Deeply heartened this past week by a speech given by Amnesty International Executive Director, Larry Cox: The Global War on Terror and the Impact on Human Rights.  Caught it on C-SPAN.  A video is available at their website. 

I wanted to quote him here (uttering his "shock" at the absence of outrage and accountability on this monstrously grievous matter), but can't get the video to load.  Said, too, (with a kind of commitment and hope I've tended to forget) that a full reckoning will come. 

Related: Also on C-SPAN, caught Jimmy Carter accepting the Ridenhour Courage Prize. 

Sharing the dias with this champion of human rights was David Vance -- "a two-time George W. Bush voter and Navy veteran" -- who was, "falsely accused by the U.S. military of aiding terrorists[;] held without charge for more than three months in a high-security prison in Iraq, and interrogated daily after sleepless nights without legal counsel or even a phone call to his family."  News article, here. 

(For more information on this subject, I highly recommend The Anti-Torture Memos at Balkinization, esp. the work of Scott Horton.)

From Larry Kramer, Co-Founder of ACT UP!, wearing a tee-shirt emblazoned with the question, "Where is the OUTRAGE?," and speaking with Amy Goodman on Demcracy Now! about activism: 
   

LARRY KRAMER: . . .I learned, we learned, through ACT UP, . . .  that the only way to do anything is major in-your-face activism, and I think that's the only way you can change things. Why isn't this country up in arms about this unbelievably hateful president who has put us into this police station?

AMY GOODMAN: Police station?

LARRY KRAMER: Police state, I'm sorry. Police -- we're in a police station -- we're in a firehouse [Democracy Now is filmed in a renovated firestation]. I don't know. You know, why aren't there more protests against this evil man who's our president. Everybody is so passive in this country. What is that all about? I just simply -- where is the outrage? People live under the most terrible circumstances. We do live in a police state.



Anyway, I just really got a shot in the arm from these two Larrys.

I'm going back to a "sleep disorder" clinic at the urging of my caregivers.  I'd attempted to live with a "c-pap" machine once before, but found it just another impediment to "restorative" sleep. 

Anyway, I was being examined and interviewed and tasked toward getting another machine (yippee!), and was questioned, given my history, about "Which symptoms of depression [am I] currently struggling with?"  In responce, I just blurted out the list: 'Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.'  I could have just said, 'All of them.'

Later (and here is what I am getting at), it occurred to me that I might have simply and summarily said, 'Heartache. That's what I struggle with: heartache.'

Just then, this struck me as a refreshing perspective on my situation.  It sort of vaulted me out of the whole "medical model" with which I and so many kind and caring individuals have approached my "affliction" over the years.  And together with this suddenly simple explanation, in my mind's eye, I dressed myself in widower's black; empathically contrasted myself with a parent grieving the death of a child; flipped through just a few pages of the ever-expanding and unfathomable catalog of human heart wounds . . .  And, refreshingly, my situation seemed so very "normal" and "natural."  And maybe, like others have, and do, and will, maybe I can get past this.  Like, suddenly, there was a bigger space or perspective.  Almost, like, embracing my heartache; surrendering this years-long battle against what I and many formidable allies have attacked as a "disease." 

"Hold it! Wait a second!"

Maybe this ("depression," nay, heartache) really can't be treated like gonorrhea, or diabetes, or cancer.  And, at some level, maybe it's "okay."  It's "normal."  It's "natural."  It's "understandable."

Who knows? 

Perhaps, too, this interlude, this refreshing respite from my puny, personal "battle" with depression is none other than proof that the psycho-pharmacological antibiotics (currently: Cymbalta) and (to tie this to some of my last post) the electro-convulsive therapy (underwent 13 sessions over a three-week period) are working! 

Ha, ha, ha! 


 

was reflecting yesterday on how well i do this deep, dark blue thing; how utterly pathetic and self-indulgent this routine is; on the wisdom of remaining solitary and mum while in its throes . . .  yadda, yadda.  and yet . . .

the once-and-future revealation of Non-Dual Realization, of One Taste, stands always-already to jump in between the beats of my hearts, between breaths, like a child, bobbing to the rhythm of the ropes in a double dutch game, poised to jump in.  i want to remind someone (who? "god forgets god so that god may seek god." ~muktananda) about the Truth of what IS!

the relative vs. the Absolute . . . colliding, contending, competing for my  fate.

i chimed in earlier this month, and here, partly supposing that maybe some dear reader (perhaps some fellow sojourner in the blue) might wonder what i've been getting up to, or, specifically, what effect electro-convulsive has upon the body and soul (in my case: not much.).  also, to be completely candid, i break my enforced silence to curse this lonely road i've set myself upon -- to squeak out loud (mere mortal that i am), wanting for some grease.  where are my dear, true friends that i am yet to meet?

anyway, i've rummaged through my bookmarks here, reminded of a brighter perspective that sort of speaks to and unravels this particular tangle a bit.  i got the title to this post from what follows (nod to Fritz).


part of Ken Wilber's foreword to a book by andrew cohen:

When it comes to spiritual teachers, there are those who are safe, gentle, consoling, soothing, caring; and there are the outlaws, the living terrors, the Rude Boys and Nasty Girls of God realization, the men and women who are in your face, disturbing you, terrifying you, until you radically awaken to who and what you really are.

And may I suggest?: choose your teachers carefully.

If you want encouragement, soft smiles, ego stroking, gentle caresses of your self-contracting ways, pats on the back and sweet words of solace, find yourself a Nice Guy or Good Girl, and hold their hand on the sweet path of stress reduction and egoic comfort. But if you want Enlightenment, if you want to wake up, if you want to get fried in the fire of passionate Infinity, then, I promise you: find yourself a Rude Boy or a Nasty Girl, the ones who make you uncomfortable in their presence, who scare you witless, who will turn on you in a second and hold you up for ridicule, who will make you wish you were never born, who will offer you not sweet comfort but abject terror, not saccharin solace but scorching angst, for then, just then, you might very well be on the path to your own Original Face.

Most of us, I suspect, prefer our spiritual teachers to be of the Nice-Guy variety. Soft, comforting, non-threatening, a source of succor for a worn and weary soul, a safe harbor in the samsaric storm. There is nothing wrong with that, of course; spirituality comes in all sorts of flavors, and I have known some awfully Nice Guys. But if the flavor tends toward Enlightenment instead of consolation, if it drifts away from soothing dreams toward actually waking up, if it rumbles toward a God realization and not egoic fortification, then that demands a brutal, shocking death: a literal death of your separate self, a painful, frightening, horrifying dissolution-a miraculous extinction you will actually witness as you expand into the boundless, formless, radical Truth that will pervade your every cell and drench your being to the core and expand what you thought was your self until it embraces the distant galaxies. For only on the other side of death lies Spirit, only on the other side of egoic slaughter lies the Good and the True and the Beautiful. "You will come in due course to realize that your true glory lies where you cease to exist," as the illustrious Sri Ramana Maharshi constantly reminded us. Your true glory lies on the other side of your death, and who will show you that?

Not the Nice Guys and not the Good Girls. They don't want to hurt your feelings. They don't want to upset you. They are here to whisper sweet nothings in your ear and place consolation prizes in the outstretched hand of the self-contraction, balm for a war-torn weary ego, techniques to prop it up in its constant battle with the world of otherness. In a sense, it's very easy being a Nice-Guy teacher: no muss, no fuss, no wrestling with egoic resistance and exhausting confrontation. Be nice to the ego, pat it on the back, have it count its breaths, hum a few mantras.

Rude Boys know better. They are not here to console but to shatter, not to comfort but to demolish. They are uncompromising, brutal, laser-like. They are in your face until you recognize your Original Face-and they simply will not back off, they will not back down, they will not let up until you let go-radically, fully, completely, unhesitatingly. They live as Compassion-real compassion, not idiot compassion-and real compassion uses a sword more often than a sweet. They deeply offend the ego (and the greater the offense, the bigger the ego). They are alive as Truth, they are everywhere confronted with egos, and they choose the former uncompromisingly.

Fritz Perls, the founder of Gestalt Therapy, used to say that nobody comes to a therapist to get better (although they always say they do); they really come to perfect their neurosis. Just so, nobody comes to a spiritual teacher to get Enlightenment (although everybody claims they do); rather, they come to a spiritual teacher to learn more subtle and sophisticated egoic games-in this case, the game of "Look at me being really spiritual."

After all, what is it in you that brings you to a spiritual teacher in the first place? It's not the Spirit in you, since that is already enlightened and has no need to seek. No, it is the ego in you that brings you to a teacher: you want to see yourself in the presence of the spiritual game, you want to meet yourself tomorrow as a realized being-in plain language, you want your ego to continue into a spiritual paradise.

And what's a poor teacher to do, confronted with such egoic cunning? Everybody who comes to a spiritual teacher comes egoically motivated. And teachers have two choices in the face of this onslaught of the separate selves, this conference of the self-contractions: they can play to the audience, or they can blow the entire building up.

Andrew Cohen is a Rude Boy. He is not here to offer comfort; he is here to tear you into approximately a thousand pieces...so that Infinity can reassemble you, Freedom can replace imprisonment, Fullness can outshine fear. And that simply will not happen if all you want is consolation, soothing prayers, ruffle-free platitudes, "It will all be okay." Well, it will not be okay if you want Enlightenment. It will, in fact, be hell, and only Rude Boys are rude enough to tell you that, and to show you that-if you can stand the rudeness, stay in the fire, burn clean as Infinity and radiate as the stars.

Congressman Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, will introduce articles of impeachment against Cheney today!



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