Actually, the Sky is Falling.

Among its many difficult demands, Buddhism requires that we take personal responsibility for our own understanding and awareness of how the world works—and our place in it. We cannot turn over to a higher power what we think we can’t or don’t want to ourselves. This is what we’ve got. We work with it. We make do. We get as close as we can to living with the world rather than against it; like a cardinal waiting for the crows to finish before heading down to eat. I don’t think the cardinal sits up the the tree complaining the whole time and swearing about the crows, or figuring out how it can kill them so they won’t bother it.. It doesn’t even wait. It just lives, part of the cloud that is every moment and its possibilities. That is nothing like us, but, the Buddha says, it can be, and is, like it or not. If we were like the cardinal, we wouldn’t feel so alone, or so besieged.

I believe that Americans in particular are faced with first-world responsibilities like global weirding or "global boiling (UN report)" and late-stage capitalism that we handle poorly and know it. We also cope with an exhaustion, sensory overload and sense of the center not holding that are the results of living according to an artificial and incorrect sense of reality. We are lulled by consumerism into seeking happiness through acquisition, even of spiritual knowledge. We cannot sleep. We stay up all night worrying about that, and during the day we look for apps that will help us get to that blissful place. Except when it is full of nightmares.

I think that at a fundamental level we cannot yet detect, we know something bad is happening. I do, anyway. It just seems inevitable that the destruction of the world we know is coming, in one form or another. Civilizations have lifetimes, just as we do. They carry the seeds of their own destruction. Some and even many of this global civilzation will survive, but chaotically and in great grief.

I believe it will be critical for some people to take responsibility for grasping and then holding onto some wisdom about more natural and fulfilling ways of being in that world. In fact, that is the only way humans have remained human throughout a history of falling civilizations. The “war of all against all” as Hobbes defined it hasn’t happened in cultures with some sense of moral compass that reflects the compass of the earth itself. But it well may happen in ours; some people are sure preparing for it. Some of those who survive--war of all against all or not-- must somehow take on the responsibility of keeping some lights of compassion and wisdom lit. But how?

There are ways. We have done it before. For one thing, people need to study, adopt and live by moral codes and world views that support being human: bravery, courage, kindness, generosity, humor, love,respect, and even rules and morals. For me, I have chosen Buddhism to keep me whole, and to do what I can to hold my discoveries and commitment steady for whomever comes next.

Buddhism teaches that the world does what it does and in the end we must accept that. We must respond to rage and loss with wisdom and compassion, non violence and stillness. We cannot change people because they are different in how they have been formed over eons. We cannot fix anything. We will not be able to fix what will happen because the world does what it does. Actions have millions of unexpected consequences and until we see that, we will hurt ourselves and others and soil our own habitat.

I am told to look carefully and see that what I believe isn’t real, but only a vast, species-wide error that leads to suffering. This sounds insane, but I swear it is a better insanity than the one we live with now. And little by little, as I look and look, it proves to be true. You can begin to realize, feel somewhere off in a flowing part of your mind, as a friend put it to me this morning, that the universe is functional. We can be too, if we just stop trying to make everything better or complain when it isn’t. This slowly dawning sense of what is true is something we can live with, rather than being driven by an overwhelming fear of the world and what it offers. In the end perhaps we are all cardinals and crows, and the sooner we figure that out the sooner we will feel less terrible or blame the world for our own ignorant suffering.

In thirty-plus years of study, I have read and practiced, listened and practiced, wept and practiced, argued, doubted, and finally thrown Buddhism over as a bad job again and again. But I pick it up again in desperation. And again. And again. Fall seven times and get up eight. Might we share and hold on to the truth of love and wisdom, compassion and kindness, however we can. We are going to need it, I think.