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I’m continuing to sit and contemplate with the Gita, and I thought this week I might try to write about embodiment, and the ways that our sense and pleasure drives can lead us into confusion and destructive actions or can become a celebration of our interdependence and entanglement. But instead, I’m going to write about the demonic – again. I know I’ve done that before, more than once. I’m doing it again anyway because Chapter 16, on the Divine and Demonic qualities - felt particularly relevant as everyone I know is wrestling with the problem of evil and what it means to live in a nation in the grip of the demonic. Psychoanalytic theorist Robert Fairbairn said, “it is better to be a sinner in a world ruled by God than to live in a world ruled by the devil” This is the metaphor behind what is known as Fairbain’s Moral Defense: Most would rather see themselves as flawed, failed, or inadequate – taking on “the burden of the badness”. Children prefer to cling to parents who harm them and think themselves naughty. Adults blame themselves one way or another for falling through the cracks and getting caught an underworld of systemic cruelties. If only they - were stronger, better, smarter, more talented, showed more initiative, worked harder. If the failures are personal ones, we must still live in a just world. To acknowledge the depths of the destructive and demonic circumstances we are in, to see that we are trapped in an unjust world ruled by the Devil, is too intolerable. But these immoral human energies are very real, and when they are let loose in a community they move through human bodies, one to another, a trickle-down moral economy. It has happened before. And it is happening again. We will need to choose, individually and most essentially collectively which direction to take. The divine path is for the fearless and generous, the path of compassion. The path of destruction is one of cruelty, arrogance and ignorance, where there is no truth, no spiritual law, no moral order. The oligarchs and the authoritarians have chosen this road and plan to ride it to the domination of all they survey. Holding such distorted views, possessing scant discrimination, they become enemies of the world, causing suffering and destruction.
This is not subtle. It is blatant, explicit, egregious. There are no question marks here. We are, at least for the present, in a world ruled by the Devil. Hypocritical, proud and arrogant, living in delusion and clinging to deluded ideas, insatiable in their desires, they pursue their unclean ends.
No one should be able to pretend any longer that the sadism that has lived in the heart of this nation since its inception is anything less than demonic. Bound on all sides by scheming and anxiety, driven by anger and greed, they amass by any means they can a hoard of money for the satisfaction of their cravings.
Leaders who yearn to be rulers, wholly possessed by the lust for power and selfish desire. What is it doing to us all? Especially those of us who shake our heads and click our tongues as our neighbors starve, are disenfranchised, and live in hiding from violent deportation squads? What path are we being led down? What does this do to a whole citizenry and how does it play upon our own selfish desires? Does it lure us to pursue our own insatiable hungers at the expense of others? Does it call us into deeper service, community, generosity? Does it summon our own cruelties, indifference, indolence? Or activate our collective compassion? “I got this today” they say: “tomorrow I shall get that. This wealth is mine and that will be mine too. I have destroyed my enemies. I shall destroy others too!”
It is hard, isn’t it, to remember that these Hindu scriptures were likely transcribed in the first century BCE. They sound like something any of the members of the current administration would - without any shame or hesitancy - say out loud or post on social media. We are deporting refugees, immigrants, legal residence and US citizens to prisons and internment camps in places like El Salvador and Congo. We are torturing, sickening and killing children and adults in federal concentrations camps around the nation. We are murdering, vaporizing, civilians in their schools and beds with drones we’ve sent around the world. How is this not a demonic path? Don’t we, almost every day, have to manage such rageful, righteous, even murderous forces inside of us and try to transform them into protection, solidarity, palliation and harm reduction? How easily is that done? For how long? How sustainably? This settles into our bodies, souls, this distorts our collective values, damages our central nervous systems. Bound by their greed and entangles in a web of delusion, whirled about by a fragmented mind, they fall into a dark hell.
We are all trapped in a dangerous web, wrapped up in one national delusion or another – whether we are struggling to break free of it, or if we have surrendered ourselves up as demon fodder. The earth is being spun around by a cabal of fragmented minds. We’ve fallen into a dark hell. Egotistical, violent, arrogant, lustful, angry, envious of everyone: they abuse my (Krishna’s) presence within their own bodies, and in the bodies of others.
Too many bodies captured, detained, starved, sickened, abused, killed. Too many bodies twisted in fear, horror, and moral injury, bodies recoiling from or withstanding violence. Our bodies all absorb the abuse. There are three gates to this self-destructive hell: lust, anger and greed. Renounce these three.
Can we? Not as scatterings of individuals, but as a whole people? This is the escape route from the gates of darkness. This is how we embrace the goal of life and return to the divine path. The only way.
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