Good morning!
Due to the abnormal weather we have been enjoying cool wet conditions with
abundant greenery and vibrant flowers here now, while other places are afflicted
with record heat, wild fire, drought, pouring rain, flooding, and land slides. There
was nothing, but grass in the yard here when we moved in, but now we have dense
plants thriving and variegated animals playing. So, please enjoy strolling and sensing
the peacefully prospering life system here.
Here we have now practitioners for four, three, two, one decades, cultivating and
verifying flowers and fruits of practice of their lives and hearts, just like cultivating
and verifying our lands and habitats. We have been reading Dogen’s Yūji, Possessing
Time. He mentions the virtues of experience and the virtues of practice.
I forwarded Chomsky’s informative commentary on the really existing capitalist
democracy (RECD) titled “A Roadmap to a Just World” to our listserve. He does
not discuss in detail whether capitalism and democracy are compatible, but what
he describes there clearly tells them incompatible: lower 70% wealth scale
population having no policy influence, but only 0.1% get what they want, which is
not democracy, but plutocracy.
He gives the roadmap of RECD, more of its failures, and for the future, dark shadows
under it, two particularly ominous ones: environmental catastrophe and nuclear
holocaust. He shortcuts the former, as it is clear it is occurring. He cites many
opportunities to eliminate the latter’s threat, not acted on due to the dogma of the
U.S. hegemony. Such sole supremacy can never be compatible with the salient
system security and sure survival.
He mentions the two components of the Magna Carta, the source of the Anglo-
American laws and modern democracy: the Charter of Liberties, which has been
dismantled, and the Charter of the Forests, which is for the protection of commons.
The latter has been dismantled by the capitalist dogma of privatization – the tragedy
of commons – commons of community of all. Privatization is creating the pyramidal
power poisons.
Our modern civilization (from civitas, city) is forced by five fictitious bodies of
nation, corporation, media, education, and religion, all infected by the five maladies
of militarism, materialism, money-ism, me-ism, and mannerism, essentially stiff
sectionalism. We must have the prognosis shift from the triple poisons to the triple
learnings, essentially wholly wholesomeness of all with all – beyond divisions such
as nationalism, and capitalism.
8/18/13
Note: 1. Noam Chomsky: A Roadmap to a Just World:
http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/18946-focus-a-roadmap-to-a-just-world
2. The “prognosis (Sanskrit: prajñā, Pali: paññā, Japanese: hannya) shift” is to
attain prognosis or awakening from the delusion of separate self, independent
eternal self substance from the limitless life system in Interdependent Co-origination
through the triple learning of sīla, samādhi, and (usually translated “morality,
concentration, and prognosis or insight) countermeasuring the triple poisons of
delusion, craving, and anger. This fundamental fallacy is illustrated in the parables
of the Buddha’s blind men groping for an elephant (cf. Plato’s men in the cave). This
can be partly saved by particular-universal category or class level,
ex. Individual< national< human being<living being, etc.
