The Mad Monk Manifesto. Yun Rou

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СКАЧАТЬ human domination. When regarding ourselves, let’s focus on compassion and community instead of on gratification, self-aggrandizement, and excess. In this way, we rectify ourselves, and restore harmony and balance to a world badly in need of both.

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      Energetic exchange is the overarching principle of all human interaction, and there is far more energy in feelings than there is in facts. The sooner we accept emotions to be more powerful (not better or more important) than facts, the sooner we will achieve beneficent government, realistic and effective politics, and a frank understanding of what makes us tick. This represents a move away from the doomed, rational way we try and define ourselves, towards the hot, wet, feeling creatures we actually are, passions and insecurities and ambitions and all. The trick is to judge ourselves less, because we are not the machines some would portray us to be, but rather to accept that we are creatures born of an organic planet and living in an unpredictable and often dangerous world. Rectification is organic; it is not the stuff of stiff, sci-fi cyborgs. When we embrace our own emotional irrationality during the setting of policy and the charting of courses, we actually cleave most closely to nature, finding balance, and relieving our changeable selves of the burdens of unrealistic, rigid, and unchanging strictures and rules.

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      If our culture has one defining characteristic, that characteristic is anger. Americans have the dubious distinction of being amongst the angriest people on earth. Anger doesn’t just lead us to kill each other, it also kills each and every one of us. We see the evidence every day. High blood pressure, blown arteries, refluxing digestive systems, insomnia, and more. How can the wealthiest and most privileged society in human history be so angry? The first answer is the sense of entitlement we get from media messages about material abundance and excess: the gap between our lives and the lives we see on television, in movies, and on billboards. The second is the unequal distribution of wealth, healthcare, and education, and the opportunity gaps across racial and socioeconomic divides. The third answer is an all-pervasive lack of awareness of our own good fortune. A dose of reality can lead to gratitude, and gratitude is the best antidote to our individual and collective rage. Grateful, we can begin to relax. Relaxed, we can begin to rectify. Rectifying, we can channel anger into energy for positive action.

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      It is long past time to erase the stigma of mental illness. Advances in science and medicine have demonstrated that depression, schizophrenia, and substance abuse are diseases every bit as organic as Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s. We should no more discriminate against someone with a broken mind than we would against someone with a broken leg. The cure to mental illness starts with compassion and forbearance on the part of the patient’s family, then proceeds to placing the highest priority on their care. Compassion is a key element of the awakened, rectified life.

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      While there is a definite role for certain traditional hallucinogens—particularly those from the shamanic tradition—in advancing the growth of consciousness, the dark side of hallucinogens is a bad trip, enduring psychosis, or worse. While Daoists have traditionally availed themselves of nature’s toolkit for the maintenance of health and the expansion of consciousness, these days the most popular Daoist methods for achieving these goals are meditation and qigong under the guidance of a qualified master. Too, psychotropic drugs are so widely abused these days and, when abused, can so ravage families and communities, that their use must be weighed carefully against their risks. Addiction is a personal and public health issue. As part of a compassionate society, addiction-avoidance education, ongoing support, and therapy for addicts is the responsibility of government. It must be provided without cost, and funded by corporate profits, consumer taxes, and social programs.

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      Feeling entirely certain of our own motivations is a strong sign we are deluding ourselves. Pretty much nothing we do is based on a single, pure emotion or concern. Our feelings are never one-dimensional, our reasons for what we do never simple. Yet understanding our motivation is a big piece of understanding ourselves and an absolute prerequisite to real rectification. As always, step one is to relax. During meditation we have an opportunity to really ask ourselves why we’re doing something. In the peace and quiet of the meditative stance, we can find the space to discover the layers of truth in our lives. Experience, perspective, mood, and circumstance lend different shades, casts, and insights to what we see and how we see it. Let’s recognize that even feelings or convictions we consider fixed and inviolable may well change or become irrelevant one day. This is because we are subject to cycles, contracting and expanding, rising and falling. The more extreme the highs we reach, the more compensatory the lows will be. The farther to the right we move, the more we can expect a shift to the left, and vice versa. Let’s come to see ourselves not as steel but as water, shifting, changing, evolving, reversing and being flexible enough to bend and fold with the times. Daoist rectification is all about being like water.

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      Passionate enthusiasm is the greatest source of energy but can also be the antithesis of relaxation. Ramped up, we may think superficial thoughts and make irrational decisions. Instead of becoming lost in feelings of optimism and personal power, why not use the energy passion provides to explore the yin and yang of our emotional register, the inevitable falling away of a positive mood in favor of a dour one? Can we find reassurance in that cycle? Can we find the passionate times all the more precious because they are fleeting? Can we remember them when we feel down and know they will return? When we feel low, can we relish the opportunity to rectify ourselves in the solemn focus of the moment? When it is time to rest and recuperate, let’s do that. When it’s time to go crazy, let’s do that, too. High or low, let’s sense the sublime all-pervasive breathing of the universe—in and out, standing for happy and for sad. This sensing is a passion itself, a passion for Dao.

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      The more predictably we behave on the outside, the less likely we are to be in tune with nature. This is because—large forces like magnetism, gravity, and the cycling of seasons aside—the progression of natural events is generally chaotic. Therefore, let’s not worry if our desks are messy. Let’s not fret if all our tools are not lined up inside drawers. Let’s not waste time ordering all the books on our shelves or the songs on our playlists. Let’s not take the same route to work every day. Let’s not always insist upon the same table at our favorite eatery. Let’s not fixate on one brand of shoe to the exclusion of others. Let’s not squander our energy attempting to order a fundamentally disordered universe. Instead, let’s use meditation and exercise to rectify ourselves, to find what is constant and true within, and thereby create internal coherence and stability. In this way, we will be able to effortlessly flow with the vicissitudes and challenges of life while growing inside in harmony with the ever-expanding universe.

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      In groundbreaking research in the latter part of the twentieth century, Nobel laureate Dr. Wilder Penfield attempted to map the connections between specific parts of the body and particular areas of the brain. He wanted to see, for example, where the “wires” from the hand led, and where the connections to the feet ended up. To produce his map, Penfield had to be able to talk to his subjects while working on them. A needle stuck in a particular part of the brain might make a patient feel hungry or make her feel as if her fingers were on fire, but Penfield could only know this if the patient was awake and communicative. Fortunately, while the skull has sensory nerves in it, the brain does not, so Penfield could numb the skull, and go ahead and poke away without causing the patient pain.

      Penfield’s poking and talking routine gave him the information he was after along with an additional surprise, namely that the patient was able to announce what he was experiencing. Rather than simply saying, “Yum, mustard,” for example, the patient was able to say, “When you use that needle, I taste mustard on my tongue.” Penfield got to wondering who was speaking and who was the “I” to which the speaker СКАЧАТЬ