Sunday 29 March 2015

my buddhist blog number 86

Hi Everybody,

Hope you are well and rejoicing in this spring that's all around us, here in the UK anyway. You can't help but think of Nichiren's famous gosho phrase, ' winter always turns to spring,' and what it means when the goin ggets tough and you have to pull yourself up by the bootstraps. Winter always turns to spring...I will get through this. We can never remember whole gosho passages, but as daisaku Ikeda advises us, we can embed in our lives these extraordinary powerful phrases so that they leap into the mind when we need them; phrases like, ' no one was born hating others,' and ' a coward never had his prayers answered' and ' the treasures of the heart are most valuable of all,' and so on. And that's the phrase we pick up on this week, because we're right at the end of Chapter 11 and I'm going to back track a couple of lines. So we've been talking about the fact that although there are huge pressures on us these days to live as essentially acquisitive, materialist individuals, bent on a accumulating more stuff, we should never forget how profoundly important to us is our need for a meaningful spiritual life.

' As we've seen, Nichiren Daishonin nails this seemingly modern issue so precisely that it's worth repeating his words again; ' more valuable than the treasure in any storehouse...' that is to say more stuff, ...' are the treasures of the body...' that is to say good health and an active life...' and the treasures of the heart are most valuable of all..' that is to say a vital and meaningful spiritual life.

And in our deepest selves we know that whenever we manage to pause from the pace and bustle and constant bombarding materialism of modern life, just to take stock of who we are and where we are in our lives, and what is truly important to us, we recognise that we earnestly seek treasures of the heart in our lives. We need a strong sense of the meaningn and the worth of our lives, totally regardless of wealth or possessions, and warm and generous relationships with all those whose lives touch ours.

It's like coming home.

And I think it could be argues that that kind of seeking, that kind of search for something more to life, is at least part of the reason why over the past few decades, what might be called this quiet revolution has taken place, quiet because it has never been the stuff of headlines. But in that time frame many tens of thousands of people in the West and elsewhere around the world, ordinary people like us, holding down a job in an office or a factory, falling in love and bringing up families, worrying about the rising tide of bills and caring for aged relatives and so on, have chosen to put that altogether under a Buddhist set of values and principles. And for this constantly growing number of people, clearly the choice that Buddhism offers provides a meaningful resolution to the countless challenges that modern life in the West throws at all of us. Meaningful and happier indeed, because obviously people in such large numbers are not turning to Buddhism because it makes them less happy, or resolves fewer problems!

It's also possible to argue I think that this movement of strong Buddhist values and principles westwards is one among several influences that is triggereing a profound re-think of what we really mean when we talk about the successful society in the West, away from the readitional measures that have todo largely if not entirely with the accumulation of wealth and rising GDP, towards measures that have more to do with quality of life and well-being.'

That's it for today. Hope it was worth reading.
Back next time with the start of Chapter Twelve
See you then.
Best wishes,
William
PS Just to remind you, The Case for Buddhism can be bought as a paper back from Amazon and as a download from Kindle.

Friday 20 March 2015

my buddhst blog number 85

Hi Everybody,

Such a beautiful bright spring-like day. My morning run in the park with Gatsby was just joy. I missed the eclipse because of the clouds, but they soon broke up and let the sunlight through, and as we ran through a couple of woods you could the sunlight streaming through the trees. Just beautiful.

To the blog. This episode runs on directly from the last one. so that one brought us up the life state of Hunger. This one describes it. They're all important of course, but in this obsessively materialistic age, I think a firm grasp of the way in which this life state can undermine our pleasure and satisfaction with our lives can save us from a lot of grief.

So Hunger very briefly is about wanting. It is the life state in which we are convinced that our happiness lies in acquiring something that is, for one reason or another, just out of reach. We know for sure that if we can only have this something, we will be so much happier than we are now. It will really do the trick. The agony lies in in the fact that for people who have this as their dominant life tendency there is always something to want, always something more to reach out for in the saleroom or the web catalogue...that will really do the trick. And it's not limited of course simply to material stuff, to clothes and cars and falt screen TV's and stuff. By no means. It manifests itself in just about every aspct of people's lives; the nagging dissastisfaction with what we have, the constant desire for something more. A modern social network like Facebook for example even stimulats the desire to acquire and display..more friends. And Twitter..more followers. As if they were commodities.

And that's the key point isn't it? For as long as our lives are largely taken up with stuff, we are essentially treating ourselves as material animals. But we know that to be false don't we? We know that we all have a spiritual dimension to our lives, however much we may seek to ignore it or mask it, under a shell of cynicism say. The physical and the material simply aren't enough, and for as long as we try to live as if they were, with our live slargely driven by the next acquisition or the next bonus, we know full well that we are in some measure diminishing ourselves. Or in Buddhist terms we are slandering ourselves.

As we've seen, Nichiren Daishonin nails this seemingly modern issue so precisely that it's worht repeating his words;' more valuable than the treasures in any storehouse...' that is to say more stuff...are the treasures of the body...that is to say good health and an active life...and the treasures of the heart are most valuable of all,,, that is to say, a vital and meaningful spiritual life.

And in our deepest selves we know that whenever we manage to pause from the pace and bustle and constant bombarding materialism of modern life, and just take stock of who we are, and where we are in our lives, and what is truly important to us, we recognise that we earnestly seek treasures of the heart in our lives. We need a strong sense of the meaning and the worth of our lives, totally regardless of wealth or possessions, and warm and generous relations with all those whose lives touch ours.

It's like comng home.

That's it for today.
Thank you for reading this far. Its much appreciated.
See you next time.
Best wishes,

William 

Thursday 12 March 2015

my buddhist blog number 84

Hi Everybod
Well I'm back from Mexico and all that sea and sunshine and windsurfing and tennis and food and Mayan ruins and well...lots of good things. I really rate mid-winter holidays, and when you get back the daffodils are out in the garden and it's spring already!! Sarah always takes a couple of my books with her and puts them on the left-books shelves to see what happens...and they both went on the first day, and stayed went! It's her little bit of kosen rufu on holiday. This time it was this book so 2 somebodies are reading The case for Buddhism when they didn't expect to.

OK so where were we in February? Half way through Chapter Eleven I think, and we're in the middle of the section about western-way-of-life societies being much richer places than they were 50 or so years ago, but no happier. Strangely enough I noticed while I was away that BBC Worldwide is actually running a series of mini documentaries on just this subject, and one I watched talked of western wealth doubling in that time...but there being no real change in how people felt about their lives....which brings us precisely to where we were in Chapter Eleven!

' Why do we find that so surprising? Because of course in today's western societies the vast mass of the population has more of almost everything you care to name; the list is endless, more comfort, more food, more houses, more cars, more health, more leisure, more partners...but not it seems more happiness, or more well-being, or more general satisfaction with life.

So what kinds of answers have the sociologists come up with to help us understand this restless modern malaise, because it's only with a better understanding of course that we can begin to do something about it, in order to move on from it. As you would expect there are no single or simple answers, but there are some truly brilliant insights that help to open our eyes to what is really going on. We can all too easily it seems find ourselves trapped in a sort of materialist dead  end.

Professor Layard for example, eminent economist from the LSE, talks of a ' hedonic treadmill.' That's that Greek word again meaning pleasure, and the treadmill you might say comes from the hamster's cage, to indicate that we can spend a lot of time, going around in circles, chasing our tails. It's the phenomenon we mentioned a moment ago he more we have...the more it seems we go on wanting. In an age of immense plenty there is still so much we find to hunger after, that it can undermine or diminish or even cancel out altogether, the pleasure and the joy we might feel in all that we undoubtedly have.We'll come back to that word hunger again in a minute because it offers a fascinating link between the modern social research and what Buddhism has to tell us about this key issue.

The psychologists tell us that comparison with others is part of the way we function as human beings, buried deeply in our psyche. We all do it, even if we're not always aware that we are doing it. So it's a constant and immensely influential dimension in our lives, and it has a very real effect on our overall sense of self-worth, an on our general sense of satisfaction or dissatisfaction with our lives. As the American psychologist Sonja Lyubomirski has expressed it;

' The more social comparisons you make, the more likely you are to encounter unfavourable comparisons, and the more sensitive you are to social comparisons the more likely you are to suffer their negative consequences...You can't be envious and happy at the same time.'

What a warning that is...' you can't be envious and happy at the same time!'

That in essense is the paradox revealed. It seems that instead of our enjoying a really solid sense of satisfaction because of our own considerably improved circumstances, almost the reverse can happen. The vastly greater knowledge of  other people's wealth and possessions, which is so visible in today's western-style societies, seems to have become the source of a much wider and more broadly felt sense of dissatisfaction, the reference anxiety we mentioned earlier, which chews away at our appreciation of all the good things that we undoubtedly do have in our lives.

But the remarkable thing for me I have to say is just how closely this very modern and scientific analysis, which lays bare for us the powerfully disturbing and unsettling effects of the constant itch to acquire more stuff, chimes with the classic Buddhist description of the life state of  Hunger. Which underlines for us once again just how accurate and therefore how valuable to us, is the Budhist analysis of the dynamics of human motivation and behaviour. Budddhism describes this life state as the root cause of a great deal of self-inflicted pain and suffering, with the emphasis very clearly on the fact that it is self inflicted. We choose to go there.

And that's where we go next episode.
Thanks for reading this far. It's much appreciated.
See you next time I hope.
Best wishes,
William
The Case for Buddhism is available on Amazon or as a download from Kindle.