Knowing What We Don’t Know
Accept it is all fiction. The assassination attempt, the bleeding ear, the fist pump. The billionaire, being so moved by the courage of the fist pump that he converts, becomes radicalized, joins the president’s team. The billionaire coming to work at the White House with his child on his shoulders, and the president smiling like a sweet grandpa. The neat 100 days of swagger and destruction, during which the billionaire becomes the nation’s villain, his businesses are torched, his name the new name for evil itself.
In the next chapter, the billionaire, whose companies are absolutely critical to the nation’s defense and space industries, is seemingly foiled by the president, who refuses to appoint the billionaire’s choice for NASA, threatening his space dreams and money flow. The president and his people foment a narrative about the billionaire’s bizarre and excessive drug use; the billionaire counters that there are unreleased documents aligning the president closely with the probably- assassinated character whose shady global financial dealings implicate many in world leadership, and who is also known to have provided children for their sexual pleasure at his infamous island hideaway and elsewhere. The battle for most depraved is played out in the press, and the topic of every dinner table.
In a seeming sidebar, that may actually be the main story, a dark wizard from Silicon Valley who got the VP elected, is pushing forward a dramatic and swift agenda to end democracy, to shift most resources from the lower and middle class to the select few at the top, and to remake money itself such that no security is possible. Armed men pick up masses of immigrants to be carried away in windowless vans, to the worst prisons in the world. Those who would defend the most vulnerable protest in the streets, facing off against guns and smoke bombs, as we wait to hear of fatalities and exacerbations of violence.
It is a toxic, drama-filled reality show, a fiction. The president is not a governing agent but a reality show producer. The billionaire owns and controls most online conversation. Nothing is as it seems. You know virtually nothing about what is going on, what the motivations are, or what the ultimate goals are. Only the guns are real. Only the absence of those carted away. Only the diversion of money from the sick, the old, the infrastructure, the « cathedral » of institutions.
Now, without knowing, it is time to practice. Don’t throw hatred towards hatred, illusions at illusions, threats towards threats. Choose to be clear. You don’t know. Yet you will be present, eyes open, doing the work of staying clear. It is time to show up, not in the fiction, but in the raw strength of wisdom, the gritty work of compassion. Breathe. Act. Make mistakes and begin again. Practice not falling for it, practice breathing, practice attention. Body, speech, thought: create the karma of practice. It is time.
Bonnie Myotai Treace is a Zen teacher and priest, the founder of Hermitage Heart, and formerly the abbot of the Zen Center of New York City (ZCNYC). She teaches currently in Black Mountain and Asheville, North Carolina.
Treace is the author of five books: A Year of Zen, Wake Up, Zen Meditation for Beginners, Winter Moon: A Season of Zen, and Empty Branches. She has also had chapters in Water: Its Spiritual Significance (Vons Fitae Press), The Art of Just Sitting: Essential Writings on the Zen Practice of Shikantaza, and Lotus Moon: The Poetry of Rengetsu, along with many other writings.