An Australian Approach to Buddhism, Life & Reality - Week Thirty Eight

“NO WORRIES”

(an Australian approach to Buddhism, life & reality - Week Thirty Eight)

It seems clear that in essence, ethical principle three is about learning to deal with our passions, desires and craving for stimulation, intensity and excitement. What we take in and what we push out, under the sway of craving and aversion make us what we are in each moment of existence. The way of practice here is to train ourselves to check our unhelpful reactive desires, in order to make space for helpful, creative desires to flourish. The root of all reactive desires is the deep, but often barely conscious sense we have that somewhere, somehow, we are currently incomplete. We tell ourselves “If only I had this or that, my life would be complete and I would be happy” only to find that very soon after we get whatever it was that sense of dissatisfaction and emptiness returns.

We live in a consumer society. No other modern people have consumed as much as we do today and it seems that the level of discontentment continues to rise even amongst those who appear to have everything in the sense of material worth. There are many probable factors that contribute to this rise, social fragmentation, the breakdown of the traditional family, the pace of change, the loss of religious belief or perhaps our constant subjection to brand advertising to name a few. But, the real issue is that deep down, at a part of our being we’re barely conscious of, there is a sense of our own incompleteness. There is no fixed and unchanging essence that we can point to and say ‘This is me, this is what I truly am’. We crave above all else simply to be whole, to be complete, to be real. Advertisers tell us that we can achieve this by wearing their brand, or driving it, or drinking it. We carry on consuming, chasing after an elusive satisfaction that the world seems to promise: “I shop - therefore I am”.

The point of the third precept is not that we have to give up chocolate, wine or the latest fashions. It is more about bringing awareness to the business of consumption. It’s about getting the material aspect of our lives into proportion and with learning to maintain our humanity and creativity within the context of our consumerist society. Once a desire has lodged itself in our minds it spreads like a virus, rapidly infecting other parts of our being with its intense clamour. So long as we constantly give way to reactive desires, such as the desire to have and to own, then our more creative desires, our yearning for what is truly beneficial for our development, will be weakened.

The positive counterpart of this principle is contentment. Taking things as they come and not getting caught up in the dramas of life that are driven by our desires. It’s about learning to let go of any expectations because the expectations themselves are formed from our base desires also and inevitably they will lead to disappointment and a heightened sense of worrying. Dealing with mental disturbances such as craving has always been an issue for Buddhist practitioners. You can’t live your life thinking thoughts and then expect them to vanish just because you sit down and close your eyes. This is why the threefold path is so important when we understand the clear link between ethical conduct and the clarity of the mind required for the level of concentration needed to gain insight. Let me make one thing absolutely clear. Although the Buddha suggests that living a simple life is more conducive to realising the enlightenment experience, what he does not say is that there is anything wrong with having stuff. There is nothing inherently wrong with stuff itself. It is our attachment to it and the idea that it will bring us happiness that forms part of our delusion that is the problem. Happiness will never be found in anything that is impermanent and you can be assured of one thing, all stuff is impermanent - including you.

Ethical principal four (Classical Buddhism): I undertake to abstain from false speech. Ethical principal four (Secular Buddhism): I undertake the ethical training principle to avoid unhelpful speech and to practice truthful and kindly communication. We may like to think that a little white lie never hurt anyone but it does. It hurts us, by keeping us confined in constricted states of self-concern and it hurts others, by perpetuating the smog of delusion. The deliberate pursuit of truthfulness, on the other hand, clears the air around us. It leaves us better off as we can see more clearly where we stand and where we’re going. When we’re honest, people feel they can trust us and that makes our dealings with them much more straightforward. We know what we really want and others and ourselves know us to be authentic. They know that what you see is what you get.

Developing helpful speech is vital to our practice. It is the principal means of communication between human beings and it also occupies the central position between body, mind/thought and action. It also happens to be one of the hardest things to take control of and one that does an amazing amount of harm in our daily lives. Truthfulness is essential to the functioning of any society. Without truthfulness there can be no trust. Without trust human relationships fall apart and we are left with an atmosphere of suspicion and disharmony. Truthfulness as an ethical principle has to be based on loving kindness and not used as a weapon to hurt others. Truthfulness, like all these ethical principles, begins with us. We need to be honest with ourselves about what we think, what we feel, what we do and what we say. It’s not easy to do this. It might mean facing up to unpleasant aspects of our character and it may seriously dent our pride and even put us in the position of needing to apologise to others. But if we can’t be honest with ourselves we have absolutely no chance of being honest with others.

Truthfulness means, firstly, being factual in what we say or write. It also means steering clear of exaggeration, which is one of the great building blocks of egotism. Truthfulness means not understating things and it means not deliberately leaving relevant things out and of course truthfulness means not deliberately lying. When we tamper with the truth it is usually because we want to be seen in a particular light or we want to gain some advantage. We want to be liked, we want to be popular and bending the truth can seem an easy way to get attention and approval or get whatever we want. Of course, if we do that as a matter of habit, we will ourselves become a kind of fiction and in our hearts we will be lonelier than ever.

Untruthfulness is rooted in craving, ill-will or fear. If you tell a lie, it is either because you want something, or because you wish to harm or hurt someone, or because you’re afraid to tell the truth for one reason or another and is therefore a clear demonstration of unhelpful mental states. For speech to be unhelpful within the context of this principle there has to be an unhelpful intention behind the speech itself. There must be some intention to mislead in some way the person who you are communicating with. The range of untruthfulness is as vast as the ocean, from the mass deceptions of political organisations, now commonly known as spin doctoring, to those little white lies we tell to get us out of sticky situations. It doesn’t even require the use of speech, we can equally take part in the lie by a simple gesture or nod of the head or a failure to correct something that’s said which we know not to be true.

One of the biggest problems with telling lies is that you have to tell more and more lies to cover up the first and eventually you can no longer remember what you’ve said to individual people and it’s only a matter of time before you are exposed and humiliated. The other danger with untruthfulness is that it can become a habit and people who go down this route begin to lose the plot as they can’t make out what’s real in their life and what’s unreal. They are taken in by their own deceit. According to the Buddha the consequence of persistent lying is that you won’t be believed even when you speak the truth.

From a Buddhist perspective, the ethical dimension of how we communicate doesn’t stop at telling the truth. According to the Buddha, there is both helpful and unhelpful speech. Helpful speech is usually described as speech, which is truthful, kindly or affectionate, helpful and productive of harmony and unity. Unhelpful speech is untruthful, harsh, harmful and promotes disharmony and disunity. So much suffering has to do with unhelpful speech and a good example of this is the all too familiar trend for gossip. The problem is that gossip is so seductive, it’s really easy to start doing it without thinking.

How easy it is to find ourselves joining in with gossip when we are in a group situation. If we stay silent, that very silence singles us out and makes us uncomfortable as we will be expected to have an opinion that conforms to the group. It takes an act of bravery for someone to make a stand that goes against group think and behaviour and this is the working environment of the authentic Dharma practitioner. Even then, when making their stand clear need to develop ways of doing that in such a way that their response fits the criteria of the ethical principal.