A Matter of Conscience
December 2, 2007 Greed, anger, and ignorance—the three poisons. The first and the third have landed us in a “muddle” of epic proportions. We’re overwhelming the fragile planet we live on and living as if there’s no tomorrow.
I don’t want to come across as so negative that readers become overwhelmed at the enormity of our situation and give up even trying. Nor do I want to make light of our situation and have the message dismissed as not urgent yet. So I’ll try for the middle, the balanced approach:
We need to start changing, and we need to start today.
From the Buddhist perspective, every cause will have a result. If we treat others with thoughtfulness, we will in turn receive thoughtfulness. If I conserve water and food, I will have water and food in my future. If I consume and continue to toss the product’s containers, wrapping, and earlier models they are replacing into the garbage, I’m going to have a lot of garbage in my future. And we don’t have to be Buddhist to understand this.
Hearing about climate change and all its resultant evils can, very frankly, become overwhelming. We can easily get to the point where it seems that we’re too far down the road to change our direction. But we know from the butterfly effect in chaos theory that small changes do matter.
According to Wikipedia, in the Butterfly Effect “small variations of the initial condition of a nonlinear dynamical system may produce large variations in the long term behavior of the system.” In other words, small causes can have major results. Very Buddhist. And very true. A flutter of a butterfly’s wings (a small cause) can produce a hurricane on the other side of the world (a large result). So small actions can have large results.
Acting out of ignorance, not understanding that our actions will come back to haunt us, and greed, thinking we can buy happiness, has to stop. It’s our responsibility to try our best to undue what we, in blissful ignorance, began. Just buying CFLs for our lights and recycling a bit more and stopping there won’t do it. We can’t buy ourselves out of this one.
What can we do? A whole bunch. The Internet can be a wonderful tool. Instead of using it as the Cyber Monday version of Black Friday, we can use it to educate ourselves. There are wonderful blogs and websites written by people who have decided they would make a difference. I invite you to spend some time reading and learning. I’ve listed some of my current favorites in the sidebar to the right under the heading: A Matter of Conscience.
We have no way of knowing exactly what will come of our efforts. But if we each try our best to live more simply and wiser, we’ll at least be part of the solution instead of the problem.
Reader Comments (2)
I've found a fun website for parents to show their kids (regarding buying organic food). Check out www.storewars.org it's a fun video!
I liked the Meatrix too, but it was a bit gross for kids.
I tried to view Store Wars but couldn't. Today I was looking at another Free Range production and clicked my way through to You Tube where I found all the Free Range movies including Store Wars. It's wonderful!! If anyone is interested, they can access it at http://www.youtube.com/profile_videos?user=FreeRangeStudios