Responding to the Death of Osama bin Laden

As a non-American it is difficult to imagine how it must feel for Americans, but so far away my perspective is a global one and a particular one . Bin Laden himself was a powerful symbol and his demise was necessary, I can imagine, for a sense of closure for Americans who had felt the violence and fear and hatred and confusion and most of all for those whose lives have been forever impacted by terrible loss and trauma caused by the events of 9/11. I do not want in any way to minimize this.

To see this as a major step in the war against terror however, I feel is a mistake. The war against terror is a very telling name for the situation the world is in at the moment. Is it not through the rule of fear that we have arrived where we are at this moment in history?  Fear drives greed, drives unceasing expansion, drives the destruction of cultures, of ecology and ultimately the Earth Herself. Once it was the persecution of the early Christians,then it was the Romans , then it was the  Christian Crusaders doing the persecuting.......on and on through our violent, testosterone and fear driven history as consciousness slowly and unevenly evolved.

Action produces reaction and this is a continuous process, violence begetting violence until enough people reach a stage of saying, "Yes, I am capable of the most terrible violence against another living organism. Yes, I use violence, both directly and indirectly in order to live. I am also capable of great and transcendent love. The body that kills a cow to eat also nurtures a tiny kitten or a new baby with great tenderness. I am choosing right now to give all my energies to the latter while acknowledging the former." At that point actions of tenderness and compassion, of passionately  loving commitment will be able to have the reaction of  ever greater degrees of these which will produce an end to the war on terror in all its forms and the Earth and its inhabitants will be re-born to a totally new paradigm. Try making a tree diagram with Fear on the left side of a piece of paper and Love on the right and make a branch for each phenomenon that arises out of each. It is a wonderfully informative exercise.

 Thank you for opening  very complex, deep issue - Iceberg.

After much delibiration I decided to comment on few of your comments.

I found very helpful in my practice to use facts rather then talk about ideas. To assist people in working with their emotions by understanding bigger picture and having knowledge of more facts, helped transform the emotion into strenght and wisdom.

The human heart has no contradictions or paradoxes, it is all inclusive. But human mind does.

Patriot theme has been rather strong in your text and in this worlds culture, meaning and justifing violence and murder. To me patriot is someone who respects,  honours and builds their culture and the world - not destroys it.

Huge emphasis on Bin Laden as a '21st century boogy man', 'predominant face of evil', 'public enemy', attacks and destroys everything American etc....sounds like Fox news. Its rather silly perpetuated fantasy description of a omnipotent, crazy bearded man in Afgan mountains or Pakistan. Perhaps we should ask who and why has created such a narrative for the US and the world and used vast amounts of our money to persue this idea. Rather then dealing with cardiovascular desease(no1 killer), energy/environment criminaly perpetuating fiasco, world poverty, spiritual ignorance,  etc.....

I am not sure that(as you said)he has provoked massive military response that caused bankrupcy of US economy! Lets not forget corupt investment banks and corupt corportions and what US policy makers decided is in the best interest of American people! Last month there was a bonus of $500million given to US computer executive?!Fact!

Bin Laden attacks economic infrastructure that  'supports' western world. If you accept what you've been fed that is true. But some would say that Wall street and Pentagon are 2 parasitic organisations that casue famine and death to Americans and the rest of the world. The real infrastructure makers and supporters might be your baker, butcher, farmer, teacher, builder etc....the working man who make and create things.

Military might of American empire......Fox and other propaganda media again....how integral is this???

American empire and might was created by founding fathers, hard and intelligent working americans, scientists, artists and others who showed the rest of the world that you can live and work in freedom and achieve anything.....military fluorished after II world war...and has been forced onto world population from Hollywood and media in recent decades.

American mythology, american culture, american way of life, american subconscius....important points of reference for american identity and self image. This is a very rich teritorry and it shouldn't be simplyfied and reduced to private interests of the few and then accepted as given. Not really sure about Bin Ladens role in it, except subconscius. And after all, we don't really know the real truth about any of  this.....

Personally I was appauled by president Obamas attitude and language. Arrogant overconfidence and violence that he desplayed in his body language and words themselves was astonishing! Nobel Peace price winner bragging and being proud of the death of another human being, which murder he ordered, was rather sickening and shocking to me. His psychological manipulation and stimulation of our lower self, most vulnarable aspect of us rippled on the streats of US. If the example and the idol for the country and the world displays this kind of arrogance and violence,  what culture can we expect to have? Two wrong deeds don't make one right! He used Martin Luther Kings words often in his presidential campagn, but clearly he never understood a word....... 

Thanks for the post Corey. 

I like most of what you wrote here, but I dont see Compassion and violence as a valid paradox that needs to be integrated. Compassion and Hatred maybe.  I own my hatred, I own my agression... but I am not violent and don't rejoice in any act of violence. Most of the non-dual teachers I respect don't condone violence in any form either. I realize this view is not necessarily integral, but it IS the view taught by people like MLK, Gandhi, Desmond Tutu, and probably the Buddha and Jesus. 

I believe I can stand in a place of acceptance and understanding of people's reactions to this news... my own feelings and reactions are somewhat muted because I never placed Osama in the category of 'Enemy'.

I feel mostly sadness and worry, not at his death specifically, but at the lust for justice in both the Arab world and in the US.

Remember how some people in arab nations celebrated after 9/11? We were appalled that people could rejoice at our loss. But to a group of people who hate american foreign policy, 9/11 was an act of justice, of leveling the playing field.

In my mind, the word justice as its being used in both these situations has the shadow of revenged embedded into it. Justice is not Just if its coming from a place of hatred. When I contemplate, the two wars and trillions of dollars we have spent to kill this man and suppress his terrorist network I feel grief and sadness... and a twinge of hope that a 10 year war might be over.

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Jason Digges Video Designer

Thank you for this thoughtful message.

I find it very uncomfortable seeing the celebrations at the death of this man.

I am glad he is no longer at large. And in an alternate level of consciousness I am sure he is reaping his just rewards.

But how does the bandying of photos of his bloodied face and dancing in the streets and waving of flags differ from the celebrations that were broadcast from Iraq as they celebrated the twin towers?

It cannot bring back the lives of the innocent he killed. His death may bring closure but I feel the public elation at death can never be higher level thinking can it? Surely it is diminishing us?

 Was it really Osama?

Press TV Video

What happened is what happened. And we all have an opinion and a story about what happened.

But notice how we all our using our language. Pretty much our language is at the level of comments and explainations. Nothing wrong with using language at that level, just nothing new as a possibility comes about when using language at that level. Just some agreement and some disagreement.

Sure, I have some opinions about what happened , but at the level of opinion nothing really gets done, or alters the course of life.

I declare my life and my languge is being used by the future and not by what happened, which is more about the past. I learn from the past and I create from the future .

OBL is from the past. He played his part and he got our attention via destructive actions. And most of us watch the news and its mostly filled with murders, crime, and accidents. Where we place our attention seems to be at a low level of development and we wonder why the world turns the way it does.

Could it be the great visionaries are really just ordinary people who simple choose to use their attention, and language on events , and possibilities that have not happened ,and they simple limit how much they place their attenion on what has happened.

Reading Corey's thoughtful comments and following the press, I am also riddled with conflicting feelings. Is it right to kill a ghastly killer - that old ethical question, to which I have no answer.

The personal aspect and the aspect of revenge seems to be the topic the press is happy with. Swiss newspapers today wondered whether it was right for Obama to annouce that Osama was dead, or whether that was giving the "bad guy" a greater importance than is his due. As if it were a question of personal accounts being settled. But there is a long story behind 9/11, and it will not end with Osama's death. It's the story of North vs. South, of our greed and unwillingness to distribute more evenly, of the poverty in the nations that sprout religious radicals.How many kids in Europe with the prospect of a job and a future would be willing to go to a training camp for killers and to blow themselves up at 18 or 21 to show the US that it's not invulnerable? 0%.

I would be relieved to hear messages like, we have some time now because that extraordinarily talented personality that held things together and organized the ones without hope is dead, and we will use that time to think and start to do something about the problems that are liekly to be the roots of martyrdom and violence. Just as I would be relived to read that the US will spend a fraction of the money - 10%? - that went into the war in Afghanistan into education of the poor there, including women. What a gesture of hope that would be.

Much as I like the sensitive processing of emotions and reactions, the big issue for me is what started the Iraq war:  911.

Or rather, your leaders deciding that the way to respond to 911 was to bomb somebody.

I for one am still waiting for the explanation as to why Iraq was the correct target for 911.

They found Bin Laden in Pakistan -- wow, who'd have imagined -- that's only slightly more surprising that if they'd found him in Boulder. /sarc

As Integralists I'm sure we are capable of processing the most sophisticated and networked reasoning as to why the best thinkers of your political leadership understood Iraq as their target.

I mean, they must have had some reason for picking Iraq.  Serious and highly capable minds made that decision.  

What was their reasoning? 

One point Jeff Salzman and David Riordan made in their dialogue is that when violence is used by the lower stages, it promotes a cycle of violence, but when used by a higher stage on a lower stage, it stops violence. 

Makes me think of the police: their function isn't to cause violence, but when there is violence they have to do what's necessary to stop it. [1]

Or the way a stab victim is patched up at the hospital using knives and invasive bloody procedures. 

Clean-ups are very messy but the goal, for orange level power, is usually to make good with the minimum amount of pain.

So we may over-quote the Dalai Lama when he says,

"I believe violence will only increase the cycle of violence."  

If that was true, really true, it would be a positive feedback system and the whole world would have spiralled into hell 25,000 years ago. 

Because if violence simply promotes more violence, then there's always going to be more and more and more violence, and we'd have all killed each other already. 

So violence can be used to stop and make safe. 

[1] For sci-fi fans, this principle was stated by John Sheridan in B5, quoting his father:

"Never start a fight; but always finish it."

 I cannot say I found this article very helpful. The suffering experienced by the author in processing his emotions simply does not compare to the levels of suffering of those who face the bullets and bombs. For non-Americans it is perhaps easy to dismiss what Americans feel. Yet being brought up to believe (yes I am sorry but this is true) that one is somehow superior to people of other nations is something which Americans who strive towards an integrated vision simply HAVE to acknowledge as large part of their conditioning.

As a white South African growing up in apartheid South Africa I was absolutely and unquestionably conditioned to feel that it was justified to have the privileges afforded to people of my skin color. As I became a teenager I certainly began to feel that something was very wrong, but it was only after I left the country for a year and returned that I started to see the nightmare (for most) for what it was. To strive toward a wholesome integral vision means to draw on one's own direct experience of life and thoroughly question the symbols and myths churned out by the government via the commercial media. Whoever has lived in the midst of war and experienced direct TERROR (such as those who experienced the bomb blasts that killed 80  in Pakistan two days ago on May 13th and already hardly being covered in the media - these are REAL breathing alive people for God's sake ) does not need the media to tell them what is happening in the world. They know.

When I left South Africa, despite being hugely anti-apartheid I was sick of being criticized by people from other countries simply because I was white, and hence guilty. At this level I can well understand how Americans are simply sick and tired of being scathingly criticized. Yet nevertheless their situation in no way compares to what it must be (and have been) like to live in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan through these wars. I am with Chomsky when he says that George Bush is responsible for far more violence, far more misery and suffering than Bin Laden when he chose, despite all other options given him, to go into Iraq with absolutely no regard for the wishes of those living there - all on the ticket of American nationalism. Yet Bush walks free and is treated as a hero.

This does NOT mean in ANY WAY that I am suggesting Bin Laden was not a man steeped in evil. It's just that if one does what an integralist should do and steps into the shoes of those living in countries so far from the safety of the United States, one would see what he (Chomsky) is driving at. The vast majority in Iraq and Afghanistan feel they have been invaded and would absolutely, given the choice, have not allowed America in. 

I am sorry but nationalism has no place for those seeking a true and honest integral vision which at the very least needs a human-centered rather than nationalist centered vision. To stop dangerous people such as Bin Laden is a must but all the chest-beating and celebrations are the opposite of a true spirituality. Indeed if we believe in Wilber's unity consciousness we are compelled to see that elements of what Osama Bin Laden represents are operating in ourselves. Wherever his soul is now, since we are all affected by each other, we need to wish it peace - so we can experience peace.