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Summer 2003

NAMASTE,

What an unholy mess!

My country has invaded another country, bombed its people, and allowed centuries of archaelogical and cultural treasures to be destroyed, while the overwhelming majority of the citizens of the world take to the street to protest what they see as illegitimate aggression, greed for oil, and geopolitical imperialism. Meanwhile a terrible despot is shot and starved his own people, using them as human shields, and claiming kinship with those he has heretofore either ignored or slaughtered. Whatever your viewpoint on the war, only a deranged person could be happy about this huge explosion of hatred, violence, and suffering.

Furthermore, as it always does in these things, truth gets shattered along with the lives of people. We are told that we are a peace-loving country and that we are waging war to maintain peace in the world. Care to count how many wars we've been involved in during our relatively short history? And how do you maintain something that's already gone? As a major justification for our preemptive attack we were told that Iraq had a nuclear weapons program. Now it looks like they didn't. We were told that this whole thing would be a "cakewalk". Now, "It will take as long as it takes". And all the while, in a farcical display of chutzpah, Saddam claimed innocence and imminent victory. Journalists and commentators on all sides are denied access and vilified if they present unfavorable information or ideas.

While the lies, evasions and misrepresentations expand, as they inevitably do when the stakes are so high and controlling public opinion is essential, trust evaporates like a rain puddle on a hot summer day. We saw it thiry-five years ago in another war far from home. Here in the "homeland", fear becomes imbedded in our day-to-day consciousness and makes us malleable, ripe for manipulation. We can't ask questions or we become targets of suspicion. We can't disagree or we are unpatriotic. Legitimate debate disappears in the need to be "unified" and "show our support". We are told that we need to relinquish more and more of our rights and protections because we are at war, and that this will be necessary for our security. Oh, and by the way, since we are at war not just against Iraq, but also against all terrorists and those who harbor them, we will be at war as long as there are terrorists. Got any guesses as to how long that might take? When was the world ever without terrorists? Of course, blatant lies, state censorship, and official intimidation were the order of the day in Baghdad for many years.

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Meanwhile, the rest of the world wonders who's next. We have pulled out of a number of international agreements and treaties (ABM), refused to join a number of others (Chemical Weapons Ban, Global Warming), and denigrated the UN, "Old Europe", and any government or organization that dares to question or defy us. We are isolating ourselves by paying lip service to international cooperation and responsibility when it suits our purpose (Geneva Convention) and ignoring or trashing the opinions of others (Geneva Convention) when it doesn't.

I tend to ignore alarmists, of which we always have a plethora. Hyperbole and fear mongering do nothing to shed light on a situation and usually only create division and distrust. But responding to an uneasy feeling of deja vu, I re-read Orwell's 1984 this past February. I found it alarming. No, I don't think we're there yet, although from all we've heard about Saddam's Iraq, many of the scarier aspects of Orwell's totalitarian society were already in place. Here in America, there are no televisions in our house to watch our every move. And we still have elections, sort of (DC, FL, under 50% turn out). But more and more security cameras, detention of citizens without due process, stricter control of the dissemination of information, increased governmental secrecy, blatant doublespeak (WAR IS PEACE), fear as a primary means of controlling the populace, continuous war as a means of instilling fear and hatred: these elements of Big Brother's society Orwell described are creeping out of the shadows and beginning to take root in our own country.

All right, so what are we to do to reduce fear, violence, hatred, falsehood, and ignorance?

Many answers are possible ranging from bomb the terrorists (after all, they do contribute in a big way to all of these things we want to reduce); to take to the streets to make your voice heard; to turn off the TV, go about your business, and hope for the best.

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My suggestion, not surprisingly I suppose, is to practice yoga. That doesn't preclude doing something else. But what it does do is increase the likelihood that whatever other actions you undertake, you will do so with more energy, more intelligence, more compassion, and more awareness. Because whether your practice consists of performing postures, working with the breath, meditation, serving others, prayer, studying scripture, or more likely, a combination of some or all of these things, an underlying thread through all of them is the development and nurturance of awareness. We need awareness above all else.

We have got to pay attention if we are to maintain our health, our equanimity, our discriminative faculty, our inner security, and a broader perspective than our own individual self-interest--qualities essential to making things better. These qualities are under serious assault at the moment. Postures, conscious breathing, and meditation can help relieve the stress we all feel right now. Reducing stress and tension can free up more energy for positive action and enable us to proceed with a better sense of balance. Any or all of these yoga practices can reveal to us our connectedness to what is happening. They can ready us to open our hearts and allow our natural capacity for compassion to reveal to us how to act from a place of love and wisdom.

We need to pay attention to hear what we are actually being told, what is really happening around us, to opinions and reports from all viewpoints. We need to question those who would tell us what to think, to go past the glib slogans, the catchy sound bites, and superficial grandstand gestures, and turn over all the rocks we can. We need to engage in real dialogue, which is a search for truth rather than a battle of preset opinions, first within ourselves, then with our family members, and then with the broader community. We need to watch what people do, not only what they say. We need to think seriously and deeply about what kind of world we are creating for our children, grandchildren and great grandchildren, environmentally, fiscally, culturally, politically, intellectually, emotionally, spiritually.

And when all of that has been set in motion, we must act. "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing," Edmund Burke warns us. Beyond advocating being present by practicing yoga, though, I have no intention of prescribing a course of action for you. That must come from your own heart and mind. We are way too quick to turn over our responsibility for thought and action to someone else (e.g., Congress - Patriot Act), to look to others to fix things. Voting, speaking out, giving of our time and money are obvious avenues, but the specifics are yours to discover. Paying attention, exploring, questioning, and seeking what is real and true are at the heart of yoga, and if brought to bear through practice and devotion, will lead you to your own way. Although there is plenty of room for doubt, despair, and disappointment these days, one thing I'm sure of: yoga is an unparalled gift for finding your way in interesting times.

       

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