Making peace with mass media tragedies in our society

Today in the news we have: Officials: Gunman dead after bloody campus rampage ... the story? A lone shooter goes on a rampage on the Virginia Tech campus in Blacksburg VA, he managed to kill 31 people and wound many more. The police sent in SWAT teams, found the killer, and shot him dead.

This is clearly a tragedy, one which will be a focus of the mass media attention for a couple weeks. Or at least until the next mass media tragedy comes along. We don't yet know why this happened, what motivated the person who perpetrated the shooting. We know from past shooting incidents like this that the people have been disaffected people in pain about their lives, etc.

Such violence can only be perpetrated by a person who believes violence is a way to ease their pain. Perhaps they are unwilling to acknowledge their pain, and need to lash their pain out to others instead. But it's easy to get lost in second-guessing why someone else might commit such an act. Many spiritual traditions such as Buddhism teach that the universe is one consciousness, and that our ego's create an illusion of being individuals with identities separated from the identities of everybody else. Hence, the spiritual teaching is that our true identity is unitive consciousness and that everything which happens, every persons individual thoughts and hopes and fears and pains, all happen within that unitive consciousness.

Clearly in our world as it stands a lot of people are in pain. We have seemingly unnecessary death happening all over the world in all forms. If the teachings of the spiritual traditions are true, then in our true identity as a being of pure universal consciousness, all those unnecessary deaths and pain is happening within us. In particular Buddhist practices ask us to seek inside ourselves the pain we see in the world. And to hold that part of ourselves in compassionate awareness.

Essential Phowa Practice contains a very good and clearly described method from a Buddhist perspective.

While looking at the CNN.COM web site for news I saw the following title: Having baby at 12, 18K dead a day; $34 to stop it

It's a link to a video about world hunger, and discusses how at least 18,000 people per day die of hunger. There's an intriguing contrast between this figure, 18,000 people per day, and a single incident involving 32 deaths. This clicked something in my mind .. often the mass media goes into a frenzy over certain stories while ignoring other stories that have similar attributes. Last week the frenzy was over "shock jock" Don Imus and an inflammatory and racist statement he said on his radio program. The frenzy over that event led to his firing as a radio personality, but isn't it interesting how there's a whole industry of "shock jocks" who are famous for pushing the bounds of indecency, who regularly get fined by the FCC for public indecency, etc, and why does this one incident by this one guy get so much frenzy when the same thing happens every day by dozens of other shock jock's?

Similarly why will this shooting incident get so much coverage compared to the tragedy of 18,000 deaths per day due to hunger?

Tragedy is happening every day in every corner of human society on this planet. While we may be led to incredulously ask Why?, it's clear this has been the path of human society for millennia and it shows every indication of continuing for the forseeable future. I believe that a practice of praying for and manifesting peace around the world is a necessary part of changing the course of this pattern in human society.

Contemplative Science, bringing together scientific method with spiritual experientialism

Contemplative Science: Where Buddhism And Neuroscience Converge makes for an interesting line of thinking. In our modern times we think of Science and Religion as occupying two non-overlapping worlds of study. Science is to stay with its rigorous method of proof based on testable hypothesis, while Religion is to stay with matters of the divine, that transcend material existance, and deal with matters of ethics and the like.

But that split exists only in Europe and in relation to the Catholic church. In other regions of the world, at other periods of history, spiritual and religious seekers also studied the material world. The great flowering of learning in Islam, while Europe was in the clutches of Christianity imposed anti-learning dogma, was because the early Islamic practitioners were enamored with getting to know the Divine through studying the material world created by Allah. And what an amazingly intricate creation this world is. The detail in this world which has been revealed to us by science is truly mind-boggling vast in scope, depth, breadth, detail and in every other descriptive measure I could muster.

Another spiritual tradition of the world that did not split reason and spiritual practice is Buddhism. The Buddha himself told his followers "Do not take my statements to be true simply out of reverence for me. But rather, put them to the test." In other words he challenges Buddhist practitioners to test the teachings he presented to us, test them and prove them for ourselves.

In this Salon.COM interview, Buddha on the brain, B. Allan Wallace, the author of Contemplative Science is interviewed at depth about his proposal, Dogma and Science. The difference between Dogma and Science is a poignant observation here. Dogma is a ritualistic acceptance of what you are told, no critical reasoning, no testing, just a blind acceptance of what others claim to be truth. The Scientific method is all about testing everything, and a key aspect is the formation of testable hypothesis.

A testable hypothesis is refutable, that is you can prove the hypothesis is wrong, just as you can prove it to be right. The existence of God is, for example, an untestable hypothesis because you cannot disprove God's existence. In the realm of Spiritual experience there are many an untestable hypothesis.

An interesting idea to ponder is this:

At the same time, science is not just science. This very notion that the mind must simply be an emergent property of the brain -- consisting only of physical phenomena and nothing more -- is not a testable hypothesis. Science is based upon a very profound metaphysical foundation. Can you test the statement that there is nothing else going on apart from physical phenomena and their emergent properties? The answer is no.

Science is full of dogma, that is it's full of ideas that are accepted by rote rather than proved by scientific method. For example the idea of the mind and consciousness. Neuroscientists have found all sorts of correlations of emotions and chemicals or locations in the brain, but what have they proved? Have they disproved any claim made by mystics? Have they been able to form a testable hypothesis around mind and consciousness solely being a byproduct of the chemicals and brain activity? No.

B. Allan Wallace suggests bringing Buddhists practices of studying the mind into cooperative work with those who can drive the instruments of science. The Buddhists have a couple millennia of experience and teachings to draw upon related to a rigorous system of studying the mind. That is what Buddhists do as they meditate is to observe the function of the mind, and deep Buddhist practice has a lot in common with psychological theories.

It is my experience that the actions of spiritual practices are very real and can cause real effects. That is what healing is about. Healing is to access spiritual states and through spiritual practice bring about beneficial change of a physical condition. This tells me that spiritual forces are part of the world and ought to be measurable by appropriate instruments. Until now the appropriate instruments have been living beings such as you and me. But these forces ought to be measurable by other kinds of instruments, the kind that give objective measurements, that can be quantified, etc.

"Don't give on the outside, give on the inside"

I was just at Whole Foods and saw this statement at the checkout stand: "Don't give on the outside, give on the inside" It was targeted to charitably minded people who would give food or money to the homeless people who congregated outside the store. Rather than give to the people who congregate outside, give to a charity who then gives to those people.

Interesting concept, but my mind took a very different direction from this.

The statement is very Buddhist in nature, even if the program is not. In Buddhist teaching we are told that everything we see in the world is a projection from inside us. Put another way, every part of the world is inside us, because the whole world is one identity, and our supposed separate identities is some kind of illusory madness.

For example, if you witness some kind of pain in the world the tendency is to go to that pain and try to fix that pain. That's an example of dualistic thinking, that the pain you're witnessing is outside yourself and therefore must be corrected outside yourself.

A Buddhist way of dealing with an "external" pain is to meditate on what that pain brings up inside you, sitting with it to learn about it.

What struck me as I walked outside and was approached by someone soliciting for donations is ... when I give to a charity, in a way it affirms or witnesses some form of lack in the world. They need money, therefore I will give it to them.

But, where am I needy inside myself? What part of myself feels it is lacking something? And, wouldn't it be more honest for me to find a way to satisfy that inner feeling of lack? And, wouldn't it be wonderful if everybody had a way to learn to satisfy their inner feeling of lack?