When Will East Meet West?

When Will East meet West?

Almost daily I travel across the Meridian line. It’s strange to think that this is something I do and take for granted, often oblivious to the precise moment that it happens whereas a few miles down the road, visitors are anxiously standing, straddling their frame in both east and west, ready to have their photographs taken. Visit Greenwich almost any day of the year and you will see them; smiles on faces acknowledging that this is the known point when the worlds meet through a narrow brass line.

It is strange to think that although Greenwich is the place where time is measured and therefore east and west unite, it is also the place where these two halves of the world divide.
In fact as the longitude line runs through Greenwich, then clearly, by nature it runs through other places in the country; where east and west either collide or unite.

Back in the 80s, the riots of the time in places like Brixton, Toxteth and Handsworth were seen as the “Race Riots”; the latter being not only a ‘war’ between black and white but also between Afro-Caribbean and Asian – a form of west fighting against east.

East and Asia has so frequently been viewed by the West as the ‘poorer’ half of the world; the Third World, together with Africa; the ill-informed, the illiterate, the place where you see slum children scuttling through rubbish tips to find an ounce of mental that they might sell or the shanty towns of sticks, built up above the murky waters of Asia’s great rivers – rotting food, rotten people, all surviving, just about, on scraps, rice and brown water.

That is the stereotypical view of Asia. Furthermore, there are some in the west who see ‘Asia’ as one nation, forgetting that the divide between Pakistan and India or Malaysia and Thailand is far greater than the difference between the Limey’s and those obstinate Frenchies.

And yet, it is all inconceivable that a great chunk of this world has resolutely maintained such ignorance of what the East has to offer; inherent racism, if you ask me.

The riots this year have been dismissed by some, including our erstwhile and present Prime Ministers, as some form of mindless thuggery rather than there being an underlying cause or series of issues amalgamating together to create a tipping point that they have some hand in developing.

But this is what happened. As a society we have served up a Molotov Cocktail of despondency, ignorance, injustice and hopelessness for our young people, together with elitist and futile forms of education that leave the majority without any hope of fulfilment. Add to that a feeling of disenfranchisement and a constant reminder that their world is far from democratic or equal and what you end up with is anguish, frustration, annoyance and hatred.

This hatred can manifest itself in various forms, including some of the things that we witnessed last week; suffering for many.

And of course racism is present, as it always has been.

It was not mindless thugs who gathered at the police station on that Saturday night in Tottenham. It was people who had just had enough when they saw yet another of their brothers, covered in the death sheet that had been placed there by what they saw as the perpetrators of this murder. To further exacerbate an already inflamed situation, the police decided not to inform the awaiting and troubled crowd of what had happened.

Tempers flared, fighting ensued, police knew that they were fighting a losing battle and took a tactical retreat. And then the copycat rebellion, often without such obvious causes began to take shape across the nation.

Fear, as we know, is a destructive emotion. It has a strength of drive that is almost admirable in its forcefulness. The young people in Hackney the following Tuesday who witnessed what had happened in Tottenham were confronted by the police. A stop and search took place on yet another group of black youths. They had seen the dead body of Mark Duggan less than a couple of miles away, and they were frightened that the same thing was going to happen to one of theirs. Instinct kicked in; fight or flight and they chose the former. Lewisham was next; young people showing their fear and rebelling against it, pre-empting similar activity, creating violence through their fear. And so it escalated.

Misunderstanding, miscomprehension, victimisation, destructive emotions, injustice, instability, mistrust all came to the forefront and whether Cameron chooses to dismiss this as mindless or not, it is clearly quite the opposite.

Young people are very mind full – of injustice and greed and the thoughtlessness of capitalists and a government intent on whipping any state crutches away from an already ailing body.

And why are we still in this situation? Well partly because the mass population are unenlightened, and not necessarily by their own fault. Opportunity has passed them by.

When will east meet west?

Today, I had the pleasure of watching two very different documentaries on television. One depicted the recent riots in London and elsewhere; a “Panorama Special”. The other reviewed seven sites and sights of significance to Buddhists around the world whilst simultaneously outlining some of the key components of this Eastern philosophy.

The Panorama documentary was only informative to those who had fallen off the planet for a couple of weeks. The narration was sardonic, predictable, lacking in any real enquiry or analysis. It merely posed the question over and over again, “why did this happen?” without being prepared to delve into this all important question.

There were comments from politicians that sounded as though they had been to their party cliché bank, raided it and were intent on spouting off the usual rubbish that collects there. It’s thuggery. There’s no reason for this looting. This is not political. I was from a single-parent family and I’ve turned out okay – the same old, same old that is neither intuitive nor particularly helpful.

There was Kelvin McKenzie (why do people call upon his brainwashed wisdom at such times? – please tell me) who was coming out with fatuous, reactive and in my opinion explosive comments whilst pretending to be some sort of anthropologist.

There were no solutions in this programme because nobody had bothered to identify the problem in the first place.

The highlight of the programme was the message of hope from Tariq Jahan, who lost his son in the riots. No more fighting, he pleaded. Do other people really want to be in my situation and lose their sons? We are a community of people; black, white, yellow – there is no difference.

The man was a beacon of light, showing all the qualities of peacefulness and hope that is so sadly lacking.

Within this ‘Special’ programme, there was only two mentions of education. One such comment came from Ian Duncan Smith – the quiet man, who despite his work and genuine concern for the impoverished in this country, still misses the point by a very long way. These young people need to ‘attain’ in schools and have the opportunity to get higher grades, he said. The other mention of education came from that ‘Sun’ editor who mentioned the lack of discipline and the fact that the parents should be educated too (missing the point that the parents also went through a flawed education system that did nothing to instil a sense of well-being, community, social and personal intelligence and the likes).

Not once did anyone within this programme consider the fact that our deeply misdirected education system has a very significant role to play. The young people themselves cannot even understand that this is partly what they are rebelling against but we cannot continue with a system that does not do what is purports to do.

When you ask stupid and naive education managers what they want for their children, what they are hoping to achieve, you often get the response that in schools we should be “preparing them for adult life”. Precisely how have we prepared them for adult life? If we have given them no hope, then what do you expect? If we have given them no resilience through developing and nurturing their spirit and their passions, their creativity and their individual minds, then how the hell can we say that we have been “preparing them for adult life”?

What skills have we given these young people, and their parents before, to be able to manage their destructive emotions, to be able to work collaboratively with one another within an implicit set of values owned, understood and embraced by all?

How responsible is the exam factory system for the sort of rioting and looting that we saw on our streets in recent times?

The other television programme was something completely different. Historian Bettany Hughes travelled across the nations of Asia, with a quick stop in California to placate the westerners view that no programme could be complete without the input from the great US of A, in a programme entitled “Seven Wonders of the Buddhist World”.

Her journey started in India at the Mahabodhi Temple where the Buddha first sat under the Tree of Life and considered the three jewels of Buddhism; The Buddha, Sangha and Dharma.

Within her quest to discover what these actually meant, she travelled to a range of phenomenal places, trying to eke out what it was about this ancient philosophy that meant that followers of this ideology and practice are increasing year in year out across the entire globe and not merely restricted to that uneducated ‘country’ of Asia.

It was a vivid and, for me, a spiritual experience, to see these places of overwhelming brilliance, so effectively described and discovered through the eyes and the thoughts of this very capable woman. She did not stop with a simple acceptance of what the three jewels were. She explored further, looking and feeling everything for herself and opening out to the awaiting audience, inviting them to take a similar journey even if they did not have the ability or means to physically travel to these places of wonderment.

She went on to look at other aspects of Buddhism; Zen, the quest for Nirvana and within this outlined the peacefulness and the thoughtfulness of the philosophy itself. She considered suffering and how this needs to be eradicated in all of our lives, whatever the circumstance, if we are truly to reach a state on oneness with ourselves and subsequently the rest of the world.

There is so much to write about this programme that it warrants an entire blog of its own but for now I will continue with my theme.

One of the things that struck me was the insistence of people in the west to numb and dumb things down to comprehensible facts and theories when sometimes it is not actually that simple. Our entire learning process has been indoctrinated into thinking that everything has to be explained and understood. Surely the most important things in our world are inexplicable. Isn’t that the whole wonderment of our world? If enlightenment was so easily attainable then what would be the purpose? We’d all pass our life exam and be done with.

An example of this is the manner in which ‘Dharma’ is described in this country and others in the west. On a recent visit to that esteemed place of understanding, the British Museum, there was an exhibition on Buddhism. The simple description of what ‘Dharma’ was – was ‘teachings’. That is all. Even on this programme, there were some academics who were interviewed who said exactly the same thing but in reality it is far more than this, only we in the west are sometimes too lazy to look into it further. Dharma equals teaching. That is understood, the box is ticked and now we can move on. But Dharma is far more than teaching. Dharma is a road of learning. Dharma is the universal understanding, united and individual. It is the ultimate presence of learning in our lives, throughout our lives, every day of our lives. It is in fact a life-long learning that should be a pathway for everyone, infinite and glorious in its incompletion. It is also about specific learning and understanding along our way but it is certainly not as simple as the teaching of the Buddha.

We are so indoctrinated in the west that it is quite terrifying how much we have lost of our natural minds, all because we have been swallowed into one way of thinking, one way of reacting, one way of learning.

We are so utterly dismissive of the unknown or the unusual that we can only see in to the end of our feet, and sometimes never beyond.

I am as guilty as the next person.

Last year, I fulfilled a lifetimes ambition to go to Granada and see the Alhambra. I was awestruck. I was mesmerised by the detail and the intricacies that I saw there. I wanted to sit in quiet contemplation – meditation – alone and at one with myself and all of the history that surrounded me in this palace of perfection. At the time, I could barely imagine anything more wonderful. I was certainly in ‘the moment’.

And last night, as I watched the television, as I was transported across Asia to all these incredible places, with their unbelievable, stupefying brilliance, I realised that I too was merely a dumb westerner, who could not even begin to contemplate just how much of the world has remained closed to me, even though I am one of the people prepared to open my mind and discover new worlds, new ways, old ways and embrace a philosophy of discovery, of living.

It is a tragedy that we are so blinkered in our opinions, in our thoughts and in our willingness to embrace the east within our closed western lives.

And yesterday was a gentle reminder of that fact.

Recently, friends of mine have been fortunate enough to travel to Asia. Two of my friends sent hundreds and possibly thousands of photographs via Facebook of their visits to the very temples in Bangkok that Hughes visited during her epic Seven Wonders trip. I delighted in their wonderment and began to feel it even though I had never been to the places myself.
Another friend talked about the total acceptance of people within Thailand of one another, irrespective of their weirdness or uniqueness. There were no class boundaries or even language barriers. People of all colour, all creed were accepted and treated similarly; men, women, lady-men, everyone treated exactly the same.

Is it any surprise that this country is so steeped in the philosophy of Buddhism – with 90% of the population here professing to be Buddhists?

The East has had its fair share of appalling atrocities in both ancient and current times, and I am not professing that everything is alright in that part of the world, but we sure as hell can learn from the goodness that comes from there, and do something about changing our own society to accommodate the qualities of learning, oneness and community as outlined in the Buddha’s three jewels.

What if? What if? According to a recent piece of writing that I read, a spiritually intelligent person asks “what if”. An even more spiritually intelligent person realises that there is a time and a place for such “what if’s”.

But what if the west was to embrace the east? What if the rioters of August had been given the opportunity to look inward at themselves and outward to the world and understand the unity of such a thing? What if our education system enabled young people to contemplate more than calculate? What if we could demonstrate the purpose of being uniquely oneself and in being so we can give so much to one another?

Today, I also walked through the streets of war-torn Hackney. The media furore would suggest that it might not be a place that I could safely travel to, let alone walk down a road that saw so much of the violence of the August non-revolution.

The street in question was quiet. It was warm and sunny. People of every creed, religion and race were gathered there together in harmony. Men were sitting together on the street corner, talking about all manner of topics. A young man casually wandered up the street on his bicycle, supping from a bottle of cola, intent on harming nobody. Shopkeepers wandered out of their premises to take in the delights of this latter summer heat. There was peace. There was tranquillity. And there was unity. I only wish that the television cameras had been there to capture the real essence of Hackney rather than the distorted view that they seem to love to portray to an unenlightened and fixed state world.

East has met west in places like Hackney. In fact, the meridian line probably passes through this borough too. But there is still plenty to do. There is still much Dharma to be had. Last week, after the riots there was better news for some folk in Hackney. The infamous Mossbourne Academy had their first set of A-Level results, and indeed it was promising. Despite what some might deem to be dictatorial tactics, it appears that the impoverished working classes do have intellectual capacity and can pass exams of the highest order in spite of the key life issues that have so frequently held them back in this area; poor housing, lack of opportunity for learning etcetera. It has to be good news but life, as I stated previously, is not all about exams. A core set of agreed values for each community within society needs to be established and needs to be without a conflicting set of values from a different source. If east could gently assume some sort of influence in the west then this is achievable, if only people had eyes and ears and minds to see the possibilities ahead.

Today, my eldest child will receive his GCSE results. I don’t actually care too much what he gets as long as he knows that this is not a reflection on him as a human being, as long as he knows that this is not the be all and end all. These results that he receives today are not going to be a true reflection of his capability or of his nature (other than a reiteration of his disinclination to sit and study). What I would really like to do is tell him to get out there into the world and start wandering on a pathway that leads eastward. I want him to discover himself through his journey. I want him to embrace the totality of one and all, together and within himself.

I want him to embrace the East.

So when will east meet west? Or will it remain a fictitious line in the middle of our city? Can we not work together and do something that ensures that the philosophies of living that are so integral to the wise people of the east are somehow discovered and considered by the very people who need it most?

The west needs to wake up. The east can offer some support. The west can listen for once in their lives and not try and categorise everything, putting it in some convenient little box, ready to move on to the next thing without really taking on board what they have allegedly learned. Even calling Buddhism a religion is a classic example of where we go wrong in the west.

But will our leaders and opposition leaders be enlightened enough to consider change away from the realms of their programmed thinking?
All we can do is watch and wait, and those of us who have an inkling of understanding about the Way should be shouting from the rooftops to the best of our ability to see if we can make a change in our world for the better.