Corona, the sound of one hand clapping

Retirement is the stage of life for the wisdom quest. Suddenly, you are naturally “living in this world anonymously, completely unknown, without being famous, ambitious, cruel.” The weekly calendar loses it meaning since there are no more “blue Mondays, hump day, TGIS Friday, or weekend rapture. Every day is just this day. And here one begins to contemplate mortality.

The reality map we used in the first half of life to climbed the Mountain of Attainment no longer works. But there is no culturally supplied map in the west. Just watch TV in a stooper or play golf.

In the East, the last stage of life is that of wisdom quest. The children, the job, the work in the world is naturally dropped. Now you can turn within and find the inner source of contentment instead of seeking it in time. Now there is no more time.

Corona with its home confinement is giving us a taste of retirement from the world. Are you ready for your wisdom quest?

The wisdom of Corona is that no one is special. We all get Corona and die. You have no righteous rights. The proliferation of rights and identity through being special comes to an end with Corona. Corona is the great leveler.

Since the 60s, which broke up the monolithic culture of the 50s where only white men had rights, there has been an avalanche of new rights. Black rights, women, rights, gay rights, on an on, new rights are being born as the cleaver divides life into new rights, and with every new right, there is an opposite right to oppose it. Rights always come in pairs-of-opposites.

And then Corona comes to end the butcher’s cleaver of creating new pairs of rights. With Corona, no one has rights. No one is special, excluded, safe. There is no righteousness with Corona.

This meditation has evolved into an investigation in the proliferation of Rights since the 50s. And now that proliferation has come to an end with Corona. The Age of New Rights has created gridlock, cultural wars, and dysfunction, which Corona has brought to light. In the Age of Rights, whatever rises in the news is immediately divided into the yin/yang of Rights.

Whatever your rights are, they take away from my rights. This is the Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee of Rights. We are all on the Butcher’s Table where the cow of life is chopped into more and more rights.

The illusion of the Age of Rights, is that there can only be right and no left. The right is right by eliminating the left. We only want the sound of one hand clapping.

he Age of the Right suffers anxiety and the frustration of dysfunction because of our Logic of Identity that has been the dominant logic of the western science. Everything is what it is. A is A and cannot be both B and A at the same time.

This logic works perfectly in a material world conceived as a machine, but fails when trying to understand life, which is ambiguous. Lifes comes in pairs-of-opposites. Life is Noah’s Ark. Left is right, right is left. There is no up without down, and down without up. They cannot be separated. You cannot only go up. The One that is two is ambiguous, the UP/Down One that is up or down. UP/Down is the One that is two, but our logic of identity which says up is up and down is down and they exist separately cannot understand the wholeness of life that is beyond good and evil.

The logic of Identity is the fall from the Garden, the logic of the Apple that has been divided into a good and bad half, and that it is possible to have only the good half without the bad half. We don’t realize that everything is defined by what it is not. Nothing stands alone. Everything is relationship, and relationship is ambiguous, the two that is one, each standing alone but mutually dependent upon the other and cannot be separated.

Corona is the sound of one hand clapping. This is a famous Zen Koan. What is the wound of one hand clapping? Well, we know the sound of two hands clapping, the right hand slapping the left hand. This has been out politics for the last 50 years, the clapping of the left and the right against each other applauding the returning of the same play over and over. Endless clapping. Endless conflict. Nothing advances. When the right or left tries to go something, the other hand rises to stop it. Each gives birth to its opposite hand. The whole body has been lost. The reference to the One body, one America has been lost in the identity with one or the other hand. The Body, the One America is the sound of One hand clapping.

We have lost the silence, the transcendence of the One over the cacophony of the many. But Corona comes to stop the noise, and in the silence, we can hear the sound of America once again.