In prison this morning conversation about AI, evil and good, craving and aversion, truth and illusion, and the fact that “withholding” or secrecy seems to be the practice of everyone, from each of us in the room to every government and corporation in the world.
One man felt there is a dome in the outer atmosphere and no one has travelled to the moon. Another referred to Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva as close cousins to Father, Son, and Spirit. The Native American man emphasized walking in peace.
Returning home, I look into a NYRB article "Indecorous Decorations", by Lauren Kane, (Medieval ideas about sex and love, both rowdy and reverent, are recorded on objects meant for everyday use. March 28, 2026.)
The name Tuchman and the word ‘renunciation’ caught my attention. She mentions the "misapprehension that medieval people were prudish simply because they existed in the past.” I was reminded of a priest back in 1971 dressed in his thirteenth century brown habit who, when asked if he considered a woman we knew from Paraguay to be attractive, responded “Father is lustless” as he sipped a Tom Collins two blocks from the Pacific Ocean.
In A Distant Mirror, her influential 1978 book about daily life in fourteenth-century France, the historian Barbara W. Tuchman warns against the “difficulty of empathy” that results from this misunderstanding:
The main barrier is, I believe, the Christian religion as it then was: the matrix and law of medieval life, omnipresent, indeed compulsory. Its insistent principle that the life of the spirit and of the afterworld was superior to the here and now, to material life on earth, is one that the modern world does not share…. What compounds the problem is that medieval society, while professing belief in renunciation of the life of the senses, did not renounce it in practice, and no part of it less so than the Church itself. Many tried, a few succeeded, but the generality of mankind is not made for renunciation. There never was a time when more attention was given to money and possessions than in the fourteenth century, and its concern with the flesh was the same as at any other time. Economic man and sensual man are not suppressible.
https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/03/28/indecorous-decorations-medieval-sexuality/
Everything is simply itself until you want it.
Desire and craving create objects of attention. Money becomes said object. Material things too. As well as women and men. Then they are no longer ‘itself', they are objects for your possession.
For something to be itself, 自体 Jitai, it requires a corresponding manifestation of each one of us to also be itself, 自体 Jitai.
It is oftentimes difficult to read or speak about renunciation or consider a world free of craving and desire as a way of being-in-the-world. To understand insubstantiality, to not fabricate a culture of accumulation, representative objectivication, and accretion, to practice the poverty of 13th century mendicancy without feeling the need to impose the same upon anyone else -- this is a keen activity.
Ours is a societal culture of reaching for wealth, reaching for sexual conquests, a plague of pedophilia, an orgy of infidelity and criminal acquisition by means of grift and graft, greed and grotesque acts of dominance. Our oligarchs and authoritarians have taken control of liquid assets, mineral and material resources, and our authentic satisfaction in living an authentic life.
There’s a lot of withholding going on. Secrecy, unshared wealth, human and other sentient or natural deprivation. There is a cadre of elite top-percenters hoarding and sequestering their booty.
The three poisons (Sanskrit: triviṣa; Tibetan: dug gsum) in the Mahayana tradition or the three unwholesome roots (Sanskrit: akuśala-mūla; Pāli: akusala-mūla) in the Theravada tradition are a Buddhist term that refers to the three root kleshas that lead to all negative states. These three states are delusion, also known as ignorance; greed or sensual attachment; and hatred or aversion.[1][2]
In the Buddhist teachings, the three poisons (of ignorance, attachment, and aversion) are the primary causes that keep sentient beings trapped in samsara. These three poisons are said to be the root of all of the other kleshas.[6][7] The three poisons are represented in the hub of the wheel of life as a pig, a bird, and a snake (representing ignorance, attachment, and aversion, respectively). As shown in the wheel of life (Sanskrit: bhavacakra), the three poisons lead to the creation of karma, which leads to rebirth in the six realms of samsara.[1][8][9]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_poisons
This morning: ‘Let’s talk about trees. It’s time to leaf and watch what leaves.’ (The man smiled at his pun.)
Walk, walk away, leave what no longer serves the well-being of each and all!
