Covid Meditation--Episode Three

Approximately two months ago, on day 67 of the lockdown, I began to meditate more seriously, a resolve which has been assiduously followed. What have I learned in the interim?

1.
There are two things that I do spectacularly well. When I sit in meditation, which I've been doing longer and more frequently, I observe plain air going through my nostrils and into my lungs. After it accomplishes its ancient business of respiration, it exits, albeit modified, just as mysteriously as it entered. In and out, in and out; in my 76th year of life, I still do this with the same expertise I did when I started.

And, a fact which thoroughly delights me, I do this no better or worse than you. You might sing better than me, I might sing better than you; you might have more or fewer friends; no matter your circumstances or mine, we are expert breathers. Why isn't this enough?

2.
Before the covid epidemic, I did some volunteer work with a hospice program. The patient whom I visited, first every week, than more frequently as he got sicker, had had a tough life. At age 18, he had witnessed the murder of his mother by strangulation at the hands of his father. He was raised in a very tough neighborhood; once as a young man, he remained hospitalized for three months, having been an accidental victim of a drive-by shooting. The worst time in his life, he told me, was when he was homeless for a year in Baltimore; he said he was very near hopeless during the brutal winter of this homeless year.  That was the only time in his life during which he had occasional suicidal ideation.

Talk about a reactive depression.! Otherwise, he--I will call him Mr. C-- was remarkably upbeat. Saved by social workers, he lived in public housing for the last two and a half decades of his life. He was a social worker's dream--he never complained, and never used drugs.

If you ever got to know this champion breather, you would never waste your breath again.

Being an artsy guy, I asked him what his favorite piece of music was. It was "What Becomes of the Broken Hearted" by the Temptations:

He listened to this beautiful song on his phone over and over. It reminded him of his mother, to whom he had been very attached.

Mr. C was an amazing, unforgettable person. Everyone in the nursing home loved him. So many of the other patients complained; Mr. C. never complained.

As he was dying, I increased my frequency of visits. The last time, the day he died, he could no longer talk. I was well aware that he could still hear me--at least I thought so. Still feeling a bit guilty that I was not at my mother's side when she passed away in 2001, I shut the door, vowing to stay by his side until his last breath.

I closed the door, and kept on singing softy gospel tunes I knew he would know. How many times I sang "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot," I'll never know. Eventually a soft death rattle became apparent. As his lungs filled with fluid, I raised my singing voice level, and continued. I'll never forget the last breath of this wonderful, gentle man. His suffering was almost over; his face relaxed. 

Mr. C. had been an expert breather for nearly sixty-five years. I will miss his expertise forever.

Mr. C. had led a simple life. He was not a doctor, lawyer or accountant; he was not a mailman, salesperson or clerk. He had earned some supplemental income when he could, by helping  a friend of his paint houses. Yet Mr. C., in my book, was a towering figure. Nearly everyone could learn a lot from him. One of his favorite sayings was "Go with the flow"--the current of life kept him afloat for years with hardly a complaint on his part. 

As I witnessed his final breath, I realized why the ancient Hebrews thought that breath and soul were one. G-d had breathed the soulbreath, the ruach adonai, into Adam's nostrils. We humans begin breathing at the first cry, and end it as we breathe our last.

3.
Meditation is a wonderful way for us to know that breathing is enough. You can always fall back on it periodically; it will support you; it will make you wiser. Yes, do what you do best as best you can, but, in this highly competitive world, if you sometimes think you have failed, do what you do best with unquestionable expertise: breathing. 

Buddhism, (and science), with its doctrine of anatta, "no soul," denies the existence of an eternal soul, even in this life. The ego is a fiction! If your id is doing a number on you, remember it has no more substance than the Wizard of Oz. Peak behind the curtain--smile, and realize what a fool you've been listening to him rather than listening to your own breath.

Thank you, plants, for the oxygen. Thank you, universe, for the privilege of meditation. Who focuses on breath begins to clear the hot air that has condensed into faulty thoughts. It might take some time to achieve tranquility, but, if one is persistent, one will be rewarded, After all, you've been breathing for a lifetime. Becoming truly aware of what you're doing is the best way to become aware of what truly is. 

Choose life, as the ancients taught us. Choose relationships, not love of money or fame. Chose wisdom, not distractions, of which there are many. Once again, choose life! Periods of silence, focusing on breath, refining periods of action, focusing on deeds--

Just live justly.  Breathe!

Book Review: Quichotte, by Salman Rushdie

Quichotte
by Salman Rushdie  
Random House 2020
London
390 pages          

The late Tom Wolfe, journalist turned author, whose major novel, Bonfire of the Vanities, appeared in 1987, complained that many modern novelists failed to do enough research regarding the themes broached by their novels. If he were alive today, he certainly would not have included Rushdie among those novelists whose lack of planning and whose unfamiliarity with details is readily apparent. Quichotte is as complex and detailed as a Tibetan sand mandala.

The well thought-out many layered plot contains fictions within fictions, some of them "written" by a fictive character of the novel. It is done so well that as we open each Babushka doll, as it were, we are surprised, even delighted; he maintains this artistry to the very end of the novel as we open the last doll, and are left with, well, nothing.

This, in keeping with the Quichotte tradition, is a picaresque novel with a very complex plot. The constant progress of the story line, including many twists and turns, is very entertaining. The theme of the novel, however, is bleak. In Rushdie’s words, pertaining to  the fictive author of the doubly fictive Quichotte character:

He talked about wanting to take on the destructive, mind-numbing junk culture of his time just as Cervantes had gone to war with the junk culture of his own age.

Nothing very ambitious, then, she (his sister) said. 

                                                               --page 289

                                                     

Rushdie is being ironic here, for his novel is very ambitious indeed.

At one point in the narrative, it is asserted that only two attitudes to life are valid: one, that life has meaning, albeit a hidden one; and two, entropy wins, thus life has no meaning at all. Entropy does indeed win. The end of the novel reminded me of Macbeth’s famous lines, that life...”is full of sound and fury,/ signifying nothing.”

The novel is very much about the Indian diaspora, symbolic of the near impossibility of finding a solid home in a world where "the center no longer holds.” The main characters of the novel, including the characters Quichotte's fictive creator invents, all hail from India. They have changed their names to better assimilate—Ismail, for instance, becomes Smile—but it doesn’t really work. Even if they feel at home in the West; even if they marry Westerners, they are more than occasionally reminded that their skin tone prevents them from being fully accepted. They wind up being at home nowhere, not in India, Pakistan, the United States or Britain. This describes, perhaps, Rushdie’s own view. After partition, Rusdie’s father chose Pakistan, while Rushdie chose to remain in India. Rushdie subsequently moved to Britain. Can one imagine Rushdie at home in the England of Brexit, in the India of Modi, in the Pakistan of Khan, or in the United States of Trump? I think not.

Rushdie is an expert story teller, as evinced by the wonderful tale of Ayesha in The Satanic Verses. A parallel to that tale is the equally beautiful, if sad, story of Sancho. Seeking love like his doubly fictive father, he takes a bus where he encounters the blue fairy in the form of an old woman—the blue fairy is central to the Pinocchio tale of a puppet being transformed into a real boy; Sancho is on his way to see “Beautiful from Beautiful, Kansas” a young Indian woman he had encountered on the journey cross-country with Quichotte. (Jiminy Cricket, you guessed it, had previously appeared to Sancho in the form of an Italian-speaking cricket, the Grillo Parlante, They have lively exchanges, in English and in Italian. Ruhsdie’s humor, however, fails here, a least for me.) Just as he rings the doorbell of Beautiful, from Beautiful, he disappears, since he is no longer an integral part of Quichotte’s imagination. It is a beautifully told tale; no Disney ending here, however. The tale, like the novel, ends in annihilation.

For Rushdie, however, a story is more than just a story. If life has no meaning, stories, quintessentially human, are what give life meaning, at least on a temporary basis. Religious faith is no longer possible for secularists like Rushdie; other fictions, such as nationalism, etc. are no longer possible either. Even Quichotte’s quest for romantic love is mocked; Quichotte’s quest begins only after his so-called, Internal Event, his stroke. Prior to this, he was, apparently, more rational.

There is one exception to the belief that life has no meaning. It is the belief in some form of the Golden Rule. If life truly had no meaning, all the mean-spirited characters of the book would be as valid as the kind ones. What makes junk culture junk culture, the windmill aimed at by the lance of Rusdie’s prose, is its inhumanity, its assault on the truth that we should treat neighbors with love and kindness.

The center no longer holds, but the center is still there. There is apparently a warm ocean beneath ten miles of solid ice on one of Saturn’s moons, Enceladus. Who, standing on the frozen surface, would be aware that life potentially exists far beneath his feet? Viewed metaphorically, every lie, every conspiracy theory, buries the source of potential life deeper and deeper. 

The book offers No Exit. At the end, the main doubly fictive characters, Salma R. and Quichotte, try to escape a collapsing world by transportation to another Earth, a system devised by Evel Cent, formally known as Awwal Sant. It doesn’t work. They are instead transported to the room of the dying fictive man who created them:

He saw the first minute creature enter, gasp, and faint, its hope turning to despair… The microscopic man, the creature of the Author’s imagination, had brilliantly done the impossible and joined the two worlds, had crossed over from the world of Fancy into the Author’s real world, but in this one he was unassimilable, helpless, puny, gasping for air, not finding it, choking, and so lost.

Stop! cried the Author, knowing what would happen next, the thing he could not stop, for he had already written it; it had already happened, so it could not be prevented from happening. His heart pounded, feeling as if it might burst from his chest. Everything was coming to an end.

The end cannot be changed after it has ended, not the end of the universe, not the death of an Author, nor the end of two precious, even if very small, human lives.
     

There they stood in the gateway, on the threshold of an impossible dream: Miss Salma R and her Quichotte.
                                                                      page 390
                                                                        

Entropy wins again! This is an entropic version of Alice having fallen trough the Rabbit Hole. Here, however, there will be no vials marked Eat Me and Drink Me; there will be no Cheshire Cat, no Mad Hatter, no Queen of Hearts, no anything.

It is a tribute to Rushdie’s genius that he is able to entertain us so fabulously as we gaze into the kaleidoscope of his creation, fascinated by its many moving jewels. We are delighted throughout; most of us moderns are able to handle the bleak ending as well. For as Buddha taught in his doctrine of anicca, everything changes; most of us now are aware that nothing is permanent, everything in the universe must come to a (non-Disney) end. Even great novels.

"Small Hands Blues" Have Gotten Worse

November 8, 2016, the date during which American citizens decided who would be their next president, was, at least in Baltimore where I live, a wonderfully crisp fall day. Several hours after I voted, as the results were starting to come in, I noticed that two of the three of us gathered before the LCD screen—my wife, Nirmala, and my nephew, Ranji--looked a little nervous.  I, however, remained calm.  “Hillary will definitely win, don’t worry—The American people will not elect a pathological narcissist with non-existent impulse control and with very little to offer, other than hyperbole and populist blather."

That's a quote from a blog essay entitled "Small Hands Blues," which I wrote directly after Trump had been elected president.

I knew his number even then. After the nation's disastrous selection, I didn't expect him to "grow into the job," as several pundits predicted. I expected a mess, and that's what we got.

https://thomasdorsett.blogspot.com/2016/11/the-small-hands-blues.html

Up until the Covid epidemic, Trump enjoyed what I call the "luck of the non-Irish"--a fortunate outcome of a throw of the dice by the chilly hands of entropy. But entropy asserts that nothing lasts; winter must come, even to fools, and so it did. 

I also predicted in the blog that the white working-class, who had a right to be angry but were angry for the wrong reasons, by the time Trump's term was up, would realize that they'd been duped and would see the land of the free beyond the Trumpian pig-iron fence. This is beginning to happen, thanks to the increasing manifestations of incompetence and malevolence on the part of our president, but I expected a stampede of raging whites, rather than relatively small groups of cattle transformed back into human beings by a repentant Circe.

The Mad Red Hatter's luck has run out. During the first three years, the Union was in relatively good shape, no thanks to him. (His sole achievement during this time was a tax cut that outrageously benefited the wealthy.) Then came the Covid epidemic. (How many persons would still be alive today, (138,000 dead as of 7/17/2020), if it weren't for Trump's incompetence? Thousands!)

The liar headed the birther movement for five years before he was elected. Some 17,000 lies later,  Trump, leading us into the valley of the shadow of death, still claims we should fear no evil and proceed. 

He wants the nation to get back to work for the sole purpose of getting himself reelected.  (He refuses to wear a mask, like an overweight angel of death.)

I knew he was mentally ill from the very beginning.  The pathological narcissist whom we elected--intellectually limited, incurious, racist, misogynistic, self-centered and viciously mean has behaved abominably, just as one should have expected.

Last night, I listened to Rachel Maddow's interview of Mary Trump, whose book excoriating her uncle has just been published. Maddow asked Trump's niece if she had ever heard him use the "n" word and/or antisemitic slurs. Mary Trump looked surprised. "Yes, of course," she replied. Maddow looked very serious, as if she had brought something very hidden to light.

The man who headed the birther movement; the man who wanted the Central Park Five to be executed; the man who thought the latter group of black and Latino men shouldn't be released from prison, even after, many years later, they had been found to be innocent; the man who ordered families to be separated at the border; the man who said that there were fine people on both sides after white supremacists marched on Charlottesville, etc; should we be surprised that such a man used racial epithets in private? If Mary Trump said that she never heard a racial slur come out of her uncle's mouth, I would instinctively know that she was not telling the truth.

C'mon, Rachel Maddow.

(It would be different if, say, President Obama, in a purloined recording, had declared himself to be a Holocaust denier. A lot different.)

What annoys me about many pundits is that they act surprised or outraged when Trump, a bad man, behaves badly. I suppose that's how they earn their money.

Another thing that annoys me about pundits: when Trump talks nonsense, they try to parse his statements as if he really believed what he said. For instance, Trump claimed recently that experts have been exaggerating the severity of the Covid epidemic, and that "99% of the time" the infection was harmless. As if this ignorant man were capable of making a scientific statement! Trump meant nothing more than"a whole lot"  by his designation of "99%". Pointing out that "99%" was way off the mark is like taking a little braggart kid seriously when he claims his big braggart dad is the richest person in the world.

Taking this evil Pinocchio in the White House seriously as if he were a real boy instead of a crazy man is, I guess, how pundits make their money. To keep sane, I limit my exposure to them.

As I wrote in my 2016 blog, I had told my nephew, on the eve of the election, not to worry; America would never choose him. Yet we did. I am now a lot less sanguine about our democracy than I was in 2016. Mary Trump read my thoughts when she stated that if The Orange Impostor wins again, the American experiment would probably be over. We can't let that happen!

Or can we?

Divided, we're ruled. How about ruling instead?

I have something I passionately wish for. I am soon to enter my 76th year of life; I also have several preexisting conditions which will probably preclude living a very long life; I probably will not see this wish fulfilled in my lifetime. But I am optimistic that one day, my wish will become a reality.

I do not wish for any thing. Much less for vain things, since at my age, I realize that it is the fate of human beings to dissolve into the air like a wisp of smoke. To be somewhat vain at 40 is somewhat acceptable; to be vain in the eighth decade of life is, however, ridiculous. Old people know that entropy is paring them down, hopefully relatively slowly, like apples. Claiming to be a ruddy MacIntosh while turning into a sour crab is, however, ridiculous indeed. I'm not here to make entropy laugh.

What am I here for? Research has clearly proven that the most important aspect of life is relationships. Not fame, not fortune, but relationships. I've heard of a group of old Koreans who met daily at a local McDonald's. They ordered maybe a coffee and doughnut each and talked and talked and talked. Not like a typical American who takes a bun on the run. That the Koreans remained in their seats for an hour or so drove the management wild. Their primary interest is, of course, money. I like to think of the management as Time (time is money, after all,  as a proverb popular among the young goes)--I admire those Koreans for continuing to practice what's most important in life until Time has the audacity to throw them out.

This little essay will not stress the personal, but the political. (The personal is the political; this cliché has a point, but the personal and political are political in very different ways). My fervent political wish is this: I would like the working classes of all races to come together. I would like to see them initiate a "revolution of fairness." (Let the czars live, but not in palaces).  This would include increasing taxes, especially on the very rich and on corporations, and using the funds for infrastructure programs, universal health care, expanded social programs, etc. We need an era of vibrant unions again; workers need to participate on corporate boards and have some control over policy. This is not an exclusive list!

There are two major impediments to this view of the future: Racism and class division. We will discuss these in turn.

Racism

Let us imagine that Uncle Sam's mother breast-fed her soon-to-be powerful son. If she did, there is no doubt that there was racism in the milk. It has been characterized as our original sin. (Not very original, one must admit, since racism is and was widespread. But just as fascism was not limited to Nazi Germany, the Nazi example was so horrible that one could consider them the worst fascists ever. Similarly, America, the most powerful country of the world, was one of the last nations to repudiate slavery--it took a war to do it--and continued extreme racial injustice for decades after that, the legacy of which lasts to this this day; similarly, America may be considered one of the worst racist nations ever.

You know the history.

Recently, George Floyd became Rosa Parks. (If a Rosa Parks had refused to go to the back of the bus a decade or so earlier than the real Rosa Parks did, she would have been arrested and no one would have heard of her.  In 1955, when Parks refused to give up her seat to a white man, the times they were a changin'.)

The times they are a changin' once again. How many George Floyds died at the hands of the police before George Floyd was murdered? How many acts of brutality were never recorded on video? I shudder to think of the number,

The zietgeist is different now. First, many blacks are well educated and have positions of power; they cannot be cowed into silence. Second, just as during the Civil Rights Movement, many non-black Americans today have been protesting alongside their black brothers and sisters.

I imagine that blacks of all classes have felt Derek Chauvin's knee on their necks. It is a disgrace. It is also symbolic of the knee of opression in general. It has to stop.

It's not going to be easy.

In the nineteenth century, there thrived, for a while, the Know Nothing Party (an apt name), which opposed immigration, especially Irish, Italian and East European migration. If your name had a vowel at the end or a "Mc" at the beginning, you were in trouble. (The Protestant rulers thought that other religions would change the American character for the worse. Even in the 1960 presidential election, which I remember well, many had doubts about electing a Catholic president).

Now it doesn't matter if you're last name is Esposito, Cuddy or Smith.

Remember the fuss Trump made when he discovered that the judge presiding over a suit against him had an Hispanic surname? I think the day is coming when one will be as indifferent to names like Lopez and Rodriguez as they are now to Esposito, Cuddy, or Smith. But what if you happen to be named Jamal?

No other ethnic group in the United States--with the possible exception of Native Americans--have been the victims of such vicious, persistent racism as African Americans. It has to stop.


Class

Americans don't like to talk about class, but class says a lot about us.  Conservatives talk about class warfare against the rich, while the rich are the ones who have been waging class war against everyone else. Especially during the past forty years, which might be characterized as the age of neoliberalism. It began with Reagan, perhaps with his infamous dictum that government isn't part of the problem, government is the problem. Neoliberalism involves decreasing taxation of the rich, deregulation, cuts in social services, including transportation. Prior to Reagan, the working class might not have been doing well, but at least it kept up. According to neoliberalism, The great Market machine will supposedly drip down oil to keep its cogs in good shape. The opposite happened.

In Trump's only major legislation, the 2017 tax cut, 80% of the benefit went to the top 1%--Classic neoliberalism.

For those earning below the median income--and even considerbly higher--this is no longer a democracy.

The political scientist, Martin Gillens, has demonstrated that there is hardly a linear relationship between public sentiment and policy. The legislators more or less pass policies that the rich want, not what the public wants. This is not surprising, since we live in an oligarchy, the members of which lobby assiduosly, and usually  get what they want.

Since the 1980s, salaries and job aspects for the working poor have precipitously declined.

The working class, especially the white working class, is angry. They realize that the government has been unreponsive to working class needs. As Bernie Sanders pointed out, the working class has a right to be very angry. But they are angry for the wrong reasons. Their rage has driven working-class whites to support whites who are diametrically opposed to their interests.

A resident of Montana was asked why he and his neighbors support Trump. Because he is the only one who will look after us, was the reply.

The white working-class's alienation from the Democratic Party is partially the latter's fault. It is, of course, good to advocate for diversity, but a more frequent mention of how class warfare having produced white victims as well as black victims would help. Diversity, yes--but what about such things as the organization of labor?

Chris Hedges in his book America: A Farewell Tour eloquently addressed white working-class plight, as follows;

Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton blame the suicide rates among white males (which have skyrocketed) on what they term  "cumulative disadvantages," meaning a combination of unemployment or underemployment, the failure of marriages, the loss of social cohesion, and declining health. They argue that the "collapse of the white, high-school educated, working class after its heyday in the 1970s led to a variety of "pathologies" that fostered a potentially fatal despair.

It is not a stretch to attribute a large portion of this decline to an elite which controls legislation and who only care about themselves. What is a once proud bread-winner to do when he is left with a handful of crumbs?

Let them eat cake, say the elite. (Which they, alas! increasingly do).

The oligarchs, one of whose core principles is divide and rule, undountedly enjoy the partisan split plaguing our nation. Ever since poor, indentured whites were made overlords of poorer blacks, the elites have used the "race card" to maintain the  support of the working class.

What about my wish to see the white working class unite with the minority working class? It is not going to be easy.

I do, however, have a few suggestions.

The Democratic Party needs to address working class concerns. The party's tent must welcome working-class whites, without making any compromise to diversity. It needs to combat class supremacy as well.

Whites need to get used to black leadership. One day soon working-class whites must come to realize that an Ilhan Omar represents their interests better than does a Mitch McConnell. 

Workers must organize from the grass-roots to see to it that government is more responive to working class needs. The Citizens United ruling, for instance, must be rescinded.

We must combat voter suppression in all its forms.

We have a lot of work to do! It is my fervent wish that we join hands and work together. 

Better sooner than later!

A Spiritual Revisited

1.
My blogpost from 5/10/2017 entitled, "Music of Transformation: Analysis of a Spiritual," discussed what in my opinion was and is one of the most deeply moving, harrowing spirituals of all time, I Told Jesus.

The call-and-response text varies, but the words are basically as follows:

I told Jesus it would be all right if he changed my name (repeated 3 times)
Jesus said, the world would turn against me, if he changed my name (3x)
But I told Jesus it would be all right if he changed my name (3x)
Jesus said my father may not know me if I changed my name, etc

To the repeated calls, Jesus's responses are, in turn, my mother, my brother, my sister may not know me; it ends with a sadly triumphant singer telling Jesus that it's all right to proceed.

When I first heard this sung by The Harlem Spiritual Ensemble, I was deeply moved:

On the 2017 blog I wrote the following:

The meaning here is not something simple such as, "If I do the right thing, people are not going to like it;" it goes much deeper than that. 'Change my name' implies the complete surrendering of one's identity, so that one becomes, well, One. Individual comforts, individual greed, individual hates, individual delusions, individual sorrows--and even individual joys--all these must go. A thorough giving up of one's hold on oneself, is, as far as the individual is concerned, death.

Let us use Christian mythology here: it is the Cross.  It is imitatio Christi done with full attention, no matter what the consequences. It is not speaking truth to power; it is being truth to power. Unable and unwilling to tolerate an existential threat to its dominion, power will ignominiously toss this gem of truth which once had a name into the depths of the sea. Those that live by the sword die by the sword. Yes, said Simone Weil, but those who put it down die on the Cross.

How many people take the path which the song delineates seriously? Not many,  as we shall see.

2.
(Note: I haven't thought of this spiritual much, since I wrote the 2017 article. And there it was on my YouTube feed! One day Google and Facebook will know more about us than we do! Are we heading toward a new religion, Dataism, a huge cyber room into which we will all be subsumed, as Harari suggests? There is no privacy anymore--Get used to it, say the young. Maybe in my next life, say the old).

Although I do not share Ms. Gwynn's worldview, I respect her, find her sympathetic, and am glad  she has found a belief system that gives meaning to her life. I would characterize her faith using the Hindu term bhakti, often translated as 'devotion to a personal God.' God loves her and she loves Him; that's all she needs to know. Such devotion is a universal phenomenon, as exemplified in Bach's famous cantata, Ich habe genug (I have enough, or I am satisfied).
Jesus bears the Cross for her; she need only thank him for all the gifts of  her life. (She is recovering from a benign tumor. Why would another good person be plagued by a malignant one? That she can't answer).

The spiritual Ms. Gwynn sings is categorically different from the one sung by the Harlem choir. The way she changes the lyrics reflects her devotional worldview. At one point she sings, Jesus said it will be all right, etc. In the original version, there is no such comfort. The seeker wants to take up the Cross. Jesus answers, in effect, Are you sure? Because if you do, this and that will happen; it's going to be tougher than you think.

In Hinduism, bhakti is complemented by jnana, wisdom. Ramana Maharshi, a great Hindu sage of the last century, thought bhakti was a good path for most, since the path of jnana, as the Harlem choir well knew, is so very difficult. Maharshi said if people dedicate themselves to Jesus sincerely, eventually they will move up to jnana. Maybe, depending on the sincerity. I have seen in my lifetime, for instance, persons who claim that they are dedicated to Maharshi yet seem to be very ignorant of what he stood for. Putting a picture of him next to a picture of Sai Baba on an altar while talking nonsense doesn't cut it.

Irma Gwynn is a beautiful person who possesses a high degree of genuine bhakti. But it is not jnana.

If God asked her to obliterate her name for Jesus's sake; if God asked her to take up the Cross; if God demanded, as it were, that she throw her worldly self beneath a juggernaut, would she do it? Maybe; maybe not. The more important question is: would her God ever demand such a thing?

3.
The two major world religions that have been strongly influenced by ascetics and monks, and therefore advocate, among other things, examples of extreme personal behavior, as opposed to collective behavior, are Christianity and Buddhism.  Let us discuss Christianity first.

It is difficult to pinpoint Jesus of Nazareth, but he seems to me to have been more in the guru-mold,  rather than in the activist mold. He did not establish hospitals, places of learning, etc. He seems to have been more or less a wise man whom people consulted. A notable exception to this trend of personal salvation was his advocacy for the poor. (We moderns assume that the miracle stories are largely apocryphal; since time immemorial legends of miracles have been attributed to saintly characters of the past.)

Ascetics often demand extreme behavior. Would Christianity have lasted as long as it has if its adherents took Jesus's dictum, "Turn the other cheek" literally? We must note that it was an Aramaic trope to exaggerate in order to make a point. What exactly did Jesus mean with the assertion that is it easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven? Perhaps this was nothing more than a demand that the rich  be more generous. I think, however, he was being more severe than that. For instance, when a man asked Jesus what would he have to do to be better, since he has strictly followed the Torah since youth? Jesus advised him to give everything he has to the poor. (Mark 10: 17-31). You can almost hear the young man mumble to himself, "No way!" as he departs.)

The vast majority of Christians, like the rest of us, live in the world and have to come to terms with balancing their own needs with those of the spirit's. Nearly everyone needs to be less selfish and more other-directed, that at least is certain. But turn the other cheek while someone is about to mow you down? 

Nature demands a certain degree of attachment to self; should we ever give up our name, that is, our entire identity, and forgo self-protection completely for a cause? When this happens, it is both beautiful and deadly--and exceptionally rare.

4.
Buddhism has an even stronger ascetic tradition than Christianity. After Buddha wandered and meditated for six years, he became enlightened at the age of 35. The basis of his teaching is found in the Four Noble Truths. The first truth, that life entails suffering in the sense that craving will not satisfy even when the object of craving is obtained, is unassailable. The second truth states that suffering is caused by desire or craving, also an unassailable fact. The third truth recommends that the way to perfect peace is by giving up desire altogether, while the fourth discusses how that is to be accomplished. Perfect peace is nirvana; who has accomplished that? Whoever has, no doubt, would have no problem turning the other cheek.

Buddha was certainly on to something. A lot of our desires have an evolutionary origin; natural selection has no truck for enlightenment and serenity, only for the survival of the species. What if nature allowed orgasms that lasted days instead of moments? Those creatures would be so distracted that they would neglect the task of living, which often entails hard work; those creatures would die prematurely, albeit with smiles on their faces, having little time left over to raise families.What happens when survival is no longer a concern? You don't survive. Might as well turn the other cheek! 

What's worse is that modern capitalist culture creates desires for things we don't need, and fosters insecurity as we inevitably fail to get what we want when we want it, and if we ever do, we're still dissatisfied. Modern culture fosters competition as well. An endless parade of desires! Endless ways for paraders to come up short!

Yes, we must tamp down and eliminate excess desires. But get rid of them completely?

Perhaps Jesus in the spiritual discussed here should say, "Keep your name. Do the best you can with it."  Hard enough! A religion of balance, I think, combines contemplation and action. In other words, 'Love your neighbor, as yourself!' This involves thought and sacrifice, not suicide. 

I Told Jesus is music of transformation. It can help us approach the wisdom of Jesus and of Buddha while still remaining beings conditioned by evolutionary biology; that is very difficult to do, and that is good enough.