A Matter of Conscience

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.

Earl Grey or Dragon Pearl Jasmine?

 

To learn something new, we must let go of the old.

Picture in your mind a teacup. Imagine that is filled with tea, Earl Grey tea. Now imagine wanting to try another tea. This time, Dragon Pearl Jasmine. If the cup is full and we try to pour more tea into it, the cup will overflow. Even if it is not full, if we pour in the Jasmine and it mixes with the remaining Earl Grey, the mixture would not taste right.

Learning is like this. If we try to take in new teachings but our cup is already full, we’ll take in more than we can handle. Even if our cup is only partially filled, if we had different teachings we may become muddled—an intellectual version of conflicting tastes.

Sometimes, we need to clean the cup—let go of former ideas and notions—to fully and purely appreciate that which is new and different.

The Four Immeasurables

"Rahula, practice loving kindness to overcome anger.
Loving kindness has the capacity to bring happiness to others without demanding anything in return.

Practice compassion to overcome cruelty.
Compassion has the capacity to remove the suffering of others without expecting anything in return.

Practice sympathetic joy to overcome hatred.
Sympathetic joy arises when one rejoices over the happiness of others and wishes others well-being and success.

Practice non-attachment to overcome prejudice.
Non-attachment is the way of looking at all things openly and equally. This is because that is. Myself and others are not separate. Do not reject one thing only to chase after another.

I call these the four immeasurables.
Practice them and you will become a refreshing source of vitality and happiness for others."

~ Buddha, to his son Rahula, from Old Path White Clouds by Thich Nhat Hanh 

Practice in the Face of Laziness

A reader raised a very good point regarding the November 19^th entry “A Change of Heart”. To summarize, she wrote that she finds that while “we are somehow, with great concentration, able to control our speech and what we do but it is the THOUGHT that is hard to control. Even minor bad thoughts will arise even though we are able to control our speech and actions…I have the belief, and I had vowed to go to Pureland but it is the practical effort that I lack in chanting due to my LAZINESS....and even though I know its a hinder to my cultivation.”

In response, Master Chin Kung (in Changing Destiny) talked of the difficulty of changing by trying to catch each thought in. The problem is that there's just too many of them. (A copy of the book is available here.)

Essentially, the best way to change is from the heart. To do this, we need to replace our old habits, like that of laziness, with new ones. If this were easy to do, we'd be sitting in the Pure Land having this discussion!

Like everything that is worthwhile, we need to keep working on breaking those bad habits. We can think of how we feel when we practice and contrast that with how we feel when we don't. As with any good habit, we feel much better when we’ve done what we knew to be right. And yet, even knowing this, we still give in to laziness.

As I mentioned in practice on the meditation cushion, we can set aside some time in the morning for chanting. Or perhaps at night when we’re done with our work and household chores and enjoyed time with our family. It’s fine to start our practice of chanting, or other meditation, simply and just for a little while, say five or ten minutes. As we feel good about having met our goal, we can gradually increase the time.

Today, we are used to quick fixes, immediate gratification. I don't know of an easy way to break our habit of laziness. It takes work, and it takes patience. If we have vowed to be reborn in the Pure Land, we can think of why we made that vow. We wanted to help all beings end suffering. Since it's difficult trying to get our mind around "all beings," we can think of those we love. Thinking of how much we want to help them can motivate us to do our cultivation.

A Public Opinion Poll

I began this blog a little over a year ago. The initial reason for its formation, the reduction in the time I could spend away from my mother who was not well, ceased the day she passed away. The initial goal of the blog, to help in the propagation of Pure Land Buddhism and to suggest a less self-centered way of living, has remained the same.

As an example of the principle that everything changes, I've gradually included other's writing and added more categories. I've periodically tinkered with the layout, appearance, organization. (To those who were reading the blog while I was trying different color combinations and banner images, I send a big apology. I thought I was working just on the template, but discovered the changes were appearing in the actual blog. Oops!)

When I give a lecture, I can see from the faces in the audience, how I'm doing. With a blog, it's more difficult to gauge. Comments are great for feedback, but I know people often don't like to write for a variety of reasons. That leaves me trying to guess what's working and what isn't, what I could add and what I could focus less on.

So what would help me is to hear from you. Are there topics you want to read more about? Or less about? What are your thoughts of the blog's focus, its organization, categories, appearance, or anything else? Are there any questions you wish someone would ask?

Your feedback is much appreciated.