Swami

Well, here we are again, and what do you know? The human comedy has been renewed for another season. I heard we were under contract until 2012, but given the increasing cost to the planet, it’s been year to year. Hey, as long as we keep God laughing...

But it’s a funny thing. With all the serious foolishness we humans engage in, we still don’t seem to get the joke: Even though we fear tsunamis and earthquakes and tornados and hurricanes, so much of our human suffering is self-inflicted. And so much of our self-inflicted suffering is due to the foolish nonsense we get tricked into believing -- and never question. The good news is, the worse things get the more motivated we are to question these questionable beliefs.

The First Step Toward Fool-Realization is Realizing You’ve Been Fooled.

Yes, the first step toward fool-realization is realizing you’ve been fooled. Take the recent Presidential election -- please! Statisticians told us that the odds of the exit polls and election results not matching in the way they didn’t match were 250 million to one. Did you read about that in your local paper or see it on CNN? They gave it blanket coverage. That’s where they put a blanket over a story and smother it to death.

Now help me out with this one. Some athlete does something illegal to artificially enhance his performance, and it’s front-page news. An entire political party is accused of the same thing and a 250 million to one shot comes in, and it’s no-page news. Boy, talk about irony deficiency.

Here’s another couple of irony tablets we were expected to swallow whole without digesting: Reporters were locked out of the vote-counting in a key Ohio precinct. No problem, we were told, it’s just taking democracy to the next level. The secret ballot has now been extended to make sure the entire process is done in secrecy. Faith-based vote counting, they call it.

Then there were the voting machines that changed Kerry votes to Bush votes, but never the other way around -- ah, those are the new smart voting machines. It’s a miraculous new technology. You don’t have to do a thing. The machine votes for you!

No wonder the body politic is still suffering from electile dysfunction.

Now there’s no reason to blame the Republicans alone for this, even though Karl Rove has long practiced the ancient art of using energy -- what the Chinese call “ch’i” -- to take unfair advantage. Ch’i ting, it is called. Yes, every abuser needs an enabler, and that’s why we have the Democrats. The Democratic leadership vowed they would stop at nothing to make sure every vote was counted -- and that is exactly where they stopped. 2004 saw the Democrats change their official party song from “It’s My Party, and I’ll Cry If I Want To” to “I Concede Clearly Now.” Except for Barbara Boxer, the only Senator willing to peek behind the irony curtain and expose ‘mockracy in action in Ohio.

I guess when the body politic is suffering from such a serious case of irony deficiency, God has to make an obvious joke in order to awaken us from the trance. How about this one: A war hero Presidential candidate counts himself out before he even hits the canvas. And the one who stands up to fight is a female Boxer with a sharp left hook to counter a wicked right cross. Clint Eastwood, eat your heart out.

The election left many Americans disillusioned, and from the cosmic scheme of things, that is a good thing. Since the cause of disillusionment is illusionment, anything that disabuses us of abusive illusions is a key to awakening. So we must wake up laughing, and leave laughter in our wake. Why laughter? Because there is definitely something funny going on. Besides, if we laugh loudly enough, we might even wake the neighbors. Sure, we may have been alarmed by the election, but how about those who slept through the alarm? Isn’t it about time they woke up too?

And in the wake of awakened laughter, may there be even more awakening. Those bubbles of joyful laughter are just what the body politic needs to counterbalance the toxic conditions due to toxic conditioning.

“If it quacks like a duck, and steps like a goose ...
there’s something fowl afoot.”

In addition to the toxic conditioning that is our “birthwrong,” we now find out that “fear-gnomes” were released into the body politic repeatedly after 9/11. These little gnomes of gnawing fear have lowered our resistance to impropaganda. The repeated injection of fear-gnomes under the brand names Code Orange and Deniatol, political scientists say, has caused code-dependency and dope addiction -- that’s where we get addicted to electing the same dopes again and again, despite proven long-term damage to the body politic.

Even more serious, toxic conditioning due to fear causes selective blindness. The resulting loss of hindsight and foresight -- not to mention the inability to see what’s right in front of your nose -- is often called “Not-Seeism.” Here’s an example: Remember all the fuss and furor and special prosecution over the Monica Lewinsky affair? Meanwhile, we have 9/11, the crime of the new American century, and are left with unanswered questions and unquestioned answers. How is it that legislators and a special prosecutor spent four years and $50 million taxpayer dollars investigating a President who lied about a blow job, while the official story on this far-more-serious blowup job is swallowed whole? Cheating on Hillary is one thing, but cheating on the whole country is something else. And yet, that is what a number of private investigators -- notably David Ray Griffin, author of “The New Pearl Harbor” -- are trying to tell us.

No wonder political scientists are concerned about the effects of irony deficiency and truth decay, and are beginning to utter the “F-word.” While few are ready to openly diagnose our condition as “fascism,” you know the old saying: “If it quacks like a duck, and steps like a goose ... there’s something fowl afoot.”

Fascism is a potentially fatal condition where artificially generated fear causes unnatural growth of muscle tissue. If left unchecked, it will eventually constrict the heart and squeeze the life out of the body politic. Already, a grave parasitic condition called Military Industrial Complex has been draining our lifeblood for decades, and has been linked to the current epidemic of Deficit Inattention Disorder. No wonder we didn’t have the resistance to shake off Mad Cowboy Disease last year.

With the body politic near fiscal exhaustion and fear-gnomes clouding our vision, all the administration had to do was utter one magic word -- “Osamasaddam!” -- and presto, all criticism would be dismissed. Thanks to this sophisticated dismissal defense system, far too many Americans were put into a state of cattlepsy and herded into the bewilderness.

Good News! Creationists and Evolutionists Are Both Right.

Now I have bad news. The current condition is irreversible -- because there is no going back. I have good news too. We can outgrow it by moving forward. Albert Einstein said that a problem couldn’t be solved at the level it was created. He said that nearly 100 years ago, but it still hasn’t sunk in. Quantum physics tells us the universe is a unified field where everyone and everything is related. And you know what? Jesus said the same thing 2,000 years ago, and that hasn’t sunk in either. He said “Love thy neighbor” because we’re all neighbors under One ‘Hood.

So how is it that “Do unto others...” devolved into “Doo-doo unto others”? Well, because we humans are still acting as if we are living in the Newtonian universe of equal and opposite forces. Force must be met with more force. You poke out my eye, I poke out your eye. Talk about irony deficiency. Forget all that self-righteous homage to the Three Wise Men. When push comes to shove, it’s strictly Three Stooges. No wonder we have a world at odds trying to get even.

We have smart bombs but apparently don’t have the smarts to determine when using even the smartest bomb is stupid. Is it that hard to understand that when you use a big stick to become number one, everyone else is going to treat you like number two? Or, as another old saying goes, “It doesn’t matter how big your stick is, if you stick your stick where it doesn’t belong -- you’re stuck.”

In order to break the linear pattern of black eyes and stuck sticks, we must evolve to the next level beyond getting even and get odd instead. In other words, if what we have been doing for centuries hasn’t worked, let’s try something new for a change. It turns out both the creationists and the evolutionists are right. The Creator created us to evolve in consciousness. Otherwise Jesus would have said, “Now, don’t do a thing until I return.”

We must face the sad truth. We have found the weapons of mass destruction, and they are us. Not just the U.S., but humankind’s addiction to inhuman unkindness. So the question is, can we undo the doo-doo we have done? Or will the done doo-doo be our undoing? And this brings us to the next level of fool-realization, and a tough irony tablet to swallow: Instead of using our blessed resources to be fruitful and multiply, we have used them to stay fruitlessly divided. Why? Because we have been tricked into taking sides.

Here’s something funny. If you were to take a survey, you’d find that a vast majority of humans would be happy to live in peace. But the world’s mining interests (you know, the ones who say, “that’s mine, that’s mine, and that’s mine”) know that the best way to overwhelm an overwhelming majority is to divide it in two. And so, they get the mine and the rest of us get the shaft.

When we see this from a higher perspective, we realize there are no sides, only angles. And when we see it from the right angle, we see that we’re all on the same side. You know what? Those mine, mine, mining interests are ... a minority. The bad news is, a small number of individuals have inappropriately appropriated great amounts of wealth and power. The good news is, there’s way, way more of us then there are of them.

It is like the classic the story about the Lone Ranger and Tonto being caught in an ambush. “Well, Tonto,” the Lone Ranger says, “we’re surrounded by Indians. Looks like we’re done for.” And Tonto says, “What you mean we, kemosabe?”

What if the next “mining” expedition comes along, and the vast majority of us say, “What you mean we, kemosabe?” What if we demanded that our leaders fund think tanks that think about more than tanks? What if we declared the entire system illegally insane, and began building a sane asylum big enough for all 6.5 billion of us -- and all our relations as well?

Strike While the Irony Is Hot!

So, now that we see the sad irony of otherwise peace-loving people willingly committing themselves to the institutionalized insanity of warfare, what do we do about it? We must laugh heartily because after all, what better than levity to lift us to a higher level? Rising up in levity is the only kind of uprising that really works. And in the awakening that comes in the wake of the laughter, we see what a futile waste of energy it is trying to overthrow what we have now. If we realize a problem can only be solved at a higher level, we must overgrow the system instead -- from the grassroots up. We do this by declaring all out peace. All that inner peace we’ve been developing all these years? Time to let it all out.

Here’s a modest proposal that could work for starters: What if all the peace groups said, “Ah, peace on it!” and made peace with each other? Who knows? That could start the ball rolling and the idea might catch on.

And while we’re being peaceful, might as well be joyful too. Since the currency of joy is laughter, I say play it forward. Right now we have the power to use the laugh force to shine a light on the utter absurdity of the current holy war over the Holy Land. And we must strike while the irony is hot.

A few years ago, I was traveling on one of those higher planes, and who should I find myself sitting next to but George Gershwin, the great composer. He told me he really cared about the healing of this planet, and that he was particularly saddened that the Israelis and Palestinians had almost the same word for peace but couldn’t seem to create peace to save their lives. And then he brightened. “Would you be willing to take my healing message to that part of the world?”

Well, how could I turn down the guy who wrote “Swami, How I Love Ya?” So here is George Gershwin’s song for peace in the Middle East:

Let’s Call the Old Thing Off

You say salaam and I say shalom
You throw a bomb, I blow up your home
Salaam, shalom, we blow up our home
Oh, let’s call the whole thing off

You say baraka, I say barucha
I spin the dreidl, you toke the hookah
Barucha, baraka, this warfare is ca-ca
Let’s call the old thing off

And oh, if we call the old thing off
We’ll all be right
And oh if we are all right, well there’s no need to fight

I eat the kasha, you eat the kibbe
We both dig falafel, but never pork ribbie
To kasha, to kibbe
Forget the pork ribbie
(At least there’s one thing we agree on)
Haven’t we had enough?
Let’s call the old thing off

Th-th-th-that’s all folks!

So as we spring forth into this new season, let’s call the old thing off -- and make space for something new. In this shrinking world that could definitely use a good shrink, it’s time to play truce or consequences. This is not a game show to be watched behind a remote but a world game to be played full out as if our life depends on it -- because it does. Time to leave behind the dueling dualities of left and right and come front-and-center, ready to move forward.

The military might of a country that spends $400 billion a year on weaponry pales in comparison to the real super power of this new century: We the people of the world itching for an evolution, willing to try something new. Time to embrace our superpowers, use our x-ray vision to see through the deception, and see that it’s right that makes might, not the other way around. Together, let us learn to use our superpowers wisely in a world win campaign where the whole world can win.

© 2005 by Steve Bhaerman. All rights reserved. Swami’s latest book, Swami for Precedent: A 7-Step Plan to Heal the Body Politic and Cure Electile Dysfunction can be purchased online at www.wakeuplaughing.com, or call (800) SWAMI-BE for free catalogue.

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