The Silent Guest, 12th Day of Spring, 526 M.E. (Aldebaran): As I said yesterday, war is by definition a failure and nothing good comes from it, despite mankind's enthusiasm for the activity. 

During the first days of the Stable Genius' war on Iran, 167 people were killed when a missile struck a girls’ school in Iran , apparently because the Pentagon was using outdated targeting data. One of Iran's hundreds of counterattack missiles hit a makeshift command center in Kuwait, killing six US troops and wounding dozens more. None of those tragic deaths needed to or should have happened.

Due to a lack of foresight and planning, tens of thousands of US citizens were stranded in the region as the State Department tried to figure out a way to evacuate them. Due to a lack of foresight and planning, the U.S. has allowed Iran to effectively shut the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20% of the world's oil passes. 

The air strikes that killed the Ayatollah also killed many of the successors favored by the Stable Genius. In his first address regarding the war, the Stable Genius told the Iranian people to “take over your government” although no viable opposition party yet exists and with no indication of how that takeover should be done. 

The first six days of the war alone reportedly cost $11.3B, and it isn’t clear if that figure includes the cost of the military buildup or the cost of our missile defense. The ultimate toll of Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz on the world economy remains to be seen. 

I could gloat over these failures of my country, but I don't want to see us fail in this effort. I don't want the U.S. to lose this war. I want the the U.S. to end this war - just stop it, right now. The Stable Genius, not content in just destroying the U.S., is harming the world order in miscalculations and mistakes that will be felt for decades. It's already too late to stop the harm now, but we can still stop now before the harm gets even worse. 

Stop the war. Now.

 

Fourth Ocean, 11th Day of Spring, 526 M.E. (Helios): Fourth ocean of the year 526, first ocean of this spring. 

So how are you enjoying the war? War is never the answer - war is usually what happens when all other options are exhausted. War is by definition a sign of failure - failure of imagination, failure of leadership, failure of diplomacy. 

I had to add the word "usually" to the paragraph above, because the Stable Genius apparently started bombing Iran with no clear purpose or goal in mind - there was no impasse reached, no breakdown in communication or negotiation, no intolerable threshold crossed. Some say it was done as a distraction from the most recent, shocking revelations in the Epstein files. Some say it was a payback to the Saudis and Arab states for their generosity and contributions to the Short-Fingered Vulgarians' various financial enterprises. Some say it was because Israel told him to and the SG/SFV thought he was supposed to do whatever Bibi tells him. 

Some simply admit they, and the Stable Genius, don't know.

Now the Iranians are threatening shipping traffic in the Strait of Hormuz with sea mines and drone attacks in the most predictable response to being bombed one can imagine. Last year, the Iranian Parliament voted to shut the strait when the Stable Genius first bombed Iran, so it doesn't exactly take supernatural abilities of prognostication to foresee the the threat to the strait this time around. 

Any military commander worth their salt would know to secure the Persian Gulf first before commencing a war on Iran.  Any teenager with video game experience would have know to secure the Gulf first. But the Short-Fingered Vulgarian and his black-out drunk Secretary of Defense like to cosplay as tough-guy warriors and went straight to the "fun" part - bombing missions - and now literally the whole world is quite literally paying the price for their stupidity and recklessness as global oil costs skyrocket.

People on social media are saying the Stable Genius will be remembered as the worst president in American history. I don't believe that. I think the Stable Genius will be remembered as the worst leader in world history.

 

Day of the Rains, 10th of Spring, 526 M.E. (Electra): To be sure, Dogen arrived at the conclusion that grass and trees are conscious not from a deep botanical study of arboreal structure and functions or from reading philosophical essays by David Chalmers and Thomas Nagel.    

To Dogen, everything is everything. To Dogen, everything was mind and since everything was mind, everything has the same substance and nature as everything else. The self is mind, mountains and rivers are mind, grasses, trees, and even land are mind. And because they are mind, they are living beings. "The sun, the moon, and the stars are mind itself. Because they are mind, they are living beings and they have Buddha Nature."

When we look at the world, we see self and others, we see mind, we see man and nature, mountains and valleys, life and death, and the conscious and the insentient. But when all is mind, there is no self and others, no man and nature, no mountains and valleys, no life and death, and no consciousness or unconsciousness. But because it is like this, there is self and others, man and nature, mountains and valleys, life and death, and the conscious and the insentient. Still, sunny days, while adored, cloud over and rain arrives when it's least welcome.

It was a surprisingly sunny and warm 82° outside today. I walked a 5.6-mile Monroe and as I always do, I stopped and laid my hand on my favorite tree on my route, a spectacular Pennsylvania ash. There's a spot on its trunk where its braided bark is worn down, and every time I pass it, I put my hand for a minute or so on that exact spot. Every single time. The spot almost perfectly matches the size and shape of my hand, if I hold my thumb and index finger apart and the other three fingers together. 

I doubt the tree is aware of my presence or my touching it, but I become aware of the tree, more than I would by simply walking past. Laying hands on that one particular tree has become a part of my routine, and my walks wouldn't feel the same without it. My routines become my rituals and my rituals begin to feel sacred.       

Day of Mourning, 9th of Spring, 526 M.E. (Deneb): 

Students of the Way, the reason you do not attain enlightenment is because you hold onto your old views. Without knowing who taught you, you think that mind is the function of your brain – thought and discrimination. When I tell you that mind is grass and trees, you do not believe it. . .  When it is said that mind is grass and trees, you should understand that grass and trees are mind. (from Shobogenzo Zuimonki, Book 4, Chapter 7).

I've started reading Michael Pollan's A World Appears, his new (2026) book on the subject of consciousness.  Talk about up my alley - my personal area of dharma research has long been samskara (mental models or schema), consciousness, and the self, and the introduction, at least, of Pollan's book reads like a review of themes I've been discussing here since at least 2007, when I first mentioned philosopher David Chalmers and the "hard problem" of consciousness, Thomas Nagel's "what's it like to be a bat?" thought experiment, and Giulio Tononi's ideas about neural connectiveness.  

Pollan contends that consciousness extends beyond humans and even brains, and that even plants may be conscious in their own way (Dogen's mind of grass and trees). He notes that people most likely to ascribe consciousness to non-sentient things such as plants are those who've tried psychedelics and those who practice meditation. I was an enthusiastic consumer of psychedelics for a period in my life (roughly 1971 to 1976), and I've been a regular practitioner of Zen meditation for the past 26 years, so according to Pollan, I'm likely to recognize consciousness far beyond the grey human matter.     

His prediction is correct, at least as far as this one-man sample set is concerned. You will never convince me that my cat, Eliot, doesn't have consciousness - an interior experience and a sense of self identity. And if my cat is conscious, then so too are dogs ("Does a dog have Buddha-nature?") and many other organisms - consciousness likely extends way beyond mammals and charismatic megafauna, in my opinion. 

Trees and other plants obviously lack brains and nervous systems and do not experience pain or possess emotions like animals. However, evidence suggests they possess a form of plant sentience, allowing them to sense and interact with their environment and react accordingly. Roots act like decentralized "mini-brains," sensing water, nutrients, and obstacles to navigate the soil. 

Richard Powers’ novel The Overstory portrays trees as deeply conscious, social, and intelligent beings, rather than mere inanimate objects. Through his fictional characters, Powers provides evidence that trees communicate, share resources, learn, and form complex, sentient networks that constitute a form of forest-level awareness. "If you link enough trees together," Powers claims, "a forest grows aware." Some have described forests as a collective, intelligent superorganism.  

Physically, trees even sort of resemble neurons, and while a single neuron doesn't possess consciousness, a network of neurons, e.g., a brain, can, just as a single tree might or might not be conscious, but a network of trees, e.g., a forest, may. An aspen forest in Utah has recently been recognized to actually consist of a single organism - a massive, 106-acre colony of over 40,000 genetically identical trees sharing a single root system. Considered one of the world's largest, heaviest, and oldest organisms at roughly 13 million pounds and thousands of years old, it is a single, connected entity.

Trees can use chemical, electrical, and hormonal signals to warn neighbors of danger, such as insect attacks, and share nutrients and communicate through underground fungal networks, often described as "fungal synapses" or humorously as the "wood-wide web." They can recognize their own species and even assist kin, indicating a sophisticated level of interaction constituting a form of intelligence.

Ethically, it's probably better to assume most all living things possess consciousness and govern oneself accordingly under that assumption, than to assume the opposite and inflict suffering where it could otherwise be avoided. 

Thirteenth-Century Zen Master Dogen recognized the mind of grass and trees. Powers and Pollan make a strong case for plant consciousness. This contemplative urban monk with former psychedelic experience does not disagree.

 

The High Winds, 8th Day of Spring, 526 M.E. (Castor): Not to sound like Debbie Downer, but the overdrawn, polluted, fragmented, and invaded freshwater ecosystems across the country are in crisis. Marine and terrestrial ecosystems are also degraded, with reduced biodiversity. An estimated 34 percent of our country's plant species and 40 percent of its animal species are at risk of extinction. Human pressures are diminishing the clean water, food, health, livelihoods, and protection from storms and fire that healthy natural systems can provide.  

So the National Nature Assessment was set to say in a first-of-its-kind assessment of the health of nature in the United States. The assessment had started on Earth Day, 2022, when President Biden signed an executive order authorizing the report, but in January 2025, weeks away from completion of a first full draft of the assessment, the Stable Genius disbanded the effort. However, the researchers went ahead and completed it on their own and released a 868-page draft last week as the Nature Record, a new name to reflect a new, independent effort. 

The draft will be reviewed by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, the same organization that would have reviewed the report had it remained under the auspices of the federal government.

The assessment was completed by about 125 researchers who were not federal employees, mostly working on a voluntary basis. The report primarily synthesizes existing research, so its individual findings are not new but rather a scientific consensus by which policymakers and the public can make informed decisions.

In addition to canceling the nature report, the Stable Genius has also taken aim at national climate assessments, which are mandated by Congress and have been published since 2000. He dismissed the authors and instead released a separate report by the Department of Energy that downplayed the threat of climate change. Scientists condemned that report, and in January, a judge ruled that the way the it had been commissioned by the government had violated the law.

Not reporting problems doesn't make them go away. If anything, willful ignorance of problems only allows them to fester and get worse. But I'm getting the distinct impression that the Stable Genius isn't interested in solving problems.

 

Day of the Roots, 7th of Spring, 526 M.E. (Betelgeuse): I propose that somewhere in a remote section of North Carolina's Blue Ridge Mountains, there is a colony of ants. Some of the ants claim the existence of highly intelligent beings, "humans" they call them, from somewhere outside of their nest, maybe even from beyond the mountains, but they have no proof. 

"If humans exist," the skeptical ants ask, "Why haven't they come visit our colony?" Surely, they reason, these intelligent humans would be curious about the customs and mores of the colony and would want to communicate with the ants. The believers counter that the humans would obviously want to do all that and more, but given the colony's territorial nature and the way they attacked the wasp that tried to visit, the humans are either afraid or intimidated to appear.

That's how I feel about both UFO conspiracy theorists and the Fermi paradox skeptics. The Fermi paradox is the contradiction between the high probability of the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations, based on the billions of stars and planets in the universe, and the lack of evidence or contact with any such civilizations. 

I believe that given the countless, near-infinite number of stars and planets in the universe, there is lfe out there somewhere on some planet other than Earth. Statistically, if the right combination of amino acids started life here, it must also have happened sometime, somewhere else.  The vast majority of planets are not suitable for organic life as we know it, but there are probably millions (billions?) of other planets where the spark could have started. On some subset of those planets, intelligent life may have evolved, and a subset of those planets may have developed life far more intelligent than us.

But here's the thing - if a species was so vastly more intelligent than us that they managed to figure a way to overcome the space/time challenges of traveling millions of light years, have mastered quantum physics to the point that they can harness relativity to their own purposes, what interest would they have in this ant colony Earth? We're no more capable of learning what they could have to offer than those ants in North Carolina are of translating Shakespeare form English to Chinese, or solving quadratic equations. 

Look, I'm a compassionate person and I also have a tendency to anthropomorphize animals, but if I somehow realized that the North Carolina ants were about to engage in a vicious territorial war with an adjacent colony, a war that would end badly for both, my reaction still wouldn't be to attempt to communicate with the ants and intervene in the war. No, I'd think, "Oh, so that's what they do," and that would be that. So why do we think super-intelligent extraterrestrials would want to get involved with us and stop a potential nuclear war, even if it were disastrous to this planet?

I bring all this up because today The Guardian reported that Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) institute is suggesting that space "weather" may be making radio signals from aliens hard to detect. Stellar activity, such as solar storms and plasma turbulence from a star near “a transmitting planet,” can scramble such transmissions, potentially explaining the radio silence observed in SETI's searches.

“Plasma density fluctuations in stellar winds, as well as occasional eruptive events such as coronal mass ejections, can distort radio waves near their point of origin, effectively ‘smearing’ the signal’s frequency and reducing the peak strength that search pipelines rely on,” according to a SETI press release.

They are not incorrect about those challenges, although I do wonder why they're only realizing the problem now. But I disagree with any assumption that extraterrestrial intelligence has any intention on communicating with us. Especially that they're trying to but can't get through because of those pesky plasma fluctuations. 

For all that we know (and we don't know very much), extraterrestrials have already observed us, have garnered all of the data and information they want or need, and have moved on. They may even still be here, occupying some extra-dimensional space right here in our midst. 

How would we know?

 

Day of the Fronds, 6th of Spring, 526 M.E. (Aldebaran): Oh, fun! There's another new climate-change study out! This one, as reported by the NY Times, found that previous studies of sea-level rise have underestimated just how high the water actually already is. It turns out hundreds of millions of people worldwide are already living dangerously close to the rising ocean than previously estimated.

The study, published in the journal Nature, found that coastal sea levels are, on average, eight inches to a foot higher than many maps and models of the world’s coastlines indicate.  The discrepancies are most pronounced in Southeast Asia and Pacific nations, where coastal sea levels are up to several meters higher than commonly estimated.

The study concludes that scientists have often been working from the wrong starting point when calculating what land and populations might be affected in the future. In other words, they were underestimating where coastal sea levels already are. Of course, people who are exposed to tidal floods know exactly where the ocean is.  

The problem centers on a decades-old method that compares satellite-based measurements of land elevation to what scientists call the “geoid model,” which estimates average sea level based on the Earth’s gravitational field. This method, once considered state-of-the-art and commonly taught in graduate schools, doesn't take into account factors like currents, winds, and tides, which can also influence sea levels but are not included in the geoid model. Sea levels are most accurately estimated when all factors are considered and combined correctly.

Some 90 percent of the papers reviewed in the study relied only on the method of mapping sea levels using Earth’s gravitational field. Another 9 percent of the papers, most of which are relatively recent, did use both kinds of data, but failed to combine them correctly.

In general, the findings indicate that hundreds of millions more people — particularly in Vietnam, the Philippines, Indonesia, the Maldives, and other Southeast Asian and Pacific nations — are living closer to sea level than widely assumed by Western experts and policymakers. In other words, methods of studying sea-level rise that seemed to work relatively well for coastlines in Europe or the U.S. lead to bigger discrepancies in other parts of the world.

Day of the Lamb, 5th of Spring, 526 M.E. (Helios): Welcome to Spring. And with the new season, a welcome return of the Spring avatar, the Earth Mother. 

Speaking of Mother Earth, the World Meteorological Organization confirmed that the past three years have been the hottest three-year period on record. Greenhouse gas concentrations are hitting record-breaking levels even while the planet’s carbon sinks, the natural systems that remove CO₂ from the atmosphere, are becoming depleted. The CO₂-induced warming has also been compounded by a recent drop in sulfur pollution that had provided temporary relief. 

The extreme heat in recent years was due in part to natural fluctuations such as solar cycles, volcanic eruptions, and the El Niño weather pattern. A previous period of accelerated warming was the result of the strong El Niño of 1998. The relative slowdown in warming that followed was incorrectly interpreted as evidence of a pause in global warming. The question now is how much of the current increased temperatures are the result of unforced variability (i.e., natural climate cycles).or forced responses (i.e., anthropogenic climate change).  

A recent study excluded the effect of natural factors behind the latest temperatures by applying a noise-reduction method to filter out the estimated effect of nonhuman factors in five major datasets of the Earth’s temperature. The study found that even without taking natural causes into account, global warming accelerated from a steady rate of less than 0.2° C per decade between 1970 and 2015 to about 0.35° per decade over the past 10 years. The rate is the highest since methodical measurements of the Earth’s temperature began in 1880. 

If the warming rate of the past 10 years continues, it would lead to a long-term exceedance of the 1.5° C limit of the Paris agreement within the next five years. One of the datasets, supplied by the EU’s Copernicus service, indicated the world will cross the 1.5° threshold this year if the rate of warming does not slow. Analysis of the other four datasets showed a breach in 2028 or 2029.

Global heating of 1.5-2° C may be enough to trigger near-apocalyptic “tipping points,” with the chances of catastrophe increasing at higher levels of warming. In the short-term, climate change will make heat waves hotter and allow storms to unleash more rain.

 

Back of the Driver's Neck, 4th Day of Spring, 526 M.E. (Electra): I'm 100% convinced no one would have noticed, but I made some more changes to my New Revised Universal Solar Calendar. For the record, I called yesterday the 64th day of Childwinter, and although Childwinter had 73 days, I'm calling today the 4th of Spring. 

The weather's springlike outside today. I walked an 8.4-mile Van Buren this afternoon in 78° weather wearing a t-shirt and shorts. Somewhere up in doggie heaven, Cricket is wagging his tail because the Stable Genius fired Kristi Noem today. And just about everybody is realizing that the U.S. war in Iran is purposeless with no clear goals or exit strategy. But those aren't the reasons I modified the calendar.

Following the Discordian calendar, the New Revised USC divided the year into five seasons instead of 12 months. But there are 366 days in a full year (what you would call a "leap year") and 366 isn't evenly divisible by five, so the seasons didn't all have the same number of days. 

My problem with the 12-month Julian calendar was that every year started and ended on a different day of the week. Holidays and celebrations tied to a specific day of a month would fall on different weekdays each year and even the "fourth Monday" holidays would fall on different days of the month (and don't even get me started on Easter). But a calendar of 366 days divided into 61 six-day weeks always begins on the first day of the week and always ends on the last. In the USC, at least the earlier version, Independence Day, your July 4, the 186th day of a leap year, would always fall on the fifth day of a six-day week, and would always be the 40th day of Summer. 

But a few things about my calendar still bugged me. There was that extra, "rounding error" day in Autumn, and it also felt that even the other 73-day seasons were still too long. Also, "Autumn" began too early (August 7), at least here in Georgia, as did the end-of-year winter season (October 20).

So instead of five Discordian seasons, I've revised the calendar to evenly divide the year into six 61-day seasons. I've kept Angus MacLise's terms "Childwinter" and "Hagwinter" for the seasons at the beginning and end of the year, as well as the names "Spring" and "Autumn." But in my Newest Revised USC, there are now two separate 61-day summer seasons, Midsommar, roughly equivalent to May and June and which contains the summer equinox, and Hundstage, German for "Dog Days," roughly equivalent to July and August. Yes, I took "Midsommar" from the movie (and what of it?) and the German "Hundstage" seemed to fit better with the Swedish name before it than actually calling it Dog Days. 

So the year is now evenly divided into 61 six-day weeks, and into the six 61-day seasons of Childwinter, Spring, Midsommar, Hundstage, Autumn, and Hagwinter.

Old Angus MacLise gave each day of the year its own poetic name (today's is "Back of the Driver's Neck," which may not sound particularly poetic isolated like that but it works in context, trust me) and I generally kept the names in the order he assigned them. But I noticed that there were six groups of names randomly scattered throughout the year where the names were each repeated five times (e.g., Day of the Zenith, Second Day of the Zenith, and so on to Fifth Day of the Zenith), so I moved some around so each of the six seasons had one "theme" week. 

MacLise also had some paired but not sequential names, such as "Day of Quest" and "Last Day of Quest," scattered throughout the year. I moved those pairs to the first and last days of my seasons, so that.Spring began three days ago with "Day of the Western Isles" and will end after 61 days with "Last Day of the Western Isles." Midsommar begins with "Establishment of the Dreamweapon" and ends with "Launching of the Dreamweapon." Hundstage starts with "Dog Days Begin" and concludes with "Dog Days End" (another reason that I call the season Hundstage and not Dog Days is to avoid confusion between those two specific days and the larger season). "First Day of Quest" and "Last Day of Quest"  are the first and last days of Autumn. The two winter seasons both start and end with random names following MacLise's nomenclature.  

But as I said, I doubt anyone would notice and I suspect fewer care. But long story short, I was sick of winter and that weird albino Childwinter avatar, so we're now four days into Spring in my Newest Revised USC.

Welcome to Spring.

 

The One of Mind Inferno, 64th Day of Childwinter, 526 M.E. (Deneb): In retrospect, maybe the Stable Genius didn't deserve the FIFA Peace Prize. 

 

Haste of the Avenging Hound, 63rd Day of Childwinter, 526 M.E. (Castor): I see in the news that the Stable Genius is angry that the UK, France, Spain, Canada, Australia, and other allies are not supporting the U.S. in its Iran adventure. Our black-out drunk Secretary of Defense called out “so many of our traditional allies who wring their hands and clutch their pearls, hemming and hawing about the use of force." With diplomacy like that, how could they refuse to join in? 

FWIW, you don't get to bully your neighbors, threaten to annex them as the "51st state" or seize their territory, shove illegal and outrageous tariffs down their throats while accusing them of cheating on you, trash talk their leaders, threated to tear up decades-old alliances, and then turn around and expect them to come to your aid in an illegal war of choice that you started as a distraction from the nearly 4,000 times you're mentioned in the Epstein files.

It's well documented that the Stable Genius watches a lot of Fox News on a daily basis, apparently believing every word they speak. For decades, they've been calling for military strikes on Iran. Last year, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, and Brian Kilmeade pleaded with the Stable Genius to bomb Iran and when he finally did, they lavished praise on him, with Hannity saying the bombing would “go down in history as one of the great military victories.”

Could the encouragement by Fox News be the reason the Stable  Genius started this war? Or did it  have something to do with the increasing heat over the Epstein files? Or was it a tantrum over the Supreme Court striking down his tariffs? Or was he responding to pressure from Netanyahu or bribery from Bone-Saw Arabia? Or all of the above?

Friendly reminder that Fox News, CNN, CBS, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the NY Post are all owned and controlled by billionaire allies of the Stable Genius. They also control Facebook, Instagram, Twitter (X), TikTok, and more. They control the AI that drives the algorithms that feed your content. With info sources like that, is it any wonder we all find this war a little bewildering and confusing?     

The stated reasons for the war keep changing. First it was to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons and then it was for regime change. Our b.o.d. DoD secretary said it was revenge for U.S. citizens killed by Iran and its proxies over the year. The Stable Genius, who's mind and worldview seems to have stalled in the 1980s, has even mentioned the 1979 takeover of the U.S. embassy in Tehran and the American hostages (who were released over 40 years ago).

Whatever the reason, our so-called leadership seems to have forgotten that the removal of Hussein in Iraq only resulted in long-term instability, sectarian violence, insurgencies, and a fragmented, often corrupt political system still struggling with democracy. 

The 20-year intervention in Afghanistan ended in failure, despite over 2,400 American deaths and  $90 billion spent in security and nation-building. The U.S. was not able to establish a stable, self-sustaining Afghan government, resulting in the Taliban’s swiftly regaining control following the U.S. withdrawal. 

Removal of Gaddafi from Libya only created a failed state characterized by prolonged chaos, civil war, and a descent into fragmentation with rival governments in the east and west, militia proliferation, and foreign interference. 

The aftermath of Syria saw a mixture of jubilation over the end of five decades of Assad's brutal rule along with serious sectarian rivalry, a major realignment of regional power with Turkey, Qatar, and the US holding increased influence, and a nation still in considerable  flux.

War is never the answer and is always a symptom of other failures. War is what happens when other things don't work. The world is broken, the Middle East is broke, the U.S. is broken, and our leadership is broken. The center does not hold, and things are falling apart.

 

The Glass Limbo, 62nd Day of Childwiner, 526 M.E. (Betelgeuse): "Stop the war on the other side of the river!”

Were he alive today, I think the Buddha would be disappointed but not surprised at the latest war going on in Iran. He would have been disappointed but not surprised by any war - now, previously, or in the future. During his own time, there were wars between the feudal states of India, and he lived to see his own tribe, the Shakyas, exterminated by the neighboring kingdom of Magadha. 

To put it simply, the Buddha did not consider man to be an inherently warlike creature. He considered human nature to be naturally kind, generous, and empathic. But greed, hatred, and delusion arise out of ignorance of our natural state, clouding our understanding of our true nature and resulting in conflict and war - war between nation-states, war between men and women, war between man and nature. The solution is neither winner-takes-all nor split-the-spoils in a negotiated treaty, but to awaken to our true generous and peaceful nature.

"Stop the war on the other side of the river" is a very short koan in the Japanese Zen tradition. "The other side of the river" sounds like "the other shore," the allegorical location which one attempts to attain in spiritual practice (before realizing, of course, that we're already there). As an English interpretation of the dhāraṇī at the end of the Heart Sutra says, 

Gone, gone, gone to the other shore

To beyond the other shore,

Having never left.

Taken that way, "stop the war on the other side of the river!” could mean to stop the war over on the unrealized shore of ignorance. It could also mean to stop the struggle to attain the other shore.

I think the meaning is more subtle than that. How can one stop a war "on the other side," be it the other side of a river? Or the other side of the world? Or the other side of one's political or religious opinions? I can't teleport over to Iraq, and even if I could, I don't think popping up and saying "Stop it!" would make any difference.

The way to "stop the war on the other side of the river" is to abandon the idea of "the other side," which is to abandon the idea of a barrier separating the sides. There's a war "on the other side of the river" only because we divide ourselves by the river, or by an ocean, or a continent, or by political beliefs, or by ethnic differences. Separation and division leads to distrust and resentment, which leads to violence and war. 

"The monks of the East and West Halls were arguing about a cat," a different koan begins, and of course they were arguing - they already differentiated themselves as "East Hall" and "West Hall." "Stop the war in the West Hall," the monks of the East Hall were saying, while the monks of the West Hall were saying, "Stop the war in the East Hall."

The Buddha would have us forget the geopolitical and socioeconomic differences and intimately recognize each other as fellow sentient humans. We all were once children who only wanted to please our parents, we all want to keep our families safe and fed, and we all want to feel secure and be free to pursue meaning in our brief lives. But the three poisons - greed, hate, and delusion - make us mistrust each other, and we retreat into territorial positions and find ourselves in conflict with each other. 

"Stop the war on the other side of the river" mean to forget the river, to drop the idea of "the other side." To stop the war in Iraq, we need to drop the distinctions separating us from each other and awaken to our common nature. Our common nature includes you and I, self and other, and everyone needs to recognize our commonality - Americans and Iranians, the Stable Genius and the current Ayatollah (whoever that may be), even the Secretary of Defense and the Supreme Commander of the Republican National Guard. 

We're all far more alike than different, but you and I can't awaken others and all we can do individually is let go of our own greed, hate, and delusion, and then with an awakened mind, practice empathy and demonstrate loving kindness to all. One person at a time, each by their own effort. 

This plan won't end the war overnight - by my estimate, it would take about a thousand years, but that's all the more reason to start right now rather than give up in despair.