Deception, Corruption and Truth
by
Suzanne Duarte
Hell is the truth realized too late. ~ E.O. Wilson,
Harvard biologist
 |
Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche,
1975,
|
It is
said that when a great teacher passes, as Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche did in 1987,
his or her students each carry particular teachings from that teacher that they
then have the responsibility to bring to fruition in their lives. This is how lineage is carried on. I received many transmissions from
Trungpa Rinpoche, but after he died several specific aspects of his teachings
rose to consciousness, bringing an urgent sense of my obligation to fulfill
them. These pieces came as little
energetic packets of information—or ‘medicine’—about my ‘mission’
that had his stamp on them. I
don’t know how else to explain it. These ‘messages’ usually came to me while I was on retreat and they shaped
the path that would subsequently unfold in my life.
Two of
the ‘messages’ I received (on two separate retreats) had to do with two dharmic
values that the Vidyadhara embodied, which were reinforced in me by his example. Those values are consideration and
concern for future generations and the importance of being truthful, which are
related with each other. After
receiving these messages after he died, I began to understand that our personal
adherence to the truth – or honesty – in the present is
essential for the sanity and wellbeing of future generations, and thus for the
continuity of the dharma. That neither
truth nor concern about future generations is a value that is widely held or
respected in mainstream Western societies has become increasingly apparent to
me since the Vidyadhara died, which has served to sharpen my focus on the
importance of these values.
The
Vidyadhara and his Kagyu and Nyingma lineages had a great deal of foresight and
always acted on behalf of future beings. This was the force behind the Rimé movement in the 19th century, which helped to preserve sacred teachings in Tibet for future
generations. Trungpa Rinpoche expressed
his concern about the future in the Sadhana
of Mahamudra and in his Shambhala teachings. I was already concerned about our collective future before I
met Rinpoche in 1972, but when I found myself reciting the Sadhana of Mahamudra the first time I walked into a Dharmadhatu (aka
Shambhala Center), that clinched it for me. That shared concern for the future was the main reason I
became his student and it fueled my devotion to him.
Trungpa
Rinpoche went to great lengths to make sure his students understood that we are
the beneficiaries of the work and sacrifices of many generations of dharma
practitioners and teachers whose explicit intention was to benefit future
generations of human beings. In
the summer of 1976 or 1977, at a Naropa Institute lecture at the Sacred Heart school
auditorium, I heard Trungpa Rinpoche describe his 500-year vision of how the
dharma could be kept alive through the Dark Age of materialism, and thus enable
future generations to maintain awakened mind in difficult circumstances. He called this vision Enlightened
Society, which is elaborated in his Shambhala teachings on warriorship. He founded Shambhala Training in the
late 1970s specifically to build the foundations for an enlightened society.
In
2000, when George W. Bush showed up on the American horizon, the truth aspect
of the Vidyadhara’s teachings – his consistent directive to adhere
fearlessly to the truth, both within ourselves and with each other – began
to echo recurrently in my mind. Surrendering to the truth – even when bitter – and integrating
the wisdom offered is the spiritual practice that enables the path to unfold. After all, when we enter the stream of Buddhadharma
by taking refuge in the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha, we vow to free
ourselves from delusion, acknowledging that ignorance and delusion cause
suffering for ourselves and others. The cure for delusion is to face the truth, the facts of reality.
As Trungpa Rinpoche said in Just the Facts:
Dharma literally means
"truth" or "norm." It is a particular way of thinking, a
way of viewing the world, which is not a concept but experience. This
particular truth is very painful truth -- usually truths are. It rings with the
sound of reality, which comes too close to home. We become completely
embarrassed when we begin to hear the truth. It is wrong to think that the
truth is going to sound fantastic and beautiful, like a flute solo. The truth
is actually a thunderbolt. It wakes you up and makes you think twice
whether you should stay in the rain or move into the house. Provocative....
The basic questions are: Who is actually listening to the truth? What is his or her situation? And, in fact, what is truth?... The truth is about you, your existence, your experience. It's about you. Hearing the truth of Dharma and becoming part of the Dharma is [being] willing to face yourself, to begin with....
Sacredness doesn’t come in the form of religion,
as a savior
If we don't face what we are experiencing then there's no path. It may be a drag, but you must be willing to face and actually give in to what is happening.... At this point, believing in miracles is an obstacle. There is great room, on the other hand, for our minds to open, give [in] and face facts. Literally to face the facts: the facts of reality, the facts of pain, the facts of boredom.
Our world, this particular world, our Dharma, our
truth, needs
Trungpa
Rinpoche himself was fearlessly honest and up-front, and he had an unnerving,
cosmic sense of humor. He abhorred
deception and pretense, deplored cowardice, and was compassionately precise in
exposing it – a characteristic that discomforted many students. Someone once said that the role of the
spiritual friend is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable. This was exemplified
by Trungpa Rinpoche.
His
emphasis on truth as sacred dharma confirmed my intuitive conviction that lies
and deception are corrosive. Lies
and deception create fragmentation, confusion, and degradation. Cleaving to truth gives us strength,
backbone, and is essential for maintaining integrity and sanity, whereas lying
fragments our integrity and therefore weakens us. Deception also sows corruption in our social milieu, like a
virus in the collective psyche. Truth sets things right and restores sanity, at least for a little
while, until the virus of corruption erupts again.
During
George W. Bush’s presidential campaign in 2000, the pretence and deception were
so transparent that I could not understand how so many people could fall for
it. Bush’s election was ‘dodgy,’
to say the least, but he got in, and the fact that so many people were so
easily deceived did not bode well for the future. Indeed, a virus of corruption erupted during the Bush II
administration, and that virus seemed to spread to other countries due to the American
political and economic hegemony that existed when Bush took office – as
if the world said, “If they do it in America, it must
be okay.”
I cite
the example of the Bush II years to illustrate the relationship between
deception, corruption and collective suffering, which is the converse of the
relationship between truth (dharma) and the wellbeing of future
generations. Although the corruption
in the Bush administration may not have exceeded by orders of magnitude that of
other corrupt American administrations, it was nevertheless a dramatic example
of the old adage that “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
In any
case, my conviction in the value of honesty and my visceral antipathy towards
deception kept my attention riveted to the shenanigans of the second Bush
administration. There seemed to be no end to the lies, hypocrisy,
secretiveness, cover-ups, disinformation, denial and distortion of scientific
findings (e.g., global warming!), intrigues, scandals, fraud, subterfuge, and
evasion that came out of that administration or were permitted by it.
It
seems significant that the Bush II years were marked by numerous scandals in
the United States, beginning in October 2001 with the Enron scandal –
the largest corporate scandal in American history, which involved Bush’s good
friend Ken Lay. And just before
Bush left office, another gigantic scandal erupted in December 2008 with
revelations of the $65 billion fraud case against Bernard Madoff –
“the largest investor fraud ever
committed by a single person,” which has had devastating effects on many sangha
people. We can’t blame all of this
on Mr. Bush, but a culture of deception and corruption did proliferate during
his administration, and now we can watch (and experience) the ripening of the
karma as the United States and the global economy suffer the economic consequences.
On July 12, 2009, an article in The Independent reported on the “State of
the Future,” the largest
single report to look at the future of the planet. Entitled “The
planet's future: Climate change 'will cause civilisation to collapse,'” the
article says:
The impact of the global recession is a key theme, with
researchers warning that global clean energy, food availability, poverty and
the growth of democracy around the world are at "risk of getting worse due
to the recession." The report adds: "Too many greedy and deceitful
decisions led to a world recession and demonstrated the international
interdependence of economics and ethics."
Although the future has been looking better for most of the
world over the past 20 years, the global recession has lowered the State of the
Future Index for the next 10 years. Half the world could face violence and
unrest due to severe unemployment combined with scarce water, food and energy
supplies and the cumulative effects of climate change.
This report
vividly illustrates the effects of deception and corruption. “Too many greedy
and deceitful decisions” lead to collective suffering in the future because deception
and corruption are entropic. They
create disorder and degradation, ruptures in the fabric of reality, and are
therefore, by definition, unsustainable. It doesn’t matter how many people buy into the deception and
participate in the corruption, there is no safety in numbers. Rationalizing that ‘everybody does it’
provides no cover. The rotten
karma will still ripen. And the
more widespread the deception and corruption are, the more people get hurt. In the case of climate change, for
example – which the Bush administration denied for 8 years, delaying
action to mitigate the effects – the collective suffering could go on for
centuries.
But
what does all this have to do with the dharma and why talk about this on RFS? Corruption can and does occur on a
spiritual level as well as in the political economy. Spiritual corruption begins when we depart from the truth,
the dharma. When we deceive
ourselves, we inevitably deceive others, which starts the degenerative cycle of
corruption.
In fact, the Vidyadhara said that
deception creates samsara (cyclic existence and suffering due to
ignorance and delusion):
With tremendous deception, we create samsara
-- pain and misery for the whole world, including ourselves – but we
still come off as if we were innocent. We call ourselves ladies and gentlemen, and we say, “I never
commit any sins or create any problems. I’m just a regular old person, blah blah
blah.” That snowballing of
deception and the type of existence our deception creates are shocking.
You might ask, “If everybody is involved with
that particular scheme or project, then who sees the problem at all? Couldn't everybody just join in so that
we don't have to see each other that way? Then we could just appreciate ourselves and our snowballing
neuroses, and there would be no reference point whatsoever outside of that.” Fortunately -- or maybe unfortunately --
we have one person who saw that there was a problem. That person was known as Buddha.
(From "Introduction" to The Truth Of Suffering And The Path Of
Liberation, edited by Judith Lief, Shambhala Publications 2009.)
No matter how many people believe a
lie, it’s still a lie, and it still creates samsara, corruption, karma, and
suffering – a setting sun world. The lie has to be exposed. To be permissive of deception is to collude with it and corrupt
ourselves. This is the Buddha’s painful and embarrassing truth that “comes too
close to home.” But, since it’s
the Buddha’s truth, there is still good news: recognizing deception and
corruption and realizing the truth releases the energy that has been locked up
in evasion, and that is the energy we use to liberate ourselves and walk the
path of dharma.
Allegiance with the truth, no
matter the cost, enables us to remain in integrity, connected with reality, one
with the dharma. We have to look
beneath the deceptive surface of ‘normality’ to glean the truth of things as
they are – whether about ourselves or about our world. Being open to seeing the truth, rather
than shying away from it, arouses our creative energy, raises our lungta, and
turns the poison of delusion into medicine - insight. Of course, it is certainly best to catch
deception before we become involved in corruption, for then we might think we
have too much to lose by facing the truth – which is the ultimate
deception that creates samsara.
As the Vidyadhara said,
surrendering to the truth isn’t a one-shot deal. It is a continuous process of unmasking ourselves, cutting
through deception, through spiritual materialism and all the other tricks of
ego that are reinforced by our conditioning in the setting-sun world. Our wisdom co-emerges with our
confusion when we are willing to catch ourselves in deception and surrender to
the truth.
The energy of truth uplifts us and
takes us forward in a dharmic direction, the direction of enlightened
society. Enlightened Society is
our hope for the future of humanity and of the dharma, and that hope resides in
being honest and truthful with ourselves and each other.
Published on Radio Free Shambhala, July 16, 2009.
© 2009 Suzanne Duarte