Faith in The Era of Post Truth
..Climate Refugees, Habitual Rituals, and The Cult of Modernity..
Faith is a curious thing. It allows us to find meaning when meaning is hard to find, motivation when despair has set in. Faith does not come with peer review. No works cited page offers assurance that what one is accepting as truth is in any way verifiable. Faith comes from a place a mystery, a place of myth.
The modern world is a curious smorgasbord of contractions. No doubt this stems from displacement and the usual side effects of the overbooked schedule most of us now possess as we awkwardly scramble into the hallowed halls of late-stage capitalisms inner chambers to bow at the throne of The Economy. On one hand, humans the world over have miraculously managed to maintain cherished values that stem from ancestral ties to a time before science and technology threw everyone a curious curveball. On the other hand, especially among the world’s youth, many seem to have lost faith in anything at all.
In the west, where I was raised, we have yet to see a president who isn’t a god-fearing Christian. Even in an era of rigorous scientific debate, we still print “In God We Trust” on our holiest of sacraments, paper money. In Thailand, where I live now in a rural Northern village on a farm with my Thai wife and our two-year old daughter, the intergenerational dialogue between animistic views, Hindu forms of worship and the now dominate view presented by Siddhartha Guatama has resulted in a unique mash-up faith of ancestral worship, merit making, and the ritual feeding of elemental spirits. Present in both worlds one can, with little need for rigorous inquiry, see that amongst the followers of each respective faith tradition, it is a faith in money that ultimately drives the actions of most peoples on a daily basis.
My family and I have recently been forced into climate refugee status, along with countless others throughout Southeast Asia, due to our home being threatened by uncontrolled fires. Exasperated by increasingly long, hot and overly dry “dry” seasons, fires lit intentionally by villagers pressured into hunting, scavenging, etc. by the increasingly present forces of international capitalist interests produce an unbearably thick fume of smoke for several months each year. Those who can afford the luxury of being able to leave, do. And those who cannot, they usually leave too. If one can’t breathe, they cannot live.
Unfortunately, about an hour into our exodus our car broke down in Lamphun, an ancient city famous for a temple that claims to have been visited by the Buddha himself (Wat Phra That Haripunchai Woramahawihan) and now houses a piece of The World Conquerors skull within a massive golden stupa adjacent the main temple. For the past week we have been posted up in a cheap air-conditioned hotel room patiently waiting for the mechanic to figure out what is wrong with our car. With the air quality in Chiang Mai province rating among the worst in the world, anyone who plans on staying outdoors for more than a few minutes a day here is putting themselves at serious risk. Breathing in high levels of hazardous particulate matter smaller than 2.5 microns (PM2.5) can result in any number of diseases, including cancer. PM2.5 particles dominate our skies currently. They can penetrate deep into lungs and even into the bloodstream, potentially causing irreparable damage to the brain, heart and lungs, especially to small children, those with preexisting respiratory issues such as asthma, and the elderly. Air pollution has killed far more people than COVID-19, resulting in around 7 million premature deaths annually but remains to get far less media attention than it deserves. It is hard to explain to anyone who hasn’t spent weeks on end ensconced in a thick veil of smoke and ash what this feels like. The raspy, weighted effort placed on the lungs. The thick oily grease the apocalyptic air lathers upon the skin. And then there is the mind. It is maddening. And for parents, extremely troubling. Toddlers aren’t big on wearing masks. It’s virtually impossible to get them to keep one on. So the likelihood of them ever truly being protected while outdoors is nil.
As it happened, this week aligned with Magha Puja, a major holiday throughout the Buddhist world marking an event that believers claim took place around 2,500 years ago in a bamboo grove of Veluvana, located in present day Bihar, India. It is said that 1,250 enlightened monks who had been ordained personally by the Buddha came to see him there spontaneously on the the full moon day of the third lunar month of the year (Marchish) with no one having been previously summoned to do so. On this occasion The Enlightened One presented those in attendance with special instructions regarding the fundamental rules of his teachings (called the Ovada Patimokkha or, Patimokkha Exhortation). Today Magha Puja draws thousands of pilgrims to various temples and shrines throughout the world to commemorate this auspicious event by performing merit-making activities such as alms giving (providing monks with necessities), meditation, lighting candles, listening to dhamma talks, etc.
For most traditional practitioners of Buddhism, the act of making merit has been grossly misinterpreted as “to pray for good luck”. Similar to gangsters, businessmen and politicians who show up to mass, confession or the National Day of Prayer in order to symbolically demonstrate faith, the superstitious act of “taking refuge in the Triple Gem” (placing trust in Buddha, his teachings and the community of believers) is often motivated more by fear and collective cultural pressure than a genuine faith in anything beyond habitual actions generated over time via the curious container of one’s unique cultural mold.
Humans everywhere are products of their environment and will follow the norms of the molds they by chance (or karma) have found themselves oozing into. For some the spiritual mold looks like an exceptionally kind, long-haired hippy in robes. For some, this mold takes the shape of a serene monk sitting atop a giant lotus flower. There are other molds as well. Many. Yet whichever mold one finds themselves formed by, there are certain protocols, commandments and precepts we are asked to follow in order to be blessed with the good fortune they claim to afford us. Diluted and manipulated over time by culture bearers far removed from original context however, these protocols, commandments and precepts often take new forms, lose much of their original meaning and become folk traditions instead of living sacrament. When rituals become simply habitual, they tend to lose their spark and the necessary symbolism gets diluted into forms of identity instead of divine code.
The further we get from original contexts as they relate to a certain place and the elemental rhythms and matters of such place as they relate to and with a certain demographic of integrated peoples the reason for such ritualized actions start to look a bit like asking Santa for presents if we promise to be good. We bow before Buddha and ask for a salary increase instead of the ability to possess Right View. Well-intended but misguided Christians gather around establishments pridefully bearing rainbow flags to “pray the gay away” instead of praying that they are well fed, empowered and protected from harm. The mold, the spiritual container, thus starts to serve something far from what it was originally intended to serve.
As is witnessed in the west, where a violent trend of disregard for the natural world has resulted in over 90% of the American landscape being deforested, overgrazed and over farmed, when looking at one’s actual actions, faith is generally not truly being placed in God as most in the Christian demographic there would publicly suggest but rather in the rules laid out by the overlords of Economy. Whereas God told Moses to make sure the Israelites let their land lie fallow every 6 years, giving the land itself a Sabbath (Leviticus 25:4-5), the gods of commerce suggest that to rest is to be lazy, our time be better spent honing skills of efficiency, increasing output and maximizing profits. How enraged would shareholders be if Monsanto required farmers to take it easy occasionally, to give soil an opportunity to regenerate herself? What if, like several of the hill tribes dotting the Northern Thailand landscape still practice today, major transnational Agricultural firms like CP Group encouraged Thai villagers to practice rotational farming methods and allowed large swaths of forest to remain untouched for at least 7 years before being tended to again for agricultural purposes? Another form of faith altogether would surely sprout forth. One not unlike that which I surmise once resided in the original forms of what is so often misread in modern rituals. I imagine we would again see a faith in The Land.
Our actions demonstrate clearly what we really place faith in. Trump violently tramples through a large group of oppressed children of God for a photo op of him holding a Bible. Thai firms directly responsible for destroying the natural world don “spirit houses” on the front lawns of their administrative offices. On full moon days, Thai villagers recite the foundational rules and precepts of The Way, only to cover the very land that bore witness to The Anointed Ones enlightenment with countless toxic chemicals, threatening soils very ability to continue sustaining life. Christians give thanks to God for providing “abundance” while, knowingly or not, having severed virtually all ties with the land and animals that makes such abundance possible.
Once we were farmers. The Land Herself was our Church. It was so long ago for most of us we can barely remember, but try. Set the phone down and listen to the Still, Small Voice whispering inside your heart of our collective, ancient, inseparable tie with the cycles of stars, the movements of unfathomably large celestial bodies, of a time we once understood intimately how our actions were intertwined with theirs and we danced within these holy changes. Once we understood fire. We had respect for the ways of death and decay, transformation and rebirth. Once we knew how to rest. We had faith then in something much more important that the uninspiring desire to simply get what we want. Now we pay homage to the memory of those days in habitual ceremonies yet forget all too frequently what any of the symbols actually mean. The New Year once started in March. Remember why? Listen. Deeply…
In Matthew 6:25 of the King James Version of the Holy Bible, it is written, “Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they?” We dare not actually believe this however, placing our faith in insurance plans, stock trade investments and terrifyingly massive machines that constantly slice away at the earth, year after year, exposing Her secret insides to the Sun, destroying precious soil and killing countless sentient beings all for the species-centric desire to secure our yearning to eat what we want, when we want. Modernity’s faith seems not to be in God or Buddha, Yahweh or Krishna. This era of post-truth places its faith in the holy trinity of Science, Technology and the ever-elusive “Economy”. Maga Puja day has now come and gone. The faithful went through the expected motions of offering flowers and incense, making rounds about the ancient chedi. Now, for the next 364 days we grind, we burn, we till. The candles surrounding the stupa blow out, hushed by winds whirling from the raging of countless fires.
-------------
My family and I walk out of the Wat Phra That temple after offering our own prostrations, taking refuge ourselves in the Triple Gem. We rest in an adjacent ice-cream parlor. I easily spot in the room at least four kathoeys (transvestites or “lady boys”). No one is judging them. No one is circling around them to “pray the gay away”. They are at peace. Fully embraced just as they are, even in this dogmatic kingdom of rigid rules. Having just received word from a friend back in Colorado that more violence has come down upon members of the trans community there and being that I am no longer capable of not seeing the correlations between how we treat people based on sexual preference and how we treat the Earth, I am both inspired and exhausted by the complexities of these curious times. I look down at my daughter, innocent and overjoyed to be eating ice-cream. How will I know where to even begin when my daughter starts to ask questions regarding the layers upon layers of contradictions, misinformation, hypocrisy, historical inaccuracies and outright untruths? I am reminded of what the great philosopher, psychologist, professor and poet Bayo Akomolafe says,
“I am quite confident that even as the oceans boil, and the hurricanes beat violently against our once safe shores, and the air sweats with the heat of impending doom, and our fists protest the denial of climate justice, that there is a path to take that has nothing to do with victory or defeat: a place we do not yet know the coordinates to; a question we do not yet know how to ask. The point of the departed arrow is not merely to pierce the bullseye and carry the trophy: the point of the arrow is to sing the wind and remake the world in the brevity of flight. There are things we must do, sayings we must say, thoughts we must think, that look nothing like the images of success that have so thoroughly possessed our visions of justice. May this new decade be remembered as the decade of the strange path, of the third way, of the broken binary, of the traversal disruption, the kairotic moment, the posthuman movement for emancipation, the gift of disorientation that opened up new places of power, and of slow limbs.”
I eat a spoonful of ice-cream. I take a good long look at my beautiful, exhausted wife. I look out the window at the hordes of devotees, dressed beautifully and glowing from their fleeting, but genuine effort to keep alive something their bodies know is worthy of remembering, if only for a day. I smile. I stop judging. I admit how little I know about anything at all. I breathe. How beautiful, strange and lovely is this life. I have faith we will be ok.
-Please take a moment and click the link below to learn a bit more about the state of soil in our world today. Save Soil is a global movement launched by Sadhguru, an Indian mystic and environmental activist, to address the soil crisis by bringing together people from around the world to stand up for Soil health and support leaders of all nations to institute national policies and actions toward increasing the organic content in cultivable Soil.
#savesoil
https://consciousplanet.org/