December 2019 final December

MOVE TO THE LIGHT
ZEN PHILOSOPHY WITH BILL WALZ
“Be a light unto yourself.”
— Buddha
Buddhism is very different from Christianity in
that rather than the “light,” the good and perfect,
being embodied in a demi-god-being bridging the
realms of the Divine and the worldly while humanity
exists in the profane world of “fallen,” Buddhism
holds that what is true and good is in the
nature of everyone, for that matter, in everything.
The Buddha is not meant to be a the object of
worship, simply the model of a fully realized human
being. As a very logic-based, rather than magic-based
religion, Buddhism simply teaches that
it is logically impossible that the perfect harmony
that is the Universe is not at the very core of every
manifestation of the Universe, including humans.
This, of course, presents a problem for us, as
clearly there are destructive forces in the world
which cause us to recoil. There is the dance of life
and death, the wolf killing the fawn, the virus bringing
horrid illness and death; there is cancer and
famine. There are terribly destructive earthquakes,
hurricanes and wildfires caused by lightning. There
is pain and suffering. We feel that this cannot be
light; this cannot be harmony and good.
There is also a particular kind of human darkness
and evil beyond the realm of Nature’s
catastrophes. There are Hitlers and Charles Mansons,
the evils of hate, war and vicious criminality.
There is also all the everyday petty meanness,
cruelty, dishonesty, and hurtfulness that people
inflict upon each other, while society seems to
be organized around the mundane heartlessness
of corporations and bureaucracies. It is right to
ask: where is the perfect harmony, the good and
perfect, the light in all this?
Buddhism teaches that while within us is the
perfect harmony of the Universe, just as it is within
every squirrel and bird, there is a problem in
that in humans this core of harmony gets covered
over with social/cultural/psychological conditioning
telling us all kinds of crazy things about who
we are and what the world is. We do not experience
ourselves within an infinitely connected,
harmonious and balanced universe. Rather, we
experience ourselves alone and struggling, with
but a few tenuous connections of family, friends
and affiliations which all too often feel broken.
Buddhism calls this Dukkha – a unique kind of
suffering experienced by humans caused by
our misperception of ourselves in separateness
and our clinging to an identity and value system
based in this separateness. This is a violation
of what Buddhism calls Dharma, the Way of the
Universe or Nature, with its infinite interconnection
and interdependence. Our light is obscured
and our harmony upset, but Buddhism, and
all true spiritual traditions, point out that while
the light may be obscured, it is not, cannot be,
extinguished, for, and here I move into mystical
language, The Light is who we are.
Life needs death, Creation needs destruction;
they are inextricable. This is Dharma. The difference
in Nature is that all death is in the service of
Life; all destruction is the necessary making way
for creation. Hurricanes and forest fires caused
by lightning are natural occurrences that cleanse
and clear away so that new growth can occur.
An ecology needs predators to maintain balance
so that the herbivores do not strip away vegetation
causing imbalance that will lead to the reimposition
of balance through death by starvation.
To the surprise of many, the reintroduction of
wolves into Yellowstone Park has reestablished a
balanced ecology where all species flourish more
abundantly. Life moves to balance. Always.
But humans do not destroy and kill within the
laws of harmony and balance; they clear-burn
and clear-cut forests, forever destroying ecologies.
They callously, thoughtlessly, industrially
raise, slaughter and process animals who never
experience a moment of freedom or comfort in
their short lives. They make war on each other
and Nature. They steal, swindle, lie, cheat,
abuse, kill and destroy so as to make and take
more for themselves, and this creates imbalance
in The World - it creates dukkha. Cynics, nihilists,
and some atheists point to this enduring fact of
human history as proof that there is no transcendent
intelligence, no balance, no hope, no Light,
yet, they typically neglect that it is NOT true that
we are moving inexorably toward darkness. To
the contrary, history proves that we are moving
toward The Light, and that The Light has always
been with us and within us.
The nihilist view neglects that for thousands
of years humans lived in magnificent and rich
cultures on the American, Australian and African
continents in complete harmony with Nature. It
neglects that Western and Asian history has
moved from tyrannical and violent monarchical
class systems into ever growing democracies,
being pulled by the light of reason and compassion
to move their societies toward justice,
fairness and compassion, no matter how much
further is still needed. The Light is in us and
pulls and guides us as human collectives and
as individuals, even while the darkness misleads
and confuses us. This is the dance of the human
experience. What seems undeniable is that the
Universe has given us just a bit more Light, for
otherwise, all would have been completely lost
long ago.
As it is a commonality of all religions to call
us to move to The Light in whichever way the
religion depicts it, perhaps we can reframe the
entire notion of religion to that which calls us
to our basic “religious” task of uncovering this
basic ground of goodness and bringing it into the
world, whether we consider ourselves identified
with an organized religion or not. Perhaps we
can make our religious task to be that Light unto
ourselves that Buddha called us to when darkness
and confusion surround us so that we can
then bring this Light into the world. Our journey
into healing can be found it would seem, individually
and collectively, not through adding on more
complicated psychological, religious or spiritual
jargon and practices, more political or economic
‘Walz’ continued on page 23
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