The Peace Officers and the Practitioner

[ by Charles Cameron — disturbing and keeping the peace, OWS Oakland, paradox ]

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Paradox.

It’s a bit like the koan where a zen monk is asked “is it the flag or the wind that moves?” — is peace what the meditator is dipping into, or is peace what the occupier / meditator is disturbing while the peace officers are maintaining it for the rest of us?

Here’s a photo taken a few moments / minutes later:

And in fact, the whole incident does seem to have passed off pretty peacefully (in both senses of the word): as the Chronicle’s SFGate blog put it in a caption:

Police peacefully detain Occupy Oakland protester, “Pancho” Ramos Stierle who was meditating while police cleared out the Occupy Oakland camp early in the morning on Monday, November 14, 2011.

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And the zen master said, “Neither and both: it’s the mind that moves.”