Carrying a Message Further • Part 7: Sacred Victims and the Grand Acknowledgement
Vast inclusivity and the recognition of the universality of lived experience
This is the seventh chapter of “Carrying a Message Further,” section III of All We Are: Dispatches from the Ground Experience. This collection of writings explores the problem of ideological rigidity in social theories, the concept of "lived experience" (including my own), and the argument for using empowerment as a basis for education.
This painting was done by Jon Lomberg for Carl Sagan’s famous book “Cosmos”. In Lomberg’s own words: “From quarks to quasars, here is an update of an old painting from 1975 used in Carl Sagan’s COSMOS book. I’ve renamed it COSMIC PERSPECTIVE, one of Carl’s core concepts and a good description of the vision we shared. It’s also a visual depiction of the scope of our intended One Earth Message.” Lomberg was also the Design Director for NASA's Voyager Golden Record (which was sent to outer space to communicate to extraterrestrial life forms on behalf of humanity), designing the image and sound sequences on that legendary project.
Life is Tough
This essay is a companion piece to the previous chapter called “Sacred Victims and the Land Acknowledgement”. The Sacred Victim narrative that Erec Smith lays out in Critique of Antiracism in Rhetoric and Composition ignited a months-long inquiry for me, during which I delved deeper into the many dimensions of victimization and the stories we tell about the individual and collective lived experiences of the Sacred Victim.
In this chapter, I want to explore in more detail the many elements of pain and suffering that are inherent to all life forms, including human beings at the very top of society, using the basic worldview of Eastern spirituality, which, overall, emphasizes the universality of lived experience for people from all walks of life. I will first examine contemplative texts from Tibet and Vietnam that relate to the suffering of living things, and then explore some Western references to suffering, including the lived experiences of suffering of the internationally renowned 19th century poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
At the end of this exploration, I will propose a broader and deeper approach to the Land Acknowledgement ritual, which I hope might invite more unity and empathy into the progressive spaces in which this ritual is carried out.
Why Have I Chosen one Specific Framework for Exploring Suffering?
I’ve intentionally chosen to frame this chapter around the specific insights around human and animal suffering that are foundational to the basic philosophy of Buddhism. I’ve chosen Buddhism for three reasons:
First, it is the only philosophical system that I know of that centralizes pain and suffering as the main components of life that should serve as inspiration to walk a path of wisdom. Like all systems of thought—both spiritual and secular—Buddhism begins with a premise (all life is suffering) and builds upon that premise in subsequent additions to the original philosophy as laid out in additional non-canonical commentaries, practices, and texts by those who have taken up the carrying of the torch for the lineage sometimes over thousands of years. Because of this, Buddhism in its many different sects and lineages has developed a supremely sophisticated and detailed exploration of the many dimensions of pain and suffering experienced by living things.
Second, many communities that are influenced by critical theories of social justice (i.e. Critical Social Justice theory, or CSJ) have taken a liking to Buddhist epistemology (theory of knowledge/ways of knowing), believing that there are significant overlaps between the postmodern theories of how we know what we know and the insights into human consciousness that Buddhist teachings brings to the table. It’s useful to note that the word “woke” was originally used by Black Americans to indicate a “waking up” to the realities of systemic oppression and that the ancient Indian language of Sanskrit has a similar word for waking up to the realities of pain and suffering for all “sentient beings”. That word is “Buddha”, which means “awake” in Sanskrit and is the honorific title that was given to the founder of Buddhism, Siddhartha of the Shakya clan, 2,500 years ago.
Third, I want to demonstrate through the contemplation of one specific framework (Buddhism) a truism that I feel has become lost to our society in recent years: no single individual and no single ideology has cornered the market on empathy, caring, fairness, analysis, knowledge, wisdom, or justice work. The presumptuous and totalizing claim to absolute, exclusive authority in all things related to humanity is the Great Achilles Heel of postmodern social justice frameworks (i.e. Critical Social Justice, intersectionality, critical theories of race, gender and other categories of sociocultural identities, etc.). I believe this unacknowledged shadow has led to a profound split and even active hostility between many people from different demographic groups and world views, and that this unacknowledged shadow has contributed greatly to the rapid unraveling of societal cohesion.
I also believe that this escalating situation can be turned around if those who advocate identitarian forms of anti-oppression justice work (what Erec Smith calls the primacy of identity) could learn to embrace a universalist perspective that honors both the unique identity and shared history of the demographic groups being advocated for as well as their place in the larger identity and shared history of the human family and even all other living things. The detailed contemplation of suffering in Buddhist philosophy is but one example that demonstrates that critical theories of social justice are not the only path to a just world nor the only lens through which we can study problems and find solutions.
The mutual influence between Buddhism and Critical Social Justice (CSJ) is rooted in the preconfigurative politics that has been embraced by CSJ activist communities and academics. Preconfigurative politics is the utopian practice of communal living, self-criticism, and rooting out all oppression as it manifests in relationships, communities, and inside ourselves—all as a kind of “practice run” for social justice communities (including classrooms, academic departments and programs, and activist spaces) who wish to replace society’s current norms, policies, laws and culture with the utopian vision they have been designing and preparing for. As CSJ-influenced preconfigurative politics has made its way into a wide variety of religious institutions and communities, including the various lineages and sects of Buddhism, yoga centers, non-sectarian meditation communities, Christian churches, self-help movements, group therapy gatherings, and spiritual practice communities from other Eastern paths, including Sufism, Hinduism, and others, it’s important to highlight what it is that Buddhism offers as (arguably) the most influential spiritual discipline in all these movements.
In a future chapter, I will be examining Erec Smith’s critiques around “preconfigurative politics” in more detail with some concrete examples of how preconfigurative politics plays out. I mention it here because, it’s important to highlight where the gaps are in terms of “praxis,” which is a Marxist term that is often used by CSJ adherents to refer to how we bring our ideals of compassion and inclusion into practice—something that we will see in the next chapter is rarely achieved.
It is not my aim to convert anyone to any specific framework or system of thought, including Buddhism, but I do like to find the gems in various frameworks and systems of thought and bring them into the light when I feel they can provide insight into whatever it is I am inquiring into. A philosophical term that comes to mind is “heuristic”, which the American Heritage Dictionary defines as “of or relating to a usually speculative formulation serving as a guide in the investigation [of] or solution [to] a problem.” So, taking a heuristic approach to Buddhism would mean that I am treating this philosophy not as “The Truth” but as a speculative formulation—a coherent but not fully crystallized (i.e. non-dogmatic) set of ideas or contemplations that can be used as a guide during the process of investigating and finding solutions to problems that we have identified during the investigation phase.
The basic outlook of the Buddhist world view is a good fit for this moment because the philosophy of “the dharma” (the traditional Sanskrit name for Buddhist teachings) begins with the “First Noble Truth”, which is that “all life is suffering.” American Buddhist scholar Thomas Cleary later revised this ancient doctrine to say “all conditioned life” is characterized by suffering, implying that we can liberate ourselves from the conditioning that causes us to suffer.
But, even if there is a far-off distant moment in which we might imagine that we have finally, once and for all, freed ourselves from conditioned existence wrought by suffering, the foundation of this speculative formulation (the dharma) is that we have to start where we are, which, if most of us are honest with ourselves, is often characterized by the ongoing “hangover” of deep dissatisfaction, causing us to seek refuge in pleasure, excitement, entertainment, intoxicants, and even social movements that give us meaning and purpose, temporarily relieving us of the boredom and existential depression that lies underneath, especially in advanced capitalist societies where people have more leisure time.
My thesis for this chapter is simple: In the end, we can all be considered, from a certain angle, to be sacred victims because life is tough, tough, tough. This is not a retort to any social movements that advocate for Black lives or transgender lives or women’s lives (i.e. this is not an appeal to the “All Lives Matter” viral meme that many find offensive and as dismissive of the injustice experienced by marginalized groups). Rather, it is a timeless recognition of the universality of suffering for all living things.
It’s a bigger perspective that transcends time, space, the politics of the moment, and our own individual and collective lives.
In the same way that some secular ideologies like Critical Social Justice theories (CSJ) have cataloged many of the ways in which these theories believe that language and discourses have privileged some groups and marginalized others to gain power for the privileged, thousands of Buddhist teachers from various traditions (Theravada, Mahayana, Vajrayana, Zen, etc.) have cataloged the obvious and subtle intricacies of suffering experienced by living things, including human beings for over 2,500 years, since the moment when the historical Buddha founded the tradition in Northern India around 500 B.C.E.
Whether the subsequent iterations of teachings and commentaries came from India, China, Japan, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Vietnam, the Middle East, or most recently, Western Europe and the United States, the universality of suffering has always been the foundational thread that has held them all together.
Tibet’s Contribution to the Contemplation of Suffering
In a classic medieval Tibetan Buddhist text, “Words of my Perfect Teacher”, the revered teacher Patrul Rinpoche (Rinpoche is an honorific title meaning “precious one”) covers hundreds of pages contemplating the ways in which bugs, animals, and human beings experience their own unique pain of being alive in a body—the ways in which they all suffer. When Buddhists use the phrase “sentient beings”, they are referring to all organisms, and that’s something I’d like to spend a little time with as I begin to wrap up this contemplation on land acknowledgements. Below, I will share a few passages from Patrul Rinpoche’s text with some light editing for brevity to give the reader a sense of what I’m getting at in how we might approach the possibility of a broader acknowledgement of suffering that transcends and includes the land acknowledgement, if we really want to be sincere, non-tribal, and more complete in that acknowledgement.
In chapter 3 called “The Defects of Samsara”, Patrul Rinpoche exhaustively categorizes the “sufferings of samsara in general”, covering human suffering, insect suffering, fish suffering, animal suffering, and the painful experiences of all organisms on the planet (and, possibly even other planets and galaxies!). Samsara is a sanskrit word that is often translated as “the wheel of becoming.” In traditional Hindu and Buddhist cosmology, we are all said to be bound to the “world of appearances” characterized by the “three marks of existence” of impermanence, dissatisfaction, and emptiness. According to the orthodox view of Eastern spirituality in general, all sentient beings are caught in samsara and are continuously born and reborn into different life forms until they are finally liberated from the cycle in a state called nirvana. It is said according to tradition that to be born human is the most fortunate lifetime of all because humans are able to consciously work to free themselves from desires, emotions, and selfishness, and thus have the ability to liberate themselves or to become enlightened.
Many modern day Buddhists do not believe in this cosmology, though they do have confidence in the practices of meditation, compassion, humility and other aspects of living the “good life.” I mention the cosmology here to add some context for the original teachings around the suffering of sentient beings. But, like all cosmologies (or frameworks, belief systems, or ideologies), there can be a great number of specific insights we can work with from those who have taken up these belief systems, even if we ultimately reject the framework underlying the belief systems themselves.
I believe Patrul Rinpoche has much to offer in the contemplation of the suffering that is all around us regardless of the cosmology that surrounds his teachings, so I have chosen to include a good number of passages from his much-revered text. I want to invite the reader to practice patience and to make room for the next 10-15 paragraphs, many of which draw directly from Patrul Rinpoche’s commentaries on suffering. In today’s social justice culture, we are often told to “sit with our discomfort” and to “listen and believe” when we are hearing the details about the pain and suffering of people who have been categorized as belonging to groups deemed marginalized or oppressed.
For those who have taken up this practice of “anti-fragility” (leaning into uncomfortable or painful experiences instead of trying to escape or dismiss), I would ask that you keep an open mind in this context, too, and that you allow yourselves to “get into the bones” of the suffering of people who do not belong to your tribes, subcultures, or age groups, or sociocultural identities and also the suffering of creatures from different species, which we sometimes cause and often benefit from. For those who might feel that the detailed contemplation of pain and suffering is too indulgent, depressing, negative, or even fetishistic, I would ask that you read maybe the first two or three sentences from each of the next 10-15 paragraphs to get the gist of what Rinpoche is trying to convey and just skim the rest of the paragraphs.
If you choose to skim the entire section, you can skip down to the close-up image of a horse’s eye and read on down to the end.
Reality Bites: A Hit Parade of Suffering
Chapter 3 of “Words of My Perfect Teacher” covers the specific sufferings experienced in the Six Realms of existence. The two realms that are empirically verifiable (and therefore relevant to this essay) are the animal realm and the human realm. In the beginning of this section, Rinpoche informs us that “there are two categories of animals: those living in the depths and those scattered in different places”.
These two animals, the Australian Mountain Pygmy Possum (top) and the South American three-toed sloth (bottom) are adorable. But, a careful contemplation of the day-to-day realities involved in their survival reveals a harsher existence.1
About the animals living in the depth, Patrul Rinpoche writes:
“The great outer oceans teem with fish, reptiles, turtles, shellfish, worms and other creatures, as numerous as the grains of malt in the bottom of a beer-barrel. There are serpents and monsters so big that their bodies can wind many times around Mount Meru. Other creatures are as small as particles of dust or the tip of a needle.
They all undergo immense sufferings. The bigger ones swallow up the smaller ones. The small ones burrow into the big ones and eat them alive in their tum. The big animals all have many tiny ones living inside them, feeding on their flesh. Some of these creatures are born between the continents, where the sun does not shine and where they cannot even see whether their limbs are bent in or stretched out. Stupid and ignorant, they have no comprehension of what to do and what not to do.”
About the animals that live scattered in different places, he writes:
“The wild animals that share our human world, in particular, live in constant fear. They cannot eat a single mouthful of food without being on their guard. They have many mortal enemies, for all animals prey on each other and there are always hunters, beasts of prey and other threats to life. Hawks kill small birds, small birds kill insects, and so on, continually amassing evil actions in an endless round of killing and being killed.
Hunters are experts in all methods of torturing and killing these animals. They threaten their lives with all sorts of vicious devices—nets, snares, traps and guns. Some animals are killed for their horns, fur, skins and other products of their body. Oysters are killed for their pearls; elephants for their tusks and bones; tigers, leopards, otters and foxes for their fur; oxen for their musk; wild asses and yaks for their flesh and blood. It is a terrible affliction that the very body with which they are born is the reason for their being killed.”
And of the domesticated animals, he continues:
“As for those animals domesticated by man, they are so stupid that when their executioner approaches, knife in hand, they can only stare wide-eyed, not even thinking of escape. They are milked, loaded down, castrated, pierced through the nose and yoked to the plough. Not one of them escapes this continual round of slavery. Horses and yaks continue to be loaded and ridden even when their backs are nothing but one big sore. When they can go no further, they are whipped and pelted with stones. The fact that they could be in distress or [fall] ill never seems to cross their owners' minds.
Cattle and sheep are exploited until they die. Once they are too old, they are sold off or killed by the owners themselves. Whatever the case, they are destined for the butcher and a natural death is unknown to them.
Animals, then, experience inconceivable torments.”
When considering the suffering that animals and bugs experience, the suffering becomes more poignant when we equally consider the nurturing that happens between parents and their young and the well-documented capacity for some species (such as monkeys) to feel a sense of awe at a sunset or the willingness to go to great lengths to court a mate, such as the ball of poop that the dung beetle rolls up to court a new girlfriend.
Scientists were commissioned by the London School of Economics and Social Science to conduct rigorous research into the sentience of marine animals, particularly Cephalopod Mollusks and Decapod Crustaceans. Turns out, the study found that shrimp, cuttlefish, squid, crabs, lobsters, octopi and others feel emotional and physical pain.2
Part of what makes this meditation on the suffering of animals interesting to me is the way in which human beings often romanticize animals and reduce them to cartoon things that are “cute.” We can see, for example, the adorability of rare pygmy possums rediscovered in Australia after becoming almost extinct due to bushfires and marvel at their little black bean eyes, pink noses, and tiny, droopy bodies, little pink hands, wildly large whiskers and big ol’ ears. But, when we really think about it, pygmies get hungry, thirsty, bored, hot, cold, and horny, and are constantly on the move to avoid being eaten by predators, which means that to some extent their lives are full of fear. Same goes for the maximally precious cute faces of sloths.
What matters here is a sober reflection on the harsh realities of the lived experience of animals.
And humans.
The collage above is from two sources: The images of the boy in the hospital bed and his brother praying are from Blavity.com (no attribution available), which bills itself as “The Community for Black Creativity and News.” The images of the elderly couple are stills from the music video for the November 2013 hit song “Say Something” by a Great Big World.3
All Lives Suffer: The Pain of Being Human
After spending a good amount of time contemplating the specific sufferings faced by a variety of non-human creatures, Rinpoche pivots his finely tuned lens to the three types of sufferings faced by all human beings, including, in modern parlance the privileged and the marginalized, the oppressor and the oppressed.
And herein lies the crux for me.
As I mentioned three or four times in the All We Are series, I grew up in a severely poor household that was also physically abusive with an equal level of severity. In the spring of 1982 I wound up running away at the age of 12 with my 13 year old sister, only to see her gunned down by cops decades later. Within a few short years after that event, I experienced the sudden deaths of nine more people in my life, three of whom were among my dearest friends. Then there is the experience of aging, as I am now in my early fifties with all that comes with that period of adult life.
And yet, I know that somehow my own individual suffering is not ultimately unique to me. And I know that even those who have not yet experienced some of what I have experienced one day will experience some of those things in one form or another. And, I also know that just my being alive crosses the line for other people, animals, and bugs—yes, bugs.
These different dimensions of suffering are what Patrul Rinpoche addresses in the passage on human suffering, and he breaks these dimensions down into three categories: suffering of change, suffering upon suffering, and suffering of everything composite.
In his descriptions on the suffering of change, he offers highly itemized details about all the ways in which human beings experience shifts of mood from moment to moment due to the fact that conditions are continually changing from moment to moment, day to day, week to week, and so forth. Heat, cold, friendships coming and going, tiredness, energy, comfort, pain, sickness, health, embarrassment, pride, physical agony, ecstatic pleasure… all human experiences faced by all humans. In his descriptions of the suffering upon suffering experienced by people from all walks of life, Rinpoche speaks about how we often experience multiple sufferings on top of one another.
“We experience suffering upon suffering when, before one suffering is over, we are subjected to another. We get leprosy, and then we break out in boils, too; and then as well as breaking out in boils we get injured. Our father dies and then our mother dies soon afterwards. We are pursued by enemies and, on top of that, a loved one dies; and so forth. No matter where we are reborn in [samsara], all our time is spent in one suffering on top of another, without any chance of a moment's happiness.”
And he writes about the “suffering of everything composite”:
“Now, some of us might think that things are going quite well for us at the moment, and we do not seem to be suffering much. In fact, we are totally immersed in the causes of suffering. For our very food and clothing, our homes, the adornments and celebrations that give us pleasure, are all produced with harmful actions. As everything we do is just a concoction of negative actions, it can only lead to suffering.
Rinpoche then offers examples of the pain and suffering that goes into the tea trade and the way in which tsampa (a type of wheat barley common in Tibet) is prepared, reminding us of the vast interconnected network of relationships and actions that go into the simplest moments of our lives that we take for granted.
Regarding tea, he writes:
“Where tea is grown, in China, the number of small creatures that are killed while it is planted, while the leaves are being picked, and so on, would be impossible to count. The tea is then carried as far as Dartsedo by porters. Each porter carries a load of twelve six-brick packs, taking the weight on a band around his forehead which wears away his skin. But even when his skull shows through, all white, he carries on. From Dotok onwards, dzo, yaks and mules take over, their backs breaking, their bellies perforated with cuts, patches of their hair chafed away. They suffer terribly from their servitude. Bartering the tea involves nothing but a series of broken promises, cheating and argument, until finally the tea changes hands, usually in exchange for animal products like wool and lambskins. Now wool, in summer before shearing, is crawling with fleas, ticks and other small creatures as numerous as the strands of wool themselves. During shearing, most of those insects are decapitated, cut in two or disemboweled. Those not killed remain stuck in the wool and suffocate.”
Regarding the making of Tsampa:
“Now look at tsampa. Before sowing the barley, the fields have to be plowed, which forces to the surface all the worms and insects living underground and buries underground all those living on the surface. Wherever the plowing oxen go, they are followed by crows and small birds who feed incessantly on all those small creatures. When the fields are irrigated, all the aquatic animals in the water are stranded on dry land, while all the creatures living on dry land are drowned. Likewise, at each stage of sowing, harvest and threshing, the number of beings killed is incalculable. If you think about it, it is almost as if we were eating powdered insects.
After going over the sometimes excruciating suffering of animals in the making of milk and butter, he ends the contemplation of the relationship between animals and humans in the crucible of suffering with the following:
“All the factors we now see as constituting happiness-food to eat, clothes to wear, and whatever goods and materials we can think of-are likewise produced through negative actions alone. The end result of all those things can only be the infinite torments of the lower realms. So everything that seems to represent happiness today is, in fact, the suffering of everything composite.”
This is the cover photo for an article published on July 31, 2023. The article reports on the severe neglect of a horse by two men who had agreed to care for the horse after one of them bought it. From the article: “Lawyer Luke Vella Versin testified that the horse…was full of maggots, fly larva, wounds all over his body, very thin… nearly in the last stage of life… he could barely walk.”4
The final section of Patrul Rinpoche’s catalog of human suffering describes in grotesque detail the physical elements involved during the birthing process for both mother and child and the physical and emotional agony that newborn babies experience (in spite of our romanticization of the birth experience) the horror and grossness of the dying experience, and the many experiences of sickness that happen in between these two main life markers. He also details the many sufferings that happen along the way: the suffering of losing loved ones; the suffering of running into adversaries; the suffering of sickness; the suffering of losing money; the suffering of adolescence; the suffering of the aging process; the suffering of boredom—all of it.
The Universality of Suffering
I encourage the reader to read Patrul Rinpoche’s own words on the universality of suffering beginning on page 76 of the book Words of My Perfect Teacher (you can download the 564-page free document here; the section on the universality of suffering is on page 120 in this PDF file). It’s not necessary to follow Buddhism or any other teaching or framework to appreciate the breadth and specificity of the passages describing the universality of human suffering. And while it may at first glance feel like a “dark” or “negative” take on things, I’m certain upon certain that some readers might find hope and inspiration in such a starkly clear and honest appraisal of the painful aspects of living a life in this world.
And, most importantly, I think that contemplating the universality of suffering in this way can help to open us up to the possibility that those on “the other side” of the conflicts we are engaged in may not be different from us in the fundamental way that we all come to believe from time to time—especially those who have taken in ideologies that separate entire groups of people into distinct groups that are painted as not sharing any commonalities, traits, or lived experiences and whom we must regard with contempt as our permanent adversary.
The psychologist Erich Fromm, quoting the famous words of Roman playwright Terence (circa 170 B.C.E.)—Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto—had this to say about the universality of what it is to be human:
“The experience of humanism is that 'nothing human is alien to me'; that I carry within myself all of humanity; that nothing which exists in any human being does not exist in myself. I am the criminal and the saint. I am the child and the adult. I am the man who lived 100,000 years ago and the man who will live 100,000 years from now.”
The Vietnamese Zen teacher, peace activist, and advocate for nonviolence, Thich Nhat Hanh, embodied a similar perspective in a powerful poem titled “Please Call Me by My True Names.” The poem asks us to recognize the universality of suffering, and to acknowledge that in many ways, we are all sacred victims, including ourselves and our “enemies.” And to the extent that we are honest with ourselves, we are all capable of victimizing others in ways small and large, subtle and obvious. If we could develop this understanding even in a small way, we would be able to connect with other living things (sentient beings) in a way that is genuinely empathic.
Here is the poem in its entirety:
Please Call Me by My True Names
Don’t say that I will depart tomorrow —even today I am still arriving. Look deeply: every second I am arriving to be a bud on a Spring branch, to be a tiny bird, with still-fragile wings, learning to sing in my new nest,to be a caterpillar in the heart of a flower, to be a jewel hiding itself in a stone. I still arrive, in order to laugh and to cry, to fear and to hope. The rhythm of my heart is the birth and death of all that is alive. I am the mayfly metamorphosing on the surface of the river.And I am the birdthat swoops down to swallow the mayfly. I am the frog swimming happily in the clear water of a pond.And I am the grass-snake that silently feeds itself on the frog. I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones, my legs as thin as bamboo sticks.And I am the arms merchant, selling deadly weapons to Uganda. I am the twelve-year-old girl, refugee on a small boat, who throws herself into the ocean after being raped by a sea pirate.And I am the pirate, my heart not yet capable of seeing and loving. I am a member of the politburo, with plenty of power in my hands.And I am the man who has to pay his “debt of blood” to my people dying slowly in a forced-labor camp. My joy is like Spring, so warm it makes flowers bloom all over the Earth. My pain is like a river of tears, so vast it fills the four oceans. Please call me by my true names, so I can hear all my cries and my laughter at once, so I can see that my joy and pain are one. Please call me by my true names, so I can wake up,and so the door of my heart can be left open, the door of compassion.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. nominated the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh for a Nobel Peace Prize In 1967. Both men advocated nonviolence in their approach to social change. King practiced nonviolence in the service of the Civil Rights movement in the United States. Hanh practiced nonviolence in the service of the anti-war effort in Vietnam.
The Secret History of our Enemies
Heading into the final section of this chapter on the deeper dimensions of the Land Acknowledgement ritual and its relation to the Sacred Victim narrative, I would like to introduce the concept of “spiritual bypassing.” Spiritual bypassing occurs when we hide behind spirituality and use ideas of “transcending worldly matters'' and being above it all,—including the romanticization of being in the “here and now”—at the expense of facing hard facts and uncomfortable realities. This includes an avoidance of acknowledging the history that has led to the here and now, effectively delegitimizing the very real pain and suffering that has happened before and that is happening currently in the real world in part due to that history. It could be the history of a relationship or the history of a country. The principle is still the same. We often seek to bypass an uncomfortable issue by going on retreats or retreating into our own minds without really seeing “the other.”
But, there has to be a balance.
If we overemphasize dark moments of history and refuse to acknowledge the progress we have made (see Bill Maher’s segment on “progressophobia”), we risk devolving into a culture of resentment and recrimination, thus compromising the social trust that is needed if different groups of people are to cooperate in solving problems and building a better world for ourselves, our children, and our grandchildren. But, acknowledging victims and the trauma they have experienced individually and/or collectively will always be important for societies that seek to be benevolent. As I have stated in previous chapters, we should always make room for the voices of those who have been victimized and never forget the human impact of policies on any scale of political and social endeavors, especially policies that enrich the few at the expense of many and those that cause physical agony, loss of freedom, a weakened human spirit, and the denial of the right to exist.
And, above all, we should remember that, in the end, nothing human or animal is ever truly alien to any of us, which means that we can take to heart Mahatma Gandhi's choice to call the oppressors of the British Empire who colonized, brutalized, and dehumanized his Indian compatriots “my friend, the enemy.”
Questioning the ultimacy of enemy-ship is a duty for people with a conscience, especially those who have influence in their communities or the larger public. We may need to take up ideological arms or policy fights against people who appear to be our adversaries in the moment, but in the end, there is nothing ultimately real about enemy-ship. The poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow said something in the late 19th century that captures this wisdom so succinctly and powerfully.
This something that Longfellow said is related to the universality of suffering.
In 1835 he lost his first wife to a miscarriage, which caused him severe bouts of grief for a long time. Four years later in 1839, in a work titled “Hyperion: A Romance” the famous world-renowned poet spoke of the universality of suffering through a semi-autobiographical character named Paul Flemming:
“In the lives of the saddest of us, there are bright days like this, when we feel as if we could take the great world in our arms and kiss it. Then come the gloomy hours, when the fire will neither burn on our hearths nor in our hearts; and all without and within is dismal, cold, and dark. Believe me, every heart has its secret sorrows, which the world knows not, and oftentimes we call a man cold, when he is only sad.”
Although Longfellow specifically mentions “the saddest of us,” I believe he is speaking about what it is to be a human being living in this world as it actually is. Sadly, he was to become a connoisseur of sadness. Years later, in 1857 another tragedy struck. After a long courtship with Fannie Appleton, the daughter of a wealthy merchant who was born in Boston, Longfellow found himself another partner in life, and they married in 1843. The couple had two boys and three girls and lived quite happily on Brattle Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts while Longfellow taught in the humanities at Harvard (the same house that George and Martha Washington stayed in when Washington took command of the rebel Continental Army in 1776).
One day on July 9, 1861, Fannie was combing her daughters’ hair. There are some variations of what happened next, but the gist of it is that there was a highly flammable match involved. One account tells us that she was placing a lock of one of her daughter’s hair into a packet and heating wax to seal it up when all of a sudden the highly flammable white phosphorus match touched the sleeve of her delicate muslin dress, causing her entire body to burst into flames. She ran into the front room where Henry was working, and he did all he could to put the fire out, including wrapping her with a throw rug. House servants also brought water and splashed her with it, all to no avail. By the end of the ordeal, her entire body except her face, which Henry protected, was covered in third degree burns. She died early the next morning in her bed. Henry couldn’t go to the funeral because his face was so badly burned that he was in agony. For the rest of his life, he would never be seen again without the famous long white beard which he wore to cover up the disfigurement caused by the third degree burns to his face.
To say the least, the man knew grief in a more intimate way than he could ever have known anything else. And yet he knew, in the end, that the grief was not unique to himself.
Later that year, in 1857, a two-volume book was published that shared the famous poet’s prose. The name of the book was “Prose Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Volume 1 of 2, Chapter: Drift Wood: A Collection of Essays. The second volume was called “Table-Talk”. And included this shining jewel on page 452:
“If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man’s life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.”
This quote underwent some variations as it was reprinted by different authors, beginning with the “Saturday Evening Gazette” of Boston in 1857 and finding its way more than a century later inside a 1982 article written for The Gazette by the advice columnist Ann Landers. In 2014, this passage formed the main refrain for a song I personally wrote and recorded called “The Gospel of Longfellow” with only two important variations: I removed the word “man” to be inclusive of women and transgender people and changed “hostility” to the plural “hostilities”, out of the recognition of the cultural warfare between demographic groups that was just beginning to heat up at the time.
In the song, the lyrics of the refrain go as follows:
“If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each life, sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostilities.”
My sharing this is not insignificant, as I will be discussing the Sacred Victim narrative in the next chapter as it relates not only to inclusivity in race relations but to inclusivity in gender and sex relations, particularly inclusivity in the relationships between men and women and the need for a more balanced approach to equality that does not stigmatize any demographic group, including straight natally born men.
On July 10, 1861 Longfellow (left, seen in his famous beard) lost his wife, Fannie Appleton Longfellow (right) to a tragic fire in their Brattle Street home in Cambridge, MA. He was never the same since. This heartbreaking quote from just a few years before,1857, was analyzed and commented on by Longfellow’s contemporaries for years after and was even featured in an Ann Landers advice column in 1982. It became the refrain for an original song I wrote and recorded called “The Gospel of Longfellow”, which was released as part of an album called “Eleventh Hour Shine” in 2014.
The Great Song of Life
As I head to the close of this chapter, I’d like to share passages from two books: Siddhartha and A Path With Heart.
One of the final passages from Herman Hesse’s novel “Siddhartha”, which chronicles the spiritual journey of Siddhartha Shakyamuni, the historical prince and “Sage of the Shakyas” who founded the Buddhist path in India more than 2,500 years ago. In this passage, Siddhartha, after so many years of meditation and various ascetic practices, finally sits beneath the now-mythical “bodhi tree” and realizes the inherent unity of all life, including all people, all animals, all bugs, all phenomena—which the Taoists called the “ten thousand things.” As I mentioned earlier, the word “Buddha” in ancient Sanskrit means “awake” or “the awakened one.” When the Buddha sits underneath the Bodhi tree and discovers his essence, he awakens to the joys and sorrows of all sentient beings, causing to arise within him a deep and unmanufactured sense of compassion.
From his own contemplation of what the Buddha must have experienced all those centuries ago, the author Herman Hesse writes:
“Siddhartha listened. He was now nothing but a listener, completely concentrated on listening, completely empty, he felt that he had now finished learning to listen. Often before, he had heard all this, these many voices in the river, today it sounded new. Already, he could no longer tell the many voices apart, not the happy ones from the weeping ones, not the ones of children from those of men, they all belonged together, the lamentation of yearning and the laughter of the knowledgeable one, the scream of rage and the moaning of the dying ones, everything was one, everything was intertwined and connected, entangled a thousand times. And everything together, all voices, all goals, all yearning, all suffering, all pleasure, all that was good and evil, all of this together was the world. All of it together was the flow of events, was the music of life. And when Siddhartha was listening attentively to this river, this song of a thousand voices, when he neither listened to the suffering nor the laughter, when he did not tie his soul to any particular voice and submerged his self into it, but when he heard them all, perceived the whole, the oneness, then the great song of the thousand voices consisted of a single word, which was Om: the perfection.”
We can set aside the question of what “spiritual” or “spirit” means, and we can also set aside any notion that there is any real empirically validated condition of unity between and among organisms in the universe. That’s for the mystics (or the “quacks”) to decide. We can also say that we are all just blood, bones, skin, and brains governed by chemical processes and the laws of physics with no real essence or spirit. But, we cannot deny that there is a unity of experience in that birth, aging, sickness, death, disease, despair, joy, triumph, agony, and ecstasy are part of the experience of all people and most animals.
This fundamental unity of experience is a cause for pause.
In the 1993 classic “A Path With Heart: the Promises and Perils of Spiritual Life”, Theravada Buddhist teacher, writer, and public speaker Jack Kornfield lays out all the ways in which people can get stuck along the way, including spiritual bypassing, addiction, attachment to abusive gurus or communities, self-satisfied pride about having awakening experiences, getting lost in “compassionate” activism that causes us to become embittered, angry and frustrated, and many other pitfalls. Throughout the book, Kornfield stresses the importance of staying grounded in the day-to-day world of responsibility, relatedness, and self-discipline so that we can be more “awake” to what comes up in our lives and respond with conscious intent and appropriate measuredness.
He also has a perspective to offer about being in the world that I believe can inform a much broader an more compassionate and inclusive Land Acknowledgement ritual. In the final chapter titled “Spiritual Maturity”, Kornfield introduces “The Great Song.” At the beginning of this section just before offering his own interpretation of Herman Hesse’s passage of the Buddha’s awakening, he speaks of the joys and sorrows of “the ten thousand things.”
“Maturing on the spiritual path opens up for us a thousand possibilities. All the magic and enchantment of the ten thousand things that appear before us come alive in a new way. Our thinking and feelings open to an expanded palette. We experience more deeply both the beauty and the sorrow of life; we can see with new eyes and hear the whole great song of life.”
After sharing the Herman Hesse passage, Kornfield continues:
“When we have not heard this great song we tend to live only in limited possibilities, seeing the world only through the popular myths that have been dispensed to us. The impoverished myths and songs of our culture are sold everywhere: the myth of materialism and possessiveness that says worldly goods lead to happiness; the myth of competition and individualism, which produces so much isolation; the myth of achievement and success… and the myth of youth, which produces a culture of eternal adolescence and advertising images as our model of reality. These myths of grasping and separateness. The stories in our culture would have us hold our breath, remain adolescent, grasp our possessions, search for the perfect experience and capture it on film—repeating one small note in the song.”
About the interconnection between and among us all, he has this to say:
“Whenever we try to fix on a particular state, maintain an image, or hold on to an experience, our personal life, our professional life, and our spiritual life will suffer. When we try to repeat what has been in the past, we lose the true sense of life as an opening, a flowering, an unfolding, an adventure...Everything breathes, and in this breathing and movement we are all connected. This interconnection offers us enormous possibilities. Spiritual life can open us to the magnificent music all around us, not just to that music limited by our ideas or plans or by the story that encapsulates us in our culture. In this we can touch the mystery….
How do we honor this mystery?
From an awakened perspective, life is a play of patterns, the patterns of trees, the movement of the stars, the patterns of the seasons and the patterns of human life in every form. Each of these patterns could be a song or a story.”
Finally, he speaks about “our individual song within the great song”:
“As our vision opens we can ask extraordinary questions. What patterns and stories have been given to us in this life? What “individual” form have we taken this time? What are the myths and stories we have inherited, and what stories have we continued to follow in the face of the mystery? Is our religion materialism or Marxism, is it hopeful or fatalistic, is it isolating or is it communal? Is ours a religion of kindness or of harsh justice?”
And this, here, is the question for the age. What is our story? What narratives should we embrace to make sense of our history, our present, our future, and the nature of our world? Who are we? Are we the collective product of a long process of human evolution towards a more just world? Are we just a continuation of an intrinsically oppressive culture that is intentionally designed to serve some groups while dominating others? Are we a people of hope with the aspiration of further evolving? Or are we a people of fatalism who are stuck only in the endless cycle of battle, trying to get what’s ours at the expense of “those people?”
Is this all we are?
Returning now to the land acknowledgement ritual I discussed in the beginning of this chapter, I believe the acknowledgement ritual could be more compassionate and radically inclusive in a way that transcends anger and separation and the ethos of “harsh justice.” Why not acknowledge the Great Song of Life that pays homage to the indigenous tribes who once owned the land that the Europeans captured for themselves, while also acknowledging that the indigenous tribes themselves had engaged in the same type of domination and warfare against one another and that civilizations, nations, and communities have been enacting against one another since the beginning of human time? Why not acknowledge the cycle of violence and domination that has governed the lives of people, animals, sea creatures, and insects since the first single-cell organisms surfaced 3.5 billion years ago?
And why not acknowledge that we have a chance to do things differently from a much more vast perspective.
Towards a Vastly Inclusive Acknowledgement
Closing out this meditation on the sacredness of the universality of suffering, I’d like to offer a proposal for a new acknowledgement ritual, which I would like to call the Grand Acknowledgement in honor of the Great Song of life that touches all living things. This is only a gentle proposal, not at all something I am fiercely advocating for, and I have no expectations around its acceptance as a replacement for a ritualized recognition of the suffering of displaced indigenous peoples that has only recently become popularly accepted as the way to begin events in public spaces.
But, even if we choose to present the Land Acknowledgement the way it is currently presented, with an exclusive focus on the tribes who last held the lands we are occupying at the moment, we could still do so with a vast, compassionate, radically inclusive heart perspective that reminds each of us that we are all each other’s limbs. We could quietly commune with ourselves, our immediate communities and those in attendance at the event, and silently communicate from our hearts to all others in our circle of influence, that, in the end, we are all each other’s people and that we are part of a larger tapestry that connects all living things.
Part of the inspiration for this proposed acknowledgement comes from the May 2017 public appeal to the Australian people called the Uluru Statement from the Heart. This document was worked on over a period of four days at the very center of the Australian continent, where the sacred rock formation called the Uluru has stood for more than 600 million years. The process of drafting the appeal involved the collaboration of representatives of both Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders—the two distinct aboriginal cultures in Australia—and called for “the establishment of a First Nations Voice enshrined in the Constitution”, stating that “with substantive constitutional change and structural reform,” the “ancient sovereignty” of these two peoples “can shine through as a fuller expression of Australia’s nationhood.”
Out of reverence for the innately spiritual nature of the “ancestral tie” between these peoples and the land they had held for more than 60,000 years, the appeal stated:
“This sovereignty is a spiritual notion: the ancestral tie between the land, or ‘mother nature’, and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples who were born therefrom, remain attached thereto, and must one day return thither to be united with our ancestors. This link is the basis of the ownership of the soil, or better, of sovereignty. It has never been ceded or extinguished, and co-exists with the sovereignty of the Crown.”
And, in speaking about being the “most incarcerated people in the world” and the many sufferings they have experienced over the past 200 years, they spoke of the agonizing experience of powerlessness and how the acquisition of formal recognition and shared power would impact not only their own children and descendants but the country as a whole.
“These dimensions of our crisis tell plainly the structural nature of our problem. This is the torment of our powerlessness. We seek constitutional reforms to empower our people and take a rightful place in our own country. When we have power over our destiny our children will flourish. They will walk in two worlds and their culture will be a gift to their country.”
The Urulu is a 600-million-old sandstone formation in the center of the Australian continent. According to Wikipedia, “Uluru is sacred to the Pitjantjatjara, the Aboriginal people of the area, known as the Aṉangu.” This is the site of the 2017 four-day gathering of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples during which they drafted and finalized the Uluru Statement from the Heart.
In a recent Quillette article called “Voice From the Heart”, Australian philosopher Andrew Gleeson summarizes the invitational spirit of the Uluru Statement from the Heart, which is the spirit that I would like to see in more acknowledgement rituals as they continue to grow in popularity.
“The language of the Statement is concise, temperate, and moving. Its tone is neither that of an importunate beggar nor of an incendiary activist. It is one of sorrow yet hope, of dignity and amity, of one people looking another in the eyes to negotiate the terms of their fraternal association. Thus, it does not speak of demands but of aspiration, of seeking and inviting, and in one place, of calling for. It asks—in a word that has come to name the ideal of Australia’s journey to a just and amicable relationship with its original peoples—for reconciliation.”
If we carried out acknowledgement rituals with the depth and breadth of inclusivity and spirit of welcoming described in Gleeson’s summary, I believe we would be making an important step as a culture and as members of the larger human family—even the larger cosmos.
Below, is a proposed Grand Acknowledgement. It is intentionally longer than the average land acknowledgement so that readers who are interested in taking up this practice have more content to work with. I’ve chosen to open this chapter up to public comments from both subscribers and non-subscribers, so please feel free to leave a comment if you have any ideas for further revision. As with the original Land Acknowledgement, there is no one-size-fits-all version, so readers may choose to use and revise all or any of the contents below.
The Grand Acknowledgement
In this shared space and time, we stand on the intricate tapestry of existence, woven by countless lives before us. We acknowledge the vast expanse of experiences, from the first breath of life to the last sigh of beings past and present.
We honor the Great Song of Life, a melody that resonates with the hopes, dreams, and sufferings of every creature. From the tiniest insect to the majestic whale, from the silent forests to the bustling cities, every life contributes a note to this eternal symphony.
We recognize the struggles of our ancestors, the indigenous peoples, the wanderers, the oppressed, the plundered, the dispossessed, and the resilient spirits of all who have shaped the world we inhabit. Their stories, both of joy and sorrow, echo in the winds, the waters, and the very ground beneath our feet.
Bound by the threads of compassion, understanding, love, and self-honesty, we acknowledge the role our peoples have played individually and collectively in the suffering of other beings, including indigenous tribes and communities who once held the land upon which we now stand.
[Name each tribe that once held the land beginning with “we acknowledge” or “we honor”]
It is in remembrance of these peoples and their sacred connection to the lands we now possess, that we pay homage to the joys and sufferings of all living things.
With hearts united, we recognize, too, that we are all linked together by the golden strands of empathy, insight, affection, and the responsibility to right what has been wrong. As we chart our path ahead, let's bear in mind that our deeds, contemplations, and expressions have shaped our past and will echo far into the future as we shape our tomorrows within the grand tapestry of existence. And let’s keep in our hearts the truth that our deeds, contemplations, and expressions must be fortified with concrete righteous actions to be determined in concert with one another until our bones become separated from our souls.
In this moment, we pledge our commitment to fostering a realm where injustice is concretely addressed, every sufferer is given salve, and every heart finds its sanctuary. For within the luminous great chains of being, we are all both separate and one, woven together in the Great Song of Life.
Continued in Part 8: Sacred Victims and Bridging Ideological Divides
FOOTNOTES
The tiny possums have not been able to eat their favorite meal, the Bogon moth, for several years now, leading to a campaign by Zoo Victoria to enlist the public to track down these moths and send the information to the zoo. The sloth, the world’s slowest mammal (clocking in at .15 mph, moving so slow that algae grows on their hind legs) are known to tear into cockroaches and moths in not so cute a fashion. And they themselves can become prey (watch this Bill Burr narrative video of a Harpy eagle snatching a sloth and this video of a puma climbing up a tree to kill a sloth).
I pondered this discovery even as I willfully ate two small boiled lobsters after learning that they would not be killed humanely but in the usual way. My desire for pleasure—not nourishment— took over my sense of ethics in that moment and I knew it. I did ask a friend if it was okay, and she explained that life is life. And at a time when some scientists are releasing studies that show that even plants let out an ultrasonic scream when their leaves are cut or they don't get enough water and disputed claims around environmental destruction to due grain-harvesting for vegetarian diets, being an “ethical eater” seems an impossible task.
The video is poignant in that it features multiple characters who are either sick or dying. This elderly couple touched me most, so I grabbed a couple of screenshots for this collage. Birth, aging, sickness, death, loneliness, boredom, fear, and all the rest like joy, ecstasy, triumph, love, purpose, and creativity are part of all of our lives, no matter where we come from or what our socio cultural identities are, which is part of the message from Patrul Rinpoche’s writings.
After fining the two accused men 8000 £ each (UK currency…. $10,219.70, USD) , the court went on to say, “...undoubtedly, it would have been obvious for the accused that the horse was suffering in the state it ended up in, where… it began falling on the floor and had wounds. As it should have been obvious that their inaction and passiveness constitutes cruelty.” Although this case is severe, the wide scale suffering of livestock animals cannot be overstated. Pain and neglect is simply a way of life for these animals. Sometimes the painful experiences are natural and unrelated to their treatment by humans. Horses, for example, are in constant danger of experiencing tetanus (lockjaw) even in the most loving conditions in which they are consciously cared for by ethical farmers.