This is November 23 2024 and I'd like to offer up some reflections on the recent election. The morning after the election, that's November 6. The very next morning, I went out of state for eight days and to furnish a new condo in New Hampshire, and was so I so consumed by that job that had no time to reflect on the election and no stomach for it either. I just had no interest in looking at the news the rest of that week, but since returning, I've been hearing from Sangha members in dokan and outside of dokan, people who are still reeling from the election results. And so I'd like to present some of my own reflections on this whole thing, and I will be speaking really to those who've been disappointed by the outcome.
For for people who are pleased at the outcome of the election, well, I'm not sure there'll be much for you in this talk. And then there also might be people who would say, Well, I've learned enough about Zen to know that all I really need to do is be absorbed in my daily life, and so when I'm really in a a Samadhi of daily activities, well, there's there's no there's no Election, there's no yesterday, there's no tomorrow. There's nothing. There's just the stirring of the soup or brushing my teeth or driving in the car. There's just this very famous words in the Zen koans, just this, only this, just the present, and and, yeah, if you can do that, if you've have no trailing vines to process after the election, then you're good to go. But I would, I would warn you about what we sometimes call spiritual bypassing, where you just stuff the the ordinary richness of human experience, feelings, emotions, yeah, regrets, hopes and put it aside and possibly delude yourself into thinking that you're beyond that, because it's true. It's true, whatever, when we are completely one with our daily activities, then where is there any problem? The danger, to put it another way, is being attached to the absolute, being attached to emptiness and denying what's really going on in our bodies and minds. That's not That's not Zen. There are, there are quite a few koans that teach us not to be attached to emptiness, that is the side of of experience that is beyond this, this world, worldly feelings and all so I will then be speaking mostly to to people who are still kind of on the ropes about all this and trying to trying to process it.
It was a blow to many of us, so many of us, were not just disappointed but dismayed that so many 10s of millions of our fellow citizens voted to re elect this deranged man to. Lead our country for the next four years, this deranged man and his army of cowards and Grifters who continue to support him out of their own self interest, of course, so dismayed, aghast, that's what I believe so many of us are dealing with, especially that first week after After the election, when the shock was so acute.
The uh, as with other kinds of setbacks, it's natural to ask, why, how could this have happened? That we do that very commonly after other kinds of losses or failures, just we wake up with an intestinal bug, and what do we do? We start thinking back, okay, what was it that I may have eaten or being turned down for a job, not getting into a school we apply to divorce or other, another kind of breakup in a relationship. If we're not just externalizing the problem that is just putting it on the other person, then it's natural that we reflect on what the cause of this was. We're trying to bring order to the world. Find order in it. And you could say that the ultimate order is causation, cause and effect. The basis of science. You so that's the first step many of us would take completely natural, rational kind of way of coping with a severe setback. Why would a i a majority of voters want to elect a pathological liar, a thug and Predator and racist. Why would a majority of voters want to elect a vengeful, petty, malignant narcissist who's bent on blowing up our institutions. In other words, why would a majority of voters overlook the matter of character?
Characters, it's hard to imagine something more important than character. Politicians can promise any number of things and and mean it sincerely, but then, once in office, it often doesn't work out that way, especially if there there's a balance of powers. But what? What is more important than character?
So back to the question what caused this really, clearly decisive victory for Trump and his minions? Well, this is these, are this the the suggestions I find plausible that it was those left behind. That's the phrase, those left behind who voted for a change. That is that voted against Democratic Party. So the working class is often cited among sociologists and philosophers as one big segment of those who in our society who feel left behind the working class young men, I've heard that quite a bit, rural people. Here's another reason why people would ignore character in Donald Trump and vote for him is they believe what he says about solving the problem of illegal immigration. They might believe that he's going to lower taxes for them, or they feel. Passionately about abortion, and they want to see it outlawed. They want to that is they want to foreclose a woman's right to choose. Here are a couple of others, people who are deeply invested in the Israel Palestinian conflict on one side or the other. There are those who would who would vote for Trump because they feel he can do more for Israel's security, and there are others who would be outraged at Democrats for their continued support of arms sales to Israel. Just the other day, I read that every day, every day, 10 children in Gaza each lose a limb due to Israel's bombing. I don't who knows about the veracity of these kinds of statistics, but I think it's indisputable that 10s of 1000s of civilians have died as a result of the bombing there and there were plenty of people who were furious with Kamala Harris and the Democrats for not changing their stance on that. There are people to just to continue here, people who were upset by too much change, social change, gender roles, or what, what James Carville referred to as identitarianism, economic change, globalism demographic change, racial and ethnic demographic change, too much change. A lot of a lot of Zen practice is is to enable us to cope with change. Change is is, generally speaking, change to us human beings, is threatening to some more than others. I
any leader who gets too far ahead of the masses with respect to change, is likely to pay a price, and then, of course, disinformation, another reason why people would ignore character and vote for Trump, disinformation, disinformation, turbo charged by social media. And then, as a final way to wrap our minds around how this this man could be re elected, is just sheer ignorance.
Someone wrote to me that the number one Google search the morning after the election was, Can I change my vote? Can I change my vote?
Other reports say that people were googling after, after the election. Did, did Biden drop out? So it just boggles the mind at the level of of ignorance that's involved in these elect, these elections, and then there's, there's just the and what one person called the entrenched bias against a woman as president, Commander in Chief. These these biases based on our conditioning, they run deep, and it calls for for patients, doesn't it? So this is where we are. This is who we are, isn't it? We are in the majority people who voted for Trump, that's who we are. Now, let's not, let's not despair and think that there's something fixed about that nothing's fixed. There's, there's, is only flux. The question is, how quickly change will happen. Change for the better. How soon people may find that in in overlooking character, they made a terrible mistake before the election, I heard from some of my senior students in Europe and Sweden and Germany that that Europeans are. He said that you wouldn't you wouldn't believe how invested they were in the results of this election, because they know that they'll be huge repercussions for them as to what happens now,
I've heard talk of people admitting that they they're toying with The idea of moving out of the United States, the countries I hear most often are Canada, Sweden and New Zealand. Not that it's any simple matter to emigrate to those places, especially if you're beyond a certain age. They have age limits. They don't want to have a lot of people emigrating there, whom they then have to support through their social system and medical system. So it'd be no small thing to relocate to another country. But for myself, I just, I just can get no traction the idea of relocating. That's probably partly my age, what it would be involved in doing that, even if one could be accepted to these other countries. But I think back to a story I heard once about a Zen master who was asked if you could be reborn anywhere. Where would it be? And he said, in hell, because that's where I'm needed the most.
We're needed now. We're needed to work for change. We're needed to resist the forces of terrible greed and hostility division, but we really we don't know what's going to happen. Now, who knows? We don't know. There's that famous story from ancient China, the lost horse. I won't repeat it because it's it's sure most of you have heard it at least once before, but it comes. The point is that in the in the heels of some misfortune, some old wise man in the Chinese village says, who's to say this isn't a blessing? Who's to say this isn't a blessing? Well, that really is a stretch to think of how this the results of this election, could be a blessing. But, well, if you use your imagination, maybe by Trump winning, we averted a civil war.
Who knows? I
I'd like to think that the pendulum now has swung so far to the right that it's going to start coming back toward the center before long. I think it's a pretty. Very reliable guide that things can only get so extreme before they go back toward the center, either direction, right or left, and that's just to go back to the possible causes of people ignoring Trump's character. That's one that you do here, that that there's, there's a feeling by those who, some of those who voted for him, that it just that the progressive politics have become so extreme that they're just reacting to that. All of this then leaves us with a test of faith, and most basically, it's just faith that the universe isn't wrong somehow that's a, that's a that's a big thing to to believe that, that it wasn't. It's some, some ultimate mistake that this happened. There's some design to it, not, not like a a creator designing it, but that there is some order to all this, some sense to it, that that we we won't be able to appreciate for possibly a long time, possibly decades. We won't be able to look back and see of course, this had to happen in order for we're asked to have faith that the problem, such as it is, the problem is in our own mind, the way we are conceptualizing all this.
And then, if we can maintain faith in practice, that's what will make all the difference. To go back to those who say I'm, I'm indifferent to winners and losers, because I'm one with everything I'm doing. Well, yeah, there's, there is our liberation in not dwelling, not dwelling in these things, but acting, responding as called for, and that starts with sitting, sitting every day. This will, of course, settle the mind. We're going to be less anxious. We may still be anxious about all this, but we're going to be less so the more sitting we do. And then with the sitting extending that, that mind of meditation, that seated mind, extending it into our daily life, we're so that even if we're not involved politically, we're not engaged on some grassroots political movement with eye toward the next election. Aside from that kind of work, we have our own work, our life, school teachers, teaching school with their whole mind, their whole being. Healthcare workers, the same parents, what? What do you do as a parent? Well, you you parent, you parent, without the mind being divided, drifting off into catastrophes that could happen politically. This, this is the fulfillment of the four Bodhisattva vows. This is how each of us does it. It's not through some imaginary heroic thing we might be doing that's other than being fully engaged with whatever our life is at home, at work, and to do that, we need to sit. Come on, let's keep sitting. You.
