Endgame Volume I_ The Problem of Civilization - Derrick Jensen [155]
But we have to ask ourselves how these religions are expressed on the ground, in the real world—I mean both of these literally—how they play out in the lives of living breathing human beings and others. What have been the effects of Christianity on the health of landbases? Has biodiversity thrived on the arrival of the cross? How has the arrival of Christianity affected the status of women? How has it affected the indigenous peoples it has encountered? We can and should ask the same questions of Buddhism, science, capitalism, and every other aspect of our or any other culture. Not how they play out theoretically, not how their rhetoric plays out, not how we wish they would play out, not how they could play out under some imaginary ideal circumstances, but how they have played out.
Just as Christianity has so very often been on one hand a tool of empire—as when Emperor Constantine went forth to conquer under the sign of the cross, and as when George W. Bush went forth to conquer because “God told me to”—and on the other hand a tool of subservience to power and escapism by the powerless (or those who believe themselves powerless), as I’ve described these last few pages, so too Buddhism often becomes yet another means for the traumatized to rationalize escaping the physical world. I cannot tell you how many Buddhists have said to me—attempting to sound serene, but instead with an odd combination of smugness and brittleness in their voices—that salmon and other creatures are just shifting patterns of energy and are therefore not “real,” meaning concern about their fate is not only folly but a barrier to enlightenment. A longtime pacifist activist said to me during an interview, “There are no salmon on one level of existence. There is only the movement of God’s eyebrows. I’ve had the experience of transcending all duality. There’s only this kind of rush of consciousness, and a part of that consciousness becomes salmon, and a part of that consciousness becomes time. And the salmon thrive for millions of years, and they go extinct. There’s all this momentary burst of consciousness.” Because, the story goes, these creatures are nothing but a part of this illusory earth—a “movement of God’s eyebrows”—it doesn’t matter so much if these creatures are driven extinct. In fact, I’ve been told, there can be no extinction because the salmon don’t exist in the first place, or if there is extinction, then it is God’s will, God’s dream. Further, there is clearly something wrong with me because I remain attached to these creatures. This would be a good opportunity, they say, for me to practice detachment. How can I ever achieve enlightenment if I remain attached to this world?
I have many times experienced my own version of what this interview subject called non-duality, and what I call an uninterrupted state of grace. It has sometimes gone on for months. But for me it does not involve detachment from the world, or perceiving the world as a “rush of consciousness.” Instead it is the opposite, a falling deeply into the world, an immersion, until I can feel how trees, insects, rain, soil, humans, the body of the earth, and my own body work together and in opposition, and my response is to say, “Oh, the beauty. The beauty.” It is to experience and comprehend complete and joyous participation in the dance that is this extraordinarily wonderful world.
At one recent talk a Buddhist objected to my discussion of violence, saying, and I’ve heard this one a lot, that there can never be any reason for any form of violence. I did not ask whether she eats. I asked instead what she would do if she saw someone standing in front