Meeting the Moment

How do we meet this moment we find ourselves in - a world that is changing so fast and is so chaotic and confusing it’s difficult to find our bearings. I am grateful to be a part of a loving Sangha community and a Zen spiritual tradition that nutures a sane, grounded way of living that meets each moment with openness, kindness, deep respect, and grace.

I am an American citizen, but its increasingly difficult to know what that means, as this moment is often given over to division, partison politics, biopolar ideological disagreements, fear, and violence. Is America having a nervous breakdown? This crisis of identity is debilitating. And what adds to it, is the barage of lies and conflicting stories coming at us so fast, we have no way of knowing what is true or false, what is fact or fiction. Overwhelmed by this flood of noise, it’s easy to become numb and to withdraw.

This is a strategy authoritian governments around the world employ to make their populations complient and passive. And the government that is currently leading our country seems to believe that some people are more important than others, and it supports this ideology by demonizing and “othering” those who are most vulnerable among us.

So what does it mean to be an American? What it has meant for several hundreds of years until recently is that we are a country founded on a Constitution and a Declaration of Independence which claims that everyone is equal before the law. This is our authentic, principled history that many Americans have fought and died to defend. We fought the Civil War, WWII and the Civil Right movement to defend this principle that all people are equal.

Let me quote the document as a reminder because the words are beautiful and worth repeating. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” Abraham Lincoln said the Declaration of Independence was “a rebuke and a stumbling block to tyranny and oppression.”

This “liberal consensus” that was evoked by Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War, and FDR during WWII was based on this principled moral principle of equality of all. The recent populist politics of our time have countered this by suggesting that the myth of the heroic cowboy that is rugged and self-sufficient is our true identity, and those advocating the liberal consensus are lazy, stupid, corrupt, and unAmerican.

My Zen spiritual tradition teaches that this kind of individual identity is a serious delusion that leads to trouble, turmoil and great suffering. He may ride off into the sunset victorious from defeating all the bad guys wearing black hats, but he rides off alone, isolated, and disconnected from nature, from community and from all that nurtures and supports life.

While Buddhism is appreciated as an effective critique of personal suffering, it can also critique the social and political structures by which our patterns of interdependence and relationship are shaped and formed.

Zen celebrates the interdependence of all beings where relationality is more basic ontologically than the things related. The Chan (Zen) tradition, along with Confucian and Taoist teachings sought to articulate a world where relationality (not things-related) and change (not an unchanging or eternal essence) were ontologically primordial. As such, they challenge the assumption that the individual is the proper unit of ethical, social and political analysis.

We are complex beings and our world is complex. We must learn new ways to communicate that honor that complexity without reducing our identity down to a narrow and sentimental ideal of some past glorious age. Communication itself is sacred and when that process is corrupted by propaganda and continuous lies, it undermines our morals, our ability for mutual learning, and our capacity to find a path forward.

So let us meet this moment with courage knowing that we stand on hallowed ground whom many of our citizens have fought and died to defend. This is our true identity and the most beautiful moral teaching about what it means to be an American.

~ Roshi Robert Joshin Althouse, July 2025