And he showed himself in his true form of
SMOKEY THE BEAR

A handsome smokey-colored brown bear standing on his hind legs, showing that he is aroused and watchful.

Bearing in his right paw the Shovel that digs to the truth beneath appearances; cuts the roots of useless attachments, and flings damp sand on the fires of greed and war;

His left paw in the mudra of Comradely Display--indicating that all creatures have the full right to live to their limits and that of deer, rabbits, chipmunks, snakes, dandelions, and lizards all grow in the realm of the Dharma;

Wearing the blue work overalls symbolic of slaves and laborers, the countless men oppressed by a civilization that claims to save but often destroys;

Wearing the broad-brimmed hat of the west, symbolic of the forces that guard the wilderness, which is the Natural State of the Dharma and the true path of man on Earth:

all true paths lead through mountains--

With a halo of smoke and flame behind, the forest fires of the kali-yuga, fires caused by the stupidity of those who think things can be gained and lost whereas in truth all is contained vast and free in the Blue Sky and Green Earth of One Mind;

Round-bellied to show his kind nature and that the great earth has food enough for everyone who loves her and trusts her;

Trampling underfoot wasteful freeways and needless suburbs, smashing the worms of capitalism and totalitarianism;

Indicating the task: his followers, becoming free of cars, houses, canned foods, universities, and shoes, master the Three Mysteries of their own Body, Speech, and Mind; and fearlessly chop down the rotten trees and prune out the sick limbs of this country America and then burn the leftover trash.

Wrathful but calm. Austere but Comic. Smokey the Bear will Illuminate those who would help him; but for those who would hinder or slander him...
HE WILL PUT THEM OUT.

Thus his great Mantra:

Namah samanta vajranam chanda maharoshana Sphataya hum traka ham mam

"I DEDICATE MYSELF TO THE UNIVERSAL DIAMOND BE THIS RAGING FURY BE DESTROYED"

And he will protect those who love the woods and rivers, Gods and animals, hobos and madmen, prisoners and sick people, musicians, playful women, and hopeful children:

And if anyone is threatened by advertising, air pollution, television, or the police, they should chant SMOKEY THE BEAR'S WAR SPELL:
DROWN THEIR BUTTS
CRUSH THEIR BUTTS
DROWN THEIR BUTTS
CRUSH THEIR BUTTS

And SMOKEY THE BEAR will surely appear to put the enemy out with his vajra-shovel.

Now those who recite this Sutra and then try to put it in practice will accumulate merit as countless as the sands of Arizona and Nevada.

Will help save the planet Earth from total oil slick.
Will enter the age of harmony of man and nature.
Will win the tender love and caresses of men, women, and beasts.
Will always have ripened blackberries to eat and a sunny spot under a pine tree to sit at.

AND IN THE END WILL WIN HIGHEST PERFECT ENLIGHTENMENT

...thus we have heard...


(Gary Snyder has given permission to reproduce this free forever)

Cultured?

I spent the years from 14 to mid-40's avidly espousing my supposed Scottish heritage (25% of my genetics, if that), playing bagpipes, dressing up and parading around. I remember the almost erotic excitement that people would often display when they first happened on a group of us pipers all kilted up--they would babble on about their Scottish ancestry, where their grandparents came from, etc. The desire to belong is very powerful. Of course those of us in possession of the magic spell, the ones piping and dancing as if they were born doing it--we could look down on the newcomers with a mixture of paternalism and mild disdain. We possessed the True Culture, we were SO HOT!!

All of us are taught to revere culture--both in the meaning of "high culture" like symphonies and in the meaning of "ethnic culture" like what do you do at holidays and what language your grandparents spoke. Ethnicity is our identity and our aspiration. Eating your great-grandmother's plum pudding at Christmas makes you feel all warm and fuzzy and not just from the booze in it. So how far back are you comfortable going? That plum pudding is nice, but it's pretty much just the other day. Go back along the chain of your mitochondrial DNA to your 100X great grandmother--what did she cook? Would you like it or recognize it? How about 1000X great--what did she fix for the tribe? Did she even cook? Let's have raw bloody antelope for the holidays! Where were the people of your ethnic group 10000 generations ago? Were they mammals? Probably not . . .

Going beyond culture is a major part of enlightenment. Or if you don't like the word "Enlightenment" substitute "Heaven". How can you get into heaven if you are still looking down at beings who don't eat the same food as you do at Christmas? How can you be enlightened if you even feel Christmas is a great big deal? And this is more than just toleration and fellowship with all the wonderful rainbow people of the world. Rainbow people make me ill (got to get over that . . .) Start practicing fellowship with snails. Not ants--that's too easy, they bustle around in tribes like humans. Brother Flatworm needs a Christmas card this year.

Biologists have poked and prodded poor flatworms a lot. They are easy to study, being so simple-minded. Basically they seek food and sex and avoid unpleasant stimuli so they act just like humans. Can you get your mind into a compact enough place to imagine what being a flatworm is like? It shouldn't be too hard if you focus on your basic deep desires (food and sex). So what would a flatworm have to do to become enlightened, to move up a notch in the next rebirth--or to become an instant Flatworm Buddha? You, clinging tightly to your highbrow culture, might look down on those lower life forms and inner city residents who don't know classical music. If Brother Flatworm could meditate and transcend, he/she (they are hermaphroditic) might be able to imagine or understand or feel (not hear--they have no ears) one note, or even one sound. That would be enlightenment for a flatworm. So what must you do? You could start by leaving behind all the quirks you have learned that you think make you are You. It's OK to still savor your grandmother's borscht, but don't feel smug about it. Beets and their ancestors have been growing in the sun and then passing through the gut and being defecated out by your ancestors for millions of years. What makes your grandmother's mashed beet concoction so special? What do you think makes you so special for eating it?

How big are you?

Today a friend sent this link regarding a new State of Montana initiative to help alleviate global warming issues:

http://leg.mt.gov/css/climate_survey.asp

Although I have supported some of her past campaigns such as the one against compulsory fluoridation, and I tend to agree with her opinion on the absolute immorality of international corporations, we do differ on many things. She was urging me to take this survey and fill in “strongly disapprove” on every item because it would make all of our electricity bills go up and anyway all this “global warming” stuff is just pseudo-science.

NOT!

I took and, and you should too as it goes away on 2/29. But I filled in “Strongly Approve” on every item. That’s called diametric opposition, I guess. Is a dialog even possible?

When we consider things like air pollution, changing ocean currents, melting icecaps, we tend to discount the seriousness—after all the oceans and the atmosphere are huge and we are so small..

If you were walking through the Universe and happened to reach up and pluck off the Earth, hold it in your hand, would you even notice the thin smear on the outside, the slightly wet and slimy film that is us and all we think about? The diameter of the Earth is about 7900 miles. From the bottom of the Marianas Trench to the top of Mt Everest is only 12.5 miles, another 7 or so miles to the very top of the atmosphere. If you held the Earth like a large grapefruit and wrapped the thinnest tinfoil you could find around it with the resulting wrinkles and folds, that wrap would still be 1000 times thicker than our coating of life. If you had long legs and were wondering whether you could hop over the Atlantic Ocean or if you would get your feet wet if you stepped through, consider that the average depth of the puddle is only 2 miles while it is 4000 miles across. The water wouldn’t even come over your shoe soles. Stand on a moderate sized hill and look out over the country--you can easily see 10 miles unless the Chinese coal industry is having a heavy burn day. It doesn’t look far at all—with a good pair of binoculars you can see houses and cars, watch people driving down the road. You could walk there in 2 ½ hours. Where would you be if you could walk 2 ½ hours straight up? Snug at the bottom of our entrapped well of atmosphere, we never wonder would happen to us if we were suddenly transported 10 miles straight up. Looking across the Atlantic, the deep cold water currents that will be disrupted by melting Arctic icecap are tiny ephemeral wisps of convection, so fragile, so easy to change. The Gulf Stream which creates all the climate we have ever known in North America and Europe is just a warm glimmer on the surface of the puddle.

Here is a scale image of the earth and the moon—so close together it only takes 1.8 seconds for light to travel from one to the other, yet so tiny, so lost in space.

Then consider an object to which light takes a year to travel—the closest star, Alpha Centauri so tiny it is barely visible on a clear night. Then consider a photograph taken from the Hubble Space Telescope (orbiting only a tiny distance above us, 366 miles) of the Cone Nebulae, a place whose light has taken 2400 years to reach the Hubble. It looks like an illustration from a science fiction novel:
And the Cone Nebulae are very close in comparative terms--we can capture light and other wavelengths from things a million times farther away.

We are tiny blips in a very big place but we can’t seem to get that through our heads—we keep behaving as if we and anything we do matters at all.

Keep it all in perspective and keep recycling . . .

North American Union?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuBo4E77ZXo

This is a video about a purported plot to establish an Orwellian North American Union. Friend Kate asked for thoughts:

In some ways of course, the video is a blatant fear-mongering stunt. Remember the "Trilateral Commission"? It's not that peoples' paranoia isn't justified, but I think the truth (there are many Truths) may be that this sort of thing is a lot less organized than one might think. There is probably not an overt conspiracy among the corporate class to take over the world, they just do it by instinct. It is hard-wired into evolution for all sentient beings to maximize material gain and the richest are just the most successful rats in the rat-race. Whatever means they use to their ends of maximizing resources for themselves and for those who share their DNA, the rest of us will suffer unless we pull back and leave the rat-race. I have always said there is no lid on the maze that we rats think we are trapped in. Stand up and look over the walls. I personally couldn't care less if there was no border between Mexico, Canada and the US, etc. All such things are Culture and one of the tasks of true enlightenment is to transcend culture. It makes me sad to think of the millions (billions) who put material gain on the top of their list, who can get all worked up by politics, who let passions rule them. Yes, that is easy for me to say as I have enough to eat. There is a basic similarity and one might say even a camaraderie between the struggling Chinese factory worker who strives to get more for herself and her family and the corporate tycoon who keeps trying to get more power and wealth--they both need to step off the conveyor belt for a while.

All is Vanity . . .

Avalokitesvara, the bhodisattva of supreme compassion, hears the cries of the world, the pain of all worlds and feels great endless compassion.

What do you expect her to do with the cries? Does it alleviate the suffering to hush the child and close its eyes with motherly embraces while murmuring that everything will be all right? All cultures pray to the Mother—what do they want? Most want solace and to have themselves hushed to sleep with a full tummy. This does not help a being to grow toward the light. The suffering then keeps bounding and rebounding onward over lifetimes, forever. How does Avalokitesvara Kannon Qwan Yin Mother Mary help the child see that all suffering is an illusion, all praise is an illusion, all joy or lack of joy is an illusion. . .

What do you do with the things you see and hear? Do you let tastes and smells and touches rule your life? Do you make decisions based on the feelings that you allow to arise from what your senses tell you--what you are trained to think they are telling you?

Psychologists can demonstrate that your eyes will often deceive you—that although your belief in what you “saw” is unshakable it can be proven to be dead wrong. Do you still trust your eyes? Our words, our concepts of the physical meaning of these senses are crafted using these senses. How can we know they are real? The sound of the tree falling in the Forest of No Ears is meaningless. The concept of sound exists to protect beings from being hit by falling trees. It has no other meaning.

Physicists discover evidence that what we know as solid matter is only probabilities, that far from being made of particles, what we touch is made of vibrations of energy. All our senses have evolved to detect changes in energy for the purpose of taking us safely through a physical environment and prolonging our lives. To what end?

So what of music and art and sex? Wonderful things, cultural things, vehicles for our enlightenment, but not our enlightenment Not ends, but means. At our perfect attainment of wisdom we will feel as much joy in the movements of our brother Flatworm as we do in listening to Mozart. All life is Joy, all culture is narrow parochialism, all life is going the same direction, your cousins are bears and paramecium. Be part of life, have great compassion for life, see beyond life, see that all is illusion, even your seeing that all is illusion is illusion is illusion . . .