So Joan Sutherland has done three tremendous pieces on the myth we are in. It’s her offering right now. We think it’s valuable, helpful, and important and have decided to run a special issue of Uncertainty Club just for her piece.

At Uncertainty Club we care about the arts and the practice of Chan. The territory that links these two is myth. Contemplative practice with imagination—that’s what we’re about.

We are involved in great catastrophic events, fire, flood, hurricanes, school shootings, economic forces, refugees fleeing for their lives. These are beyond our control but we have something to do with them too and they ask for more imagination from us. So we need a vessel in which such disasters can be held, and stories that might have doors in them.

In the ancient Mediterranean world, the great myth for more than a thousand years was the story of the young Persephone being stolen into the underworld and of her mother grieving and disoriented while the earth and the plants and animals suffered. It’s still relevant today when we think of how the animals and forests are reduced and how even a country can lose part of its soul and wonder how to get it back.

Having a multiplicity of myths and images is always good. Joan’s pieces see the situation in terms of the myth of Buddhist realms. To consider this a time of the angry gods seems plausible. People shouting at the TV, people blaming the victims of shooting, all the trolling on social media, and mistaking this for a kind of freedom, yes we might be in the realm of the angry gods.

In Chan we have a myth and also a practice of seeing through myths. To see the president as an angry god is oddly consoling. If you do this, you stop waiting for him to revert to the norm and also stop hanging on his tweets in horror or hope. On consideration, even demons have Buddha Nature, so the helpful things demons do are not shocking. To see things mythically is the start of a story about where we are in the journey and how the inner work and meditation can open a path. The image is never final but it moves us along to the next image and story.

There are other helpful images too; myths talk to each other and deepen each other. The Bodhisattva accompanies people in the dark of the night. In the previous issue of Uncertainty Club, Rachel Boughton’s piece on weaving the cloth of the world speaks of images that come to visit us from another time. In that case it was from the old realms of the goddess. This myth from the old world of the goddess connects with Asian tradition and tells us what a Bodhisattva does. We are all weavers of threads. Lee Allen’s stitching of the great wave, above, is a tremendous visual display of this myth.

These pieces are long. Long form can be good, it makes a world we can live in for a while. We don’t have to hurry through; there is time. If you read all the way to the end, you get to a doorway, and to the welcome that comes with walking through together.

December 17, 2017

It’s the middle of December 2017. We’ve had almost a year of this administration, and many of us feel that the imperfect, yearning fabric of our culture and the very earth we stand upon are under assault. We’re facing a generational challenge to preserve what we hold dear about how we treat each other, and to steady a world that sometimes seems to be shaking itself apart. Our traditions ask us how we’ll respond to such a time, and our traumatized hearts ask how we’ll cope.

March 1, 2018

It was the day that began with the asura president calling African nations shitholes and ended with a presidential fixer paying hush money to a porn actress that I began to think about our country as experiencing an almost alchemical humiliation. It’s so over the top that it evokes a kind of awe, a sense that we’re in the presence of something transpersonal. And yet our humiliation didn’t fall on us like a random meteor; it has causes and conditions. It’s part of our history, our karma, our wyrd to dree, as my Scottish ancestors would say: our fate to endure, our knot to untie, our grievous wound to bind.

A time of humbling tests us mightily, but in the old ways it’s part of any initiation, any threshold-crossing from one mode of being into another. It’s the moment you put down, or have taken from you, your old habits and customs. It’s a bare field surrounded by leafless trees, where the only place to gaze is inward. Humiliation empties us out, so that we can be filled with something larger. In other words, it’s an essential step on the path to maturity. Humiliation presses a choice on us: do we accept its devastating gift, so that our transformation can continue?

But who is this ‘we’? America looks very different depending on where you’re standing. ‘We’ weren’t fine and then the asura presidency broke us; we were, in fact, very not fine in a whole bunch of ways. Perhaps our inability to mend the ways we’re broken left an opening for the asura president. When I say ‘we’ or ‘America,’ I mean it in the way Langston Hughes did when he said, “O, let America be America again— / the land that never has been yet— / and yet must be …” That America is a series of collisions between aspiration and actuality, formed by centuries of yearning, betrayal, epic successes, and epic failures — a communal dreaming by a circle of unruly dreamers. Sometimes America’s initiation into maturity seems an unbearably slow and costly ceremony, but I find, now that it’s under such savage assault, a deep desire to protect the ceremony, and its chance of completing itself.

Humiliation has the same root as humus; it’s about being brought down to earth, having your face rubbed in it. It’s leaves sticking to you, dirt in your mouth, noticing beetles and your own breathing. Is that always a bad thing? What is the wisdom of this place, of loam and small insects and the absence of our own self-importance? Humble means undefended, and undefended can mean open to new thoughts, open to the hidden places in our own hearts, and to the hidden places in the hearts of others.

In the midst of the chaos and the shouting, the virtues of humility are quiet: simplicity, receptivity, self-examination, forbearance; the capacities for regret and remorse; the desire to press our ears to the ground to discern the deeper patterns under all the noise. These virtues are particularly important now because the asura presidency too has its causes and conditions, and they are not outside us. How have we been careless about America — about the land, about people, about our obligations to the rest of the world? From our beginnings and generation after generation, different groups of people have testified to the humiliations visited upon them, and often America listens only after a long time of not listening. Is it possible that because we have been slow to take care, America as a whole is now being humiliated in a way that can no longer be sidestepped or explained away? Is it possible that, exactly because we can’t unsee what we’ve now seen, we will move closer towards our maturity?

America is a crazy experiment: larger in land mass, more complex, and more diverse than any other democracy on the planet. There are so many reasons for the experiment to fail. But what if we pull this off? If we have the courage to see the devastating gift in this humiliation, we’ll sign for this package and open it up. As Rev. Bernice King, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s daughter, said, perhaps this is a blessing in disguise, the opportunity for America to correct itself.

☸︎ ☸︎ ☸︎

But oh, the place we start from … Medieval Europeans spoke of the Wild Ride: on late autumn nights when the wind blows strong, unquiet ghosts and spirits ride out of the forest into town, wreaking havoc and scooping up anything left unattended. Not a good night to be stumbling home late from the pub. From a miasma of grievance and his magic chaos powers, the asura president has conjured a new Wild Ride. The riders are mounted on horses we’ve seen before, but this time they’ve got some fancy new internet gadgetry, and they’ve been joined by mercenaries from overseas.

But hang on a second, the townspeople have a few questions: no matter how urgent the complaint, is the Wild Ride a helpful response? Is there any problem to which authoritarianism, white nationalism, unbridled greed, casual cruelty, cowardice, or the mindless destruction of civic life and the natural world the solution? Won’t any movement that generates such things, even as byproducts on the way to some other goal, only cure the illness by killing the patient?

The answers to these questions seem self-evident to most of us. So how do we counter the Wild Ride and protect America’s initiation? If our tradition offered a suggestion, it would be about the attitude with which we approach that work: we, town and forest, are one ecosystem. We aren’t two mutually exclusive sides locked in mortal combat; we’re one country experiencing powerful forces of fragmentation within itself. And so we’d refrain as much as we could from making divisions worse, focusing on countering the forces of fragmentation rather than attacking groups of people. We’d look for ways, large and small, to begin to rebind us to each other.

Someone once said that the third law of community life is that the person you have the most difficulty with will always come sit next to you at the meeting. It made me wonder, for whom am I that difficult person? Who rolls their eyes at my approach? How, in this Wild West standoff between townspeople and riders from the forest, have we become each others’ shadows?

☸︎ ☸︎ ☸︎

And so we come to the question of grievance. At times in our history, the expression of grievance has been prophetic, in the ancient sense of showing us a terrible truth and demanding that we become what we must be. Prophetic grievance fuels civil rights movements, and we’ve responded by imperfectly but steadily enlarging our sense of who America is, group by marginalized group. Some people, largely those who used to be in the majority, have reacted to that expansion with a different kind of grievance, one that insists it’s the only legitimate one, with the right to define who America is.

When that kind grievance is exploited by a demagogue, you get an election in which millions of people feel justified in voting what they think of as their self-interest, even though they know that their vote will come at dire cost to someone else — lots of someone elses, actually. That was a sorrowful day in our history. And does anyone really believe that those voters will be better off in the end? Asuras have a kind of reverse Midas touch: everything around them turns to iron and regret. I’m afraid the people who believed the asura president would champion them will experience their own humiliation before too long. After all that has happened, will it still be possible for us to meet then, on the bare, humble ground, and find a way forward together?

I don’t always know how to hold this. Sometimes it helps to think of grievance in its old relationship to grief, as a cry of sorrow and loss. Grief that finds no consolation sometimes becomes grievance that’s wielded as a weapon. People speak words at the memorial service they can never take back, families fight over the will. Ta-Nehisi Coates suggests that some white people are experiencing some of what black people have always endured in this country, and they don’t like it. Imagine if their response had been, instead, Oh, we get it. Not knowing how to hold this, not completely trusting the stories I try out as explanation, I keep asking, What pain is so great that it lashes out like that? Can I listen, even here, for strands of prophetic possibility?

Somewhere underneath the slogans on hats and pundit shouting matches is a mournful truth: there are a lot of ways to suffer in this life. We do better or worse, day to day, handling that. Suffering shouldn’t pit us against each other; it’s the existential condition we share. The only question, really, is what we’re going to do about it. It’s a noble question, that one, a question full of grace.

☸︎ ☸︎ ☸︎

As I write this, the asura presidency looks like it’s beginning to implode, and I’m surprised by a new concern tugging at my sleeve: if it does, will we heave a sigh of relief and turn away from our initiation? Will we make the mistake of believing that our humiliation was only about the presidency and not about us, too? I don’t think so; the forces for prophecy and protection that have arisen feel stronger than that. Whatever comes next, I hope we stay faithful to this threshold moment, which we would call endarkenment. In this part of the ceremony, endarkenment means accepting the devastating gift of humiliation, opening to the grief of others, acknowledging our shadow. It awakens the desire to make amends where amends are needed. We can’t force endarkenment on others, but we can take it on ourselves. We have done it sometimes, we Americans, and we can do it again. But deeper this time, more thorough-going, wholehearted. It’s past time. Let us, for all our sakes, get this done.

☸︎ ☸︎ ☸︎

Next : Figures as lacking in nuance as the asura president feel like cartoons, but they can also be archetypes. What might such a figure represent in our own psyches, and why does it disturb us so much?

 

September 2018 – I thought I’d finished Part III of The Myth We’re In this spring, but it wasn’t finished with me. There’s a ‘step by step in the dark’ quality about the times we’re living in, and so I wanted to say a few words in that spirit about this revision. The Myth We’re In is an extended meditation on the current administration from a mythic perspective, and writing it required me to be immersed for a long time in a difficult subject. I’m no longer much in the way of robustness, and towards the end the project was wearing me out. When I reread Part III in light of the kidnappings and incarcerations at the southern border, it clearly wanted a rewrite … and, say it with me, fortunately I’m here to do it.  –JS

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In this second year of the reign of the asuras, I notice the stirrings of a shift of attention, as though we’re shaking off some of the shock and feeling a weariness we’ve come by honestly. Enough already, no? But many people can’t turn away, because of the stakes for our own lives and the lives of those we care about, human and otherwise. And many people are just not willing to yield the field to the fire-setters and the shoulder- shruggers. It’s our field, too, after all. If we’re going to stay in, we’ll be staying in not only on the levels of politics and culture. For many of us, this time puts us right up against some of the most ancient and intimate struggles about what it means to have a human life.

I’m wondering if, beneath the surface disturbance, exile is what this time of the asuras is about: the primordial sense of banishment that comes with embodiment, that sense of expulsion from the original garden, or fall from the heavens onto the hard and ungiving earth. Not just once a long time ago, but again and again, in a life full of losses and leave-takings, disappointments, bewilderments, and terrors. And exile not only in relation to the cosmos, but inside ourselves as well: are there parts of ourselves that seem irredeemable, forever separated from the love of others, even from our own companionship?

And I’m wondering if one of the shadowed gifts of this time — a gift dropped, thank you very much, from the talons of raptors into our wary palms — might be the necessity, if we want to stay in, of engaging in a new way with the ancient questions of embodiment and exile.

The asura president is so impermeable and invariable, so outside our experience of the complicated ways people usually behave, that he seems more like a symbol than a person. As a person he is a failure of breathtaking thoroughness, and yet he has an enormous impact in the world and on our psyches. It’s as though something transpersonal is happening here, as though an archetype of exile has appeared among us. The asura president has always been intent on banishing people and dividing our country from the rest of the world, but what glinting knife out of a Philip Pullman novel so severed his soul that he could separate parents and children who seek asylum at our gates? In that moment, he became the asura of exile.

Because we’re dealing with an archetype, its qualities and characteristics are exaggerated to get our attention. The job of an archetype is to pursue us until we acknowledge the small, candlelit truths hidden inside its strobing neon package. Earlier I explored what some of those truths might mean for us as a country. Now we’re turning to what they could mean for our own heart-minds. In everything that follows, the question is whether we recognize for ourselves any truths hidden behind the archetypal display. If we rescue them, is it possible that they could rescue us from the archetype’s pursuit?

☸ ☸ ☸

We spoke before of the old stories, when gods and asuras lived together on the peaks of Mount Sumeru, and the gods grew tired of the asuras’ constant belligerence. So the asuras were cast from the heavens, landing at the foot of the mountain, in our world. That sense of a fall from paradise into a world of sharp elbows and gutting limitations is a pretty common one among the great human stories, a way of explaining what Buddhists call dukkha, the unsatisfactoriness of this dream of a life. Some at least

of our yearning for enlightenment, heaven, nirvana, utopia, and the lost city of Atlantis comes from a desire to wake up in a different dream, the paradise we hope is our true home.

The asura of exile looks upon the world into which he’s fallen and sees only wasteland, because there is only wasteland within him. From the self-banishment he renews every day, he turns a face towards us made of the pains of embodied life: its cruelty and indifference, the relentlessness and capriciousness of the many ways there are to hurt each other. He confronts us with what we sometimes fear about the world, and other people, and ourselves.

But we who do not see only wasteland, are we too in exile? Is the world a fundamentally dangerous place, as the asura needs us to believe? If it is only dangerous, we must fight to protect ourselves from it. If it is something more complicated than that, other ways of spending our time open up, other configurations of heart and mind. What if the world is, instead, incomplete, even wounded? What if, rather than our adversary, the world is something in need of our care? The archetype’s grip loosens, and we trade the idea of a dangerous world for the risks of love. We begin the journey home, and the wounded world becomes something our lives might help to complete.

The asura of exile has decided to fight with everything all the time, which would be comical and then tedious if it weren’t so damaging. I wonder if this is a cartoon version of some of our own fights, which up ’til now have seemed more nuanced and compelling than this. I’m not talking about the genuine struggles that bring dignity and depth, warrior marks and cracked open hearts, but the lesser fights — the knee-jerk reactions, unexamined prejudices, killing certainties, poisonous suspicions, defenses against no known enemy — that distract us from the struggles that matter.

If we’re willing to concede a little something about the nobility of our lesser fights, we might gain something worth the loss. The asura of exile shows no signs of exhausting his own fight with life, but maybe he’ll exhaust ours. Can we take the epic chronicles of our conflicts quite as seriously once we’ve lived so long with the cartoon version? Might we, in some worn down, holy moment of homecoming, say Enough already, no? This is too much to ask the bruised world to bear, and I just can’t keep it up anymore.

The asura of exile has an inward-gazing face, too, and it unerringly finds the part of ourselves we fear will bind us to our suffering: the monster within that will never transform, never become a protector of others, or even of ourselves. Is there a part of ourselves we’ve tried to banish, unable to offer it a home, even on the outskirts of our hearts? This is the old wound around which new wounds gather, the original sin, the hard mass that stops us from breathing deeply, what’s behind the uneasily closed door or the elaborate battlement. It’s what outlives therapy and meditation and new diets, what we believe is in the way of happiness. Are we destined to carry this unborn thing around with us forever?

The asura of exile pushes on these ancient bruises until they throb. We too are wounded, we too are incomplete. We too are in need of our care. But we have one thing the asura of exile lacks, and it is the one thing that makes all the difference: we can be rescued and mended by love. The love that comes to get us — all the ways we’re welcomed, cared for, consoled, and inspired by people, nature, art, the vastness. The love we pour out to others, the warmth we let seep into the discontented places inside us. The mending will likely be incomplete: we will bear scars. But we’ll have refused self-banishment and chosen the risks of love, chosen this wounded world as home.

☸ ☸ ☸

The asura of exile is full only of exile, but we are not. We also carry home inside us — not just as a memory of paradise lost, but as a felt experience of what any moment might open into. We know what it’s like when the habits of exile drop away, leaving us, simply, returned — to ourselves, to others, to a world that goes on forgiving us for finding it unforgivable.

Perhaps we’re all survivors of a shipwreck, but it is possible to save what we can from the waves to furnish the huts we build together on the beach. Perhaps it is enough to say: I don’t know why the boat sank. But I am home here, on the beach, with the silver spoons and tattered sails and casks of hardtack we salvaged from the wreck. We build our huts, hang the majestic, useless ship’s wheel on the wall, sit out under a sky filled with stars. It is a beginning, and the stars are beautiful.

Shipwrecked Odysseus washed up on a beach and prayed for mercy, which found him there. Rilke said we should repay that mercy by praising this world to a blind angel, spirit of that place we were never actually expelled from, who walks among us but needs to be reminded, because her eyes are filled with interstellar night, of the small wonders of our beach. Take the angel by the hand and show her, take yourself by the hand and remember: “Perhaps we are here in order to say: house, / bridge, fountain, gate, pitcher, fruit tree, window …”¹ How poignant — and how essential — the simple recitation of the facts of the gate and the fruit tree are, in this time of so much lying.

And they, in turn, will recite us: the merciful facts of this dream of a world whisper our

names, anchoring us here, against the winds of exile.

A man I knew a long time ago was co-owner of a boat. He was out of the country once when he received a rather startling telegram from the other owner: “DON’T WORRY | STOP | SALVAGE OPERATIONS UNDERWAY.” Don’t we sometimes feel as he did, in this dream of a world, on this shipwreck beach, that a previous, essential message must have gone astray? Isn’t that ghostly message from a lost world, the one that contains the most important information, what we spend so much of our lives yearning for?

And yet here we are in a world made of second telegrams and salvage operations. To salvage means to save. Who is saving whom? As much as we might feel, in a time like ours, that we move from one salvage mission to the next, are we not also touched by the world’s own saving operations? We sing small songs of mercy and praise, and hear them sung back to us; we make home and welcome others to it, mend what can be mended and find new uses for the broken. From time to time, we put aside worry: salvage operations underway.

A world in which the first telegram has gone astray is by its nature incomplete, and the ways we keep bumping into that incompleteness can give rise to sorrow. The asura of exile cannot bear that sorrow and so remains marooned on the other side of salvage operations, paralyzed by an immature rage. One of the most powerful antidotes for whatever rage, disappointment, or sense of betrayal we too carry within us is to let that sorrow ripen.

Years ago I worked with someone who was a forceful personality, not necessarily given to detail. She was very depressed. One night she came to me and said she’d become aware of a miraculous thing: sitting in a group of people, she’d suddenly noticed that everybody’s chest rises and falls as they breathe, just as hers did. When she said that, I knew she was going to be okay, not because she was suddenly un- depressed, but because her sorrow was becoming tenderness.

That tenderness knows the world is incomplete, but not in the sense of lacking something. The world is not-yet-completed, a work in progress, full of the moving persistence of things in the face of struggle and setback. It’s so hard, being alive, and we go on doing it. Every day sunlight sweeps across the planet, and in a wave following the sun, people and animals and plants get up and say, One more time. Our

mature sorrow can feel and bear that, wants to feel and bear that, because it’s the truest thing, and we are part of it — this stubborn, shining belief that this is our home.

Every day the animals and plants of our own hearts also get up and say, One more time. Should we abandon any of them as beyond our redemption? Should we drive the small goats of our misery out into the desert, and has doing so ever actually relieved us of our sins? Can we instead call them back home, whisper even their names to the blind angel?

Can you love a broken world? Can you love your own broken heart? Do you see how these are deeply moral questions?

☸ ☸ ☸

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• From The Ninth Duino Elegy, translated by Stephen Mitchell.

© 2018 Cloud Dragon : The Joan Sutherland Dharma Works