Admin: June 2009 Archives

by Salman Ahmad and Deepak Chopra

Suspicions over a cooked election in Iran have brought a glimmer of hope for real reform. It takes glimmers in the long, fractious fights that hold societies in thrall. Can we find one in the toxic fight that has plagued India-Pakistan relations for six decades?

We've already had a Camp David moment. When the two heads of state met to shake hands in mid-June, Mammohan Singh of India and Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan obeyed some new forces. One was the force of economics, which has cut both ways. Economics promises to make India a prosperous player on the world scene. With money has come the expectation of rational behavior, and India can see rationally that a stable, non-aggressive Pakistan is the kind of neighbor it wants to have.

The other side of economics is the downturn. The mini-Cold War that has raged between the two countries keeps draining much needed resources that neither side can afford to squander.

The second new force is social, and it has arisen since the terrorist attack in Mumbai last November. The fact that the Indian populace did not call for reprisals against Pakistan, combined with Pakistan's seemingly genuine efforts to crack down on terrorist camps, had an unexpected result. The xenophobes and zealots on the right lost the recent Indian election, and now the ruling Congress party has seen a peace benefit in real-time politics.

Now what?

Both countries need to test if a deeper shift in consciousness has taken place. Family feuds make for the bitterest wars. Behind the facade of nationalism, Delhi and Islamabad have been acting like battling exes in a never-ending divorce dispute.

It's on this human basis that peace could make progress. The point isn't how to slice up Kashmir or brandishing useless nuclear bombs. Until the divorced parties stop demonizing each other, both sides will cling to the one thing that all family feuds are based on: feeling right. India and Pakistan mutually feel justified in calling the other side wrong, and their emotional stance has ossified for sixty years.

May we offer some suggestions as a form of couples counseling?

First, the two countries need to recognize their commonality. Both were born on the same day in 1947, share the same ethnic and many of the same tribal backgrounds. India has a massive Muslim population, and on both sides of the border millions more identify as Punjabis. Their young people go to the same rock concerts and download the same songs, while their grandparents tell the same folk tales around the fire and relive the same myths.

With this commonality in mind, we propose a new paradigm for moving toward peaceful relations:

1. Increase people-to-people exchanges.
2. Use the arts and culture in building new cultural bridges.
3. Adopt a proactive realignment in loans to serve all the people, not just the privileged few.
4. Make the public feel safer by a joint agreement renouncing nuclear weapons and massive standing armies on each other's border.
5. Agree to isolate violent extremists of all shapes and stripes, whether Hindu or Muslim.
6. Resolve the Kashmir conflict through international intermediaries.

India's current national leadership can help immeasurably in strengthening the region by playing an astute and farsighted role in normalizing relations. An older generation couldn't conceive of India without Pakistan as a blood enemy and vice versa. But the younger generation wants to be free of such rigid conditioning. With 60% of Pakistan's population under twenty-four and India's young people being globalized via the Internet, the race between MySpace.com and the politics of hatred looms large.

Given the right signals, beleaguered Pakistanis will recognize and embrace a sincere, open approach toward conflict resolution. This may take a leap of faith on both sides, but the time is ripe. Iran isn't unique. Change is in the air everywhere.

Published in the San Francisco Chronicle

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Michael Jackson will be remembered, most likely, as a shattered icon, a pop genius who wound up a mutant of fame. That's not who I will remember, however. His mixture of mystery, isolation, indulgence, overwhelming global fame, and personal loneliness was intimately known to me. For twenty years I observed every aspect, and as easy as it was to love Michael -- and to want to protect him -- his sudden death yesterday seemed almost fated.

Two days previously he had called me in an upbeat, excited mood. The voice message said, "I've got some really good news to share with you." He was writing a song about the environment, and he wanted me to help informally with the lyrics, as we had done several times before. When I tried to return his call, however, the number was disconnected. (Terminally spooked by his treatment in the press, he changed his phone number often.) So I never got to talk to him, and the music demo he sent me lies on my bedside table as a poignant symbol of an unfinished life.

When we first met, around 1988, I was struck by the combination of charisma and woundedness that surrounded Michael. He would be swarmed by crowds at an airport, perform an exhausting show for three hours, and then sit backstage afterward, as we did one night in Bucharest, drinking bottled water, glancing over some Sufi poetry as I walked into the room, and wanting to meditate.


That person, whom I considered (at the risk of ridicule) very pure, still survived -- he was reading the poems of Rabindranath Tagore when we talked the last time, two weeks ago. Michael exemplified the paradox of many famous performers, being essentially shy, an introvert who would come to my house and spend most of the evening sitting by himself in a corner with his small children. I never saw less than a loving father when they were together (and wonder now, as anyone close to him would, what will happen to them in the aftermath).

Michael's reluctance to grow up was another part of the paradox. My children adored him, and in return he responded in a childlike way. He declared often, as former child stars do, that he was robbed of his childhood. Considering the monstrously exaggerated value our society places on celebrity, which was showered on Michael without stint, the public was callous to his very real personal pain. It became another tawdry piece of the tabloid Jacko, pictured as a weird changeling and as something far more sinister.

It's not my place to comment on the troubles Michael fell heir to from the past and then amplified by his misguided choices in life. He was surrounded by enablers, including a shameful plethora of M.D.s in Los Angeles and elsewhere who supplied him with prescription drugs. As many times as he would candidly confess that he had a problem, the conversation always ended with a deflection and denial. As I write this paragraph, the reports of drug abuse are spreading across the cable news channels. The instant I heard of his death this afternoon, I had a sinking feeling that prescription drugs would play a key part.

The closest we ever became, perhaps, was when Michael needed a book to sell primarily as a concert souvenir. It would contain pictures for his fans but there would also be a text consisting of short fables. I sat with him for hours while he dreamily wove Aesop-like tales about animals, mixed with words about music and his love of all things musical. This project became "Dancing the Dream" after I pulled the text together for him, acting strictly as a friend. It was this time together that convinced me of the modus vivendi Michael had devised for himself: to counter the tidal wave of stress that accompanies mega-stardom, he built a private retreat in a fantasy world where pink clouds veiled inner anguish and Peter Pan was a hero, not a pathology.

This compromise with reality gradually became unsustainable. He went to strange lengths to preserve it. Unbounded privilege became another toxic force in his undoing. What began as idiosyncrasy, shyness, and vulnerability was ravaged by obsessions over health, paranoia over security, and an isolation that grew more and more unhealthy. When Michael passed me the music for that last song, the one sitting by my bedside waiting for the right words, the procedure for getting the CD to me rivaled a CIA covert operation in its secrecy.

My memory of Michael Jackson will be as complex and confused as anyone's. His closest friends will close ranks and try to do everything in their power to insure that the good lives after him. Will we be successful in rescuing him after so many years of media distortion? No one can say. I only wanted to put some details on the record in his behalf. My son Gotham traveled with Michael as a roadie on his "Dangerous" tour when he was seventeen. Will it matter that Michael behaved with discipline and impeccable manners around my son? (It sends a shiver to recall something he told Gotham: "I don't want to go out like Marlon Brando. I want to go out like Elvis." Both icons were obsessions of this icon.)

His children's nanny and surrogate mother, Grace Rwaramba , is like another daughter to me. I introduced her to Michael when she was eighteen, a beautiful, heartwarming girl from Rwanda who is now grown up. She kept an eye on him for me and would call me whenever he was down or running too close to the edge. How heartbreaking for Grace that no one's protective instincts and genuine love could avert this tragic day. An hour ago she was sobbing on the telephone from London. As a result, I couldn't help but write this brief remembrance in sadness. But when the shock subsides and a thousand public voices recount Michael's brilliant, joyous, embattled, enigmatic, bizarre trajectory, I hope the word "joyous" is the one that will rise from the ashes and shine as he once did.

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A lot of people struggle with turbulent emotions and addictive behavior. They spend years in psychotherapy and at times they are able to overcome addictive habits through will power, only to have a recurrence and go back to old ways. From my experience, and also through observation of many people , I have discovered that a lasting change from unwanted behavior can be achieved through the practice of mindfulness.
Mindfulness has been interpreted as many things. My view of it is that it is remembering to bring your awareness to the present moment without getting emotionally or mentally engaged in the situations and circumstances surrounding that moment. When we do this we get the insight that most of our turbulent emotions and addictive behaviors are conditioned responses in our nervous system, which have been programmed during our childhood and growing years.
For some people, bringing their awareness to the present moment seems like an abstract or confusing instruction. In fact, it is quite simple. You can come to the present moment by shifting your awareness to your breath, or you can bring your awareness to the sensations in your body. Others may find it easier to let their attention rest in the space between objects. This can be the space between breaths, or the space between movements. Once you find the method of mindfulness that suits you best, it becomes easy to access your silent presence.
For many years I would periodically take a few days of absolute silence. During these periods after the initial adjustment of not engaging in conversation, not reading a book, not watching TV, or going even on a computer, I found I would then slip into a profound silence which allowed me to experience something that cannot be described. I was bathed in mystery and felt that I was inside God's mind. These days when I'm on a long trip on an airline, say 17 hours from India to the US, I will practice total silence with my eyes closed during the entire time. It will frequently bring me into the same exquisite realm of silence or mindfulness.
As a result of this "vipassana" practice there is spontaneous awakening of intuition and conscious choice making. It's like taking a spiritual bath and renewing yourself. Old habits and behaviors die hard, but silence and witnessing awareness are definitely a means of stepping out of river of memory and conditioning and seeing the world again as if for the first time.

If France had a humane, democratic record in its treatment of Muslim immigrants, one might be bemused by Pres. Sarkozy's attempt to suppress the burqa. But the opposite is true. Arab immigrants are treated as second-class citizens, and the rightist politicians, including Sarkozy, are happy to keep them down. As a form of hyper-patriotism, controlling the dress of Muslim women is obviously unfair. Pres. Obama was right to criticize the policy.

Doesn't it seem strange that women in France have the right to wear mini skirts but not burqas? Both costumes are about sexuality, or if that seems too judgmental, both are about the issue of modesty. In the Arab world this is a religious issue, and it's not as though the Christian world is totally free of that perspective -- as far as I know, a woman will not be permitted inside the Vatican without covering her head. A secular society has no business making decisions based on religion, and that means in either direction. If God is neutral toward the mini skirt, he is neutral toward the burqa and chador, or the wig and head covering of orthodox Jewish women.

As for the argument that the burqa stands for the abasement of women, that is certainly true under the Taliban in Afghanistan. But the abasement revolves around forcing women to dress a certain way, taking away their free choice. Isn't France doing the same thing? In the name if fighting abasement, they are actually imposing another sort.

Finally, there is the simmering social resentment that occurs when a Muslim woman stands out in the crowd by her dress. In decades past, she stood out in an exotic and even appealing way. Since 9/11, Muslim dress is interpreted as a hostile statement. It's time we each become more mindful. The hostility is our own, a projection we impose on the innocent. Let Muslim women be as free to choose as any Western girl with tattoos and piercings. Beauty in this case is in the eyes of the wearer.

Published in the Washington Post

What comes next after sin?
Improvement is a simple, natural impulse -- everyone wants to see a better life for his family and society. But when you add the ingredient of sin, improvement becomes clouded. Is it an improvement to deny women education and health care, to dictate what they wear in public, and to regard them as inferior beings? To the Taliban and the clerics in Iran, those ideas are considered steps on the road to an Islamic paradise. But every society dominated by Judaism, Christianity, and Islam has had to struggle with the notion of sinfulness. The supposed sinfulness of women, as many Muslims see it, is that the mere sight of a woman inflames sexual passion and arouses temptation, thus pulling men away from God.
A woman who walks bare-headed through the streets of most Islamic countries would be considered sinful, but before we shake our heads, consider Hawthorne's novel "The Scarlet Letter," in which the sinful heroine, Hester Prynne, must run into the forest to take off her cap and unloose her hair in the sun. Also consider that conservative politics in this country are largely based on the notion that human being are not improvable, that without harsh opposition to free thinking and liberal sexual mores, not to mention a massive military and police force, human depravity would run amok.
Sin isn't a fact of human nature. It's an idea. As such, it has proved very useful to religious and political elites. The current repression exacted by the Iranian mullahs may be in the name of God, but the clerical elite in that country are immensely wealthy and corrupt. In this country, hellfire fundamentalist preachers grow rich, and many feel free to pursue personal corruption shielded by their prestige and money. Getting past the idea of sin is difficult when the myth is fostered that God hates sinners and favors the righteous. Who wouldn't want to be on the winning team, where all the power and money lie, not to mention the grand prize of salvation?
It would benefit the world as a whole if every society could move past the toxic idea of sin to a new idea. There's no lack of alternatives. Human nature is as capable of love, tolerance, rationality, and spiritual yearning as it is of sin. Psychotherapy was a nonreligious movement that attempted to deal with sin's fundamental forces -- aggression, sex, guilt, and shame -- by examining the psyche and ridding it of conflict, by bringing the darkness of the unconscious to light. The average person doesn't take advantage of psychotherapy, certainly not the kind that goes inward for self-knowledge, yet the general idea of bringing darkness to light holds good. It underlies liberal politics, reformist religion, secular tolerance, and spiritual seeking.
As a body of ideas, those movements have more to offer the future than the reactionary idea of sin. I feel optimistic about the ongoing campaign against sin-based ideologies (which don't have to be religious; police states like the former Soviet Union were completely secular but based on the necessity of repressing freedom), and optimism is needed in the light of recent events in Iran, where the religious reactionaries have clamped down, as well as Israel, where a kindred form of religious reaction grows bolder. The next idea after sin is being born, and despite the fact that sin holds sway over millions of minds, those minds can free themselves whenever they wish.

Published in the San Francisco Chronicle

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