The Meditative Mind and Identifying Suffering

I began a consistent practice of thought clearing meditation in 2014. As my meditation practice became deeply seated, and the journey of dissolving the negative behavior patterns that I had adopted through my social conditioning was well underway, I spontaneously began looking into the causes of suffering that were affecting our domestic and global settings.

Art by: Jules Fair @jlz_f on Instagram     Website: jfpersepctive.ouniverse.com

Previously, I had not given much attention to US history other than what I was taught in my primary and secondary education classes; a history that claimed that the actions of our nation’s forefathers were always honorable and glorious, and the actions of others were despicable and cowardly. Being raised in the 60s and 70s and exposed to US mainstream media sources, it was obvious that US domestic and foreign policy had a heavy influence on the rest of the globe. This being the case, I sought the writings of independent journalists, noted historians, US policy commentators, psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, and the literary masters, past and present, to get a better understanding of the current scope of unnecessary human suffering and its root causes.  

Global Suffering

The information I retrieved was deeply concerning. I discovered that the country that I call home, the United States of America, was and still is, practicing the ancient dysfunctional act of conquest as a means to secure resources and concentrate wealth to a minute portion of its population.

Former State Department official William Blum, in his book Killing Hope, identifies one hundred and sixty-eight occasions between 1798 and 1945 that the US has intervened militarily in foreign countries. In the same text, Blum chronicles almost a half century of US military interventions in foreign affairs from 1945 to 1994, totaling fifty-five in that time frame. The US has significantly increased the number of interventions since the 1990s. The Congressional Research Service issued a report on March 8th of this year that was certified by the Library of Congress stating that there have been 251 interventions between 1991 and 2022.

Image retrieved from Ben Norton at Multipolarista.com

In the majority of cases the US pitted social, political, economic, and religious factions in foreign countries against each other to weaken the countries’ defenses so that the US could more easily exploit their resources and confiscate their wealth. Much of this is largely unknown to the US population. The true motives of the people who orchestrated these events is not printed in authorized history books. This is one of the root causes of unnecessary global and domestic suffering.  

I also discovered that due to the predatory and self-destructive form of economics that the US practices, which favors people competing (rather than cooperating) to obtain the primary necessities that sustain life for all, national and global income inequality has reached planetary devastating proportions. According to the recent Oxfam statistics presented in May of 2022, in a publication entitled, Profiting from pain, during the Covid- 19 pandemic, on average a new billionaire emerged every 30 hours. During a similar timespan, an average of every 33 hours, one million more people edged closer to extreme poverty. The World Bank defines extreme poverty as living on $1.90 per day.   

The sociologist Peter Phillips, in his book, Giants: The Global Power Elite, which was published in 2018, explains, “80% of the world’s people live on less than $10 per day, the poorest half of the global population live on less than $2.50 per day, and more than 1.3 billion people live on only $1.25 per day.” Phillips goes on to state that of the global population, “twenty-five thousand per day, more than 9 million people per year, die from starvation and malnutrition.” 3.1 million of those are children under the age of five. That’s one human life lost every 3.5 seconds. In the time it took me to write this sentence, another is gone. This is another one of the root causes of unnecessary global and domestic suffering.   

As the research continues, I have become convinced that, due to the problems the world faces today, we cannot afford to lose one person to starvation per day. This means that we need every bodymind healthy, available, and engaged, in developing new measures to address some of the greatest threats humanity has ever faced.

One of the many benefits of a consistent practice of meditation is coming to understand what each of us as individuals has control over. Ultimately, we are endowed with the ability to control ourselves. In a representative democratic society, we are afforded the right to control who gets elected to represent us in the government. This right is exercised through a legitimate voting process. There are times when people who are citizens of foreign countries commit horrendous civil rights violations beyond our borders. These violations are often condemned by our representatives in government, and by many in the citizenry who speak out publicly, as they should be. However, as citizens of the United States, we ultimately only have control over what our government does in our name. Trying to control, through coercive means, that which is beyond our internationally accepted reach only leads to unnecessary US-initiated suffering.

Domestic Suffering

Shifting the focus of these words to the domestic arena, who are we becoming as a nation? Are US citizens able to easily embrace life, liberty, and experience happiness through meaningful involvement with others? Are our chosen leaders coordinating with us to create a domestic environment where people can feel secure in exercising their creative potential and flourish as a national family?

 One of the foundational texts that comes from the Chinese ethical tradition, the Tao Te Ching, indicates that all violence, even that which is well intentioned, rebounds back to its origin (Tao V.30). This means that any violent and self-destructive policies that our government has initiated abroad will lead to violent and self-destructive consequences at home. And to preempt a common misperception that there is a latency period between violent acts and their negative consequences, there is none. The negative physical and psychological consequences of violent acts immediately cling to the agent(s) who perform them. When the seeds are sown the harvest is immediate.

The Human Cost

There is not enough room in this writing to detail the many political and economic violations that have, and are being, levied on the whole domestic population. If we look at the cost to US soldiers who are ordered to the front lines of the forever wars that the US has long been involved in, it can provide insights that help us understand how violence reciprocates and how unnecessary suffering can exponentially expand to encompass the most vulnerable people. As I write this, I am keeping in mind that the political decision to sacrifice the lives of those people the politicians are supposed to serve, so that they and other imperial minded elites can expand their personal wealth, is diabolically evil.     

 What follows is a look at the military sector of our society which, for our purpose here, includes veterans and active personnel. According to 2021 statistics that would be approximately 6% of the US population or 20.3 million people.

 According to an article published May 27, 2022 on the website of the Military Suicide Research Consortium, “mental health rates have risen 65% in the military since 2000, with 936,000 troops diagnosed with at least one mental health issue in that time, according to the new data.” The same article states, “Suicide within the military has soared since 2005 as the military has waged two wars at once, and this year may set a record with troops committing suicide at the rate of one per day, according to Pentagon figures.” The clinical psychologist and military veteran, Craig Bryan who was interviewed for the article stated that, “the top reason… these guys are trying to kill themselves is because they have this intense psychological suffering and pain.” In the same writing, Army Col. Carl Castro, who is working in coordination with Bryan in a Pentagon funded research project on suicide prevention and treatment, said, “The core of the issue is that it's not that people who attempt suicide … want to harm themselves as much as they want the pain they're currently in to stop, and they don't see any other way out.”

As the US continues these policies the physical and psychological fallout will increase. Another article released in March of this year by the American Addiction Centers (AAC), expresses the prominent risk of substance abuse involved with soldiers who experience multiple military deployments. The publication, which was reviewed by the AAC’s senior editor Dr. Scot Thomas, a clinical psychiatry preceptor at the San Diego VA Hospital, confirms,

Several deployments can have a cumulative effect in terms of the related stress and trauma. During deployment, service members may experience numerous traumas, including witnessing death or serious injury of others, become seriously injured themselves, partake in hand-to-hand combat, etc. Those on their third or fourth deployments report more problems, such as using medication to cope with combat-related stress, than those on their first or second deployments… In just 8 years between 2001 and 2009, the number of painkiller prescriptions written by military doctors quadrupled.

Another study put out by the American Warriors Partnership, titled Operation Deep Dive, that has been circulating in the news recently determines that the suicide and self-injury mortality rates of former service members in the US are 2.4 times greater than previously thought. This study puts the self-initiated death rate of former service members to at least 44 per day. 

The negative domestic ramifications of the war for wealth policies that the US conducted in the first 20 years of the new century are continually displayed in Western media. Not just families, but whole communities were decimated by the spread of violence. On July 11, 2020, an article from the Daily Mail reported that “Master Sgt. Andrew Christian Marckesano, 34, died by suicide in front on his wife on Monday… Marckesano's suicide was the 30th from the 2nd Battalion - 508th parachute  infantry regiment, which had the highest casualty rates of any unit during the Afghanistan war.” Marckesano’s fellow soldiers referred to him as, the real “Captain America” as he had served six full tours in Afghanistan and many other tours overseas before he returned home to his family and a job at the Pentagon. Another soldier who served with Marckesano indicated that military personnel losing their limbs due to improvised explosive devices (IEDs) was a daily event. The continual witness of such savagery is bound to tear the psyche beyond any tolerable limit.

Another soldier from the same battalion, Staff Sgt Allen Thomas, fell victim to suicide in 2013. After being taken to the VA Hospital in Fayetteville, North Carolina, to receive an emergency psychological evaluation, he was turned away due to lack of beds and sent home with prescription pain killers. A few days later Thomas suffered a mental collapse and in the midst of a flashback killed an elderly couple, who were his neighbors, and their dog, before turning the gun on himself. Thomas, like Marckesano had children. Losing a parent to suicide is devastating to a child. Children who lose a parent in this way are three times more likely to commit suicide in their pre-adult years.    

Eric Edstrom, an infantry lieutenant who graduated from West Point in 2007, and was deployed to Afghanistan shortly afterwards, provides poignant, on the ground, insights into the effects that the US’s war for wealth policies have had on soldiers who are unaware that their deployments have nothing to do with spreading democracy and freedom. In his book, Un-American: A Soldier's Reckoning of Our Longest War, he writes:

I protected myself and three-quarters of the men in my platoon.  I endangered and hurt many.  I lived in mud shacks and trolled dirt roads for IEDs, either with my tires or, worse, my boots.  We did dangerous humdrum unilateral patrols without conducting any meaningful training with Afghan security forces. I accomplished nothing that one could consider worth fighting for. I wasted a lot of taxpayer money. The Afghans I met either didn't want us there or wanted us to stay long enough to relieve us of our money, taxpayer dollars that the military was aching to spend on exorbitant military contracts, knowingly lining the pockets of warlords, guilty of human rights abuses. On the ground, the war felt mostly dubious, illegal in scope, and unjust in terms of proportionality.  Many of my friends died or became permanently handicapped. I personally buried one of my West Point classmates in Arlington National Cemetery, handing the folded flag to his crying mother. Another one of my soldiers killed himself after returning home. One of my soldiers is serving life in prison after murdering and dismembering the body of someone whom he never knew in a bathtub in Oregon.

There are thousands upon thousands of stories similar to Eric Edstrom’s. They can be found on websites founded by former military, intelligence, and civilian national security officials, who are exposing the self-defeating nature of contemporary US foreign policy and the true costs of war. The Eisenhower Media Network , Veterans For Peace,  and Vietnam Veterans Against the War , name a few.

On May 23, 2019 the US army posted a question on Twitter asking service members “How has serving impacted you?” I found a few tweets in response from soldiers that reported positive impacts. Several tweets were from soldiers who were still in the midst of severe and prolonged mental and physical suffering that began soon after their deployment. Of the five thousand plus answers that flooded in over the next thirty six hours, the vast majority were not from soldiers. They came from the families and friends of the soldiers who were dead. These stories recounted the horrors experienced when humans are sent to slaughter one another and the devastating aftermath when, what was left of them, returned home. The tweets from the second and third group, exposed information seldom reported in the mainstream press, and other US propaganda outlets.  Below are some samples. I quote them anonymously out of respect for their privacy.

Many veterans were virtually disappeared from the army’s records as if their service meant nothing.

“It mangled my health and defrauded me my service related claims by ‘losing’ my documents. Though I kept them all, somehow the VA just keeps losing them or rejecting them on account of the Army having no record of ANYTHING I ever did apart from enlist and get honorably discharged.”  

Some of the stories drew a direct line from the violence experienced while in the service to domestic violence at home.

“My father's successful military career taught him that he's allowed to use violence to make people do what he wants because America gave him that power.”

“Made me grow up with a hyperparanoid and controlling father. My sister and I were hardly allowed to step out of our room. He had horrible anger issues, admitted to contemplating suicide. My family says he used to be different before enlisting. He wanted to be an artist.”

Other tweets vividly depicted the cross generational aspect of the wars for wealth, covering five wars over a seventy-five year period.  

“My father was career military, serving in WWII & Korea. My mother often said, ‘He came back from the war a different man than who she married.’ He suffered from PTSD, had horrible nightmares, and was prone to angry outbursts. They're buried together at Fort Snelling.”  

“My uncle served in Vietnam. Before his deployment I was told he was a vibrant young man who never touched a drop of alcohol. After coming home he couldn’t put the bottle down, lost a good job with the Boston Fire Department and died with the needle still in his arm.”

“My best friend joined the Army straight out of high school because his family was poor & he wanted a college education. He served his time & then some. Just as he was ready to retire he was sent to Iraq. You guys sent him back in a box. It destroyed his children.”

Still others, described an innocence at both ends of the gun. 

“My friend from high school came back from Iraq suffering from PTSD. The last conversation we had was how he had to kill kids the same age of his children and felt guilty. Two months later he swallowed a bullet in the bed while his wife and kids were in the living room.”

The tweets went on and on, reporting incidents of rape of women soldiers by their own troops, reoccurring nightmares, missing limbs, crushed bones, disintegrating organs, chemical poisoning, denied benefits, withheld pay, reneged promises of all sorts, homelessness, soldiers who came home and just disappeared. These are the real impacts of war.

The investigative journalist, Max Blumenthal, in his book The Management of Savagery, further displays the lifelong effects of war levied against military personnel. In discussing the wars in the middle east that took place during the Bush and Obama administrations, he saw this as a, “a series of mind-bogglingly pointless interventions that had made legless, armless, and otherwise combat- singed veterans a common sight across the country.”

It’s one thing for the empire to indoctrinate their children to believe that the past leaders of the empire could do no wrong. It is quite another to continue to propagate such false narratives to recruits and military cadets, including the idea that they will be honored human instruments fighting for freedom and democracy, leaving them completely unprepared for the mind blistering shock they receive when they find, in the midst of their deployment, that what they are doing is not spreading freedom and democracy at all, but instead generates enslavement and plutocracy. It is a twofold moral betrayal on the part of the imperial elites. One is physical betrayal, of the blunt force trauma type, which literally destroys the soldier’s body. The other is a psychic betrayal that renders the mind so incapacitated, it eventually destroys itself.

While addressing the power structure that initiates and supports war, the social critic Caitlin Johnstone stated that:

 The globe-spanning power structure that is centralized around the United States is the most evil, soulless and destructive force on this planet. The young people who are duped, manipulated and financially coerced into joining its war machine come back horrifically traumatized by the experiences they have in the situations they are placed in. Something better is needed. This cannot continue.

The shame for this rests on the shoulders of not only the empirical elites who amass huge profits and political power at the expense of soldiers’ lives, but also, on people like me, if I know about it and do nothing to try to stop it. In the ignorance of these events, one is void of the ability to do anything about it. Once I have been informed of these happenings, the longer I linger in addressing it, the more my shame grows. It is hard for me not to think that the original intentions of these soldiers were admirable, morally sound, and life affirming.

When I relay the information given here to friends and acquaintances, I have been accused of being un-American. How could making an honest effort to save soldiers’ lives by stopping these senseless wars be defined as un-American?          

In closing, I would like to remind myself and the reader that we, as a nation, are not destined to do this. This is not our purpose in life. How ridiculous it would be for me to claim that a system that was created by human beings, could not be dismantled and redirected toward peace by human beings. The wheels are already in motion to stop this madness. Some of the drivers are soldiers themselves.       

*  I would like to give special thanks to Caitlin Johnstone for pointing me to the tweets of those who were suffered the ramifications of war.