Today I thought that I’d share excerpts from two of my books.
This first excerpt is from my last book, Death: The End of Self-Improvement (published in 2019), and this part is from the time in the early 2000s when I was living in Chicago:
I remember listening once to a German Jewish survivor of the Holocaust, a friend of a friend of mine, as she recalled how on Kristallnacht many of Hitler’s men who had to demolish the Jewish homes were in fact their neighbors. In many cases, they only pretended to destroy things, carefully and tenderly turning some beloved piece of furniture on its side, pretending to carry out their orders and destroy everything. I’ve always been fascinated by these ambiguities. In hindsight, it all looks so black and white. But in reality, it never is. In reality, we are all some strange mix of oppressor and oppressed, darkness and light, capable of amazing acts of love and horrific acts of cruelty.
The next day, I was out walking and passed a man with a leaf blower. I hate leaf blowers. They are incredibly loud and offensive machines blowing leaves temporarily from one side of the street to the other—an absurd cosmetic undertaking that wastes fossil fuel, creates noise pollution, and accomplishes absolutely nothing of value as far as I can see. I was instantly filled with aversion. Then I saw this happening, and suddenly it was comic—this Mexican immigrant with his incredibly loud hose doing this utterly absurd task to feed his children while on the other side of the street this middle-aged, white princess out for a walk fumed in self-righteous rage. The comedy of life. The banquet that includes Republicans, Democrats, racists, xenophobes, people with loud machines, people with chemical and biological weapons, people who think George W. Bush is a good man, people who think he is an evil man, people who are billionaires, people who dig their graves for minimum wage. What a banquet. What will we be served? The vegan entrée or the veal?
Not knowing if this banquet has any purpose. Not knowing anything except that you have mysteriously been invited. And apparently, so have all these others. And there is no way to leave the table. Here you all are, the infinite faces of God, finding your way toward love.
Any true meditation practice is humiliating and disappointing because you can no longer believe that you are better, that if you had been in their shoes, i.e., if you’d had the same conditioning, the same nature and nurture, the same life experiences, you would never have… bombed Iraq, gassed the Jews, driven the Palestinians off their land, tortured a prisoner, abused a child, or engaged in factory farming. You know that you’ve played all the parts and you still do.
— from my book Death: The End of Self-Improvement
The second excerpt is from Painting the Sidewalk with Water (published in 2010). That book is a collection of talks and dialogs from public meetings I held, mostly in Chicago, between 2004 and 2006:
The sound of rain is so magical, isn’t it? All those delicate, wet sounds – trickling, splashing, gurgling. Rain expresses everything I’m trying to say so much more elegantly and simply. We could sit here and listen to it. Or maybe we can listen to these words that pour out of our mouths in the same way we listen to rain, without expecting them to save us, without trying to understand them, without wondering what use they have or what purpose they serve, without analyzing and dissecting them, but simply with a kind of open enjoyment that appreciates them just as they are – playful sounds like rain.
Of course, unless we’re hearing a foreign language we don’t understand, it is virtually impossible to hear words as pure sounds in the same way we can hear rain. Words instantly create a whole world in the imagination. That’s the beauty and the magic of words, that magical ability to materialize things in the mind, and this mental materializing happens as naturally as the rain.
If we have been meditating for a while, we may have the idea that the rain is something natural and good, and that thoughts are something unnatural and not so good. Rain is spiritual; thoughts are not. But is this true? Or is thought simply appearing here like everything else in the universe, all of it one seamless whole arising? Are thoughts, skyscrapers, moon rockets and cluster bombs any less natural than bird cheeps, ant hills, beaver dams and asteroids?
Can we see that the mental movies that words unfold in the imagination, the pictures they paint, are simply another appearance in consciousness that is essentially no different from the sounds of rain and the colors and shapes of this room? There’s nothing inherently problematic about words, thoughts or imagination. They can generate enormous suffering, but that suffering is as natural as viruses, bacteria, volcanoes, and tornadoes. The vaccines we create and the systems of yoga and meditation we invent are all part of nature as well. Thinking is part of how the universe is functioning, and seeing through the thoughts is also part of how the universe is functioning, and all of it is happening as naturally as rain. All of it is one seamless flowing whole.
I saw a cartoon once where there were two cavemen and one said to the other, “I’ve got a great idea. Let's divide the world up into little squares and sell them.” That’s thought. And we may think that real estate development was a good idea or a terrible disaster, but actually, it's just something humans do, the same way bees make honey and ants build hills and squirrels gather nuts. Humans sell real estate and pave over the planet.
The ants are doing their little job, the squirrels are doing their little job, and human beings are doing our little job. And we really don’t know the larger purpose of our little job, if there is one, or how our being here and doing what we do fits into the whole universe any more than the ants know any of that about their little job. We think we’re a whole lot smarter than the ants, and relatively speaking, we are, but we’re still totally clueless when it comes right down to it. The parasites and viruses are doing their jobs, the cancer cells are doing their jobs, the hurricanes and black holes are doing their jobs. We can evaluate and judge and label some of these activities disease and some of them health. That is part of what this thought process does – it sorts, evaluates, judges, ranks, organizes and categorizes, and that’s useful in many situations. It’s a survival system. It’s part of what is happening, and it is as natural as the earth circling the sun.
We can’t grasp this happening or pin it down. The sound of rain, the listening silence, the aliveness of being here – it speaks for itself. Everything is unicity speaking – the chairs, the clouds, the squirrels, the rain, these words, the words of George Bush, the bombs falling on Iraq, the airplanes hitting the Twin Towers – the whole show is unicity speaking.—from Painting the Sidewalk with Water: Talks and Dialogs about Non-Duality
I’m back from my semi-retreat, which turned out not to be very retreat-like, and the task of replacing my aging computer is still in process. There will be a few days, probably in mid-November, when I’ll be offline, but for now, I’m back. The autumn here in Ashland is beautiful—gorgeous colors, colored leaves blowing through the air in the wind gusts, cooler weather, many trees already bare, winter coming…
Love to all…..
Thanks particularly for the first excerpt, Joan. It could not be more timely. <3
I wish I could be grateful for the invite to the banquet. I feel that the inability to leave the table or least rearrange the seating is what I focus on lol