Sun Tzu Says: A Commentary on The Art of War, Entry One

The life of a human being would seem to be that of an actor going from one complication to another with perhaps a little bit of rest in between. Each day may present a new set of problems to be conquered, and each night brings a chance to rejuvenate for the struggles the coming day will bring.

Our struggles are as much, and often more, with ourselves. Our battles most often are battles with ourselves, between the multitude of inner voices that inhabit us, the sum of which makes up that which we call the “I” of who we are. We are composed of psychological systems that have been and will be at odds with one another. 

Sun Tzu said: The art of war is of vital importance to the state.

And so begins The Art of War under the chapter heading “Laying Plans.” The first chapter of The Art of War can be thought of as preliminary considerations. It’s the mind space where thought and reflection on the matter of struggle is not only welcomed, but necessary to the attainment of psychic integration of internal systems and inner peace.

Think of the “state” as the first person: I, me, self, that which I am, the agent, actor, thinker, the seat and vehicle of consciousness, love and emotions.

“War” is struggle with both external and internal realities. War is exoteric, and unfortunately literally real in different places and time, but it is also esoteric, lying within our own souls. 

For the average 21st century human being living in a relatively safe environment, “war” is an individual affair, waged on the inside. 

An encounter with a disturbing situation, or other person, out there in the world has a correlative affect on our inner world. Our battles force us to resolve how it is we should perceive the world outside and how it is that we should act upon it.

So, yes, in that vain, the art of war is of vital importance to the mental and psychic state of human beings every where and at all times. Why?

“It is a matter of life and death, a road either to safety or ruin,” Sun Tzu tells us.

Embracing Ignorance

Not long ago, I put on my first pair of bifocals and declared myself officially middle age. It took a while to get used to them.

The first week wearing my bifocals, I bumped into things constantly. I would lift my legs too high when going up or down stairs. I spilled numerous cups of coffee. At the end of each day my eyes were fatigued, and it felt great to close them and stare at nothing but the back of my eye lids.

Not long after though, I grew accustomed to my bifocals, and I learned to really appreciate them. They expanded my fields of vision, near and far. Now, things look somehow abnormal with my regular, uni-focals, which I had always counted on before to faithfully show me what the world looks like.

My experience with my new glasses got me to thinking about vision in general.

Everything we see is really just an interpretation.

What enters our eyeballs are waves of energy that are reflected off the molecules that surround us. The cones at the back of our eyes are only tuned to absorb a small amount of the energy that they are bombarded with. That energy is visible light, which is  a mere seven keys on an almost infinitely wide piano.

The way I understand it, when the back of our eyes are stimulated by light, they send signals to our occipital lobe at the base of our brain where the images out there are sorted out and constructed, in here. Everything we see is really nothing more than a mental construct. This world is literally all in our heads, and nothing we see is the thing in and of itself.

And so it is with all our other senses. Textures, tastes, smells and sounds — all of them are the product of a limited range of perceptibility and ultimately manufactured in our minds. The world we take in is only a small portion of what is out there.

It boggles the mind to consider how inherently ignorant we are, and how little we are capable of knowing.

We are creatures of habit and complacency. It’s easy to dupe ourselves into believing that there is nothing more to the world than what we can perceive. That habit serves us well enough, but it serves us just as well to remember that what we see is just the tip of the iceberg, even with bifocals on.

Much Ado About Agenda 21

“Agenda 21.” Sounds terrifying, right? “Imagine a world controlled by the Illuminati where everyone has been stripped of their property rights, and individual freedom is but a distant memory.”

In case you have never heard of it, Agenda 21 is a real thing, and its opponents are vocal and motivated.  

In the most recent legislative session at the Oklahoma Capital, HB 1412 was introduced. The stated purpose of the bill, introduced in part by Sally Kern, is to prohibit adoption of the United Nations Agenda 21 that would restrict private property rights without due process. Who wouldn’t be against the repeal of due process. Repeal due process and you might as well repeal the U.S. Constitution. 

The anti-Agenda 21 measure easily passed through the house with only 17 votes against it, and was delivered to the senate for consideration. NewsOK reported Senator Cliff Branan said that his committee would not take up HB 1412, essentially killing the bill. That angered Al Gerhart, co-founder of the Sooner Tea Party.

In an email to Senator Branan, Gerhart wrote, “Get that bill heard or I will make sure you regret not doing it. I will make you the laughing stock of the Senate if I don't hear that this bill will be heard and passed. We will dig into your past, your family, your associates and once we start on you there will be no end to it. This is a promise.”

Of course Gerhart is concerned. This is about defending freedom and the Constitution of the United States. So what is Agenda 21?

Agenda 21 is a non-binding, voluntary action plan, promulgated by the United Nations, to encourage governments around the world to combat poverty, pollution, and conserve natural resources. It’s not a law, and it has no teeth. 

Agenda 21 is merely a polite suggestion that maybe we ought to talk about protecting our environment and making the world a better place to live in. Oklahoma HB 1412 is literally much ado about nothing.

What on earth is fueling the animosity of the opponents of Agenda 21 then? Why would anyone threaten another person’s family for not passing a law that seeks to extinguish a non-existent fire?

Historian, Richard J. Hofstadter, wrote an essay entitled, The Paranoid Style in American Politics. Though published in 1964, it is just as relevant today. 

Describing those who are seduced by far-fetched conspiracy theories, Hofstadter wrote, “The paranoid spokesman, sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms — he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values ... Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish.”

And so it is with Al Gerhart and his like-minded cohort.

Update: On April 9, two felony charges were filed in Oklahoma County District Court against Al Gerhart for blackmail and violations under the state's computer crimes act. A warrant for his arrest has been issued, and his bond is set at $15,000.

Final Exam Anxiety Dreams

It’s the day of the exam, and the stakes are high. Pass, and I get to move up to the next rung of life. Fail, and it’s all doom and gloom for as far as the eye can see. 

I am frenetically running around campus looking for the book to study for the math exam, for the class I have never attended. To make things worse, the exam starts in a few minutes, and I don’t know where the classroom is. At least I’m wearing pants this time. 

In the end, I never find the book, and I never find the classroom. But when I wake up, I’m greatly relieved. 

It was just one of those dreaded final exam anxiety dreams that I have had more times than I can count.

In waking life, that same scenario can play out its painful tragedy on any given day. It’s the shock of being caught off guard — with your pants down, so to speak. It’s the humbling indignation of being taken by surprise at the worst possible moment and making an F-minus when something a little better was called for. It is nothing less than the searing torment that comes from harshly judging one’s self, and being judged by others, for executory shortcomings, real and imagined — and it’s an inevitability of being fully human in this day and time. 

My philosophy is, don’t worry, you will screw up, no matter how hard you try not to. Every now and then, things will be blissfully hunky-dory one second, and unmitigated disaster the next. No matter how many calendars, ledgers or alarm clocks you keep, some little thing will fall through the cracks, eventually, and come back to give you a monumentally unpleasant jolt. 

We should do our best to show up on time, prepared to do our best, but perpetual perfection is an illusion. The only remedy is to learn to laugh about it as reasonably soon as possible after the damage is done, patch things up, learn lessons, and move on. That is, in large part, the art of being human.

There is to only wake up to the fact that anyone who is cognizant of having been dented by a lapse of focus and attention has more dimensions through which to laugh, love and study in the school of life.

The last exam dream I had, a couple of years ago, I was in high school. According to the irrational logic of it, I had to go back to my old school to take a math test.

As things should have it, some over-zealous high school administrator went looking through my file, twenty years after I had graduated. They discovered that I was mistakenly given a diploma without having taken a crucial and necessary algebra exam. If I didn’t pass the test, all of my subsequent academic achievements and degrees would be held for naught and declared void. 

While searching in vain for the classroom where the exam had already started, I had a lucid moment, and was struck by the ridiculousness of it all. I was only dreaming. 

I looked down to see that I wasn’t wearing any pants. I laughed and woke up.

Anxieties and Fears

At the first hint of their presence, 

anxious and fearful voices 

get pushed aside, 

suppressed and denied during the day, 

and come to haunt us at night,

when our smart, rational self

hasn't enough mustard

to keep them at bay.

As I have gotten older, 

I have learned 

to sense the presence 

of those anxieties and fears 

in my waking life, 

like hearing a prepubescent boy 

pitching a fit from down the street, 

or catching a glimpse of an angry

teenager scowling at me 

from behind a distant tree. 

Like a good old uncle, 

I invite them over to sit on the porch 

with me for a while, 

to air their grievances, 

without me interrupting. 

“I’m scared,” they confide. 

“It’s not fair,” they say. 

“I don’t like it,” they continue. 

“Save me and make it all better,”

they pray.

And I listen and I nod. 

When the complaints and trepidations are exhausted, 

I pat them on the head, and say, 

“You’re a good kid,” 

and they run off to play.

My Near Death Experience

My oldest daughter and I were in the kitchen. It was just the two of us for the evening, and I was putting something together for dinner. My daughter was four years old at the time, or maybe three.

Out of the fridge, I pulled some left-over sirloin that I had grilled on the Weber the night before. As my daughter watched, I sliced strips of the steak. Not content to wait until our plates were fixed, I handed a piece of steak to my daughter as an appetizer, and popped a slice into my mouth.

The steak lodged in my throat before I even had a chance to chew. I couldn’t breath, quite literally, to save my life. I couldn’t even wheeze a little bit of precious oxygen around the morsel, as it had completely stopped up my wind pipe. 

My daughter witnessed the event bewildered, as my face must have gone from bright red to pale blue. I remember thinking, she doesn’t know how to give the Heimlich maneuver. I propped myself up by leaning heavily against the countertop, next to the sink. My legs were becoming increasingly useless. 

After a very long time of not being able to breath, a thought leaped to my mind. “I am going to die now.” 

It doesn’t take a Freudian psychoanalyst to figure out that the root of most our fears is a fear of death and dying. And so, it was with me.

Another thought popped into my mind, and it was strangely soothing. “This isn’t that bad, really.” For the first time in my life, I wasn’t scared of dying. It was going to happen, and that was that.

The whole of my consciousness, had retreated to my head and had separated itself from the physical pain my body was enduring. I had a sense that I was simply waiting for some kind of a release. I also had a sense that everything — absolutely everything — was in its right place, and that everything would be just fine. On the verge of death, I was quite content and felt a comforting warmth that I can not properly explain. The best I can do to put a finger on it is to say that I had an intuitive notion that I was about to reunite with a bigger and better world.

Another thought came to mind. I had lost almost all awareness of my immediate surroundings. The butcher-block island on top of which was sliced steak, the sink, the counter top, the floor beneath me, the light from the light bulbs above, were all disappearing from my awareness. At a critical moment, when I was on all fours on the floor, I remembered my daughter, who was standing a few feet from me.

“No,” I thought. “This isn’t right. She can’t see me die like this. This can’t happen this way. I have too much to do yet.” It was the wrong place at the wrong time.

Up came the steak! It popped out of my throat and landed five feet away. I took as deep a breath as I could, collapsed to the floor on my back, and coughed, and gasped spasmodically.

I didn’t rush headlong down a tunnel of light. I didn’t see angels, Jesus, the Buddha, or ancient relatives. But I stood at the threshold of death’s door, and I felt an avuncular benevolence on the other side. It is a feeling that has stayed with me ever since. It is a feeling that has dispelled the crushing burden of living a life in fear, and I was made a better human being for it. 

“Not now, not yet,” that feeling agreed with me. “There is too much unfinished work,” it said.

Pop!

I Have a Monkey Suit

I have a monkey suit, which

I strut about in all

of the time. It was

given to me years ago,

and did not cost me a dime.

I like to scratch about

in my monkey suit, which

was given a name

and I pretend that

me and the suit are the same,

because that’s what I do 

in my faux-me monkey world

with six billion (and counting) other

monkey suit wearing 

things, like trapped, slow-

motion monkey suit tethered

beings, where mind is

sequestered here to weather

it out, until our monkey suits

fray, falter and wear out,

and are abandoned.

Until that times comes,

I will eat, smell smells,

Run, jump and have sex

in my monkey suit,

just like the countless 

other monkey suit wearing souls,

who know not where they come from,

nor know to where it is they go.