Maybe it is Now: Tibet and Hong Kong: Mouse Swallows the Dragon

I sit here in my Yellow button down shirt with my gray tie and wonder if this is the moment. If this is where the subtle reality shifts into the gross reality, where the cracks become visible and the dam begins to actively leak, and then collapse. The naming of the Umbrella Revolution is also a very interesting and shows a symbolic relationship with the Tibetan culture as well. The Parasol in Tibetan Buddhist practice is represented as a protection from spiritual defilement analogous to the protection from searing heat of the sun (I am sure that you could use this to represent as an umbrella to protect against rain etc. as well). One was also pretty fortunate to be able to afford a parasol and this represent the fortune of someone able to be see that defilements and seek shelter from them.

What is it that they are protecting? What is the Umbrella Revolution going to do?

A seed is a catalyst to the tree, if it is more specific the seed of an apple tree produces an apple tree. It cannot produce a pear tree. Thus we examine the causes, the conditions, and the intention of those that practice and we can, through the only way we can from the side of the Other, their practice. We know it by what they do and say. I watched as young children really, no more than 20, pick through heaps of garbage placing items in different piles. I wondered what they were doing. Then I realized that they were separating the garbage from the recycling. I then saw another group sweeping the highway. One was interviewed and he said, "We are citizens of Hong Kong. We don't want to see it destroyed. We want to show that we care about this city." He went on to say, "we put up these signs," they said, in the translation, 'Sorry for the inconvenience caused by blocking the traffic.' Amazing really. Revolutions, and revolutions in China have been so bloody, heaped with bodies, when both sides have decided to use the futile seeds of violence-which bring about a fruit no one usually wants to eat.

This is why I have thought that Tibet is so unique, and so imperative to our human psyche. I have written about it before so I wont be too verbose for fear of losing the reader. But Tibet is important because reality is really just a paradigm (not Reality). The paradigm is made up of what has been done and these are the points of reference to develop the environments of our communities. Why Tibet is amazingly important is that, perhaps, the first time since India, there is a chance that there is a revolution that does not descend into violence. That there is a change of mind that shift the paradigm without blood. Oh, we know, that India eventually fell into this. Gandhi Ji has often said he 'failed' in this way. But, in his greatness, he was the leader of a movement that showed that non-violence was not only a way, but the only way, to be able to humanely engage a wayward enemy. One cannot expect, like I have pointed out above, to produce anything but violence from the seeds of violence. It is not that Non-Violence will never produce violence, there are too many seeds at play to say that, but it gives it the best shot, it weighs the equation a bit more to one side. Tibet is another chance, and frankly, an even better chance than India was. It is much smaller in population, the religious and ethnic makeup is not as diverse, and there is a leader that the vast majority of the population within Tibet and without identify as a Buddha. We will follow. He has proven himself in the various crucibles of this world and has shown that he believes in the worth of human life. When asked if he was even mad, just a little, at the Chinese for taking over his country he replied, "they took my country why would I give them my mind as well?" If you knew where this arose from it is not that he means that we remain neutral them as well. It means that we thank them for being our greatest teachers, teachers of patience, love, compassion for how can we measure these except for in their opposites? We look at them as grateful students, as loving recipients of a wonderful teaching. This does not, though, mean, as Gandhi Ji has pointed out, that we cannot confront. We will and have.

This leads us to the Umbrella Revolution. We have a chance here to be able to enact this change, perhaps. To engage it in the best of our selves. To even engage the Chinese populace through HK and be able to give them their heritage back. I have often thought China would come looking to Tibet for that. They have a long, long, history of Buddhist though, practice, of philosophical traditions of Virtue which were tried to be eradicated. As they move forward toward such wealth, at least some, they will soon, hopefully, find out what Americans who do not have this history, have found out-Materialism without purpose but Material ends is cold, inhumane, and awful for the Human. It breeds a perpetual stomach for consumption is the only way. It does not jibe with logic, reason, or any other form of inquiry to maintain this trajectory. While America will have to create it, China just has to remember it.

Be well
G

the revolt in revolution

I do not like revolution, not really. I am not a fanatic at the fringe just waiting for the Revelations to occur and the fire to fall from the heavens. I do not want to race about hacking things off or, god forbid, raping anything that I can shove my penis into. No. I am particular where I guide my penis into. It is a smart penis, I mean this in the trademarked sense; comparable to the guided missiles are often ballyhooed can sent through a window. This is, apparently, a testament to its accuracy. I tell you, my penis is more accurate than that and doesn’t get half the press. I digress.

When I think of the glee, that some write about, about the devolvement of the individual, mostly men, into are worst energies. A sort of gelatinous goo of reified testosterone and bad parenting. I am puzzled. Oh, I have felt this a time or two, mostly when I was salting slugs or blasting bugs under a rock with pilfered Black Cat firecrackers. I see that glee. But if I look at it, it is only the glee of a particularly cruel child that I believe all of us have been once or twice or thrice in our lives. Some of us continue to be one, or to live off of this particular energy, but most of us, I believe, move on to some other form of melancholy.

What one is left with if they believe that humans will act this way is the belief that one does not act accordingly in high stress or chaotic environments. In my experience people become more themselves when they are in a chaotic environment, it is a magnifying experience. They do not become other than themselves but more themselves. Our systems in place, and large portions if not entirely luck, have made it so that this magnification of our beings is necessary but muted. The coward at our job is cowardly in a small, silly way, the sadist is sadistic in similar ways. Oh it can be in larger ways when one garners more power, but individually one cannot sway enough to do it in a large scale. One needs a idealogy and willing acolytes to do this. But the individual, Stalin etc., by his bare hands could not engage this cruelty larger than his finite animated corpse could touch.

This coward or sadist when the environment collapses the system then magnifies their personalities, or at least, from my experience and what I have read, this becomes the case. The coward is Coward, the sadist, the Sadist. However, in my experience most people are more neutral than that, a long swatch of neutral. Not that they haven’t chosen a side but the very act of not choosing becomes a side. A monumental blandness. This again does not mean that they cannot be ‘fun’ or even say a witty thing or two. My goodness, just look what goes for politicians-you haven’t met a more witty bunch of folks who can party like no tomorrow.

The danger of this blandness as a side is that it becomes forgetful of its own self. The constituent parts of the system, which are the system, start believing, because of their stunning self imposed impotence, their impotence. The system rises as ruler and reality. This reality and ruler has to perpetually move, it is in motion all the time because the factual nature of the lack of a ‘system’ that is apart from the ‘parts’ but the masses must have it. So they put such huge efforts in believing it. This goes from large systems such as governing states to smaller like communities.

My neighbor once told me, as we first moved in, the only brown folks in the neighborhood,

“We don’t do that here,” in regards to a request to my neighbor to be quieter in their parties on a Thursday night. I did not tell him explicitly that I work until 10 with either my ill father, paid work, or my children-and that a wall rattling bass is not conducive to my sleep. I replied,

“I am always skeptical of one that tries to pit me against a ‘we’. I don’t know you, let alone my neighbors, yet, and until I do I will not give you that point. The, We, when it is not done correctly, honorably, or honestly, if it is not based on a virtue respecting the absolute worth of both parties, then it is a hateful thing. It is a thing that even when it doesn’t cause genocide, murder, rape, is the system in which it will happen. The ‘we’ of no responsibility is the ‘we’ that has killed untolds of innocents.”

I must admit that he had said, ‘we don’t do that here,’ to my wife and I had three days to prepare my answer to him.

So that is the system we have. The We, the We of inaction, the We of bland acceptance, the We of herculean effort to become enslaved by a hypothetical conception. It is because of this that there must be a revolution to reshape, for a time, that actual systemic way of thought. If one will not accept this individual revolution and enough individuals refuse, then the blandness must be used to be able to sway them from their current infatuation with another better one (best is only possible through the individual).

When is this to be done?

The term revolt is within the term revolution. At least to me. It is here that I am confronted with the idea of revolt. This revolt is not based upon some passionate, heated, emotion. In fact, I would say, that for the most, it cannot be. Passion, in its existent form, is unstable. It ebbs and it flows, and yet the sustainability of such a level of vehemence is highly unlikely. Revolt, I would better say, is based upon a deep disdain and, to a certain level, dynamic disgust. I say dynamic here because the nature of reality is that it is eternally dynamic and this dynamism is only bounded in the name of efficiency and practicality-I do not rename my child each moment even though they are not the same person, even biologically, they were 1 second ago.

A dynamic disgust coupled with disdain (a more stable emotion) are the twin roots of revolt. To be revolted at something, a system, needs refreshing, because it is rather vehement term (not necessarily passionate-I am revolted by chunky vomit but I am not passionate about this revolt). This refreshing comes from the dynamism of a particular system, education for example, and the effects that come from this systemic causation. I am revolted by nearly everything that comes out of it. I have dynamic disgust whenever something ‘new’ comes from it. That this system is arisen from a causation that causes me a great deal of disdain for it is the more stable emotion that remains. Disdain.

This disdain has lead me to the thought that this system is no longer tenable in any moral or humane way. It cannot be ‘reformed’ in how this is normally defined. Reformation from a subversive (working within a systems construct to be an opposition force within the system) standpoint is not useful in this way because the rot is entire, it needs to come down. When revolt leads us down this path to this realization it leaves us with the answer of Revolution.

It is interesting, to me, that this both means the revolt of someone, somethings, against a dominant whatever as well as to go around, to revolve. Because something revolves does not, inherently, mean that one arrives at the same spot in a larger scope. It is all perspective and reference points. For example, a car tire revolves when it drives but the car, if it is the point of reference, is not in the same place as it was previously when the wheel made one full revolution.

We live in an era of almost immediate change, at least in the West. But we are a creature of a different time with the capacity to give the impression of changing-but we are not happy within this change. There is a difference between falling within the spectrum of change that allows for a positive growth of an individual and the act of survival that is outside of that spectrum. Because both individuals have similar biological features; the breath, they eat, they work, does not mean these individuals are the same.

We must revolt. In our small and large ways. In our disdain for what is even called ‘ideal’ within this system we must. It does not have to be this way.