Murdering him serves no purpose. Of course he's guilty of crimes, guilty of power lust, guilty of associating with countries like the United States in their attempt to shore up oil resources and safety for shared interests in the Middle East. But then things turned sour, the alliance was spoiled. Bedfellows turned their backs. But if crime and guilt in international power lust were the measure of who hangs or who merely is assassinated, I fear many nooses would be in the ready both here and abroad.
The field of boundless emptiness
Is what exists from the very beginning.
You must purify, cure, grind down,
Or brush away all the tendencies
You have fabricated into apparent habits.
--- Hongzhi Zhengjue (1091–1157)
Hussein's habits were excessive. It seems a common malady with people whose power is unchecked and whose sycophants are happy to bolster illegality and inanity as long as they are recipients of largess and payoff. We suffer this at home here too. And as for the fundamentalist belief that whoever is in power is by the will of God -- I care neither for the belief nor the mind perpetrating that thought.
Still, I'd rather he live. I'd rather those he murdered would also be alive, as well as those the United States has murdered in Iraq. Murdering people is a sad and mindless action taken in the absence of authentic compassionate justice. That kind of justice would strive to recognize a hidden truth much too often kept covered by those who know it is there.
What is that hidden truth? It is that when anyone is murdered I am murdered. When Saddam Hussein hangs, George Bush hangs. When an enemy combatant is tortured, you are tortured. When men and women in Afghanistan or Iraq are bombed, your mother and father, brothers and sisters are killed and mutilated. When someone is sexually molested, enslaved, or abused anywhere, so too is a member of your family. Whatever befalls one of us, befalls each of us.
How is it we do not feel what is happening to us as it is happening?
Whenever and whatever kindness is shown, that kindness is received everywhere by everyone.
64
When I have seen by time's fell hand defaced
The rich proud cost of outworn buried age,
When sometime lofty towers I see down razed,
And brass eternal slave to mortal rage,
When I have seen the hungry ocean gain
Advantage on the kingdom of the shore,
And the firm soil win of the watery main,
Increasing store with loss, and loss with store,
When I have seen such interchange of state,
Or state itself confounded to decay,
Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate,
That time will come and take my love away.
This thought is as a death, which cannot choose
But weep to have that which it fears to lose.
(Poem: "64" by William Shakespeare, from William Shakespeare: The Sonnets. Little, Brown and Company.)To feel what is happening as it is happening would necessitate a more profound spiritual awareness than is currently practiced by the vast majority of us. It would call for a spiritual awareness that is willing to feel what is taking place and recognize the isomorphic nature of existence in this world.
(Greek: isos "equal", and morphe "shape"). We are in the presence of an unsettling reality: equivalent form, equivalent structure. Something "equivalent" is corresponding or virtually identical especially in effect or function. Perhaps we don't feel our equivalence with other beings because we have never understood the invitation to be that which we actually are. We hear "Be who you are" and assume the ego, or some collective definition, will give us the right information about how to be.
According to Douglas Hofstadter: "The word "isomorphism" applies when two complex structures can be mapped onto each other, in such a way that to each part of one structure there is a corresponding part in the other structure, where "corresponding" means that the two parts play similar roles in their respective structures." (Godel, Escher, Bach, p. 49)What we do not feel, what we do not understand, is the vital interest of being alive.
(--Wikipedia)
Being, alive, is hidden from us. Why? I don't know. Could it be revealed and unveiled? Yes, I think so. How? Watch carefully.
Watch carefully and see what is taking place. Watch carefully and feel what is taking place. Watch carefully and be what is taking place.
To be what is taking place is to integrate the reality of this existence.
For my Christian friends, it is what the Christ Reality (incarnationalized in Jesus) is about.
For my Buddhist friends, it is what Prajna/Karuna (the Knowing/Loving, or, Insight/Resolve) is about.
For my Muslim, Jewish, Hindu friends, it is the deepest revelation of Surrender, Nameless Presence, and Truth.
We are frightened by wholeness. To integrate is to be what we are -- whole. It is sad to see that so many of us do not see what is our true reality. So much of human existence is diverted and distracted from experiencing our true nature in union with one another. We seem unwilling or unable to be who we profoundly are.
In our delusion, we murder one another. We hang Saddam Hussein. We like the name we give this action - we call it "justice." It is not justice. It is blindness.
The Vedas tell us this about God - "OM Poornamadah Poornamidam Poornaad Poornamudachyate; Poornasya Poornamaadaaya Poornamevaavashisyate". Translated in English, this verse means "What is Whole - This is Whole - What has come out of the Whole is also Whole; When the Whole is taken out of the Whole, the Whole still remains Whole".
(- from Hinduism, the World's Oldest Religion, A Simple Introduction To A Complex Religion, c. 1997, by Sunil Balasubramaniam, cf. https://youtu.be/yJXEKmbtsts?si=U_aSNjNZGGZRB26I
I don't yet find tears for Saddam Hussein. That's because I do not yet feel the profound sorrow of personal loss. His death is someone's death far away from what I consider to be the boundary of my personal self. And yet, is it? Am I able to recognize my face in the mirror of Saddam Hussein? Am I able to recognize my face in the mirror of George Bush? These two dangerous men reveal to me my own pernicious aspect.
Not realizing our true nature we remain dangerous creatures. In our ignorance and delusion, (Sanskrit: Avidya), we create and cultivate misery and suffering.
Today is a remembrance of Thomas Becket, also murdered, also caught in the squeeze of power.
Murder in the Cathedral, is a poetic drama in two parts, with a prose sermon interlude, the most successful play of T.S. Eliot. The play was performed at Canterbury Cathedral in 1935 and published the same year. Set in December 1170, it is a modern miracle play on the martyrdom of St. Thomas Becket, archbishop of Canterbury.
The play's most striking feature is the use of a chorus in the classical Greek manner. The poor women of Canterbury who make up the chorus nervously await Thomas' return from his seven-year exile, fretting over his volatile relationship with King Henry II. Thomas arrives and must resist four temptations: worldly pleasures, lasting power as chancellor, recognition as a leader of the barons against the king, and eternal glory as a martyr. To the final and most subtle tempter, Thomas replies:
"Now is my way clear, now is the meaning plain:Temptation shall not come in this kind again.The last temptation is the greatest treason:To do the right deed for the wrong reason."
After Thomas delivers his Christmas morning sermon, four knights in the service of the king accost him and order him to leave the kingdom. When he refuses, they return to slay him in the cathedral. Each justifies his actions to the audience, claiming that Thomas suffered from the sin of pride. The drama ends with the priests and chorus mourning Thomas' heroic death. (--1997 Encyclopædia Britannica)
The right deed is to mourn the dead. The wrong reason is thinking we have eliminated someone or something not-us.
The temptation to treason is strong, very strong.
Our ignorance and misery are not permanent. Yet our mind attempts to hold them fast and furious where they are. They can and will fade. They, too, are impermanent. We must not hold tight that which, of itself, will pass. When we murder by hanging, when we murder by bullet or bomb, or when we murder by neglect and unawareness, we are holding fast to delusion and misery.
Saddam Hussein is condemned to hang until dead.
Between the fall and the snap, between the in-breath and the out-breath, remains a fraction of time for us to come to see who we are. Such seeing, such feeling, is our corresponding connection with one another, with the Whole wherein we dwell. When we come to this realization, there will be a sudden flash of understanding that will initially sink us into profound despair at all the misery we have countenanced in ignorance. That too will pass. We'll have to quickly learn to let it pass with gentleness.
In conclusion, let me share with you a short prayer which gives me great inspiration and determination: For as long as space endures, and for as long as living beings remain, until then may I, too, abide to dispel the misery of the world.
(--The Dalai Lama, Nobel Peace Prize Lecture, in The Dalai Lama: A Policy of Kindness, edited by Sidney Piburn)
It is the end of a year.
Let's say goodbye with gentleness.