It is, as Pat Tillman would say, disappointing.
When you are free and independent, you are not bound by anything, so you do not seek liberation. Consummating the process of Zen, you become unified. Then there are no mundane things outside of Buddhism, and there is no Buddhism outside of mundane things.Given the most benign benefit of the doubt, lies were the main ingredient. A more sinister doubt still has to be deliberated.
- Yuanwu
They never counted on his brother Kevin discovering that there was an initial investigation that vanished. They never counted on a mother and father who were strong enough to demand the truth about what had happened, and determined enough to rescue the real person that was Pat Tillman from the spin machine into which the Pentagon tried to feed his body.
Pat himself, after seeing the Iraq war firsthand and declaring it to be “so fucking illegal,” quipped to his fellow soldiers that the military seemed to be so inept that it couldn’t even construct a credible lie. How prescient was that?
Kauzlarich, like Boykin and all their ilk, has the spiritual depth of his own skin, which is what he is trying to save … whether in an exchange of faith for immortality or in deflecting the sorry truth onto a bereaved and angered family with cheap revival-tent accusations of “atheism.”
Mary Tillman, Pat’s mother, showed me a page from Pat’s journal when he was 16 years old. It was Pat’s reflection on why he had decided, once and for all, that he didn’t need organized religion. The entry was motivated by Pat’s grief at the death of an old family cat. Pat wasn’t comfortable with the idea that one could love another creature that was being excluded from the bargain in the afterlife. He and his brothers grew up between a river and the mountains, where they roamed countless miles and delighted in the ceaseless interplay of geography, climate, flora and fauna. In his journal entry, Pat speculated about this singular universality, and made up his mind that one didn’t need some anti-material monarchy buzzing with angels to accommodate himself to mortality.
Pat never felt separate enough from the world to despise the worms. And so Kauzlarich’s expression of fear and loathing for the world would have amused Pat.
Pat’s ashes are adrift from where they were scattered along the Pacific Ocean, mixing back into the elements with which he was so at home; while Ralph Kauzlarich and the Pentagon fret about a five-foot-two-inch mother who refuses to make them an offering of her fear. Surely Pat Tillman is laughing.
(--Playing the Atheism Card Against Pat Tillman’s Family, 7/28/2006, Truthdig, by Stan Goff)
At morning practice we listened after sitting and chanting to Adyashanti interview about identity and the illusions we cultivate around identity.
We shoot ourselves in the head, or are shot in the head by nameless others for reasons difficult to fathom, when we identify ourselves too closely with what we are not.
We are not the saviors of the world, much less the Middle East, or northern Africa, nor are we the drug policemen of any country, certainly not our own.
Something awkwardly delusional has infected our moral stability, and we lurch violently left and right smashing precious things -- like justice, decency, respect, truthfulness, and a primordial fairness that has been exchanged for power and fear.
Let’s change that!
Please?
