Preview

Lonnie Wilson / Oakland Tribune Staff Archives - MediaNews Group/Oakland Tribune via Getty Images

Madden NFL, one of the most popular video game franchises in history, has sold well over 130 million copies since its 1988 debut. And yet, says Fox Sports reporter Tom Rinaldi with amazement, There are people that dont know John Madden is a real man.

For anyone sadly in need of enlightenment about the name on the box as well as those who already revere Madden as coach of the Super Bowl XIwinning Oakland Raiders and the only color analyst to announce for all four major broadcast networks there is All Madden. This documentary profiles the figure who, intones Fox sportscaster Troy Aikman onscreen, was the authoritative voice for our sport and in a lot of ways still is.

(Credit: Dennis Desprois/Getty Images)

Madden has made an outsized contribution to our obsession with professional football. Visual broadcast features we now take for grantedthe ever-illuminated first-down line on TV screens, use of the telestrator to illustrate the movement of plays came to the fore because of his enthusiasm.

The film goes deep on Maddens life and broadcasting career, decades of which were spent alongside Pat Summerall in the booth. The Hall of Famer would joyously shout Boom! and Doink! when the play demanded it, but he also pitched products with the best of them, not to mention plugging his personal favorites, such as his beloved Thanksgiving Day turducken.

Madden gloried in players who toiled with guts and grit, and most poignant in the show are comments from current and former NFL stars such as Tom Brady, Peyton Manning, and Lawrence Taylor. Of the 38 various interviewees, We did not get a single no, notes Rinaldis codirector, Joel Santos.

Madden himself, 85, sits down too. What comes across is a picture of a very real man; being singled out by him was as valued by athletes and coaches as getting invited to Johnny Carsons couch was to comedians. Says Santos: Theres no one that has had more of an impact on the NFL than John Madden.

All Madden, Documentary Premiere, Saturday, December 25, 2/1c, Fox

Original post:
All Madden Pays Tribute to One of Footballs Biggest Icons in Fox Sports Doc - TV Insider

Imagine it is a regular Sunday morning. Youre at your kitchen table, chomping through some toast, drinking coffee, and watching TV. Suddenly your fingers twitch. Your mug shatters on the floor. Your body tenses and goes cold.

ITS TIME TO KILL! a gravelly, rumbling voice pounds through your head. THE PORTENTS ARE DELIVERED. THE SEALS ARE BROKEN. THE HOUR IS HERE, MORTAL!

The moment passes as quickly as it came. You feel exhausted to your bones and you sit there, mute and frozen in panic. What just happened? The black sludge of your coffee pools around your bare foot, and you reach for your phone. Luckily, youre a god-fearing member of your church and you have the priests number saved. After a few rings, he answers.

Father, I think Im possessed. I need you to exorcize me, you whisper.

He says hell be there shortly.

Unlike some church doctrine, exorcism actually has a lot of biblical authority. In Marks gospel (generally considered the earliest gospel), Jesus performs his first miracle when he exorcises a spirt at a synagogue in Capernaum. For much of the gospel, the only ones who recognize Jesus power are demons. The gospels seem to imply that Jesus became famous as much for his exorcisms as his ministry. In fact, the Pharisees (the villains to Jesus hero) accused Jesus of being in league with Beelzebub, the prince of demons to command demons so easily, he must himself be demonic, they thought.

At the time of the New Testament, illnesses were thought to be caused by demonic possession. This belief fed the burgeoning business of exorcism well into the mediaeval period. Hearing voices, having seizures, or being overcome by insatiable and uncontrollable urges might all be attributed to satanic influence. If a loved one had any kind of mental illness, youd likely go to your priest over a physician. Richard Burtons epic 1621 work The Anatomy of Melancholy goes into a huge digression about the varieties of demonic possession. In it, he mentions how devils and demons cause an entire compendium of mental illnesses, but also that anything objects and animals included can be possessed.

As Agrippas dog had a devil tied to his collar; some think that Paracelsus had one confined to his sword pummel; others wear them in rings, Burton wrote. (Quite amusingly, one emperors dead wife apparently had a demon confined to the wart in her neck.)

While the work of ancient (but pagan!) scholars like Hippocrates and Galen was still available in treating mental health, physicians simply didnt know what to do, for the most part. Even in our post-Enlightenment and scientific age, we largely only treat or manage the symptoms of mental illness; we do not cure it. Its no wonder, then, that people turned to their priests for help it was the only option.

In the gospels, exorcism is seen as a kind of extraordinary measure or treatment for the possessed. But as Christianity battled to become mainstream, exorcism took on a new purpose. In an effort to combat rival theologies and the sinful paganism of other cultures, exorcism came to be lumped together with the baptismal process. As early as the 3rd century, baptism was used as a way to convert heathens and rid them of any foreign, false religions demons.

But exorcisms for the possessed were still a huge part of the local clergys job description. Given this, its unsurprising that there were almost as many methods of exorcism as there were priests. However, there were a few noticeable trends.

The first is that water and salt are often used. A 12th-century manuscript features the use of salt and water with the following words (the cross represents the moment the priest must draw the sign of the cross): I exorcise thee, creature of salt, by the living God +, by the true God +, by the Holy God +, by the God who by the prophet Eliseus commanded thee to be cast into the water.

The second is that Biblical or canonical incantations are spoken. There were often certain prayers uttered: the Lords Prayer, Hail Marys, and so on. The Catholic Church still governs the rites and processes of exorcism from the 84-page document De Exorcismis et Supplicationibus Quibusdam, which can be bought online.

The third feature of exorcisms it that they involve some kind of sacred object or relic. Most often this will be the crucifix, but it might be some holy relic, or some otherwise blessed trinket that the exorcist has used to great success before.

But what actually happens today if youre to undergo an exorcism? Well, the first thing to note is that much will depend on who you go to and which Christian denomination you belong to. Methodists, Baptists, and Lutherans all have their exorcistic wings, but lets assume you want a vanilla deliverance. You choose Catholic.

The Roman Catholic Church revised and updated their rites of exorcism in 1999. The Cardinal who oversaw this revision said it has more sober language, with fewer adjectives than in the previous one. But the basic set-up is exactly the same.

You, the possessed, are typically seated or laid down and will have prayers spoken, chanted, or sung over you. The priests or pastors present will be regularly making the sign of the cross, and holy water (and salt) will often be used. There is sometimes someone present who has the gift of discernment who will be able to see the presence of the demons (and also angels), who might be able to steer the rite. The priest will often lay hands on you as they say the requisite prayers.

The 1999 revision does make substantial efforts to say that exorcism should not be a substitute for medical help, and that possession is not the same as mental illness. Exorcism is one thing, psychiatry another, Cardinal Medina said. If the exorcist has doubts about the sanity of a possessed person, he can consult a specialist. It can be a collaboration.

But that does not mean that exorcism is always only a harmless placebo that you might as well try. In his book American Exorcism, Michael Cuneo offers accounts of women being pummeled to death in San Francisco and a Korean woman being trampled to death in Glendale during exorcisms. Most disturbingly, he describes how a five-year-old Bronx girl died after her mother and grandmother forced her to drink a lethal cocktail containing ammonia, vinegar, and olive oil and then bound and gagged her with duct tape. The two women claimed that they were merely trying to poison a demon that had infested the little girl several days earlier.

The fact is that while official Catholic exorcisms might be relatively harmless to believers, the business of unlicensed and unofficial exorcists risks exacerbating mental illness and disfiguring or even killing those they profess to help. The mentally ill are not possessed and demons do not cause epilepsy, depression, bipolar disorder, or voices to be heard. To argue otherwise is dangerous and cruel.

Jonny Thomson teaches philosophy in Oxford. He runs a popular Instagram account called Mini Philosophy (@philosophyminis). His first book isMini Philosophy: A Small Book of Big Ideas.

Visit link:
Exorcism: The history of purging demons, from the New Testament to today - Big Think

As I watched James Lapines new musical, Flying Over Sunset, at the Vivian Beaumont, trying to summon some empathy with its subject matter, I started thinking through my own quite limited history with hallucinogens. Sunsetdirected by Lapine, who also wrote the book, with music by Tom Kitt, lyrics by Michael Korie, and choreography by Michelle Dorranceis the fictionalized story of three celebrities dropping LSD in the nineteen-fifties, searching for God knows what: tie-dyed enlightenment, perhaps, or an eased and possibly clarified relationship with the past, or maybe just simple fun. The writer Aldous Huxley (Harry Hadden-Paton), the actor-dancer Cary Grant (Tony Yazbeck), and the polymathic diplomat Clare Boothe Luce (Carmen Cusack) get together (theres no reason to believe that they did this in real life) and trip their extraordinary lives away (this, apparently, they all did), letting the audience see, often in fervent color and off-kilter motion, the troubled consciousnesses that vibrate beneath their well-maintained personas.

A long time ago, I munched on a few handfuls of fetid mushrooms and brought on personal crises of my own design. There werent many bright colors, but some theretofore unnoticed textural quirkson clothes, on faceswent wild with deep, scrutinizing, photographic detail. For many hours after those visual effects had faded, I haunted the hallways of my mind, regretting how many memories Id retained and neuroses Id cultivated. Mostly, I regretted eating the things at all. Nothing happened that Id want to put onstage; certainly, nobody sang.

While watching Sunset, I wondered whether its creative team had subjected themselves to some first-person experiential research when it came to LSD. (Lincoln Center Theatres in-house magazine features testimonials by the writers Deborah Kass, Francine Prose, and Gregory Botts on trips past; Lapine has spoken in interviews about his own youthful experiments.) Some of the productions other sources are made clear. In a composite scene early on, Aldous delivers a speech against the banning of his book Brave New World. Cary gives a press conference announcing his retirement from show biz, and defends Charlie Chaplin against charges that hes a Communist. Clare, DwightD. Eisenhowers nominee for Ambassador to Brazil, undergoes a rough confirmation hearing.

Part of the plays premiseor maybe its just what I wish it had managed to tease outis that LSD leads its users to a softer kind of questioning. Aldous and Clare are close friends of Gerald Heard (Robert Sella), a practitioner of the Hindu Vedanta philosophy and a forerunner of the consciousness movement, who serves as their guide while on the drug, always nudging them to sit cross-legged and chant as its effects gradually set in. Cary first hears about LSD from his wife, whos using it in her sessions with a Freudian analyst. In one scene, we see Cary bargain his way into the analysts sedate office, employing flattery, charm, and, before long, flat-out yelling, to get his hands on this stuff hes heard so much about.

Those two initial settingsspiritual and clinicalopen up two ways of thinking not only about the effects of LSD but also about the reasons that a desperate celebrity, rich but lost, might turn to it for answers. In Flying Over Sunset, though, all roads lead back to rote biography. Aldouss wife is sick and soon dies. Clares daughter has been killed in a car crash. Carys impending divorce has him ruminating on his tough childhood. As the characters trip onstage, these episodes and their central personaethe wife, the daughter, Carys young selfreappear over and over, with variations so slight that, often, they might as well not exist.

The presence of Gerald Heard made me think of J.D. Salingers God-obsessed Glasses, whose interest in the ancient Indian Vedas and Upanishads, and in Christ, made them vibrate with the kind of unself-conscious talk of higher things that might have done the likes of Aldous, Clare, and Carya morose bunch herea bit of good. But, instead of engaging one another in earnest conversation, the characters spend the majority of the show inside their own heads.

In recent years, Lincoln Center Theatre has presented two plays about the rocky terrain and the stubborn mysteries of the spiritual life: Tom Stoppards The Hard Problem, about consciousness and religious devotion; and Chris Urchs The Rolling Stone, about homophobic violence in a religious milieu in Uganda. Flying Over Sunset might have completed a kind of trilogy, but its insistence on one-to-one biographical causalitythis drug for that problemdesiccates its surface-level allusions to spirituality.

Perhaps thats why the show feels so earthbound despite its many references to flight. Sunset has a fairly formulaic approach to music: every dose gets its own song. The pattern is established from the start, when Aldous is in a drugstore with Gerald, sweating through the beginnings of a high that will continue through a mountain hike with his ailing wife. He gets fixated on a picture in a book: Botticellis The Return of Judith to Bethulia. The scenic designby Beowulf Boritt, perhaps the most consistently excellent part of the showshifts and the painting comes to life. Here comes Judith accompanied by her handmaiden, with the head of Holofernes in tow. That ecstatic visual idea gives way to a pretty but mostly conventional bel-canto number, through which we get the point that we keep on getting: Aldous is excited by what he can see under the influence, but haunted by the changing circumstances of his life.

Hadden-Paton is sympathetic as the nebbishy, intense Aldous, and Yazbecks tap-dance numbers with a young version of Cary (Atticus Ware) are the highlight of Dorrances choreography, which otherwise uses taps rudimentsfootsteps and their attendant natural rhythms, implicitly connected to the motions of the heartto establish a theme that never really makes it through the noise. Cusack sings well, but the effort is wasted on songs that sound like tropes.

One thing that I found mystifying was how un-weird the score ishere, as in few other musicals, there was a chance to dabble in abstraction and, even, atonality. Instead, the songs are fairly standard-sounding, give or take a fractured chord or two. If a drug musical cant sometimes sound weird or off-putting, which can? The closest Flying Over Sunset gets to true surreality is when Cary, a guy with mommy issues who is consumed with masculinity and its meanings, dons a body stocking and a cap and flails around, having become a facsimile of the phallus that possesses so much of his thought and his posture. The moment is brief, and the altogether too long two hours and forty minutes of the show roll on.

In an interview, Allen Ginsbergover whose work and person the idea of drug-induced inspiration has always hovereddenied the notion that there was any special relationship, positive or negative, between tripping and excellence in art. I think the myth put forward by the police that no creative work can be done under drugs is folly, he said. The myth that anybody who takes drugsll produce something interesting is equal folly. He did admit to having written the runic, nature-obsessed poem Wales Visitation under the influence of LSD:

What did I notice? Particulars! The vision of the great One is myriad smoke curls upward from ashtray, house fire burned low The night, still wet & moody black heaven starless upward in motion with wet wind.

The intensity that Flying Over Sunset tries to illustrate with its always capable and sometimes spectacular sets is seldom found in its dialogue or its songs. The play is based on a groovy idea, but it indulges in the myth that Ginsberg warned against: drugs alone dont make for interest. To reach across the gulf between stage and seat, inner experienceaddled, enhanced, or otherwiseneeds more upward motion, more of the stark feeling of wet wind. More particulars!

Read more:
The Bad Trip of Flying Over Sunset - The New Yorker

Japan poetry and a life blighted by ill-health: Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902)

Lee Jay Walker

Modern Tokyo Times

The final years of the life of Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902) were filled with pain and long-lasting suffering. Ultimately, his life was cut short from the ravages of tuberculosis and other ailments that stemmed from this.

Shiki understood the frailty of life concerning the death of his alcoholic father when he was a small child. Also, unlike his alcoholic father, his grandfather was a Confucian scholar who installed a different way of life. Therefore, Shiki understood the chaotic nature of life when only a young child.

His childhood at a time when the Meiji Restoration of 1868 was altering the political, religious, and social landscape generated a wealth of emotions and passions. In time, this would bless his poetry.

From 1888/1889 onwards, the shadow of tuberculosis blighted his life. Yet, despite the pernicious shadow of death for someone so young and the pain he felt in the last 7 to 8 years of life he bravely endured and focused on poetry and other important matters.

Despite horrendous adversity concerning his health and the economic angle of supporting people he still emerges to be one of the masters of haiku. Hence, his name echoes alongside the esteemed names of Matsuo Basho, Kobayashi Issa, and Yosa Buson.

Shiki wrote, Until now I had mistaken the Enlightenment of Zen: I was wrong to think it meant being able to die serenely under any conditions. It means being able to live serenely under any conditions.

His short life created more decades of poetry than his actual age when he passed away from this earth. Hence, his legacy remains potent today.

Art by Sawako Utsumi

https://fineartamerica.com/featured/the-persimmon-tree-and-the-reflection-of-time-sawako-utsumi.html

https://fineartamerica.com/featured/stunning-bleak-midwinter-art-of-northern-japan-sawako-utsumi.html

https://fineartamerica.com/featured/the-desolate-japanese-buddhist-path-sawako-utsumi.html

https://fineartamerica.com/featured/the-persimmon-tree-and-time-reflected-in-new-light-sawako-utsumi.html

http://fineartamerica.com/profiles/sawako-utsumi.html Sawako Utsumi and where you can buy her art, postcards, bags, and other products. Also, individuals can contact her for individual requests.

http://sawakoart.com

[Masaoka Shiki: His Life and Worksby Janine Beichman, p. 129.] Translation by Janine Beichman

PLEASE DONATE TO HELP MODERN TOKYO TIMES

Modern Tokyo News is part of the Modern Tokyo Times group

DONATIONS to SUPPORT MODERN TOKYO TIMES please pay PayPal and DONATE tosawakoart@gmail.com

http://moderntokyotimes.comModern Tokyo Times International News and Japan News

http://sawakoart.com Sawako Utsumi personal website and Modern Tokyo Times artist

https://moderntokyonews.comModern Tokyo News Tokyo News and International News

PLEASE JOIN ON TWITTER

https://twitter.com/MTT_NewsModern Tokyo Times

PLEASE JOIN ON FACEBOOK

https://www.facebook.com/moderntokyotimes

More:
Japan poetry and a life blighted by ill-health: Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902) - Modern Tokyo Times

This is an extract from Enzo Traversos new book Revolution: An Intellectual History, available from Verso Books.

The legacy of the October Revolution is torn between two antipodal interpretations. The rise to power of the Bolsheviks appeared, on the one hand, as the announcement of a global socialist transformation; on the other hand, as the event that set the stage for an epoch of totalitarianism. The most radical versions of these opposed interpretations official communism and Cold War anti-communism also converge insofar as, for both of them, the Communist Party was a kind of demiurgic historical force.

Several decades after its exhaustion, the communist experience does not need to be defended, idealized, or demonized. It deserves to be critically understood as a whole, as a dialectical totality shaped by internal tensions and contradictions, presenting multiple dimensions in a vast spectrum of shades, from redemptive lans to totalitarian violence, from participatory democracy and collective deliberation to blind oppression and mass extermination, from the most utopian imagination to the most bureaucratic domination sometimes shifting from one to the other in a short span of time.

Like many other isms of our political and philosophical lexicon, communism is a polysemic and ultimately ambiguous word. Its ambiguity does not lie exclusively in the discrepancy that separates the communist idea from its historical embodiments. It lies in the extreme diversity of its expressions. Not only because Russian, Chinese, and Italian communism were different, but also because in the long run many communist movements underwent deep changes, despite keeping their leaders and their ideological references.

Considering its historical trajectory as a world phenomenon, communism appears as a mosaic of communisms. Sketching its anatomy, one can distinguish at least four broad forms, interrelated and not necessarily opposed to each other, but different enough to be recognized on their own: communism as revolution; communism as regime; communism as anti-colonialism; and finally, communism as a variant of social democracy.

It is important to remember the mood of the Russian Revolution, because it powerfully contributed to creating an iconic image that survived the misfortunes of the USSR and cast its shadow over the entire twentieth century. Its aura attracted millions of human beings across the world, and remained relatively well-preserved even when the aura of the communist regimes completely fell apart. In the 1960s and 1970s, it fuelled a new wave of political radicalization that not only claimed autonomy from the USSR and its allies, but also perceived them as enemies.

The Russian Revolution came out of the Great War. It was a product of the collapse of the long nineteenth century, and the symbiotic link between war and revolution shaped the entire trajectory of twentieth-century communism. Emerging from the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, the Paris Commune had been a forerunner of militarized politics, as many Bolshevik thinkers emphasized, but the October Revolution amplified it to an incomparably larger scale.

World War I transformed Bolshevism itself, altering many of its features: several canonical works of the communist tradition, like Lenins The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky (1918) or Leon Trotskys Terrorism and Communism (1920), simply could not be imagined before 1914. Just as 1789 introduced a new concept of revolution no longer defined as an astronomical rotation but rather as a social and political break October 1917 reframed it in military terms: a crisis of the old order, mass mobilization, dualism of power, armed insurrection, proletarian dictatorship, civil war, and a violent clash with counterrevolution.

Lenins State and Revolution formalized Bolshevism as both an ideology (an interpretation of Karl Marxs ideas) and a unity of strategic precepts distinguishing it from social democratic reformism, a politics belonging to the exhausted age of nineteenth-century liberalism. Bolshevism came out of a time of increasing brutalization, when war erupted into politics, changing its language and its practices. It was a product of the anthropological transformation that shaped the old continent at the end of the Great War.

This genetic code of Bolshevism was visible everywhere, from texts to languages, from iconography to songs, from symbols to rituals. It outlasted World War II and continued to fuel the rebellious movements of the 1970s, whose slogans and liturgies obsessively emphasized the idea of a violent clash with the state. Bolshevism created a military paradigm of revolution that deeply shaped communist experiences throughout the planet.

The European Resistance, as well as the socialist transformations in China, Korea, Vietnam, and Cuba reproduced a similar symbiotic link between war and revolution. The international communist movement was therefore envisioned as a revolutionary army formed by millions of combatants, and this had inevitable consequences in terms of organization, authoritarianism, discipline, division of labor, and, last but not least, gender hierarchies. In a movement of warriors, female leaders could only be exceptions.

The Bolsheviks were deeply convinced that they were acting in accordance with the laws of history. The earthquake of 1917 was born from the entanglement of many factors, some set in the longue dure of Russian history and others more temporary, abruptly synchronized by the war: an extremely violent peasant uprising against the landed aristocracy, a revolt of the urban proletariat affected by the economic crisis, and finally the dislocation of the army, formed of peasant-soldiers who were exhausted after three years of a terrible conflict, which they neither understood nor perceived as nearing an end.

If these were the premises of the Russian Revolution, it is difficult to grasp in it any supposed historical necessity. The Soviet experiment was fragile, precarious, and unstable during its first years of existence. It was constantly threatened, and its survival required both inexhaustible energies and enormous sacrifices. A witness to those years, Victor Serge, wrote that in 1919 the Bolsheviks considered the collapse of the Soviet regime likely, but instead of discouraging them, this awareness multiplied their tenacity. The victory of the counterrevolution would have been an immense bloodbath.

Maybe their resistance was possible because they were animated by the profound conviction of acting in accordance with the laws of history. But, in reality, they did not follow any natural tendency; they were inventing a new world, unable to know what would come out of their endeavor, inspired by an astonishingly powerful utopian imagination, and certainly incapable of imagining its totalitarian outcome.

Despite their usual appeal to the positivistic lexicon of historical laws, the Bolsheviks had inherited their military conception of revolution from the Great War. The Russian revolutionaries read Clausewitz and dealt with the interminable controversies about the legacy of Blanquism and the art of insurrection, but the violence of the Russian Revolution did not arise from an ideological impulse; it stemmed from a society brutalized by war.

This genetic trauma had profound consequences. The war had reshaped politics by changing its codes, introducing previously unknown forms of authoritarianism. In 1917, chaos and spontaneity still prevailed in a mass party composed mostly of new members and directed by a group of exiles, but authoritarianism quickly consolidated during the civil war. Lenin and Trotsky claimed the legacy of the Paris Commune of 1871, but Julius Martov was right when he pointed out that their true ancestor was the Jacobin Terror of 179394.

The military paradigm of the revolution should not be mistaken, however, for a cult of violence. In his History of the Russian Revolution, Trotsky put forward solid arguments against the thesis widely spread from the 1920s onward of a Bolshevik coup. Rejecting the ingenuity of the idyllic vision of the taking of the Winter Palace as a spontaneous popular uprising, he dedicated many pages to the methodical preparation of an insurrection that required, well beyond a rigorous and efficient military organization, an in-depth evaluation of its political conditions and a careful choice of its execution times.

The result was the dismissal of the interim government and the arrest of its members practically without bloodshed. The disintegration of the old state apparatus and the construction of a new one was a painful process that lasted for more than three years of civil war. Of course, the insurrection required a technical preparation and was implemented by a minority, but this did not equate to a conspiracy. In opposition to the pervasive view spread by Curzio Malaparte, a victorious insurrection, Trotsky wrote, is widely separated both in method and historical significance from a governmental overturn accomplished by conspirators acting in concealment from the masses.

There is no doubt that the taking of the Winter Palace and the dismissal of the provisional government was a major turn within the revolutionary process: Lenin called it an overthrowing or an uprising (perevorot). Nevertheless, most historians recognize that this twist took place in a period of extraordinary effervescence, characterized by a permanent mobilization of society and constant recourse to the use of force; in a paradoxical context in which Russia, while remaining involved in a world war, was a state that no longer possessed the monopoly on the legitimate use of violence.

Paradoxically, the thesis of the Bolshevik coup is the crossing point between conservative and anarchist criticisms of the October Revolution. Their reasons were certainly different not to say antipodal but their conclusions converged: Lenin and Trotsky had established a dictatorship.

Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, expelled from the United States in 1919 because of their enthusiastic support of the Russian Revolution, could not accept Bolshevik rule and, after the repression of the Kronstadt rebellion in March 1921, decided to leave the USSR. Goldman published My Disillusionment in Russia (1923) and Berkman The Bolshevik Myth (1925), whose conclusion expressed a bitter and severe assessment:

Gray are the passing days. One by one the embers of hope have died out. Terror and despotism have crushed the life born in October. The slogans of the Revolution are foresworn, its ideals stifled in the blood of the people. The breath of yesterday is dooming millions to death; the shadow of today hangs like a black pall over the country. Dictatorship is trampling the masses underfoot. The Revolution is dead; its spirit cries in the wilderness.

Their criticism certainly deserves attention, since it came from inside the revolution itself. Their diagnostic was pitiless: the Bolsheviks had established a party dictatorship that ruled not only in name of the soviets but sometimes as in Kronstadt against them, and whose authoritarian features had becoming more and more suffocating.

In fact, the Bolsheviks themselves did not contest this trenchant appraisal. In Year One of the Russian Revolution (1930), Victor Serge described the USSR during the Civil War in this way:

At this moment, the party fulfilled within the working class the functions of a brain and of a nervous system. It saw, it felt, it knew, it thought, it willed for and through the masses; its consciousness, its organization were a makeweight for the weakness of the individual members of the mass. Without it, the mass would have been no more than a heap of human dust, experiencing confused aspirations shot through by flashes of intelligence these, in the absence of a mechanism capable of leading to large-scale action, doomed to waste themselves and experiencing more insistently the pangs of suffering. Through its incessant agitation and propaganda, always telling the unvarnished truth, the party raised the workers above their own narrow, individual horizon, and revealed to them the vast perspectives of history. After the winter of 191819, the revolution becomes the work of the Communist party.

The Bolsheviks eulogy of party dictatorship, their defense of the militarization of work and their violent language against any left-wing criticism either social democratic or anarchist of their power, was certainly abhorrent and dangerous. It was during the Civil War that Stalinism found its premises. The fact remains that a left-wing alternative was not an easy option. As Serge himself lucidly recognized, the most probable alternative to Bolshevism was simply counterrevolutionary terror.

Without being a coup, the October Revolution meant the seizure of power by a party that represented a minority, and which remained even more isolated after its decision to dissolve the Constituent Assembly. At the end of the Russian Civil War, however, the Bolsheviks had conquered the majority, thus becoming the hegemonic force in a devastated country.

This dramatic change did not happen because of the Cheka and state terror, as pitiless as it was, but because of the division of their enemies, the support of the working class and the passing over to their side of both the peasantry and the non-Russian nationalities. If the final outcome was the dictatorship of a revolutionary party, the alternative was not a democratic regime; the only alternative was a military dictatorship of Russian nationalists, aristocratic landowners. and pogromists.

The communist regime institutionalized the military dimension of revolution. It destroyed the creative, anarchistic, and self-emancipatory spirit of 1917, but at the same time inscribed itself into the revolutionary process. The shift of the revolution toward the Soviet regime passed through different steps: the Civil War (191821), the collectivization of agriculture (193033), and the political purges of the Moscow Trials (193638).

Dissolving the Constituent Assembly, in December 1917, the Bolsheviks affirmed the superiority of Soviet democracy, but by the end of the Civil War the latter was dying. During this atrocious and bloody conflict, the USSR introduced censorship, suppressed political pluralism to the point of finally abolishing any fraction within the Communist Party itself, militarized labor and created the first forced labor camps, and instituted a new political secret police (Cheka). In March 1921, the violent repression of Kronstadt symbolized the end of Soviet democracy and the USSR emerged from the Civil War as a single-party dictatorship.

Ten years later, the collectivization of agriculture brutally ended the peasant revolution and invented new forms of totalitarian violence and bureaucratically centralized modernization of the country. In the second half of the 1930s, the political purges physically eliminated the vestiges of revolutionary Bolshevism and disciplined the entire society by establishing the rule of terror. For two decades, the USSR created a gigantic system of concentration camps.

From the mid-1930s, the USSR roughly corresponded with the classical definition of totalitarianism elaborated a few years later by many conservative political thinkers: a correlation of official ideology, charismatic leadership, single-party dictatorship, suppression of rule of law and political pluralism, monopoly of all means of communication through state propaganda, social and political terror backed by a system of concentration camps, and the suppression of free-market capitalism by a centralized economy.

This description, currently used to point out the similarities between communism and fascism, is not wrong but extremely superficial. Even if one overlooks the enormous differences that separated the communist and fascist ideologies, as well as the social and economic content of their political systems, the fact remains that such a canonical definition of totalitarianism does not grasp the internal dynamic of the Soviet regime. It is simply unable to inscribe it into the historical process of the Russian Revolution. It depicts the USSR as a static, monolithic system, whereas the advent of Stalinism meant a deep and protracted transformation of society and culture.

Equally unsatisfactory is the definition of Stalinism as a bureaucratic counterrevolution or a betrayed revolution. Stalinism certainly signified a radical departure from any idea of democracy and self-emancipation, but it was not, properly speaking, a counterrevolution. A comparison with the Napoleonic Empire is pertinent insofar as Stalinism consciously linked the transformations engendered by the Russian Revolution to both the Enlightenment and the tradition of Russian Empire, but Stalinism was not the restoration of the Old Regime, neither politically or economically, nor even culturally.

Far from restoring the power of the old aristocracy, Stalinism created a completely new economic, managerial, scientific, and intellectual elite, recruited from the lower classes of Soviet societies notably the peasantry and educated by new communist institutions. This is the key to explaining why Stalinism benefited from a social consensus, notwithstanding the Terror and mass deportations.

Interpreting Stalinism as a step in the process of the Russian Revolution does not mean sketching a linear track. The first wave of terror took place during a civil war, when the existence of the USSR itself was threatened by an international coalition. The brutality of the White counterrevolution, the extreme violence of its propaganda and of its practices pogroms and massacres pushed the Bolsheviks to establish a pitiless dictatorship.

Stalin initiated the second and third waves of terror during the 1930s collectivization and the purges in a pacified country whose borders had been internationally recognized and whose political power had been menaced neither by external nor by internal forces. Of course, the rise to power of Hitler in Germany clearly signaled the possibility of a new war in the medium term, but the massive, blind, and irrational character of Stalins violence significantly weakened the USSR instead of reinforcing and equipping it to face such dangers.

Stalinism was a revolution from above, a paradoxical mixture of modernization and social regression, whose final result was mass deportation, a system of concentration camps, an ensemble of trials exhuming the fantasies of the Inquisition, and a wave of mass executions that decapitated the state, the party, and the army. In rural areas, Stalinism meant, according to Nikolai Bukharin, the return to a feudal exploitation of the peasantry with catastrophic economic effects. At the same time as the kulaks were starving in Ukraine, the Soviet regime was transforming tens of thousands of peasants into technicians and engineers.

In short, Soviet totalitarianism merged modernism and barbarism; it was a peculiar, frightening, Promethean trend. Arno Mayer defines it as an uneven and unstable amalgam of monumental achievements and monstrous crimes. Of course, any left scholar or activist could easily share Victor Serges assessment on the moral, philosophical, and political line that radically separated Stalinism from authentic socialism, insofar as Stalins USSR had become in his words an absolute, castocratic totalitarian state, drunk with its own power, for which man does not count. But this does not change the fact, recognized by Serge himself, that this red totalitarianism unfolded in and prolonged a historical process started by the October Revolution.

Avoiding any teleological approach, one could observe that this result was neither historically ineluctable nor coherently inscribed into a Marxist ideological pattern. The origins of Stalinism, nevertheless, cannot simply be imputed, as radical functionalism suggests, to the historical circumstances of war and the social backwardness of a gigantic country with an absolutist past, a country in which building socialism inevitably required reproducing the gruesomeness of primitive capital accumulation.

Bolshevik ideology played a role during the Russian Civil War in this metamorphosis from democratic upsurge to ruthless, totalitarian dictatorship. Its normative vision of violence as the midwife of history and its culpable indifference to the juridical framework of a revolutionary state, historically transitional and doomed to extinction, certainly favored the emergence of an authoritarian, single-party regime.

Multiple threads run from revolution to Stalinism, as well as from the USSR to the communist movements acting across the world. Stalinism was both a totalitarian regime and, for several decades, the hegemonic current of the Left on an international scale.

The Bolsheviks were radical Westernizers. Bolshevik literature was full of references to the French Revolution, 1848 and the Paris Commune, but it never mentioned the Haitian Revolution or the Mexican Revolution. For Trotsky and Lenin, who loved this metaphor, the wheel of history rolled from Petrograd to Berlin, not from the boundless Russian countryside to the fields of Morelos or the Antillean plantations.

In a chapter of his History of the Russian Revolution, Trotsky deplored the fact that peasants were usually ignored by the history books, just as theater critics pay no attention to the workers who, behind the scenes, operate the curtains and change the scenery. In his own book, however, the peasants appear mostly as an anonymous mass. They are not neglected but are observed from afar, with analytical detachment rather than empathy.

The Bolsheviks had started to question their vision of the peasantry inherited from Marxs writings on French Bonapartism as a culturally backward and politically conservative class, but their proletarian tropism was too strong to complete this revision. This was done, not without theoretical and strategic confrontations, by anti-colonial communism in the years between the two world wars.

In China, the communist turn toward the peasantry resulted from both the devastating defeat of the urban revolutions of the mid-1920s and the effort to inscribe Marxism into a national history and culture. After the bloody repression inflicted by the Kuomintang (GMD), the Communist Party cells had been almost completely dismantled in the cities, and its members imprisoned and persecuted. Retreating into the country, where they found protection and could reorganize their movement, many communist leaders started looking at the peasantry with different eyes, abandoning their former Westernized gaze on Asian backwardness.

This strategic turn, the object of sharp controversies between the Communist International and its Chinese section during the 1930s, was claimed by Mao Zedong at the beginning of 1927, even before the massacres perpetrated by the GMD in Shanghai and Canton that year. Coming back to his native Hunan, Mao wrote a famous report in which he designated the peasantry instead of the urban proletariat as the driving force of the Chinese Revolution.

Against the Moscow agents who conceived of peasant militias exclusively as triggers of urban uprisings, in 1931, Mao persisted in building a Soviet republic in Jiangxi. Without believing in the rural character of the Chinese Revolution, he could not have organized the Long March in order to resist the annihilation campaign launched by the GMD. Initially considered as a tragic defeat, this epic undertaking paved the way for a successful struggle in the following decade, first against the Japanese occupation and then against the GMD itself.

The proclamation of the Peoples Republic of China in Beijing in 1949 was the result of a process that, from the uprisings of 1925 to the Long March and the anti-Japanese struggle, found one of its necessary premises in October 1917; but it was also the product of a strategic revision. There was a complex genetic link between the Chinese and the Russian Revolutions. The three major dimensions of communism revolution, regime, and anti-colonialism emblematically merged in the Chinese Revolution.

As a radical break with the traditional order, it was incontestably a revolution that heralded the end of centuries of oppression; as the conclusion of a civil war, it resulted in the conquest of power by a militarized party which, since the beginning, established its dictatorship in the most authoritarian forms. And as the conclusion of fifteen years of struggle, first against the Japanese occupation and then against the GMD a nationalist force that had become the agent of Western great powers the communist victory of 1949 marked not only the end of colonialism in China but also, on a broader scale, a significant moment in the global process of decolonization.

After the Russian Revolution, socialism crossed the boundaries of Europe and became an agenda item in the South and the colonial world. Because of its intermediary position between Europe and Asia, with a gigantic territory extending across both continents, inhabited by a variety of national, religious, and ethnic communities, the USSR became the locus of a new crossroads between the West and the colonial world. Bolshevism was able to speak equally to the proletarian classes of the industrialized countries and to the colonized peoples of the South.

During the nineteenth century, anti-colonialism was almost nonexistent in the West, with the notable exception of the anarchist movement, whose activists and ideas widely circulated between Southern and Eastern Europe, Latin America, and different Asian countries. After Marxs death, socialism based its hopes and expectations on the growing strength of the industrial working class, mostly white and male, and was concentrated in the developed (mostly Protestant) capitalist countries of the West.

Every mass socialist party included powerful currents defending the civilizing mission of Europe throughout the world. Social democratic parties particularly those located in the biggest empires postponed colonial liberation until after the socialist transformation of Europe and the United States. The Bolsheviks radically broke with such a tradition.

The second congress of the Communist International, held in Moscow in July 1920, approved a programmatic document calling for colonial revolutions against imperialism: its goal was the creation of communist parties in the colonial world and the support of national liberation movements. The congress clearly affirmed a radical turn away from the old social democratic views on colonialism.

A couple of months later, the Bolsheviks organized a Congress of the Peoples of the East in Baku, Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic, which convened almost two thousand delegates from twenty-nine Asian nationalities. Grigory Zinoviev explicitly affirmed that the Communist International had broken with older social democratic attitudes, according to which civilized Europe could and must act as tutor to barbarous Asia. Revolution was no longer considered as the exclusive realm of white European and American workers, and socialism could not be imagined without the liberation of colonized peoples.

The conflicting relationships between communism and nationalism would be clarified in the following decades, but the October Revolution was the inaugural moment of global anti-colonialism. In the 1920s, anti-colonialism suddenly shifted from the realm of historical possibility to the field of political strategy and military organization. The Baku conference announced this historic change.

The alliance between communism and anti-colonialism experienced several moments of crisis and tension, related to both ideological conflicts and the imperatives of the USSRs foreign policies. At the end of World War II, the French Communist Party participated in a coalition government that violently repressed anti-colonial revolts in Algeria and Madagascar, and in the following decade it supported Prime Minister Guy Mollet at the beginning of the Algerian War. In India, the communist movement was marginalized during World War II because of its decision to suspend its anti-colonial struggle and to support the British Empires involvement in a military alliance with the USSR against the Axis powers.

If these examples clearly show the contradictions of communist anti-colonialism, they do not change the historical role played by the USSR as a rear base for many anti-colonial revolutions. The entire process of decolonization took place in the context of the Cold War, within the relations of force established by the existence of the USSR.

Retrospectively, decolonization appears as a historical experience in which the contradictory dimensions of communism previously mentioned emancipation and authoritarianism, revolution and dictatorial power permanently merged. In most cases, anti-colonial struggles were conceived and organized like military campaigns carried out by liberation armies, and the political regimes they established were, from the beginning, one-party dictatorships.

In Cambodia, at the end of a ferocious war, the military dimension of the anti-colonial struggle completely suffocated any emancipatory impulse, and the conquest of power by the Khmer Rouge immediately resulted in the establishment of a genocidal power. The happiness of insurgent Havana on the first of January 1959 and the terror of the Cambodian killing fields are the dialectical poles of communism as anti-colonialism.

The fourth dimension of twentieth-century communism is social democratic: in certain countries and periods, communism played the role traditionally fulfilled by social democracy. This happened in some Western countries, mostly in the postwar decades, thanks to a set of circumstances related to international context, the foreign policy of the USSR, and the absence or weakness of classic social democratic parties; and it also occurred in some countries born from decolonization.

The most significant examples of this peculiar phenomenon are found in the United States, at the time of the New Deal, in postwar France and Italy, as well as in India (Kerala and West Bengal). Of course, social democratic communism was geographically and chronologically more circumscribed than its other forms, but it existed nonetheless. To a certain extent, the rebirth of social democracy itself after 1945 was a by-product of the October Revolution, which had changed the balance of power on a global scale and compelled capitalism to transform significantly, adopting a human face.

Social democratic communism is an oxymoronic definition that does not ignore the links of French, Italian, or Indian communism with revolutions, Stalinism, and decolonization. It does not neglect the capacity of these movements to lead insurgencies notably during the Resistance against the Nazi occupation nor their organic connections with Moscow for several decades. Their first open criticism of the USSRs foreign policy took place only in the 1960s, first with the Sino-Soviet split, then with the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Soviet tanks.

Even their internal structure and organization was, at least until the end of the 1970s, much more Stalinist than social democratic, as well as their culture, theoretical sources, and political imagination. In spite of these clearly recognizable features, such parties played a typical social democratic role: reforming capitalism, containing social inequalities, getting accessible health care, education, and leisure to the largest number of people; in short, improving the living conditions of the laboring classes and giving them political representation.

Of course, one of the peculiar features of social democratic communism was its exclusion from political power, except for a couple of years between the end of Word War II and the breakout of the Cold War (the swan song of social democratic communism took place in France at the beginning of the 1980s, when the (French Communist Party (PCF) participated in a left coalition government under Franois Mitterrand). Unlike the British Labour Party, the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), or Scandinavias social democracies, it could not claim paternity of the welfare state.

In the United States, the Communist Party was one of the left pillars of the New Deal, along with the trade unions, but it never entered the Roosevelt administration. It did not experience power, only the purges of McCarthyism. In France and Italy, the communist parties were strongly influential in the birth of postwar social policies simply because of their strength and their capacity to put pressure on governments.

The arena of their social reformism was municipal socialism in the cities they led as hegemonic strongholds, like Bologna, or the Parisian red belt. In a much bigger country like India, the communist governments of Kerala and West Bengal could be considered equivalent forms of local, postcolonial welfare states.

In Europe, social democratic communism had two necessary premises: on the one hand, the Resistance that legitimized communist parties as democratic forces; on the other, the economic growth that followed the postwar reconstruction. By the 1980s, the time of social democratic communism was over. Therefore, the end of communism in 1989 throws a new light on the historical trajectory of social democracy itself.

An accomplished form of the social democratic welfare state only existed in Scandinavia. Elsewhere, the welfare state was much more the result of a capitalist self-reformation than a social democratic conquest. At the end of World War II, in the midst of a continent in ruins, capitalism was unable to restart without powerful state intervention. Despite its obvious and largely achieved goal of defending the principle of the free market against the Soviet economy, the Marshall Plan was, as its name indicated, a plan that assured the transition from total war to peaceful reconstruction.

Without such massive American help, many materially destroyed European countries would have been unable to recover quickly, and the United States worried that a new economic collapse might push entire countries toward communism. From this point of view, the postwar welfare state was an unexpected outcome of the complex and contradictory confrontation between communism and capitalism that had begun in 1917.

Whatever the values, convictions, and commitments of its members and even its leaders, social democracy played a rentiers role: it could defend freedom, democracy, and the welfare state in the capitalist countries simply because the USSR existed, and capitalism had been compelled to transform itself in the context of the Cold War. After 1989, capitalism recovered its savage face, rediscovered the lan of its heroic times, and dismantled the welfare state almost everywhere.

In most Western countries, social democracy turned to neoliberalism and became an essential tool of this transition. And alongside old-style social democracy, even social democratic communism disappeared. The self-dissolution of the Italian Communist Party, in 1991, was the emblematic epilogue of this process: it did not turn into a classic social democratic party but rather an advocate of center-left liberalism, with the explicitly claimed model of the American Democratic Party.

In 1989, the fall of communism closed the curtain on a play as epic as it was tragic, as exciting as it was terrifying. The time of decolonization and the welfare state was over, but the collapse of communism-as-regime also took with it communism-as-revolution. Instead of liberating new forces, the end of the USSR engendered a widespread awareness of the historical defeat of twentieth-century revolutions: paradoxically, the shipwreck of real socialism engulfed the communist utopia.

The twenty-first-century left is compelled to reinvent itself, to distance itself from previous patterns. It is creating new models, new ideas, and a new utopian imagination. This reconstruction is not an easy task, insofar as the fall of communism left the world without alternatives to capitalism and created a different mental landscape. A new generation has grown up in a neoliberal world in which capitalism has become a natural form of life.

The Left rediscovered an ensemble of revolutionary traditions that had been suppressed or marginalized over the course of a century, anarchism foremost among them, and recognized a plurality of political subjects previously ignored or relegated to a secondary position. The experiences of the alter-globalization movements, the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, the Spanish Indignados, Syriza, the French Nuit debout and gilets jaunes, feminist and LGBT movements, and Black Lives Matter are steps in the process of building a new revolutionary imagination, discontinuous, nourished by memory but at the same time severed from twentieth-century history and deprived of a usable legacy.

Born as an attempt at taking heaven by storm, twentieth-century communism became, with and against fascism, an expression of the dialectic of the Enlightenment. Ultimately, the Soviet-style industrial cities, five-year plans, agricultural collectivization, spacecraft, gulags converted into factories, nuclear weapons, and ecological catastrophes, were different forms of the triumph of instrumental reason.

Was not communism the frightening face of a Promethean dream, of an idea of Progress that erased and destroyed any experience of self-emancipation? Was not Stalinism a storm piling wreckage upon wreckage, in Walter Benjamins image, and which millions of people mistakenly called Progress? Fascism merged a set of conservative values inherited from the counter-Enlightenment with a modern cult of science, technology, and mechanical strength. Stalinism combined a similar cult of technical modernity with a radical and authoritarian form of Enlightenment: socialism transformed into a cold utopia.

A new, global left will not succeed without working through this historical experience. Extracting the emancipatory core of communism from this field of ruins is not an abstract, merely intellectual operation; it will require new battles, new constellations, in which all of a sudden the past will reemerge and memory flash up. Revolutions cannot be scheduled, they always come unexpectedly.

Enzo Traverso teaches at Cornell University. His most recent book is Revolution: An Intellectual History.

More here:
We Can Only Go Beyond Communism by Coming to Terms With Its History - Jacobin magazine

ANQING, China--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Mount Jiuhuashan is located in Chizhou City, Anhui Province, not far from Mount Huangshan, another famous mountain in southern Anhui Province across a lake. Characterized by natural scenery, Buddhism and other splendid humanity cultures, it is known as one of the four famous Buddhism sacred mountains in China and designated as a national 5A-level scenic spot.

In 719 AD, Jin Qiaojue, the Prince of Silla State (the main body is now Gyeongju City, North Gyeongsan Province, South Korea) crossed the sea to China in Tang Dynasty, stayed in Mount Jiuhuashan for 75 years of painstakingly practicing and passed away at the age of 99 left with his flesh body unrotten after death. He was considered as the reincarnation of Buddhist Ksitigarbha and Mount Jiuhuashan was turned into "Ksitigarbha Bodhisattva Dojo".

In Winter, romance and solemnity coexist in Mount Jiuhuashan after snow. The echoing of ice and snow makes it like a "Coloured Glass World" in fairy tales while Tiantai Peak, Ten King Peak, Huatai and other scenic spots are all covered by snow in white like ice flowers blooming wantonly, with crystal clear beauty. When visiting ancient temples by walking through the snow, burning incense and listening to the Dharma, in contrast to viewing purity, inner peace stay in our hearts.

Being covered by the white snow, the distant mountains, ancient temples and snow complement each other. The branches of trees all over the mountains become into rimes, with exquisitely carved ice crystals like beautiful blooming snow lotus, or a natural ink painting, making people infatuated with it.

Mount Jiuhuashan, shining with silver light after snow, seems to be covered with white cloud-made clothes while the land with ancient pine trees are wrapped in ice and snow. It is even more beautiful and splendid under the sunshine.

After the snow, Huatai Scenic Area of Mount Jiuhuashan seems to be full of silver trees with white flowers, and the peaks are shrouded in dense fog. Thick rime condensed on the branches, furry and shiny, just like coral.

The Winter snow in Mount Jiuhuashan is waiting for you to explore by yourself!

Read the rest here:
Mount Jiuhuashan in the Snow, Wonderland of "Lotus Country of Buddhism" - Business Wire

Some might call me a heathen for rejecting established religion. At least Im not alone as I found out from an article in the Monitor last week, titled Whats your Religion? In U.S., a common reply now is None.

It turns out, 29% of us are not affiliated. If we were a church, we would be the largest religious group in the United States. Some are atheists, some agnostics, but many, like me, are spiritual. I agree with what one of the unaffiliated folks, previously a Catholic, said in the article.

It just means finding meaning and perhaps spirituality without practicing a religion pulling from whatever makes sense of me or whatever fits with my values.

Facing my fourth cancer has prompted me to look more closely at what makes my life meaningful. While I am comforted and buoyed up by something bigger than myself, it is not that bearded, old, white man in the sky. My spirituality, instead, comes from my Buddhist outlook coupled with my identity with Mother Earth.

Nevertheless, I still experience sacred moments with a sense of awe. For instance, just centering my breath on the present moment can induce a sublime sense of oneness, causing an involuntary smile to spread across my face.I am not my puny self anymore but tethered securely within a living Earth and the cosmos beyond.

Im attracted to Buddhism because it provides a pathway toward living a meaningful life, not by worshipping a supreme being but by coming to terms with who I am within an impermanent world. It is now paying dividends by helping me deal with the uncertainty of my medical prognosis. Like being drenched with a bucket of ice-cold water, cancer has woken me up to the present moment.

An American Tibetan Buddhist, Pema Chodron, said it best.

To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. To live fully is to be always in no-mans-land. To experience each moment as completely new and fresh. To live is to be willing to die over and over again.

Connected to my Buddhist sensibility is my bond to the Earth. I identify with what Pablo Casals, the great cellist, wrote about natures mastery.

I do not think a day passes in my life in which I fail to look with fresh amazement at the miracle of nature. It is there on every side. It can be simply a shadow on a mountainside, or a spiders web gleaming with dew, or sunlight on the leaves of a tree.

Casalss ability to be present in the living moment was extraordinary, reminding me of William Blakes famous quote, If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.

Or this from another of Blakes poems:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an hour.

I get fleeting epiphanies like this from my photography. I like to carry my camera with me because it forces me to slow down and actually see what is in front of me a magical shadow on a rock, a hidden world in an ice crystal, or heaven in a mud puddle.

I am secure in my faith now, but as a young man, I was agnostic or worse. Christian Wiman has written a profound and poetic book,My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer,addressing folks who believe in God. I am cheeky enough to think it also applies to me.

When I assented to the faith that was latent within me and I phrase it carefully, deliberately, for there was no white light, no ministering or avenging angel that tore my life in two; rather it seemed as if the tiniest seed of belief had finally flowered in me, or, more accurately, as if I had happened upon some rare flower deep in the desert and had known, though I was just then discovering it, that it had been blooming impossibly year after parched year in me, surviving all the seasons of my unbelief.

A note to the reader: I wrote this essay in response to an article in the Monitor last week. In no way do I mean to detract from the joy and sacredness ofthis Christmasholiday which I savor as much as anyone.

(Jean Stimmell lives in Northwood. His blog can be found online at jeanstimmell.blogspot.com.)

Original post:
My Turn: To see the world in a mud puddle - Concord Monitor

Pat Orr | Guest Columnist

There are thousands of religions worldwide, but the five oldest and largest religions are usually considered the main ones. In order of their population percentage according to yourdictionary.com are, Christianity 31.5%, Islam 23.2%, Hindu 15%, Buddhism 7.1%, and Judaism at 0.2%. All other religions account for 6.7%, and those who claim no religious affiliation are 16.3%.

Why is Christmas, a holiday associated with only one religion, a worldwide phenomenon? When you look closer, Christmas starts with the New Testament believers whom we call Christians.

Of the five main religions Christianity, Islam, and Judaism are monotheistic, each focusing on one God. Both Islam and Christianity believe their God sent one chosen messenger to redeem man, Muhammed, and Jesus, respectively. The two major differences in these two religions are what happened when each of the divine messengers died and how their followers were asked to proceed.

When Muhammed died, other leaders rose to take his place, known as caliphs. A set of laws developed requiring the devout ritual of prayer five times a day, fasting during the month of Ramadan, and completing a trip to the holy city of Mecca before death. There are other rules about dress, dietary habits, and the primary religious text is the Quran. The central dictum of Islam is to live by the will of Allah.

Judaism is the worlds oldest religion, and its holy text, the Tanakh, includes the same five books as the Christian Old Testament bible, in a different order. While Judaism shares the same God with Christianity, it stops short of treating Jesus as divine and considers him a prophet sent by God. The Ten Commandments given to Moses by God are also an important part of teaching in this faith. The Talmud is another holy text that includes extensive Jewish laws and teaching specific to Judaism.

For purposes of brevity, I will not go into detail about Hinduism or Buddhism, which both focus on following the path and prescribed laws to enlightenment and wisdom. Both religions believe reincarnation provides a path to a better understanding of the enlightened self.

The one element of Buddhism we all recognize but dont fully understand is the concept of Karma. Buddhists believe in reincarnation and rebirth. Karma is akin to a divine bank account in which accounts of actions and moral life are recorded. You have work to do if you died as a Monk but are reborn as a goat. In the process of rebirth, your Karma can determine to what station in life you return.

The reason for this recitation of the worlds great religions is to help explain my understanding of the role that Christ played in the holiday we call Christmas.

One central theme repeatedly preached by Jesus and his disciples were that you could only be saved from earthly death by faith alone. He preached against the rules and regulations required of his Jewish followers, which got him nailed to a cross with thieves and murders.

Purported Christian sects and denominations that establish extensive rules, laws, and additional religious texts to be followed other than those specifically preached by Jesus and recorded and translated by his followers would not be tolerated by Jesus if he was traveling through the world today. He railed against mans laws as impediments to Gods truth.

No one can say for sure, but a painting of the nativity scene was first made famous around 1220 by the Church, looking to reinforce and humanize the birth story. The fact that Jesus was a human born of a woman had been muddled by myth and tales through the centuries.

That birth celebrated with gifts from afar by strangers dispatched by angels is the genesis of our Christmas. The entire concept that giving is better than receiving is a Christian concept that reinforces the story of Jesus willingly giving his life so that believers could be forever cleansed of sin and saved.

The resurrection of Lazarus and Jesus, both witnessed first-hand by multiple on-the-record testimonials, has forever cemented that Jesus birth is indeed a cause for global celebration.

The Christian faith in the birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus established the foundational belief of a better tomorrow through faith. Yes, the story of St. Nicholas dropping gold coins down the chimney of poor people is the archaic beginning of todays jolly fat guy in a red suit. Still, the original concept on which the story is based, that of helping the helpless, belongs to Jesus.

You do not have to jump through any hoops, have any surgery, wear any uniform, or even attend church to be saved by Jesus or receive his grace.

A recent Pew Research Center Survey released Dec. 14 found that the share of the American public who claim no religious affiliation has risen six points from five years ago and ten points from a decade ago.

A Fox Business poll asked why America is suffering a crime epidemic. Surprisingly, the No. 1 answer was not soft sentencing laws or liberal prosecutors. This group felt that the general breakdown of moral values in America was the root cause of the current criminal activity.

You can conclude cause and effect if you so choose. The pervasive anything goes and I have a right to do as I please mentality does not track with any major religions teachings.

As my mother told me once when at age 11, I began to question the validity of one fat guy delivering toys to the entire world in a single night; you stop believing, you stop receiving.

You can stretch, maim, trash, and discount it, but you cannot take Christ out of Christmas. I hope you celebrate the true meaning of the holiday and give the gift of love and faith to all those you care about.

If we all work to put the spiritual gifts of Christ back in Christmas, how can it hurt?

Contact Pat Orr at avreviewopinion@gmail.com.

Read the original here:
Around Town: It's time to put Christ back in Christmas - VVdailypress.com

Buddha Shakyamuni, creator of Buddhism

To bring you for this condition, Buddhism points you to enduring standards in this impermanent community, and provides you valuable information on just how issues are really. Through understanding the law of cause and effect, using practical apparatus like reflection to achieve awareness and build compassion and wisdom, we many of us can make use of all of our potential to understand the ultimate purpose of enlightenment.

Easily like a candle flame or gradually like a hill, perhaps the most solid circumstances transform. Obtained no genuinely long lasting essence.

All of our inner field of feelings and thoughts is in the exact same state of continual change. The greater amount of we understand just how all things are impermanent and influenced by most problems, the healthy a perspective we are able to keep on our everyday life, the relations, stuff, and prices targeting what matters.

If every little thing comes and happens, could there be whatever remains? Based on Buddhism, the one and only thing that will be usually current may be the consciousness in which all these experiences and phenomena look. This understanding isnt only eternal but in addition inherently happy.

To recognize this amazing understanding here nowadays means to being enlightened, plus its the ultimate goal of Buddhism.

Party meditation during the Berlin Buddhist center

Buddhism inspires all of us to get obligations for the own lives, without moralizing, by understanding cause and effect (karma). Just like the law of gravity, the law of karma performance, every-where as well as the amount of time.

Buddha discussed in big detail how we shape the potential future through all of our thinking, keywords and activities. What we manage today collects close or bad thoughts in our attention. Once you understand thus giving you big liberty and places all of us back command over our life. Karma isnt fate. We are able to determine to not ever carry out harmful steps, and so abstain from promoting the sources of future distress. To sow the the seed products for good outcome, we take part in positive actions.

Through Buddhist reflection, we can in addition get rid of the adverse thoughts currently gathered within our attention from previous measures. Even as we observe much suffering originates from not comprehending cause-and-effect, we naturally create compassion for other individuals.

Stupas tend to be bodily symbols of enlightenment, our very own minds organic potential

In Buddhism, compassion and knowledge get together. Exercising reflection frequently, we obtain extra space within our mind, and distance from difficult feelings and thoughts. This permits you to see that everyone comes with the same fundamental troubles as united states, therefore develop our thoughtful wish to just be sure to make a move to greatly help other individuals.

When we respond from compassion, focusing on rest in the place of our selves, we get much better opinions from the industry. The distressing feelings that individuals all bring, like rage, pleasure, connection, and jealousy, loosen their unique hold. Where there can be room that people dont quickly fill with the own problems anymore, knowledge enjoys a chance to appear spontaneously have a peek at the link.

Therefore, wisdom and compassion build and supporting each other on the road.

The Buddha ended up being unique because he was 1st person to attain full enlightenment in recorded history. But theres no important distinction between the Buddha and us. All of us have a mind, therefore can all attain liberation and enlightenment by working together with our thoughts. The body, views, and thinking are continually modifying. Buddhism panorama all of them as empty bare of every long lasting substance, and thus they might be no factor for a proper, split ego or self. The state of liberation arrives when we not just appreciate this intellectually but experiences it in an intense, long lasting way. With no good ego we quit getting activities actually. We acquire a massive room for joyful developing, without having to answer every unfavorable feeling that comes by.

Enlightenment may be the supreme goal in Buddhism. All positive properties specially joy, fearlessness, and compassion are completely mastered. Here, our awareness try all-encompassing, and not set at all. With no confusion or disruption in our minds, we benefits people in an instant and effectively.

If youre contemplating getting to know more info on Buddhism, you can check out a Buddhist center towards you, or read on with what this means to be a Buddhist.

More:
Whenever we really give consideration, we could observe that everything in the outside business is changing - ADOTAS

For the past year, China has imprisoned Muslims for displaying their faith, compelled Buddhists to vow devotion to the ruling coalition, and pressured Christian churches to remove their crosses. The unprecedented war on organized religion does not come as a surprise as China has been trying to eliminate religion for a long time. The ruling coalition party, which is ostensibly atheist, has for decades tried to influence religious organizations to maintain dominance. According to Chinas State Administration for religious affairs, the Catholics, Protestants, Buddhists, Muslims and Taos have freedom of worship. Basically, these groups have freedom of operation so long as they are officially sanctioned by the government. In reality, anyone who believes in a higher power is considered an enemy of the Chinese Communist Party.

Although the constitution protects religious groups from violations, the presidency of Xi Jinping seems to have no respect for religion. Millions of Xinjiang residents who are mostly Muslim have been imprisoned by the state and others harassed by the massive police installed in the region recently. The detainees claim to have been imprisoned because they refused to abandon their Islam markers, such as refusing to drink and wearing a hijab. While Beijing reported having dealt with the matter and released the detainees, there is no evidence pertaining to their claim. In fact, the Chinese government is now accused of faking their situation on social media by forcing victims to give statements of their release. In practice, little has been done to ameliorate the situation in Xinjiang.

Similarly, organized religion is being intimidated by the government all over the country. More than 10 Halal restaurants have been forced to take down their Arabic scrips and symbols depicting Islam, claiming that it does not represent the Chinese culture. The communist party claims that it does not trust suspicious foreign forces in its state, therefore, interprets such symbols as non-allegiance. They want Islam and other religious groups to operate under the Chinese language, something that strips the whole meaning of the distinct religion.

The communist party has made sure children are not taught about their various religions from a young age. The children are only allowed to believe in communism and the ruling party. While the crackdown may seem to focus mainly on Islam, Christians have also been targeted in many ways. Catholics and Protestants have been threatened and harassed severally. Many Christians have reported burning of their Bibles, being forced to renounce their Christianity, and shutting down churches. The churches that have been allowed to operate must install facial recognition devices in their buildings lest they get closed. To make it worse, the communist party officials often add state propaganda to preachers sermons. Corrupting the word of God with the lies of communism.

Buddhism and Taoism, the most ancient religious groups of East Asia, are not lucky either. Believers from these religious groups have gone through agony during Xi Jinpings Presidency. They have been limited from accessing some parts of the country, and some monks accused of terrorism for exercising their beliefs. The Shaolin Temple, among the most important Buddhist sanctuaries, hoisted the Chinese national flag recently. This is believed to be a part of the Chinese governments campaign to force religious groups into allegiance.

The Communist Party seeks to maintain its grip on power and can only do so by dismantling organized religious groups that seem to undermine its authority. This might also be a well-orchestrated strategy to limit foreign influence among the Chinese as the government has always had a concern with the extent of foreign influence over religion. According to the Chinese government, foreign forces can use religious bodies to manipulate societal thoughts that may lead to chaos and havoc.

See original here:
This is why China has declared war on organized religion - We Are The Mighty