Not so long ago I caught a snippet of a story about a U.S. drone attack on insurgents in Pakistan. Turns out we killed some villagers including a handful of kids. These things happen, right? The story explained that the U.S. government apologized and offered to pay reparations. A dead kid’s parents would – at least in Pakistani terms – be made rich in lucre if not spirit.
Everyone who reads this blog no doubt is an intelligent individual. You’ve been exposed to the whole “Oneness” thing countless times, probably understand something of Karma, of the Golden Rule. But for most of us, these are mere concepts. You read the words, perhaps nod at them knowingly, and go right back to ignoring their true meaning. And you suffer for it.
Your mind labels everything. There is a tree. Here is a pencil. It is made of tree. The mind does this to navigate a busy world. But in doing this it – pardon the pun – misses the forest for those trees. Chaos theory teaches us that a butterfly’s wings influence the weather a thousand miles away. Physics reminds us that every particle in the universe exerts gravitational force on every other particle. The organic meat of ‘you’ one day will feed other living things.
The Oneness of existence is everywhere we bother to look. It is positively screaming the news – at itself, of course – and we disparate little imaginary beings go right on imagining we are separate and apart from it.
And so back to those Pakistani children. We, the righteous ones in the US of A, the ones carrying out God’s work and the work of freedom and humanity and justice and so on, we did that. But we had to, you see, because of what the Afghans did on September 11. The way they flew innocent people into buildings and Pennsylvania farmland and burned and crushed thousands of others. The drones are an unfortunate side effect of our efforts to stop those marauding Mideasterners from doing more harm to “innocents” elsewhere. But those in the Mideast argue that for as long as they can remember the West has been invading their lands militarily and commercially, sucking away their natural resources to live extravagant lives and at the same time despoiling their way of life with our culture of sex and violence. But, counters the West, we did that because when we first arrived in the lands of Arabia you were little more than warring nomads in need of a civilizing influence and….
Karma. That drone strike kept the great Karmic wheel turning. Now it’s their turn again. And then it will be our turn. And so on.
Jesus tried to hammer home this message in as many ways as he could. If someone whacks you across the cheek, give him the other one as well. If a man steals your coat give him your shirt too. Why? Because what is happening to you is your Karma. And the only way to stop the wheel is to stop pushing it. Stop reacting.
There are immense, unseen forces at work in this universe – forces that you and I cannot possibly hope to understand. But those labeling, conceptualizing minds react and point fingers and keep that Karmic wheel turning and late at night those same brains wonder why there is such suffering – why does God let bad things happen to us good people?
In my teens or maybe early 20s I read a poignant article about the Israeli-Palestine issue. The writer ended the story appropriately enough at a funeral for a man killed in an Israeli airstrike – or maybe it was a Palestinian attack – does it matter, really?
Anyway, the writer wrote of gazing at the man’s son standing at the edge of the hole about to swallow up what remained of his father, about the agony etched in the boy’s face, and about how the writer at that moment knew – truly knew – that he was watching the birth of the next Palestinian ‘freedom’ fighter and that that same boy, in the not-so-distant future, would perpetrate an act that would end with still another child standing at the edge of a funereal abyss waiting to keep the wheel turning.
