Hi Everybody,
Here we are at chapter 8, Buddhism and Daily Life. And we dive straight in.
' One of the things that struck me most forciby when I first started to go to Buddhist discussion meetings and seminars, long before I felt ready to take up the practice myself in steady or meaningful way, was the immensely positive way that people spoke about the influence of the practice in their daily lives. So they would talk for example about having a clearer sense of purpose and direction, and a value structure that helped them to think constructively about their lives. They would frequently say that they felt more focused somehow, even if they couldn't define precisely why. Or that they no longer felt so blown off course by random events. Or that they could make choices and decisions more readily, because they had a clearer sense of who they were, and what they wanted in their lives. That's a lot of positives isn't it? Nothing remarkable or amazing. But a clear sense of ordinary people feeling in some way better about the way they were dealing with the relationships and the events in their lives and...and this is perhaps the most important thing...creating value as a result.
Moreover all the qualities they chose to mention, a clearer sense of, purpose and direction, more focus, more decisiveness, all appear prominently in the work of sociologists when they are writing about how we set about establishing a stable and consistent sense of well-being in our own lives, and equally important, how we contribute to the lives of those close around us.
To squeze it absolutely into a nutshell, Buddhism essentially presents the flow of life as a constant series of choices that come towards us, all of them lying somewhere on this continuum between the negative and the positive. So that every day, every week, countless times, we are called upon to make this choice between being positive, and value-creating, or being negative and in some measure...great or small...destructive. And what it seeks to do, as illustrated by those people at those meetings, is to bring to us a greater awareness, that in all those countless situations we are the ones making the choice. We have that capability. As I've mentioned several times, Buddhism reminds us that life doesn't just happen to us, as we so often tend to see it, we make it happen.
So instead of just drifting along, or being carried along by our habit energy, we steadily acquire a sense of shaping it, and directing its course. Or, as the people at those meetings described it, they had a clearer sense of values and purpose, and indeed stability, underlying the inevitable daily flux of events.
And all Buddhist practice, at its heart, is about that heightened awareness. About helping us to grow and nurture it, rather as we might grow and nurture a skill at sport, or at music, or some other skill, as a conscious act. That's the key point, as a conscious act, a conscious process of change, in which we invest real time and effort and energy in order to develop this awareness as an inner strength. Because it is that inner strength, that emotional muscle you might say, that enables us more often to recognise and reject the negativechoice, however persuasive and attractive it might be, and more and more often make the positive choice, however challenging it might be.
And of course it is only more often, rather than always. We all have negativity as a constant presence in our lives and it is prety skilled at slipping in under our defences.
But this is the key point to hang onto, it is that steady progression, that growth, towards the positive, that enables us to become more capable, more effective, more contributing, in all the multiple overlapping roles that we all have to fulfil, as parents and as partners, as teachers and colleagues at work and as friends at play. And of course, as responsible people living in society. which is essentially what we are talking about in this chapter. And have no doubt about it...we all want to be capable and contributing people, even those of us who would seem to be most dysfunctional in society. A Buddhist practice opens up that possibility.'
Enough to be going on with I think. The great news is that we are about half way through the book!!
Could I just remind you of that request I made a while back. If you like this blog, and think that it creates value, I would be over the moon with gratitude if you would bounce on the link to other people. Anybody. They don't have to be practising Buddhists, not at all. I like to think the values expressed would enhance anyone's life.
See you next time,
William
No comments:
Post a Comment