Why George Bush is not Christian!

What is the central lesson of the Christ’s story? He had enormous power as demonstrated by His healing, his exorcisms, what happened to the temple after His death yet He only used it for the good of others but His most important miracle is His non-use of power. In doing this He gave us a model for empowerment and love of others through self-sacrifice, literally, since He killed himself through that non-use of power. He allowed His fellow humans to be His torturers and murderers by choice, to express and feel humanness at its most horrifying. Since the later part of the New Testament is devoted to Prophecy, in its meaning as predicting the future, we can assume that Jesus knew there was no hope. He was not waiting and hoping for the people to change their mind and discover their gentleness and justice to free him. He gave himself to us knowing what was coming as an act of love, thus offering us the possibility of being loved for our complete humanness in all its flaws and limitations.

The story of the fig tree is a case in point (find this story and put in the ref.). The lesson says if you have faith you can do anything (text ref), but the fact is he killed a tree because it didn’t have fruit when he wanted it. It does seem he acted out of irritation but the other thing about the story that makes it so powerful is that he was human and had some foibles. Others say it was to teach a lesson in the power of faith. It does prove that He could kill at will meaning He could have walked away from the Crucifixion whenever he wanted to but didn’t. He proved that the greatest power for, we humans, is the power of sacrifice empowering others.

Sacrifice without choice is not true sacrifice, it can be rationalising victim-hood. To have choice you need power. Love is when you are willing to give up your power for your beloved, that is, sacrifice. There are many who believe they are sacrificing when they are actually being selfish, when they are actually acting from fear and a sense of powerlessness, from a desire to protect what power they have.

This is where it gets complicated because honesty and wisdom suggests there is always a pay-off for the sacrificer even if it means a greater sense of meaning, and/or the protection of your love by protecting those you love. It could be said, based on the internal logic of the Bible, that Jesus’ power of prophecy would let Him know that His sacrifice would create eternal life for Him as a great religious figure, and besides death was of little consequence as a result of His Godhead and so His sacrifice could be said to less generous. In a way the humanist approach which takes away the myth and its miracles leaving a man standing before the power of Rome makes His sacrifice far greater. He stands for women and men speaking truth to traditional elites arguing for a different way of living, the next step in civilisation towards justice, compassion and a deeper understanding of power.

George W. Bush, the president of the USA, sees himself as a follower of this great story. The central practice of Christianity is to embody the Christ, live life based on his example, to express His spirit. The other practices like praying, singing, and the rituals of community are secondary to reading the Bible, immersing your self in the story and its values. Since the central story is one of rebellion against even the normal ways of rebelling, that is non-violence. Pacifism was the ultimate rebellion against Rome’s warrior identity. It is clear that this was one of the primary reasons why Christianity ticked off the normally tolerant Romans. Throughout Christian history, since it took power under Constantine in the fourth century, true believers have struggled with this part of the story the values expressed and asked of them.

In the past the rich and powerful devoted enormous resources to places like monasteries, the church and charity without actually questioning or doing anything about the fundamental structure of the systems they lived in. The historically recent advent of democratic systems is a beginning for social systems based on Christian values but they arose out of the aristocratic traditions and have mostly create more dynamic hierarchical systems which are based on who you know, what you do and luck, rather than who you were born from, though this is still obviously important. Different systems approach the fundamental value of being alive in different ways, that is the minimum lifestyle the poorest and most disadvantages are given and allowed by the systems they are living in.

President Bush expresses the rebellious aspect of his Christianity with his distrust of systems such as the justice arm of government, of what he and his crew call the leftist elite in the media. His use of power in response to September eleven was and is decidedly Old Testament, an eye for and an eye. His approach to the poor and disadvantaged is a version of social Darwinism that is based on a misunderstood simplification of evolution. The survival of the fittest is the most basic rule, but fitness is different for different animals for one thing and it is not always or only based on strength as defined by muscles and intelligence. Fitness is also decided by sexual partners that is why for most animals the males are highly decorated to the point that beauty becomes dangerous for them because they make them more obvious to predators. These animals sacrifice themselves for the right to reproduce, love if you like for family. For human beings cooperation is central to our fitness for survival, this is why communication is so important to our brain to our body structure.

For two thousand years “love thy neighbour” literally meant, to most of the Christian world, only the people next door, your allies, the people who agree with you, other Christians and of course the powerfully useful. This allowed them to ignore “turn the other cheek”, “the meek will inherit” and the “the rich will have the same chance of getting into heaven as a camel going through the eye of a needle”. There are many who want to use Christian teaching to justify and promote the power elite and so come to all kinds of interesting rationales for ignoring these last teachings. A common example is that if you are rich and beautiful then you have been blessed by God and deserve what you get, which conversely means that if you are poor and disadvantaged in someway then you deserve that too. Of course they may exist to test your compassion and therefore willingness to live up to the Christ’s example for wise use and non-use your power to empower others.

Jesus and the early Christians pacifism was a direct attack on the fundamental social and political structures of Rome. Christian political and social actions therefore mean addressing the whole system of injustice and fear that leads to the need for projected violence as an expression of power and in resisting it. If you carry out violence in that resistance then you are pulled into the aggressors’ game plan and rules of contact. You can display your power without violence if you address the psychology of the person. For instance, you could block and dodge hits without retaliating and standing your ground fearlessly talking to them with a clear understanding of what they are trying to get from their attack.

If the US had acknowledged the moral clarity, safety, security, organisation and building the religious Iranian and Taliban governments offer the Irani and Afghani peoples, even with their short-comings (as important as they were), then the children of middle class and rich Muslims around the world would have less to justify their terrorism. The attitudes and behaviours of these governments to human rights, women and other issues were no better or worse than many corrupt dictatorships they have done business with for most of the life of the Republic and are on a par with life at its beginning. The Christian thing would be to take their insults and attacks then address their real needs – a sense of self determination, honour, food and infrastructure, membership in the community of nations and peoples, a clearly ethical and principled approach to business and foreign relations.

This means applying this last to all equally, including Israel.

What happens at the moment is a continuation of the fear-based dominance and submission system which means friends that kowtow or have some other payoff for the rich West (like the alleviation of guilt in the case of Israel) get special treatment over neutrals and others who refuse to participate. These Governments and their followers operate from a strong moral base that doesn’t, didn’t, follow rewards systems marked out by money and the US reading of the world status system. They are reactions to poorly managed and very violence and corrupt experiments in following western material secularism, including Capitalism, Communism and Fascism. Given the chance they could, hopefully find their own way to a society based on real justice. The English civil war/revolution, when a king was killed in the name of freedom, in the 17^th century imposed a radical puritan fundamentalism, not unlike present day Iran and Afghanistan, yet laid down the values that led to the American war of independence a hundred year later and their civil war after that. It has been nearly a thousand years for the values of the Magna Carta, five hundred years from when the printer and Luther (though he didn’t believe in it himself) help to lay down the values that let democracy spread across Europe. The funny thing is when he said that every man has a direct relationship with God and needs no priest to speak for him attacking the centralising hierarchical system of Catholicism he was presenting a Muslim value central for nearly fifteen hundred years. To expect the Middle East and other places to come to political and social structures based on justice, equality and fairness in fifty years is plainly simplistic. If we gave them the space for self-determination they may come to a social system that expresses the true values of Islam – justice and fairness – in the way that democracy tries to express the empowering truths of Christianity, of Christ’s sacrifice - where the rich and powerful step down for the greater good theoretically acknowledging equality with the poor and disadvantaged in deciding their destiny. We don’t succeed very well, so why do we expect of them what we can’t achieve ourselves.

We, especially Mr Bush, his crew, and the other powerful people of the world, have to be careful that we don’t become like Sunday Christians paying obeisance to the rituals of democracy for the social comforts it offers then just go and do whatever sins suit us for the rest of the week safe in the knowledge we’ll be forgiven in church next Sunday. The principles aimed for by democracy can only work if they are adhered to without hypocrisy so the powerful must bow to them even when it involves sacrifice. Letting empowerment for the poor and powerless work in the United Nations for instance involves considerable less sacrifice than that given by Jesus, the Christ, but the payoff in the so-called “War on Terror” would be great, helping to win one of its crucial battles the defeat of hypocrisy in the application of fairness and principle around the world.

A Yoga Of Transitions

By Christopher Michaels

© 2006

Death is the greatest transition we will all experience. What do we transition into? This is a puzzle many have spent enormous amounts of time and energy exploring. For some it is clear, there is an afterlife. Of these some believe it is permanent, others see it as a temporary stop over before returning to life. There are those who say there is nothing following death. To me none of these are as important as the role of death in our daily lives as a confrontation with our limitations, with the boundary of the Self. The fact that you are sitting where you are right now reading this means you had to take certain actions to be able to do it – learning a language which means being born into a particular cultural context, having certain tastes to want to read it, turning a page or using a computer, any number of things – is also an expression of this obvious reality but without the confronting difficulties of death.

We experience emotions as reflex responses that take us over before we think and choose. We feel some emotions are controllable, while others aren’t. Over time our responses change to situations. We experience the effects of insight, when we’ve felt one way about something then discover new information and our feelings change. How does that work? Until we learn how this process works we use discipline to control a disjunction between our feelings and our actions in response to them as a way of managing the social effects of these reflexes. This approach is like the cliché of the horse and the gate.

Everyday needs sleep. For most of us it is a form of temporary yet trustworthy death, the ultimate rest from living. We occasionally wake up with messages from it – dreams. If we pay attention then we can feel the process of sleep overtaking us. Many people just fall into it letting go. When it doesn’t come “naturally” (by which we usually mean without our control) at the time we expect it, we run for help from authority figures offering chemistry. Rather than seeking to understand its process so as to be able the choose sleep regardless of the state of mind/body we are in.

Change is the one dependable aspect of nature and life. We are continually adapting to it. In Cognitive Psychology there is a term “cognitive dissonance” which is the time and state we experience in adjusting when our expectations don’t match events, especially in the behaviours of other people and ourselves. In Buddhist the source of suffering is thought to have related sources in that it is the marriage of holding on to things or running from things, that is a problem or conflict between how we want them to and the way they are. The essence of which is our ignorance of the way things are and the mechanisms of our own participation in them.

A Yoga of Transitions is a process of exploring and developing insight and practices for understanding and affecting the way we participate in change. What in English is called “the Tibetan Book of the Dead” is better translated as “the Book of Transitions or Changes” because although it is used in funeral rituals it is more important as a training manual for developing your participation in death and therefore change. The word “bardo” in the original Tibetan title refers to transition states, or to simply states of being or mind, it is also sometimes used to refer to the soul or that part of our nature which is released from the body at death. In the desperation for consolation in the face of death most focus on the story as literal, which may or may not be true depending on your beliefs, when its deeper power is as a metaphor. Clearly in Tibet most take it literally, though many monks understand the deeper use when initiated, but that doesn’t mean we have to. In fact we need not take our participation in this book any further than as a pointer to the considerable insight that no matter what you believe death is an important experience worth understanding and preparing for; though its intensity and deep subjectivity and finality may mean that this last is practically impossible.

Even sceptical atheists should be willing to approach it with an open mind if they have the scientific attitude that ultimately knowledge is based on experience. Although the truth of these people’s beliefs, like so many of those they scoff at, is hypocritical because their knowledge is mostly based on the belief the reality is what can be shared with others through languages – including mathematics. They discount subjectivity and the feelings and experience we have that are hard to communicate and prove. If you face one of these people and they are in love ask them to how they prove it to themselves and their lovers.

Dying is such an enormous and deeply subjective experience that we will never be able to prove or communicate it to others in a way that is beyond doubt, though many will gloss over this by saying they have definite undeniable experiences as a basis for their beliefs about it. This is to avoid the power and wonder of mystery. Your beliefs about it must therefore be subjective and based on faith this being said it remains a metaphor of great importance and power for our relationship with and participation in life. Asking people what they believe about it can be insightful and help foster serious communication but can also quickly end the conversation because of people’s discomfort with the subject.

From the point of view of life, death is the greatest change we will face. Seeing it as a transition is a very positive way of looking at it, even if you are focusing only on the physical transformation of your body into manure. So change’s great metaphor is death. Regardless of what you might think and believe about what happens after death understanding your responses to suffering, loss and grief, the unknown and the unexpected is what death can teach us who remain alive. Because when you lose someone who is important to you, a family member, a lover, a close friend, you die with them in the sense that you have to create a new life, a new you, with their absence. Your destiny you fantasized worked and planned for changes. Some might say the death was part of your destiny but that is to try to escape the feelings you have with rationalisations pointing to a very cruel world that has consciously set you up for suffering.

Daily life is in a state of continuous change thankfully it follows patterns which can help us avoid focussing on it. Most of the time the patterns are clear enough that we can trust our knowledge coming out of past experience, thoughts and analysis. Life is really the process of adjusting to, taking advantage of the moments when complexity causes unexpected and even unpredictable events. These represent opportunities for insight. You can explore your reactions and why they are what they are.

Simply focus on perceiving change first and foremost. Watching, feeling, listening, smelling it then there are the changes in your thoughts as they flow, and the feelings that result and give birth to them. Feelings are when thoughts and perceptions become whole states that often result in action or the need to not act though you want to resulting in inner conflict and an examination of your values. At some point your role in the experiences, your choices and the limits on them, your affect on the change will become clear. The most intense emotional experiences in which you feel your choice is minimised – such as when you lose a Beloved either by death or say divorce or something similar – will push you to really understand death and its deepest meanings for life.

Seeing such important experiences as lessons can present a danger that goes unnoticed by so many, it is the danger of dissociation, disconnection and avoidance. Suffering is part of life, it is natural. Allowing it to be part of passion, of deeply experiencing living, changes the way you place yourself in life and your relationship with it. The complexity arises when you realise that avoiding suffering is also natural and reasonable but breathing into it, allowing it, accepting it as a measure of your love, of how much they are part of you, their importance to you, that they deserve your suffering and the future you participate in and create as a tribute to them.

A Yoga of Transitions is about learning the way you transition through what you think, the sensual details of how you think, the way that thought and feeling interact to create each other, noticing their conflicts, their interrelationships, their sources in the past, in fear, in desire, in your need for status and in your sense of an identity, a self separate from your world, the way your choice/will operates in these processes and its limits. It uses the techniques of traditions that offer insights.

It offers a different experience of and definition of self, being. If you are not your thoughts, emotions and states, rather you have, use, choose and are chosen by them then who are you, where are you, how do you experience you, who is making the choices or non-choices? Can any word(s) come close to the experience? Do you answer it quickly and easily with a cliché of your beliefs, shorthand like the soul for example, which can help you avoid actually experiencing it by sitting with uncertainty, with the dissociation and loss of not knowing, of infinity? Nirvana is the ultimate transition, it can be the ultimate death – the death of the soul as it gives up its separate identity for reunion. The atheist idea of no God, no soul, of death as a material reunion with a physical universe isn’t that far from it though it doesn’t address the existence of consciousness as a special state of existence, which it may not be.

A central exercise is to imagine your death, the process of dissolution including and focusing on the physical decay that horrifies us so that it is a taboo across the world. Many of us want to escape this experience by keeping our attention solidly on the spiritual rationales that protect us from the limits of life. We can use this as part of the process of sleeping, which for some will give them nightmares because if you can get beyond them then you can use the transition to sleep with it vivid hypnagogic experiences explore the possibilities deeply. We can practice bring daylight consciousness into the night time world of dreams – a daily experience of profound transition through different states which are highly sensual but not always materialistic. As a great Buddhist writer wrote 1500 years ago a dream apple is different to a physical apple though in the dream we may not notice. So how can we tell when we are dreaming? Transcendence is not the rising above the muck and mire of life as many would have it rather it is a side ways step to an experience of both up and down and waking and sleeping so that you get that intense experience of lucid dreaming, or astral dreaming, being awake in asleep.