Siddhartha’s (Buddha) First Noble Truth is “Life is Suffering.” Some would say suffering is caused by our worldview or paradigm. If that is true, then any change or “shift” in our experience would require us to re-examine that narrative to see if we might improve our beliefs, attitudes and values in search of a healthier approach to life. In our attempts to do this in the past, we have too often stopped short of a viable transcendent vision; we were not in touch with our inner wisdom, our “common sense.”
In January 1776 the belief in independence for the British colonies in North America was a radical and rare idea. “There was no evidence of an area of agreement among the 13 separate governments and among the hundreds of conflicting American interests that was broad enough and firm enough to support an effective common government.”[i] And yet many of the colonists were able to make a surprising shift in their worldview which would take them in an entirely different direction than they had been going. Why?
With his pamphlet Common Sense, published in January 1776, Thomas Paine proved that he was the quintessential iconoclast who saw any compromise with the British Crown as submitting to a type of slavery. “The verbal surface of the pamphlet is heated, and it burned into the consciousness of contemporaries because below it was the flaming conviction, not simply that England was corrupt and that America should declare its independence, but that the whole of organized society and government was stupid and cruel and that it survived only because the atrocities it systematically imposed on humanity had been papered over with a veneer of mythology and superstition that numbed the mind and kept people from rising against the evils that oppressed them.”[ii]
Paine clearly understood human nature better than his fellow revolutionaries, although he didn’t foresee the self-destructive behavior that would be created by the worldview Americans ended up choosing. In 1776, the American colonists were about to create a nation that they believed would give them more freedom. Freedom from what? Was King George III the source of “the evils that oppressed them” or was the source of their suffering much closer to home, that of choosing a personal worldview and thereby an identity which created its own “mythology and superstition?”
For America to transcend today’s “mythology and superstition” will require a more profound and radical story than even Tomas Paine could have imagined. As we cope with the coronavirus pandemic (2020), we must come to the realization that “homo sapiens” are the new tyrant engaged in self-affliction. In order to escape disaster, we must redefine our relationship to all of Creation, including animals. “Zoonoses [diseases transmitted from animals to humans] reveal environmental stewardship is not simply related to public health; in many cases, they are the same. ‘We need to stop looking at people in a vacuum,’ say Jonathan Epstein, a disease ecologist and vice president for science and outreach at the nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance. ‘Everything we do to disrupt natural systems, to manipulate the environment around us, influences our own health. We haven’t thought about that carefully enough.’”[iii]
Perhaps Simple Reality can be America’s “Common Sense” treatise, leading us in the direction of a sustainable community wherein we take greater responsibility for creating truly authentic freedom from suffering.
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Supplemental Reading: Paradigm Shift, The ABC’s of Simple Reality, Vol 2
#47 Common Sense
[i] Bailyn, Bernard. “The Most Uncommon Pamphlet of the Revolution: Common Sense.” American Heritage. December 1973, p. 37.
[ii] Ibid., p. 92.
[iii] Jabr, Ferris. “Out of the Wild.” The New York Times Magazine. June 21, 2020, p. 35.
