Either Way—It's Us

 

Everything is manifested by the mind and altered by the consciousness. In other words, with our thoughts we create the world.

As Buddhists, we learn that our thoughts of craving and greed result in floods. Angry thoughts result in fires, and ignorant thoughts are the cause of disasters involving wind.

Causality: every cause will have a result. As we continuously crave more material goods and experiences, the results will likewise intensify. As we become more frustrated and upset by our failure to gain all these objects and experiences that we want, we become more angry.

Look around. What are you seeing more and more? Recording-breaking floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, fires, drought.  

The other way?

It's another way of seeing the causality. The more electronic gadgets and more exotic goods we want, and the more we travel looking for new experiences, the more we're impacting the environment.

Negatively.

We buy more "stuff." This "stuff" comes from nonrenewable resources, which are being rapidly depleted. Producing "stuff" creates toxic waste that seeps into the earth, works it's way into our rivers and oceans, and is spewed into our air. The exotic foods have to be shipped halfway around the world on ships, planes, and trucks that belch toxic fumes and pump more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Non-Buddhist cause and effect. The more we buy, the more we destroy what is natural and in it's place leave our garbage and waste.

Thanks to our greed, we're destroying our world. We. Together. All of us. With our greed, whether you look at greed from the Buddhist perspective or from the scientific facts.

Either way you look at it.

It's us. 

Comments

[Bill McILwain]

In my current job I am required to waste vast amounts of drinking water hosing out toilet and shower blocks in a caravan park, I have done this for the last three weeks, seven days and nights a week, in that time only three people in the hundreds of people that witness my work questioned this action and my response was the same to each unless you complain to the authorities they will continue the practice, the caravan park is owned and run by local council, the worst part of this sad senario is that less than ten kilometers away a sewerage treatment plant is dumping millions of treated water back in the ocean which could easily be used for my cleaning porpose, but unless we demand change in attitude in our elected leaders the status quo will remain, as the Buddhist monks and nuns in Burma showed it is not against Buddhists teachings to be active for the right causes

[Venerable Wuling]

Bill,

I've been traveling and haven't had a chance to approve your excellent comment until now.

Such a waste! So much of our infrastructure has been built for the wrong reasons and not for conservation. We need to be more aware of environmental carelessness and with skillful means make sure those with the ability to do something know the problems.