Hi Everybody,
Hope all is well with you. No blogs last week. I was off with Sarah and Gatsby walking in deepest Dorset. It is such a beautiful part of the country. So overwhelmingly green and luxuriant with huge overgrown hedges and rolling fields filled with every wild flower you can name...and many you can't, or I can't. I find myself collecting samples and poring over the wild flower book in the evenings over a cup of coffee to name greater celandine and yellow loosestrife and hedge woundwort with a great sense of elation. Go on. Go and look them up. I bet you didn't know them either! And Gatsby was in his element with all these new country smells to enjoy. We had a great time with blue skies and brilliant sunshine every single day. And I haven't even started to tell you about Dorset's beautiful beaches such as Golden Cap and Eype, nestling under these huge Jurassic sandstone cliffs. Or about when we went camping on the night of the summer solstice when it stayed light all night. Or about...... Enough about all that. Back to Chapter 7.
We left it last time with the extraordinary thought that occurs both in Buddhist teachings and in modern psychology, that we can't have negatve and positive feelings, at the same time. It sounds so simple and yet it is so profound. Of course we can be mixed up and confused, and often are. Of course we can alternate between them, an doften do. But we can't experience them at the same time. So that gives us a clear objective; the more we can learn how to summon up our positive responses to tackle the difficult stuff that life presents us with, the less room we have to experience the negative impulses.
That in itself I suggest, is yet another life-changing lesson, so simple and yet so powerful in its implications. and it is precisely what I have in mind when I talk about the practice being practical and down-to-earth, rather than remote and other-worldly. So for example when Nichiren Buddhists are aware that they are approaching a time of extra stress and difficulty in their lives, anything, such as a change of job for example, or stress in a close relationship, or a major move to a new location, or a challenging illness, or even just anxiety over a tough set of exams, they step up their training you might say. They deliberately step up their daily practice to give themselves that extra self-confidence and resilience, and simply that extra life-force, to be able to push themselves through the difficult and stressful and turbulent time.
It is as deliberate, and as conscious, and indeed as practical as that. Nichiren Buddhists use the practice as an additional asset available to them. Buddhism is daily life...and in many ways that simple sounding phrase is the very heart of the Buddhist message. We are very accustomed in the West...you might almost say conditioned...by the very nature of our educational system and our culture, to live our lives driven by three primary engines; our intellect and our emotions, how we think that is and how we feel, and by our persona, how we look or how we present ourselves. We place immense emphasis, as indeed we should, on our intellectual ability to think our way through life's problems. We all need that basic rationality. And we attach great value to emotional expression, to being in touch, as the modern idiom has it, with our emotions. And we are increasingly concerned, probably to exces, about externals, about physical appearance.
Essentially all Buddhism is saying is, that's fine as far as it goes, but it does only go so far. There's more...there is an inner spiritual resource that we can all learn to tap into, and it can life our life performance to a new level. As the modern American philosopher Robert Solomon reminds us,
' Spirituality...requires action as part of its very essence. It is a mode of doing, as well as of being, thinking and feeling.'
In Nichiren Buddhism the daily practice is the method that it offers us to enable us to achieve that powerful combination of spirituality in action. '
And that's where we go next time. To look at the elements of the daily practice.
Hope all that makes sense. its good to be back.
I missed the blogging.
See you on Friday hopefully.
Best wishes,
William
PS The Case for Buddhism is available on Amazon and as an e-book on Kindle
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