We know what fear and hatred and bigotry would do. The question of our time is, what would love do? My book A POLITICS OF LOVE is a handbook for a new American revolution.
I believe that @MarWilliamson is a fresh, dynamic presence on the political stage and represents our deepest yearnings for a leader with authenticity, integrity, responsibility and the highest calling to serve. ❤️
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The Monk and the Philosopher: East Meets West in a Father-Son Dialogue
The most groundbreaking meeting of Eastern philosophy and Western culture to date.In this father-son dialgue, Revel and Ricard explore the most fundamental questions of human existence and the ways in which they are embraced by Eastern and Western thought. In this meeting of the minds, they touch upon philosophy, spirituality, science, politics, psychology and ethics. They raise the enduring questions: does life have meaning? Why is there suffering, war and hatred? Revel's perspective as an internationally renowned philosopher and Ricard's as a distinguished molecular-geneticist-turned-Buddhist-monk results in a brilliant, accessible and accessible conversation-the most eloquent meeting yet of Eastern & Western thought.
I wanted an introduction to Buddhism, this book is a back and forth between a father and his son and they are both so intelligent. It took me a while to read because I learned about so many things, also about the situation in tibet. It's really all the questions you can imagine asking next to a great, concise and very explained answer. It makes you want to be a better and more altruistic person.
つ星のうち5.0
A Warm and Insightful Dialogue
2010年7月19日 - (Amazon.com)
This dialogue between Matthieu Ricard and his father Jean-Francois Revel is similar to Ricard's other East/West philosophical dialogue (The Quantum and the Lotus: A Journey to the Frontiers Where Science and Buddhism Meet), but with more depth, rigor and intimacy - thus real communication and exchange. Ricard and Revel are both well qualified for this exchange in two important respects - first is their philosophical/intellectual and experiential qualification. Revel is a respected thinker and author of both classical and post-modern Western philosophy. Ricard was raised in this mold (in France), but went on to embrace Tibetan Buddhism after completing his PhD in molecular biology to live with and translate for some of the greatest Tibetan Lamas of the 20th century (from 1972 to present). As a result he is perhaps the most qualified and
This dialogue between Matthieu Ricard and his father Jean-Francois Revel is similar to Ricard's other East/West philosophical dialogue (The Quantum and the Lotus: A Journey to the Frontiers Where Science and Buddhism Meet), but with more depth, rigor and intimacy - thus real communication and exchange. Ricard and Revel are both well qualified for this exchange in two important respects - first is their philosophical/intellectual and experiential qualification. Revel is a respected thinker and author of both classical and post-modern Western philosophy. Ricard was raised in this mold (in France), but went on to embrace Tibetan Buddhism after completing his PhD in molecular biology to live with and translate for some of the greatest Tibetan Lamas of the 20th century (from 1972 to present). As a result he is perhaps the most qualified and able representative of the Buddhist tradition in a Western context.
The second qualification these two share is the love, respect and comfortable rapport of being intimately bonded as father and son. Revel's role here is primarily as the scholar interlocutor with a list of predetermined points designed to draw out Ricard's understanding of Buddhism. He is the clear thinking Western materialist and skeptic. Often he relates his son's responses to European philosophy and psychology from ancient Greek to the modern sciences, and appears genuinely surprised and delighted to learn of Asia/Buddhism's theoretical contributions (to human thought) long before Europe's. He is also quick to point out when Buddhism is merely covering old ground that European philosophy has mined extensively as well. Yet he consistently does this with passion and heart. It is especially touching to see his genuine appreciation of his son's deep and clear understanding.
For me this dialogue is very relevant (as a Westerner with longstanding involvement in Tibetan Buddhism). These materialistic questions are just the kind that I come up with on my own, or field from friends and family (and are probably similar to the ones Ricard would pose to his teachers in his role as the Western 'devils advocate'). The fact that Ricard is so well informed (and steeped in Buddhist culture) makes his responses especially instructive and reliable. (At times the two tread on very subtle ground, and Ricard's lifetime of learning and personal experience help keep it clear and on point.)
As in The Quantum and The Lotus there is a decided advantage for the Buddhist side, as Ricard concedes no ground, while his father's more open and dualistic point of view is gradually and steadily worn down by the gentle yet relentless presentation of the Buddha's Middle Way (yet in the end Revel too concedes little ground). My only criticism is that Ricard sometimes is too safe by presenting only the 'party line', with very little personal flavor. He also glosses over some of the Tibetan cultural traits which have contributed to their current situation (loss of national sovereignty and promotion of an easily misunderstood religious tradition steeped in magic and mystery). The result is that this book stays on safe and sometimes superficial ground.
Generally though this makes for a great intellectual beginner's book to Buddhism, the essence of the path and not the form of the traditions, as well as a comparative overview of it's universal message (vis-a-vis Western science, philosophy and religion). What makes this book unique and valuable is the combination of the range of inquiry, depth of clarity and genuine warmth of the dialogue.
One can look at the guru of a fanatical new religion or cult* as either everything or nothing. The everything would acknowledge the guru’s creation of his group and its belief system, as well as his sustained control over it—in which case the bizarre behavior of Aum Shinrikyō could be understood as little more than a reflection of Shōkō Asahara’s own bizarre ideas and emotions. The nothing would suggest that the guru is simply a creation of the hungers of his disciples, that he has no existence apart from his disciples, that any culture can produce psychological types like him, that without disciples, there is no guru. Both views have elements of truth, but the deeper truth lies in combining them, in seizing upon the paradox.
Gurus and disciples are inevitably products of a particular historical moment. They represent a specific time and place, even as they draw upon ancient psychological and theological themes. As our contemporaries, they are, like the rest of us, psychologically unmoored, adrift from and often confused about older value systems and traditions. That unmoored state has great importance. Here I would stress only that a guru’s complete structural and psychological separateness from a traditional cultural institution—in Asahara’s case an established religion—permits him to improvise wildly in both his theology and his personal behavior, to become a “floating guru.” Disciples in turn are open to any strange direction he may lead them and contribute their own unmoored fantasies without the restraining force that a religious or institutional hierarchy might provide.
The guru narrative is always elusive. The guru appears to us full-blown, catches our attention because of what he, with disciples, has done—all the more so when that is associated with any kind of violence, no less mass murder. We then look back on the guru’s life history to try to understand his part in this culminating act. But while we should learn all we can about him, we are mistaken if we believe that his childhood—or his past in general—will provide a full explanation of that act.
No adult is a mere product of childhood. There is always a forward momentum to the self that does not follow simple cause and effect. Each self becomes a constellation or a collage that is ever in motion, a “self-system” or “self-process.” There are, of course, powerful early influences on that self, but outcomes depend upon evolving combinations of experience and motivation that are never entirely predictable. This is especially clear with exceptional people: one would be hard put to explain the extraordinary actions of either a Picasso or a Hitler on the basis of childhood experience alone. With anyone, we can at best connect that childhood to later inclinations, attitudes, or passions, finding certain continuities of talent, destructiveness, or both. But precisely the quality that claims our interest here—what we usually call charisma—tends to leap out of the life narrative and create a special realm of its own.
The British psychoanalyst Anthony Storr offers a useful description of a guru type: a spiritual teacher whose insight is based on personal revelation, often taking the form of a vision understood to come directly from a deity. The revelation, which has transformed his life, generally follows upon a period of distress or illness in his thirties or forties. There is suddenly a sense of certainty, of having found “the truth,” creating a general aura around him that “he knows.” The emerging guru can then promise, as Asahara did, “new ways of self-development, new paths to salvation, always generalizing from [his] own experience.”
But the guru, in turn, needs disciples not only to become and remain a guru but to hold himself together psychologically. For the guru self often teeters on the edge of fragmentation, paranoia, and overall psychological breakdown. We will observe a particularly bizarre and violent version of this in Asahara, and in the manner in which he disintegrated when his closest disciples turned against him. Disciples are crucial to all dimensions of a guru’s psychological struggles in ways that are seldom fully grasped.
What has also been insufficiently recognized is the life-death dimension that pervades the guru-disciple tie, a dimension I have stressed throughout my work. Moving away from the classical Freudian model of instinct, mostly sexual, and defense, mostly repression, I emphasize our struggles with the continuity of life and our ways of symbolizing life and death. At an immediate level these include experiences of vitality as opposed to numbing and inner deadness. But I also include an ultimate level of universal need for human connectedness, for a sense of being part of a great chain of being that long preceded, and will continue endlessly after, one’s own limited life span. This sense of immortality encompasses feelings of living on in our children and their children, in our influences on other human beings, in our “works,” in a particular set of spiritual or religious beliefs, in what we perceive as eternal nature, or in the oneness of transcendent experiences.
In the cult, the guru becomes a crucible for life-power. That life-power is experienced as a surge of vitality, or what was constantly spoken of in Aum as “energy.” One’s previously deadened life now has vigor and purpose, even if the vigor and purpose are borrowed from the guru. That life-power becomes bound up with larger spiritual forces, that is, with a fierce sense of death-defying immortality. This aspect was the most compelling feature of Asahara’s hold on his disciples. The charisma that a guru like him is always said to possess is usually described with phrases like “magnetic attractiveness” or a “naked capacity of mustering assent.” But at the heart of charisma is the leader’s ability to instill and sustain feelings of vitality and immortality, feelings that reach into the core of each disciple’s often wounded, always questing self, while propelling that self beyond itself. Such feelings can be as fragile as they are psychologically explosive.
In this book Asahara, the guru, will be everywhere, most of all inhabiting, even in the wake of Aum’s violence, the minds of the disciples I interviewed. At the same time he will be nowhere, his guruism a phantom force, wavering between hyperreality and nothingness.
Shōkō Asahara’s childhood brings to mind Erasmus’s aphorism “In the country of the blind the one-eyed man is king.” But this particular one-eyed child was apparently an odd and uneasy king. Born in 1955 into the impoverished family of a tatami craftsman in a provincial area of Kyūshū, the southernmost of Japan’s main islands, he was the sixth of seven children and the fourth of five boys. Chizuo Matsumoto (Asahara’s birth name), afflicted with congenital glaucoma, was without sight in one eye and had severely impaired vision in the other. Because he did have some vision he was eligible to attend an ordinary school, but his parents chose to send him to a special school for the blind. It had the advantage of providing free tuition and board, and a completely sightless older brother was already enrolled there.
Having some vision while his fellow students had none, and being bigger and stronger than most of them, he could be a dominating, manipulative, bullying, and sometimes violent figure in the school, where he would remain until he was twenty years old. He would, for instance, force his roommates to strike one another in a contest he called “pro wrestling,” and when he found their efforts unsatisfactory he would himself demonstrate how it should be done. He could be rebellious to the point of threatening teachers but, if challenged, would back down and deny any provocation. He always had a few completely blind followers toward whom he could at times exhibit great kindness, and his teachers observed that he was also capable of tenderness toward his older brother and a younger brother who later became a student at the school. But he was generally coercive, gave evidence of resentment over having been forced to attend this special school, and was prone to quick changes in attitude and demands.
In his early ventures into proto-guruism, this one-eyed “king” did not command wide allegiance. He unsuccessfully ran for class head on several occasions, and each failure left him dejected. Once, after being voted down by fellow students despite an attempt to bribe them with sweets, he accused a teacher of influencing the election by saying bad things about him, but the teacher pointed out to him that the other students were simply afraid of him.
While his actual background was humble enough, there were rumors of a further taint—that his family came from the outcast group known by the euphemism burakumin (literally “village people”) or that they were Korean, also a victimized group in Japan. These rumors, though false, suggest something of others’ attitudes toward him. Yet later he would sometimes himself imply that he was burakumin, in order to identify himself with a despised and victimized group and so to claim extraordinary triumph over adversity.
Most accounts of Asahara’s early years emphasize his preoccupation with money. He would charge other students for favors his partial sight allowed him to accomplish and insist upon being treated by them when he took them to food shops or restaurants. He is said to have accumulated a considerable sum of money this way by the time of his graduation. But whatever the complexities of his school life, he apparently obtained rather good grades as a student and achieved a black-belt ranking in judo.
One aspect of Asahara’s childhood is not frequently mentioned. He was attracted to drama of all kinds. From an early age, he loved to watch melodramas on television; later he acted in various school plays and as a high school senior wrote a play of his own about Prince Genji, a great romantic figure, taking the exalted leading role for himself. His stated ambition was to become prime minister of Japan. (One teacher remembered him avidly absorbing a biography of Kakuei Tanaka, the new prime minister in 1972.) He even reportedly said in those years that he wished to be “the head of a robot kingdom” (although in the context of the popular science-fiction culture of his adolescence, this fantasy might not have been as strange as it may now sound). His teachers generally came to think of him as someone who wished to “extend his own image into someone strong or heroic.” A former classmate made the interesting observation that as the school for the blind was a closed society, so in Aum Asahara would try “to create the same kind of closed society in which he could be the head.”
None of this can account for what he did later. Moreover, retrospective reconstructions always run the risk of evoking the past selectively in the light of subsequent behavior, particularly when that behavior is extreme. But every guru begins somewhere. Asahara’s childhood undoubtedly contributed to his sense of alienation, of otherness, to his generalized hatred of the world, to his tendency toward paranoia, to what was to become a habit of violence, to his cultivation of the art of performance, and to his aspirations toward the heroic and transcendent. Overall, he developed in childhood an inclination toward controlling and manipulating other people, and perhaps the beginnings of an identity as a “blind seer.”
A Guru's Journey -- A special report.; The Seer Among the Blind: Japanese Sect Leader's Rise
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF WITH SHERYL WUDUNNMARCH 26, 1995
As a boy attending a school for the blind, Shoko Asahara was weak-sighted but had better vision than his classmates. So he emerged as a king of the school, the one who would lead his buddies off campus when they wanted a restaurant meal.
In exchange, they would pay for the meal.
Mr. Asahara, now 40, has come a long way since then: He rides a Rolls-Royce instead of a bicycle, and he has built a multinational religious sect, a business empire worth tens of millions of dollars and a stockpile of chemicals sufficient to create enough nerve gas to kill perhaps millions of people. The chemicals have been found during police searches since the gas attack on the Tokyo subway system last Monday, in which 10 people died and 5,500 were injured.
The image of the teen-age Shoko Asahara as the manipulative guru of a boarding school -- where he is the one people must depend on, where he interprets the surrounding world, where he makes the money -- seems to hold true today. By some accounts, the communes of Mr. Asahara's religious sect, Aum Shinrikyo, are attempts to recreate the culture of his childhood school for the blind.
International concern about terrorism has traditionally focused on political groups with machine guns, plastic explosives and the backing of a pariah government. But Mr. Asahara shows that it is also possible for a bizarre religious figure with no governmental support to acquire in a few years the capability to engage in something closer to war than terrorism.
Japanese newspapers have estimated that Aum's chemical stockpile could create enough nerve gas to kill 4.2 million to 10 million people, though how they did their reckoning is not clear.
There is no evidence that this was Mr. Asahara's intention, and he has denied it vigorously. But by some estimates he could have created 50 tons of the nerve gas sarin and then achieved the kind of urban Armageddon that he has been predicting.
"As we move toward the year 2000, there will be a series of events of inexpressible ferocity and terror," reads one of Aum's booklets, picked up from its Tokyo offices a few days ago. "The lands of Japan will be transformed into a nuclear wasteland. Between 1996 and January 1998, America and its allies will attack Japan, and only 10 percent of the population of the major cities will survive."
In his writings and speeches, Mr. Asahara seems to reserve a special animus for the United States Government, and he has accused American military planes of dropping sarin on Aum's communes. But Aum is also bitterly hostile to Japan's Government. Last June the group set up a shadow government with a "Ministry of Finance," "Ministry of Education" and "Ministry of Construction." It is said to have planned to become an independent nation by 1997.
Intelligent, soft-spoken, married with six children, Mr. Asahara is a far more complex figure than the cardboard image of a cult leader would suggest. He may wear a long beard, shocking pink robes and a beatific smile, but what is striking about his sect is that it is not a one-man show. He has attracted a core of bright young university graduates and trained scientists to help him in his missions, whether those be attracting recruits or synthesizing chemicals.
Mr. Asahara denies any involvement in the subway attack on Monday. The police have not made public any evidence that he was responsible, but the police raids and discovery of chemical ingredients of nerve gas suggest that Aum is a prime suspect.
In any case, for a spiritual leader, Mr. Asahara has shown a remarkable fascination with the temporal and the chemical. And his speeches have often mentioned such nerve gases as sarin, which the police say was used in the subway attack.
"It has become clear now that my first death will be caused by something like a poison gas such as sarin," Mr. Asahara said a year ago, without explaining what he meant by his "first death." At that time, almost nobody in Japan had heard of sarin. The Beginnings A Younger Son Of a Poor Family
Mr. Asahara was born Chizuo Matsumoto in a village in the southern island of Kyushu. The son of a tatami-mat maker, he grew up as the sixth of seven children in a tiny house.
One of his older brothers had almost no vision and attended a school for the blind. His parents apparently decided to send Mr. Asahara, who had weak but adequate vision, and his younger brother, who had normal eyesight, to the same school for economic reasons: The children would receive a Government subsidy and free meals.
Shoko Egawa, author of a critical biography of Mr. Asahara, suggests that he was obsessed in school with acquiring money and power. Mr. Asahara had saved $30,000 by the time he graduated from high school, and he also ran unsuccessfully for student body president in elementary, junior high and senior high schools.
Mr. Asahara did show the first signs of his later mastery of physical fitness and body control, earning a black belt in judo while still in school.
Although he spoke of attending medical school, Mr. Asahara reportedly failed exams and never attended college. Instead he moved to a Tokyo suburb to work as an acupuncturist. It was at this time, in 1978, that he met a college student, Tomoko Ishii, and married her.
Mrs. Asahara is said to have become a senior executive in Aum Shinrikyo, and one of their children, an 11-year-old girl, is also said to be prominent in the sect. But very little is known of his family life.
Mr. Asahara has been accused by former sect members of making occasional sexual advances against female recruits.
"At about midnight one evening, I was called to go to the room of the Venerated Teacher," recalled a woman who later left the sect. She wrote her account in a pamphlet prepared by a lawyers' group critical of Aum.
"There were just the two of us in the room, and he asked me if I had had any experience with men," the woman wrote. "And he asked me how many men I knew, and then he asked me to take off my clothes. I didn't think he could do anything wrong, and I was nervous and didn't want to resist, so I did as he said."
The woman said that Mr. Asahara told her not to tell anyone about the liaison. Shift to Religion From Fake Drugs To Marketing Yoga
In the early 1980's Mr. Asahara opened up a shop selling Chinese medicine. He is said to have made hundreds of thousands of dollars selling potions like tangerine peel in alcohol, and in 1982 he was arrested and fined for selling fake drugs.
Mr. Asahara became interested in yoga, and scholars say he became an excellent yoga practitioner, with very good control over his breathing technique. In 1984 he launched a company called Aum -- the name apparently is based on a Sanskrit word -- that ran a yoga school and sold health drinks.
An expert in marketing, Mr. Asahara traveled to India and Nepal to study Hinduism and Buddhism, and he came back with photos of himself with senior Tibetan lamas, including the Dalai Lama. He used these photos to portray himself as an internationally respected religious authority, and his yoga school became extremely successful.
In 1987, with just 10 followers, Mr. Asahara founded Aum Shinrikyo as a religious sect. It emphasized some Tibetan Buddhist teachings and yoga practices, including meditation and breathing control. But one of the central points of Tibetan Buddhism is compassion -- some Tibetans have trouble digging foundations for buildings, for fear that they will inadvertently slice apart a worm -- and compassion did not play a big role in Aum's theology
Of Japan's 185,000 religious organizations, most are Buddhist or Shinto shrines, but since the 1970's there has also been a growing number of sects like Aum Shinrikyo. Young people turned off by Japan's materialism and searching for something to believe in found a home in such groups.
Susuma Oda, a professor of psychopathology at the University of Tsukuba, suggests that one attraction of cults is that they offer young Japanese their first real father figure, because their own fathers were never home when they were growing up but instead were always at the office. Professor Oda also says that religious sects in Japan are to some extent the equivalent of the drug culture in America, offering people relief from stress and the opportunity to develop creative powers.
