Make Me One with Everything

Although we were only a few years apart in age and had both grown up in left-leaning, Jewish families and although Bernie’s language often resonated deeply, occasionally his words struck a discordant note.  “Bearing Witness to the System.” “System” seems to be the wrong word for Bernie to choose. Perhaps, having spent so much of the 60’s and 70’s immersed in Zen practice, he’d missed so much.

I knew about the system. I thought we all did. In the summer of ’68, on my first trip to Europe, early in my NYU doctoral program, I magically was befriended by fellow sociology students from the Sorbonne. Student rebellion was everywhere. The previous winter my new friends had fought with the gendarmes on the streets of Paris, the French police wielding their cloaks, hems loaded with grapeshot, as clubs. The students fought back, appropriating the chains which had been ubiquitous on street corners, steering pedestrians into crosswalks. My friends showed me. There were no longer any chains.

We had been advised to bring American political buttons as gifts. I brought a bunch of Gene McCarthy campaign buttons. Gene was carrying the anti-war banner. The war which would occur at the Democratics convention between protestors and the Chicago police was still a month away. Only a month earlier, Bobby Kennedy had been assassinated. I offered McCarthy buttons to my French sociologists. They were pleased. One asked, “But he’s part of the system?” I was embarrassed to admit it.

The system was the enemy. The system was the other. My “system” was not what Bernie had in mind. Bernie talked more often of “bearing witness to the wholeness of life” or to “the oneness of life.” Pogo had it right. From his name, Pogo might be an old Chinese Zen master, but he was a Walt Kelly cartoon character. Pogo once, in a Zen moment, declared “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” That was Bernie’s teaching. It was the teaching of Auschwitz. We are not separate from the system. Sitting zazen on the tracks at Birkenau, gentle snow falling, the empty guard tower looking down, I saw. Born a few years earlier, I could have been on my way to the gas chamber. Born in the same year to different parents, I could have been the guard in the tower.

The experience of the oneness of life is often one of ecstasy. I am one with the breeze. I am one with the sunshine and the grass, with the waves and the moon. Wonderful. But there is more to life than sunshine and grass, than waves and breeze and the moon. There is more even than the victims of violence. There are also the perpetrators of violence.

Bernie liked the joke about the Zen student who goes into the diner and asks the counterman for a hot dog, “Make me one with everything.” Everything. That’s the aspiration which Bernie is talking about when he talks of “bearing witness to the system.” Make me one with everything.