Cheerfulness is a hallmark of real spirituality. It has to be cultivated. Not by practising cheerfulness—that would end up in performance—but by accepting the deep intiations of grief when they come.
Much spiritual practice is aimed at joy and bliss. Festivals, dances, sacraments. As the say in the Amazon, so allegria—only joy! But if we’re not initiated into the tougher sides of life, as indigeous people invariably are, we can slide into good-vibes-only spiritual bypassing. Spirituality becomes about avoiding ourselves.
The heavy stuff is all but banished from modern life. Death, illness, loss and grief are potholes in the spiritual path. Falling in is seen as a screw-up. Air it and you will haemorrhage instagram followers to the young couple streaming acroyoga and gold investing.
Equally, banging on about heavy stuff can seem like masochism wanting to become sadism. Transference of pain. I check in with myself on that one.
We need light at the end of the tunnel. But first there is a tunnel. According to NDE people, life is a long dark tunnel with a very bright light at the end.
Real shamanism or alchemy isn’t about avoiding potholes. It’s the science of potholes. Seeing as the world is heading into an era-ending pothole, a bit of know-how might be useful.
In our thousands, in our millions, we are all Palestinians, goes the chant. It’s a chant of solidarity. But how many of us know the suffering of Palestinians, or whether or how they are accustomed to it?
This is not to say our solidarity is worthless unless we have murdered relatives and a life-changing injury. This is not to say our protest is flimflam unless we have suffered injustice for holding up a placard, or half starved ourselves to death in a British prison. Nor is it to ignore Sudan, Congo, the children locked up for 500 days by ICE.
Nor is it to say that writing, reporting, thinking, contemplating, wondering, despairing, keeping going, losing and finding faith are invalid if we have our lives and limbs relatively intact.
As I have said many times before, it is a responsibility, especially for those of us with our lives and limbs intact, to heed the signals from less fortunate parts of the human corpus. For it is being torn apart.
The sickness of humanity is now plain, save for those too sick to see it. It is a narcissistic sickness. It worships self image but cannot see itself.
There are countless examples. I’ll pick one I saw today. Not the unmentionable excrement behind the Resolute Desk but Third Reich tattooed “Secretary of War” Peter Hegseth, telling the camera in his studio at the Pentagon about the new era of American lethality ushered in by the military version of Google’s Gemini, which presumably has learned a thing or two from the infamous Where’s Daddy AI deployed by the IOF to inflict maximum damage on non combatants in Gaza.
If this was a scene—even a passing moment in an unimportant subplot—in a Netflix series, it would be panned. The waxy face, heavily foundationed to conceal signs of alcohol abuse, the Marvel Comics hair, the stars and stripes in the pocket. It’s beyond absurd.
Yet what’s beyond even that is the fact that this wax effigy is in the Pentagon. Not to say I’m a fan of that nerve centre of evil but I imagine that, like the Deathstar, there is a culture of professionalism. Hegseth’s grandstanding before the entire assembled military brass in September was met not with the expected chants of USA! USA! but with silence.
Good, but not that good. American servicemen still descended from Apache helicopters to commandeer a Venezuelan oil tanker. American servicemen still pulled the trigger on Venezuelan fishing boats. Why haven’t they pulled the trigger on Hegseth?
I’m not calling for that to happen, literally or figuratively, but finding it absurd that it hasn’t happened already. The same can be said of Trump. Or any of the billionaire class, come to think of it.
Perhaps this is tasteless, after Bondi, the American school shooting and the murder of Rob Reiner and his wife (allegedly by their son) but:
Can it be there is no trigger? Or anyone to pull it?
It wasn’t like that for Charlie Kirk, or the countless murder victims further down the chain—all the way down to Hind Rajab, on whom the trigger was pulled more than 300 times, or the thousands upon thousands of others at the bottom.
After Lincoln (1865), Garfield (1881), McKinley (1901), Kennedy (1963) and nearly Reagan (1981), my question about Hegseth is valid. Trump, if we believe the absurd narrative hacked together by cartoon puppet FBI director Kash Patel, was another nearly.
The legendary documentary Rich Man’s Trick, from JFK to 9/11 by Francis Connolly, reveals the workings of power. To summarise the 2hr 20min film, it’s mob rule. In 1963 they had television and propeller planes. Now they have drones, deepfakes and several orders of magnitude more money and centralisation of it.
For the top players at the Big Table, supremacy seems within reach. To have come so far, to have gambled not only one’s own life and that of friends and family but everyone’s life—the planet itself—it’s not so much that the end justfies the means but that the means justify the end.
The end is the only way out—even if that “end” is Orwellian perpetual war. There is another—the one Hitler chose—but somehow I can’t see Hegseth or Trump taking that option.
I don’t know enough about Hitler—he isn’t a character I have ever cared to study—to know what was going through his mind when he pulled the trigger. I doubt it was sorrow at his atrocities.
I know and care about as much about Hegseth, a bit more about Trump. What has come to light is hardly the image of caring, compassionate beings. It is possible to exercise compassion for them—though this is an exercise in compassion rather than something that comes naturally to me.
Both men are effigies, bonfire guys, stuffed dummies, monsters. To take one relatively trivial example, here is Trump’s reponse to the murder of the Reiners:
The madness speaks for itself. I post it here as an extreme example of what banishing grief, loss, lack and adversity does to the human being.
It’s tempting to wonder if, privately, Trump and Hegseth hate themselves. But no more tempting that to wonder if they are so broken, so hollowed, that even such distorted self reflection is impossible.
They are, in a word, possessed.
As are all the billionaire class. And it’s not just them. It isn’t wealth that “trickles down” but possession. Its infectious. It whispers (screams when it has to) that the end justifies the means until the means justify the end.
To explore sorrow—one’s own and the sorrow of the world, and perhaps the abject lack of it in Hegseth and Trump—is to develop compassion. Maybe this is why the professional brass at the Pentagon put up with Pete. I doubt it.
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Suffering is and always has been a key part of the human predicament. In the relatively well off north very few today reach the grim levels of material misery of the past. Elsewhere freedom from day to day material suffering is much much worse until it reaches nightmare levels in Gaza or Sudan. Of course the saddest part of suffering, at least in the material world, is that most even possibly all material suffering could be reduced or eliminated with the resources available now and in the past. The kernel of the problem then is why we allow this to happen. The answer remains as elusive as it did 5 thousand years ago.