It’s because the news is so rarely good–that its episodes seem, in a hidden way, an indictment—with humanity itself on trial.
For we live in an age lacking discernment, an age where polarization reigns, and where there are so many questions this “news” fails to ask, that almost nothing reported, seems really new. In fact, nothing is as predictable as fixated people. Turn on your television—they’re everywhere!
Or maybe it’s because so few truly wise people ever appear on TV that the News has become a succession of talking heads broadcasting from polarized Towers of Babel. And it’s because of how depressing it is to see the reruns of all we’ve failed to learn from history that it’s become so hard to watch the Evening News.
For it’s mostly become a tedious reenactment of the Right duking it out with the Left, while the welfare of the planet hangs on by a thread…
Yet many assume we’re entitled to some kind of grace period, while leaving everything in God’s hands. But what kind of Deity is this who rewards clueless passivity, or recklessness, and whose followers make Devil’s Bargains with corrupted autocrats?
Though equally tedious, we shouldn’t ignore the voluminous commercials that precede and follow each news story—the drugs allegedly, for all that ails us. And don’t ignore all the lovable dogs now appearing in these commercials.
Surely, the drugs must be a “feel good story,” just like the dogs linked with them. But the people in the commercials had grown so diseased that they only smile, or are seen singing and dancing once they’ve taken the drugs—which in truth, don’t even get you high—while their side effects may be worse than the diseases for which they’re prescribed. And to make matters worse, there truly are strains of greed, anger, and ignorance spreading through our world now—that no drug will ever cure. (Though this spread has become both endemic and pandemic—no profit there for Big Pharma.)
It seems now that we now are in need of better news stories—but don’t know how to recognize or create them—that it’s become so painful to watch the news… It didn’t have to be like this. And maybe still doesn’t. Yet the new normal has become the broadcasted bewilderment of everyday life.
At the risk of appearing to be a Cassandra making dire warnings, now is the time to wake up from this publicly shared dream verging on nightmare, lest we, our children, and our children’s children further suffer a growing lack of options, as the beauty of this world descends into the Underworld of a dystopian, apocalyptic midnight. For at this crucial inflection point, humans are failing to evolve, and are becoming increasingly like dodo birds—and may suffer the same fate.
Oh, that could never happen here (or so people thought in Germany prior to Kristallnacht in 1938). And I doubt any dinosaurs saw it coming prior to the Great Die Off sixty-six million years ago.
But “business as usual” is the optimism of the Bourgeoisie, and the animal realm as well. Here we become creatures of habit and distrustful of what’s unfamiliar, or beyond our conceptual range. However, Buddhist psychology also recognizes five other realms. For example…
There’s the Deva Realm, the realm of the indolent Gods; it’s in a sense demographically small. For most people if they visit they are only passing through. Say when some working stiff wins the Lottery. For here, if you’d like a little snack, peeled grapes effortlessly appear. Everything you’ve ever wanted is awaiting your command. Here are the billionaires and politically, the donor class. Yet as Jesus said, it’s about as hard for them to get into Heaven as it is for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle.
And then there’s the Realm of the Pretas, also known as the Hungry Ghosts. Why are they so hungry? It’s because they’re depicted as having enormous empty bellies—yet their throats are no wider than a needle. And thus, there’s an enormous and frustrating disparity between their hunger and their ability to gratify it. As the minstrels once sang: They can’t get no satisfaction.
A lot of Americans wander into the realm of the Hungry Ghosts. And some seem to have taken up residency here, a realm where whatever there is, it’s never enough. And for this, surely, someone must be to blame. Which is why, as we’ve recently seen—in the past year, when half the countries in the world were having elections—it became hard for incumbent parties and their leaders to win a next term in a time of lingering, global inflation.
This brings us to the Asura realm, the realm of the jealous and bickering demi-gods. Though born privileged, they’re forever bickering—even with each other. And so, they find it hard to reach a consensus, or anything resembling peace. Instead, they’re the practitioners of the zero sum game—a game they take quite seriously, which inevitably leads to charges of corruption and cheating. To which they reply, you’re the cheater! And then they waste their ample resources on forever battles with Reality—and when they win, societies teeter.
For Asura tyrants seek to discredit beacons of Truth, reliable institutions—such as fair elections, and in fact, facts themselves. Then the world seems up for grabs, with very little left standing in their way. For Asura leaders seek now to engineer a reverse evolutionary movement whereby we lose the evolutionary achievements of the 18th century’s Age of Reason, an age that would usher in the world’s democracies, as its fact-based sciences would prove capable of putting men on the moon.
The American, political emanations of this realm should be obvious. For it is at once anti-science, pre-rational, and anti-democratic. And it blames the suffering of the Hungry Ghost clan upon the other party. And this gives rise to a politics of grievance—mingled with gullibility. And speaking of which, a Buddhist psychotherapist might have a field day with Trump—but for the fact that his psychological type never enters therapy unless mandated by the justice system, which he—and those like him—are trying to eradicate or control.
Still, the Buddhist psychologist might point out that endlessly we all circle through all of these realms, though perhaps we spend most of our lives in one or two of them. For example, Trump has dual-residency, and most of the time he’s off bickering and contending with his enemies in the Asura realm—enemies that seem omnipresent; while the rest of the time he’s luxuriating in the privileged realm of the indolent Gods down in Mar-a-Lago. And neither of these realms are noted for their accountability. While the realm of the indolent Gods are peopled with grifters, America’s oligarchs.
Though there’s suffering in all these realms, the most painful of all is the Hell Realm. It’s been compared to landing within a giant pot of boiling oil, for the pain is so extreme and unrelenting, there’s absolutely no attention free to experience anything else. Any spaciousness has disappeared. Your nerve endings are on fire. Each breath is painful…
Lastly, there’s the Human Realm, the realm where free will—and further evolution—seem the most possible. Though it is said that a special form of Buddha exists for each realm, human life on the planet Earth is thought to be the most optimal. For conditions here are not so idyllic and pleasurable that there’s no motivation to seek liberation—nor so full of suffering and blind habits that you become unable to tame your own mind, or embody transformational practices.
Though most humans may take it for granted, Buddhist teachings say that a human birth is so rare and precious they offer this analogy: Imagine a single soul struggling to stay afloat in a vast and turbulent sea—when all of a sudden a floatation ring falls from the sky right over your head. That, they say, is how lucky it is to gain a human birth. Ergo, don’t blow it!
But the Evening News is reported from a dimension-less flatland as if we’re all in the same realm—which, as I’ve been suggesting here, may not be the truth of any moment. And in an age of polarization, we no longer have a Walter Cronkite—a trusted and objective arbiter of the news. Since the advent of cable news, such people have been squeezed out of our public discourse, such that preposterous lies become arguably plausible—as we inch closer to a totalitarian state.
Today, the Evening News is seldom reported by the wise—but rather, by networks more concerned with ratings and advertising dollars than Truth. Thus, they profit from our wide-spread polarization, and outrage. In other words, we’re not only still in the Kali Yuga, but an age of Yellow Journalism. And so, the news fails to remind us that what we know is really a rather tiny sea wall arrayed against a vaster Unknown Ocean.
For the Evening News leads us to forget at least as much as it manages to report. And that this world is a world of mystery and beauty, a world of uncertainty, where things that were once inconceivable have ongoingly appeared. This is a world where miraculous things have appeared—and those unbelievably horrific—a world both sacred and profane, a world where almost anything could happen, at almost any moment.
It’s thus a world where the option exists for each of us to be less passive. And however improbable it may seem—isn’t it time for each us to begin making some good news of our own? Yet all of the above is seldom mentioned by the news anchors on TV—and why it’s become so limiting, painful, and hard to watch the Evening News.
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P.S. I’m but a single, silver-haired man now, reporting to a still, very small following—so I’ve likely left some things out above. Though I’m hesitant to ask anyone for anything, please subscribe to www.sacredpsychology.net, and email your own takes on what I’ve left out.
Thanks,
Gary