A note on karma, story telling, the movie “Oppenheimer” and the opera "Doctor Atomic."

When I examine my conscience I ask myself not just what I did, but how bad were the consequences of my negative actions? Sometimes the immediate results are right there, a shattered relationship, a broken dish. I am not aware of any personal actions that have the possible consequences of splitting the atom, but if I were to examine the conscience of the Manhattan Project, how bad were the results, including the ones that became obvious only after Little Boy and Fat Man obliterated two cities? Worse, much worse than we could have possibly imagined.

We are sitting in a theater 68 years after the fact. Although Christopher Nolan begins Oppenheimer’s story much earlier than those eventful days, telling a story backwards is always difficult. From the storyteller's point of view, looking in the rearview mirror he or she can see how things played out in ways no one could not have imagined. But where is it in his or her job description that writers have to be omniscient? And to be honest about telling the story as it happened, how much of what we’ve learned after the fact can be scripted into the narrative before it becomes nothing more than a moralistic fable meant to instruct about the consequences of bad decisions?

There is a role for telling stories of good versus evil. God knows there are more than enough of them to claim our attention and compete for our vote. One of the problems in trying to focus humanity on taking the right steps in combating climate change is that alarmist tales where the payoffs still give cash and prizes hinder accurate telling. How can we possibly disconnect from burning fossil fuels when our lives and livelihood will be disrupted? It is a situation that can only be solved when the threat of human kind’s survival is an in our face life or death situation, or at least that is how it is portrayed in the accompanying story line. Humankind will take no action until we survey the wreckage, but then, like Hiroshima, it may be too late.

The men, and they were all men, who made the decisions that lead to humanity’s total dependence on burning fossil fuels to foster the industrial revolution, followed the time honored rules of self-enrichment; they just grabbed what was at hand and sold it for a profit. Did they see the ice sheet of Antarctica melting and the water in Florida becoming as hot as the hot tub in a beachfront condo? The answer is clearly no, they did not. They could not. Do Germans who bought into Hitler’s Third Reich after the economic disaster of the Weimar Republic share blame for the Holocaust? They claim that they are really decent people motivated by giving a new strong leader the chance of improving a defeated Germany’s economic condition and lost status in the world. The murder of millions was unforeseen. They claim ignorance and to some degree they are right. The horror of the camps was not broadcast. Did Oppenheimer and the other Los Alamos scientists foresee the insidious arms race that would stoke the economy for generations as well as the lethal consequences of unleashing the power of nuclear fission and fusion? Obviously they could not, or at least not in the way that it appears to us now. They were attempting something that they did not know could be done. It had never been done before. We have the wisdom of hindsight. Looking back, researching carefully, we might find evidence that was overlooked, neglected, even willfully hidden because it would have stopped the development of the weapon that military planners pinned their hopes on. In the Manhattan Project, there is evidence of fear in the hearts of some scientists that humankind was stepping into the unknown and that the powers about to be unleashed were of a scale that had never been seen in the history of the world, but these were suppressed by chain of command.

In each of these imagined scenarios, the protagonists could be straw men in a tale of right and wrong with far reaching consequences. But in storytelling, describing the reality of the moment when the event actually happened is very difficult and easy to botch with a lot of judgment and well intentioned afterthoughts. I will not argue that this lets us off the hook, but I will point out that if the narrator or writer or singer does not capture that immediacy, they have failed.

The story telling in “Oppenheimer” was masterful. I have some familiarity with the subject so in a sense it was a retelling for me. If I were the writer, there were a few details that I might have outlined more clearly, especially the role of Lewis Strauss in the post war campaign to destroy Oppenheimer’s reputation when he became an advocate against the disastrous arms race that has left the world with the ever present threat of mutual mass destruction, but I can imagine Oppy as the leader of the brainy team that won the race to detonate the Atomic bomb. His struggles were real, and as far as my reading of history, accurate. He studies the Bhagavad Gita, even during sex, and the famous quote “Now I Am Become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds” when he witnessed the first detonation stayed in the script.

A German friend says she was shocked when at the celebration at Los Alamos after the bomb was dropped in Hiroshima, Oppenheimer says, “too bad we didn’t get it done in time to drop on Germany.” I think that this is from an actual report. What shocked me more was when Truman says to his chief of staff after Oppenheimer’s visit to the oval office, “I don’t want to see that cry baby ever again.” That statement was definitely not recorded, but had the ring of truth. Truman’s attitude is so contrary to what I was taught. I came from a very politically conservative and activist Republican family; I thought that I had heard every suspicious utterance out of Harry’s mouth. 

Oppenheimer is not a glorification of war or the dropping of the bomb. If it were just a moral tale, there could have been cuts to the mass destruction of both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, somehow hinting at the epidemic of cancers that started to appear in the tribal people who were unwittingly exposed to the radiation, but the film maker, Christopher Nolan, was disciplined. He kept focused on telling the story as accurately as he could about what actually happened when it happened. That was its strength. It was compelling. 

There is another side to my understanding in the story telling. I just listened to a politician in the US saying that it does not feel particularly good to have been right about the total incompetence of Donald Trump and the serious mess that he wreaked on our democracy. Feeling good or bad about predicting an outcome is not an answer to understanding karma. It is not taking responsibility for our actions or inaction seriously. In this case of Trump, the evidence was pretty clear from the moment he announced his bid for the office, but the story is really not so much about the hard facts of a narcissistic personality disorder as it is the acceptance by so many Americans of a political agenda contrary to our best interests.

Does the ignorance of any story teller, and that includes all of us telling our own stories, leave us off the hook for being responsible for the consequences of our actions? Include both the consequences that we could foresee as well as the ones that appeared over time, in hindsight. I cannot say. I can only make that call for myself.

Is there still room for a moral tale about the dropping of the bomb? Of course. I know one as compelling as “Oppenheimer,” one that doesn’t dilute either by mixing the poison with the antidote. John Adams’s “Doctor Atomic” tells the same story, but opera is meant to be a moral tale. I heard one of the first San Francisco Opera’s performances in October of 2005. Whereas Christopher Nolan used the book by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, “American Prometheus,” to write “Oppenheimer,” Adams could not enlist any of the librettists from previous operas so he and his producer, Peter Sellars, used the declassified transcripts available from Manhattan Project plus some poetry that inspired Oppenheimer. It vacillates between ordinary, even crass speech and the sublime. Adam’s music is also challenging. He does not hesitate to preach.

You hear it just after the curtain goes up. One of the very first arias sung by Edward Teller sets the tone: 

“First of all, let me say that I have no hope of clearing my conscience. 

The things we are working on are so terrible

that no amount of protesting or fiddling with politics will save our souls.” 

The chorus sings a very dark stanza from the Bhagavad Gita: 

“At the sight of this, your Shape stupendous,

Full of mouths and eyes, feet, thighs and bellies, 

Terrible with fangs, O master, 

All the worlds are fear-struck, even just as I am. 

When I see you, Vishnu, omnipresent, 

Shouldering the sky, in hues of rainbow, 

With your mouths agape and flame-eyes staring — 

All my peace is gone; my heart is troubled.” 

Adams introduces a tribal Tiwa woman, Pasqualita, his wife’s maid who sings plaintively after the Trinity test, 

“The winter dawned, but the dead did not come back. 

News came on the frost, ‘The dead are on the march!’ 

We danced in prison to a winter music, many we loved began to dream of the dead. 

They made no promises, we never dreamed a threat. 

And the dreams spread.” (https://booklets.idagio.com/075597930238.pdf)

The hero’s plight is unresolved and leaves us hanging. The music, the dramatic setting aim for a different place in the heart. It is meant to plant a troubling question, one that was not clearly seen during the lead up. It is seen in the rearview mirror.

________________

Here is the message cloaked in prayer that General Norman Schwarzkopf, USA Commander-in-Chief U.S. Central Command, gave to the military on January 16, 1991 as he ordered the invasion of a Muslim nation. Billy Graham as “America’s Pastor” was at his side to sanction it.

“Soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines of the United States Central Command, this morning at 0300, we launched Operation Desert Storm, an offensive campaign that will enforce the United Nation’s resolutions that Iraq must cease its rape and pillage of its weaker neighbor and withdraw its forces from Kuwait. My confidence in you is total. Our cause is just! Now you must be the thunder and lightning of Desert Storm. May God be with you, your loved ones at home, and our Country.”

Father George Zabelka was the priest for the airmen who dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He gave them his blessing. Days later he counseled an airman who had flown a low-level reconnaissance flight over the city of Nagasaki shortly after the detonation of “Fat Man.” The man described how thousands of scorched, twisted bodies writhed on the ground in the final throes of death, while those still on their feet wandered aimlessly in shock – flesh seared, melted, and falling off. The crewman’s description raised a stifled cry from the depths of Zabelka’s soul: “My God, what have we done?” 

There was no prayer in Los Alamos. There wasn’t even a church or synagogue until 1947, two years after the destruction of the Japanese cities and the end of the war--religion in the role of a mopping up operation, gearing its ministry to assuaging the conscience of the conquerors in the service of its generals.

Father Zabelka by the end of his life came to renounce his role in blessing the airmen and aircraft that carried the bombs. Norman Schwarzkopf was buried with full military honors at West Point. To the victor belong the spoils.

Robert Oppenheimer died on February 18, 1967. There was a service at Princeton attended by 600 people. 

A few days before Trinity Oppenheimer quoted Bhartṛhari's Śatakatraya:

In battle, in the forest, at the precipice in the mountains,
On the dark great sea, in the midst of javelins and arrows,
In sleep, in confusion, in the depths of shame,
The good deeds a man has done before defend him.

In honor of Mahatma Gandhi

Originally posted on August 15th, 2008

I wrote this essay for Intimate Meanderings as part of an exploration of Hindu meditation in conversations between Dilip Trasi, Nitin Trasi and Morgan Zo-Callahan. I focus primarily on the unique contribution to Mohandas Gandhi, or Mahatma Gandhi. Tomorrow, August 15th is Indian Independence Day, and I publish this essay here in “Buddha S.J." as a tribute to a man who contributed so much to the spiritual practice of all humans everywhere on our planet.

Taking the Next Step, A Note on Activism as a Spiritual Practice

The Blessed Lord said: "Time I am, destroyer of worlds, and I have come to engage all people. With the exception of you, all the soldiers here on both sides will be slain.’’ Bhagavad-gita 11:32

Dilip Trasi and Nitin Trasi are committed and skilled practitioners who speak out of their own experience of meditation. Both have a deep understanding of the Hindu meditation tradition and both have worked with authentic teachers. They are also both laymen, not Brahmins, gurus or clergy, who set themselves apart by claiming special knowledge and this, in my view, allows for a freer exchange of ideas as well as a search for a common language in which we can share our experiences. However, when questioned about activism and practice, we entered a territory where they felt that they had to offer cautions and reservations. Not that their reservations might not valid in some cases, but I hope to show if the heart of the spiritual activists’ motivation and practice is of the simple “do-gooder” variety, it does not work as a spiritual practice much less effective community organizing.

One argument against activism runs like this: when faced with a choice between several courses of action, or taking no action whatsoever, we cannot say with certainty which one is the better, and, even if we practice some form of meditation, given that maturity in practice seems to sharpen our ability to discern shades of gray, we cannot favor one position over another. This caution halts us in our tracks. The idea is not exclusively Eastern. Albert Camus said; “The evil that is in the world almost always comes from ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding.” (The Plague)

However, in all cases, no matter what our motivation or position, in any situation, in any relationship, in any community, country, tradition, or time, all actions produce results. Religious precepts, as they are called in Buddhism, recognize that living our lives leaves a trail of consequences. The possibility of making a mistake does not relieve the obligation to try to act responsibly; rather it imposes a further, perhaps more difficult obligation to remain open and test your experience, examine the results, and then change course if you find yourself embarked on an unproductive or negative course of action.

There is a second argument: that the desire to relieve universal suffering really stems from a desire to relieve one’s own suffering, that it is a myth to believe that we actually help others. From a Buddhist point of view, we are all intimately interconnected in a world that is always in flux. Most practitioners recognize that the source of suffering is not outside ourselves, that we are ultimately responsible for the conditions that cause suffering. That is in fact one of the reasons why we act. Activism is not reserved for enlightened beings. Submitting to moral obligation is for both ordinary and “enlightened” people. Besides, the conservative position—don’t act unless you are certain that your actions will have no harmful consequences—presupposes that omniscience, being able to foresee all the consequences of our actions, is available to humans. I have seen no evidence that such awareness is possible, even in supposedly enlightened beings.

And finally, what I would like to call the “conservative position” asserts that the strain on the social order caused by righting a wrong, causes far more pain, confusion and upset than any possible benefit of the actions. I do not buy into the argument that activists are wrong headed, self-indulgent and create harm because they upset the status quo.

The only part of that analysis that I can support is that some consequences of our actions will be unforeseen. But what is wrong with that? It will not stop me from trying to prevent women and children from being sold into sexual slavery or help innocents caught in the crossfire of the civil strife in Iraq. I will say more about any strain on the social fabric when I touch on the practice of non-violence.

Take ending of the enslavement of Africans in America or stopping the holocaust of the Jewish people that came with the allied victory over Germany in 1945. These were patent evils ingrained in the fabric of a society, or the programs of a powerful single party fascist regime. They had to be eradicated by whatever force necessary though we may have to sort out the consequences of both the American Civil War and World War II for several more generations.

Morgan, who is deeply involved in the activist world, said that he regretted that some activists, though relatively very few, get carried away by their own self-importance. When I questioned Morgan, his objection was that “full fledged” activists who had a lot of unexamined personal motivations made organizing difficult, not that they were prone to mistakes that would cause harm in the outcome. But even this is not my experience. Perhaps my position is biased because my sample of activists comes largely from a group that creates effective actions in support of a cause as spiritual practice, not an add-on, or something to do during the rainy season when you don’t feel like meditating. Practice does more than keep an activist focused. It is the source of their action.

Nitin Trasi used this definition of activism in his analysis: A doctrine or practice that emphasizes direct vigorous action especially in support of or opposition to one side of a controversial issue (Webster). I want to suggest that this definition is not broad enough to include cases in which spiritual practice is the real operative factor.

The greatest modern proponent of the spiritual practice of activism was Mahatma Gandhi, and the traditions from which he derived Satyagraha, Sanskrit for “truth force,” were mostly Indian—Hindu, Buddhist and Jain. He also read the gospel of Jesus and was undoubtedly influenced by the saying: “whatever you do for the least of my brothers, you do also to me.” In the Western monotheistic traditions, taking care of the world, tikkun in Hebrew, caring for the least fortunate of society, caritas in Latin, has always been part of religious practice, much more so than in Hinduism. When we talk or write about the practice of non-violence as Gandhi developed and practiced it, we are translating the Sanskrit, Ahimsa, which means literally “the avoidance of violence,” but it is impossible not to see the influence of his western education.

Gandhi himself, Martin Luther King, Dick Gregory, as well as the Dalai Lama in his efforts to free Tibet from the oppression of Han Chinese overlords, have all undertaken practice to quell selfish motivation and focus on the goals of clearing a path to justice and equality. Many of Jesuits and ex-Jesuits represented here in Meanderings use the discernment of spirits outlined in the “Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius” to weigh their activism. The American abolitionists of the 19th century were for the most part inspired by their religious convictions, transcendentalism or Quakerism, worldviews that hold all the created, visible world to be intricately connected and their practice had the flavor of the Great Awakening, with all its limitations—preaching and conversion.

Without humans, aggression, hatred, anger are not a perpetual motion machine. They need our energy to keep the pendulum swinging. A problem arises when, by applying a force strong enough to counteract the prevailing intransigence of a social order which supports evil, inequality and social injustice, we perpetuate the underlying mechanism that holds those structures in place. Halting that engine also has side effects—what will fill the void?

There are always far-reaching effects accompanying any action, violent or non-violent. For example, World War II, which was to be the war that ended war, has not marked the end of aggression and killing. It was not enough to defeat Hitler just as winning the US Civil War was not sufficient to cause the complete freedom of African slaves. (Though there is some evidence that the amount of armed conflict has been reduced since the defeat of Germany and Japan). In the ending of the British rule over India, the Mahatma struggled with the immediate consequences of partition and the bloodshed between Hindu and Muslim. The fast he undertook in an attempt to halt the violence nearly cost his life. He says in The Story of My Experiments with Truth, "When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won. There have been tyrants and murderers and for a time they seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall—think of it, always." It’s just simplistic to think that any one action can end injustice or suffering. It is more a continuing struggle in which humans must engage. The birth of modern India, the largest functioning democracy on earth, has increased wealth and opportunities for Indians of all social strata. This is neither a myth nor inconsequential.

Whether or not one holds to some vague concept of “progress” or the endless repetition of karma due to the consequences of our actions, it seems that the world has changed and continues to change. That all life is impermanent, always being born and passing out of existence seems almost self-evident. Though I have never studied all the ways that the Hindu point of view differs from the Buddhist view, in Buddhism lived experience opens the door to religious practice.

Those who have some taste for practice seem to have chosen the path that was begun by Mohandas Gandhi. As with any discipline, Ahimsa takes practice. It is not a theory. Though solidly based on the most ancient understanding of man’s place in the universe, it launches us into the unknown territory of caring for all of humanity, the entire earth in a new way. It requires the most courageous action and deep meditation. It requires that our spiritual practice take on a wider goal than our own salvation or enlightenment.

We are in the middle of such a revolution. The aims of the revolution seem to be clear: clean the environment, curtail the destructive power of our weapons, find new ways of resolving conflict, create universal recognition of human rights. They also include what Jesus taught as ‘charity’—to feed the hungry, care for the sick, clothe the naked, visit the prisoners. What is not clear is the path we chose to follow to achieve those goals. The old institutions have failed or are crumbling. What will emerge? Where do we place our bets and focus time and resources? Those who are in the middle of a revolution are least likely to recognize it. They are certainly among the last to appreciate it—they are way too busy tending to immediate concerns of Right Now! We don’t even know if we will succeed.

It will also demand new myths, and I mean myth in the most powerful sense, not fantasy, but images that capture the imagination in a powerful way. And it seems that one of those myths will be the story of the Bhagavad-gita, which has inspired Hindus and fascinated Westerners. In Philip Glass's Satyagraha, An Opera in Three Acts (2001), huge chariots for Arjuna and Krishna with larger than life puppet figures are drawn up on the stage; the prologue is verses from the Gita sung, chanted in Sanskrit. On the Kuru Field of Justice, Lord Krishna tells the warrior Arjuna to put aside pain and pleasure, that action is his moral duty: “Be unconcerned with consequences, with victory or defeat, but act with the world's welfare as your intention” (LA Times, April 2008). Then when the figure of Gandhi walks onto the stage, small and clothed simply in a loincloth as he appears in later pictures; it is a powerful statement of “Truth Force.” But the performance is not left in some reverential version of Indian history—in the third act, Martin Luther King appears behind Gandhi, superimposed in a TV clip of his famous “I have a Dream” speech which electrified a generation of civil rights activists.

I would like to quote what J. Robert Oppenheimer said about his experience at the first test explosion of the atomic bomb, July 16, 1945. “We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty, and to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, 'Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.'' I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.” There may be some exaggeration in his statement. By the time he said it on TV in the 50’s, Oppenheimer had already become an activist working to stop the “Arms Race” and curtail the use of both nuclear fission and fusion in the manufacture of weapons.

Man now has developed a technology powerful enough to destroy himself, certainly to visit unfathomable pain and destruction on his fellow beings. The usual political balance for checking power, aggression and greed do not seem to be adequate to the task. It is not surprising to see that creativity, coupled with the spiritual dimension of reverence for all life, have shown up as potential sources for finding a way, not just to remedy injustice and relieve suffering, but to ensure human survival.

Because Dilip or Nitin didn’t have the opportunity to read and respond to my argument, I will give Dilip the (almost) last word on the subject.

“Let me investigate the useful side of [activism]. Activism in a beneficent sense can be defined as aggressive action towards a specific goal. We always find that in nature there exist thresholds. Right from the atom onwards, we find that a minimum energy barrier has to be crossed to overcome the forces of nature, which is called the threshold force. For example to get free of the force of gravity of the earth, a minimum velocity called escape velocity has to be exceeded (approximately 7 miles per second).

“Applying activism to inventiveness, we find that many of the great inventors were intoxicated with only thoughts concerning their invention. Scientists were considered as absent-minded people. But this is the kind of aggressiveness and activism that is necessary to break the thought barrier.

“Finally, applying activism to spirituality, we find that a paradigm change in understanding is necessary, like the quantum jump of an electron, freeing from the influence of the nucleus. Maya is like the intra-atomic force that binds the electrons to the nucleus. To overcome the influence of Maya or ignorance, one has to be intoxicated with Atma-consciousness or God-consciousness. Ramakrishna Paramahansa and Ramana Maharshi were typical examples of such persons.”

In the last analysis, any call to action for the spiritually centered person is an act of faith, in the deepest sense—that he or she is called to participate in the action of God loving, caring for our world, that the easing of suffering is part of the dynamic of God’s love. To close, I am not going to quote scripture or give a sermon, but rather quote one of my heroes, the visionary architect, Bucky Fuller (from NO MORE SECONDHAND GOD by R. Buckminster Fuller):

Yes, God is a verb,

the most active,

connoting the vast harmonic

reordering of the universe

from unleashed chaos of energy.

And there is born unheralded

a great natural peace,

not out of exclusive

pseudo-static security

but out of including, refining, dynamic balancing.

Naught is lost.

Only the false and nonexistent are dispelled.