Life, at one of its most fundamental levels, is the act of moving toward something that you never quite reach, trying to understand an idea that’s infinitely too big for your head to wrap around. The best anyone ever gets are bits and pieces, and even these have to be decoded and interpreted and mean different things to different people.
I find all this very exciting and confusing and terrifying. Terrifying because the less a person has seen of this thing that no one can fully visualize, the more likely that person is to mistake the little fragment they have as the entirety of the thing itself. These myopic people, many well-intentioned, are capable of doing terrible things to each other without letting logic or their conscience impinge too deeply on their actions.
That’s how you get immigrants being kidnapped off the streets. It’s how you rally support for sending innocent, untried men to a prison labor camp in a foreign country where they may spend the rest of their lives. It’s how you get people who tell you with honest conviction that empathy is the enemy. It’s how you fall for the illusion that you can fly and how you get people to blindly follow you off the edge of a cliff while they drag everyone else kicking and screaming to their deaths.
I don’t think we should be dismayed that these things are happening in our country right now. Cruelty and suffering are two of life’s ceaseless companions. Our surprise at them arriving on our doorstep merely shows how insulated we’ve been from the rank shit we shovel on the minorities and disenfranchised of the world who don’t have the power to stop it. There are countries whose GDP has been built on the back-breaking labor of its citizens toiling for western profit, and once we’ve extracted as much use as we can from our meaningless toys, we ship our trash to other “third world countries” and tell ourselves comforting stories about how the electronic waste recycling industry in Ghana has helped pull its people out of the poverty we put them in in the first place.
The clothes I wear, the food I eat, the work I do is all built on a system of cruelty that chews up living beings and spits out bloody paste, all so a privileged few can have a fleeting taste of ecstasy.
That is why writing is important to me. I only have access to one small piece of the puzzle, but when I write, I keep turning it over and over in my hands, looking at it from new angles, investigating where it does and does not fit, remembering and relearning its contours.
James Baldwin wrote, “When you’re writing, you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know.” Occasionally, even if most of what you write is trash, you get glimpses of something indescribable and immeasurable, and if you’re persistent or lucky, you’ll occasionally get to share an intimation of this unspeakable thing with other people.
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They gather under an ancient oak tree, wider than it is tall, whose branches are so thick, they’re pulled down by the weight of the earth beneath them and bend like elbows from the ground back to the sky. Those reclining beneath the tree — some sitting lotus style, some in recliners made from polyurethane that are kinder to old joints than the blankets others have arranged around the lawn — look something like the way I envision the ancestors of many cultures did as they gathered under sacred trees for rituals and celebrations.
These gnarled and venerated members of the vegetable kingdom are a bond that have joined one generation to the next in communities that likely understood the concept of reverence before they developed the words to speak of it.
There are close to a dozen different Buddhist groups in Gainesville, and on the last Saturday of every month, they meet up for an hour of meditating and chanting. You don’t have to understand much about Buddhism to get a sense of why it is they do this. The mere fact that they can all sit together and enjoy each other’s company says something about the nature of their convictions and intentions. To say that this level of inter-cooperation and unconditional acceptance is hard to find in many other religious groups would be an understatement, but then, Buddhists don’t really consider their practice to be a religion. It’s more like a type of psychology, they’ll tell you, an intentional way of looking at the world and being in it.
The group was co-founded by Dr. K. A. Shakoor and Nancy Lasseter. The former practices Tibetan Buddhism, and the latter adheres to the Thai Forest Tradition of Buddhism. The differences aren’t important, which Shakoor openly told me.
“The Buddha said there were 84,000 different methods, but the base of it is meditation. In China, they call it Chan, in Japan and Korea, they call it Zen, in Tibet we call it Shamata, Vipassana. It’s all the same thing. It’s sitting.”
Shakoor grew up in Detroit. He’s a man who’s spent most of his life trying to bring people together. Among the many hats he’s worn throughout his life, some of the earlier ones included being the keyboard player in a metal band, a high school teacher, a college professor, a volunteer Sufi chaplain for the Detroit Police Department, an Aikido instructor, an acupuncturist, a spiritual coach…the list goes on.
At one point, Shakoor — who is black — was also the leader and keyboard player for an organic techno band with a gay vocalist and members with wide age gaps and differing faiths. “We represented the world,” he told me. And to the extent that the world is represented in Gainesville, Shakoor wants to stir the pot and put people in contact who wouldn’t ordinarily talk to, encounter, or even consider one another.
“When I was a kid, my mother went to a non-denominational church, and they would have speakers once a month from different religions that came in and talked,” he said.
He implements the same process with the Gainesville Buddhist Alliance. Each month, someone from a different group will lead the meditation and introduce others to their styles and rituals, sort of like a show-and-tell for the existentially inclined.
This isn’t his first rodeo. When he was a teenager living in Michigan, he knew Malcolm X’s brother, who worked as an imam at a mosque for a time.
“We tried to bring together various Muslim factions that were fighting each other. We brought them to a church so they would all sit down and try to get along.”
The number one illness that Buddhism talks about, he told me, is ignorance. Everything else is an offshoot of that. Fear, for example, is a derivation of ignorance. People who are ignorant (that is, those who think they have the complete puzzle rather than just a piece), are more likely to act out of fear and to do terrible things because of their fear.
Ignorance in this case can be defined as an incorrect understanding of something. In other words, the symbols in our mind that we use to understand our surroundings are misaligned with the angle of the thing being symbolized, or maybe the image you’ve created in your mind is vastly distorted from the thing being envisioned. None of us see correctly. There are aberrations and limitations that keep us from seeing everything, but some see more clearly than others, and Buddhists would call them wise. The best way to realign our outlook with the orientation of reality is to look out from multiple different angles (education) and be completely open to whatever you happen to see, that is, with humility. Unfortunately, humans are exceptionally bad at this.
Given the times we find ourselves in, the statement made by the Gainesville Buddhist Alliance is radical, albeit quietly so. If Buddhists can be said to have anything that qualifies as a belief, the idea that you, me, and everything else are manifestations of a single phenomenon would come close to qualifying. Non-duality and all that. This is radical because it directly implies that the differences between people — and animals and plants and microbes and politicians and business tycoons, etc. — are more like ornamentations than impassable gulfs. The ego is an illusory construct, an emergent property of matter created by the configuration of neurons packed tightly into a mass of ganglia at the epicenter of an electrical storm.
Meditation for many Buddhists is a cessation of striving, an effortless effort, whereby one can directly commune with the raw stuff of existence without it being filtered through the narrow confines and narrative constraints of an ego.
The ego has a gravitational pull that keeps our conscious awareness grounded in the familiar scenery of our lives, but it’s possible to get a look at things from higher up. There’s a big universe out there, past the ego’s orbit, and it’s all cut from the same cloth.
The ol’ “us versus them” dichotomy drilled into our rudimentary brains by natural selection is invisible from that height.
So many of our woes stem from our perception of being separate, isolated entities when, in reality, we are connected carbon filaments that sprang up from a barren rock caught in the gravity well of a violent star. We are partial manifestations of a single golden braid connected beginning to end in a perfect circle, the dynamic extrusions of a living planet. In the face of this, all our attachments, vanities, and insecurities diminish beyond perception, and we can simply be whatever it is we happen to be in any particular moment.
The whole of existence, in this vision, becomes the wonder that life can perceive itself, that manifold wrinkles in the universe have become self-aware through some incomprehensible sorcery of physics.
When looked at from this frame of reference, tragedies don’t seem as tragic and ecstasy loses some of its appeal while joy is undergirded with a resoluteness of will. It becomes easier to accept the unexpected, recognize blindspots, and appreciate the only moment we’ll ever have access to as it ceaselessly unfolds.
On a practical level, it helps calm my anxiously overactive mind. The path ahead looks slightly clearer, and the fear of ravenous beasts hiding in the tall grass gets dialed down. Old grudges wither and dry on the vine. Baseless convictions loosen their grip.
In such a state of mind, you find yourself in a paradoxical limbo. You are not free, for you are still chained to a body and its pains, imprisoned in its passions. But neither are you enslaved, for you are the prison, the person inside it, and everything that lies beyond all at once.
“Trippers and askers surround me,
People I meet . . . . . the effect upon me of my early life . . . . of the
Ward and city I live in . . . . of the nation,
The latest news . . . . discoveries, inventories, societies . . . . authors
Old and new,
My dinner, dress, associates, looks, business, compliments, dues
The real or fancied indifference of some man or woman I love,
The sickness of one of my folks—or of myself . . . . or ill-doing . . . .
Or loss or lack of money . . . . or depressions or exaltations,
They come to me days and nights and go from me again,
But they are not the Me myself.”
-Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
You can hear Shakoor Sundays from 4:00 - 8:00 p.m. on 92.1 FM on his show Music and Medicine. He picked up this side gig after an interview he did on the station for his book “Ghetto Sutras.” As he left, he told the producers of the all hip hop station that they weren’t playing real music. So now, for a few hours a week, they also play a mix of funk, R&B, reggae, and Afropunk, all carefully curated by Shakoor.
