July 2017 – Kadampa Life

How to overcome anxiety

[Update Mar 23 2020: Hello everyone. Here is some Buddhist meditation advice on dealing with anxiety during these uncertain times.

Please check out an increasing number of live-streaming meditation classes at a Kadampa Center near you — learning to meditate or increasing your meditation practice will really help! Anyone can learn. All you need is somewhere to sit quietly for a while, and a wish to experience inner calm. Then just follow along.]

Sometimes dubbed “the age of anxiety”, people are reportedly experiencing a lot of (di)stress in this modern age. Up to a third of the UK population, for example, will suffer from anxiety disorder or panic attacks at some point; and more people go to the doctor for anxiety in the UK than for the common cold. In the US, 40 million people are suffering from anxiety disorders, where anxiety is constant and overwhelming; and as for the occasional bout of panic, or the grumbling day-to-day unease, the number is probably closer to 300 million! I didn’t do a survey on the rest of the world, but I can’t imagine it’s much better.

So, can you relate to any of these?:

You’ve got a big meeting at work coming up where you have to give a presentation. You have to see your family and have a conflict with a family member who’ll be there. You know you’re going to run into your ex-girlfriend, who is with someone new whereas you are not. You see a police car in your rear view mirror, and you are a person of color. You have discovered a bump on your body and a quick Google search reveals that death is imminent. Your prostate is ten times larger than it should be. Your tent is leaking. You have to leave home soon because you are approaching adulthood but the future is scary. You are getting old and find yourself worrying about the smallest things that never used to bother you. Your co-worker is AWOL (again), leaving you with no support. You can’t understand why you don’t feel happier. You’ve eaten too much chocolate and have to go dress shopping with your mother, who is stick thin and always on at you about your weight. Your dog is sick. Your daughter is on drugs and possibly in trouble with the police. You can’t afford to leave a monotonous job even though your boss is a psychopath. You might be losing your Obamacare soon. You’ve read some very disturbing articles recently about the forces of darkness descending on our world. Your car has a rattle. You can’t make up your mind whether to (a) go grey gracefully or (b) go blonde. You’ve just spilled coffee all over your iPhone while writing this, with splashes landing on your keyboard (that one’s mine.) You’re going to die.

Written down like this, does this seem like a list of anxiety-provoking situations?! Yet these are just snippets from the most recent conversations with the people around me. It makes me wonder, how much of our daily chit chat does revolve around things that make us anxious? Anyway, you may have more to add. And, while we have a mind to worry, the list is potentially endless for each of us. (At least we’re not alone?!)

Dictionary.com defines anxiety as: Distress or uneasiness of mind caused by fear of danger or misfortune.

It doesn’t matter whether fears or misfortunes are real or imagined, large or small — they all seem to consume us. With anxiety we can’t help overthinking, so there is no objective scale, you can’t number worries from 1 to 10 — worries never seem small because they each fill our mind.

What does anxiety feel like?

It can feel like we’re going mad, at its worst. We worry about everything and nothing. We feel out of control. The voice in our head is constant, we can’t stop it, it’s exhausting. We are on edge. Life is no fun. We can get no perspective even when we know we have things out of proportion and other people have it far worse.

There was a swan, Angel, in the small pond behind my caravan last week in the Lake District. Beautiful to watch on the surface, gliding around like swans do – but she was all alone, recuperating from an attack that killed her mate; and I felt sad for her. And, looking at her legs, I was reminded of a description I read of anxiety:

I smile gently while churning inside. I may seem calm. But if you could peer beneath the surface, you would see that I’m like a duck – paddling, paddling, paddling.

What makes us anxious?

There is always something to worry about if we have a tendency to worry: “What is there to worry about today?!”

Did you wake up happy this morning?!

Often when I ask people this question, they say they didn’t, not really. We are not even out of our warm cosy bed yet — nothing has happened! – and yet already we are feeling uneasy. So sometimes anxiety can be generalized, sort of random, lurking just below the surface of even the most uneventful day, with no specific cause. We usually cast around outside for something to blame for this feeling, “Must be because I have a presentation at work coming up in 3 weeks!” We can even lie there worrying that there is nothing to worry about, which must mean something horrendous is about to happen…

At other times we feel anxiety about something in particular, such as in the list above.

Luckily, although anxiety is a bad habit, all habits can be broken.

What can we do about anxiety?

Soooo, what is the secret of keeping it together in the face of worrying situations? Why and how do some people just seem to roll with the punches, while others are tormented by crippling anxiety at the merest glimpse of potential trouble? How do we rid ourselves of anxiety and connect with a more peaceful, balanced part of ourselves?

First off, we need to start to experience some genuine peace of mind in which we can take refuge. Then we can gradually come to understand the causes of anxiety in more depth, learning tools to train in during our lives that will help us overcome this crippling emotion for good.

Buddhist meditation can give us all of this.

By the way, if you have concluded that meditation is not for you because you are just too distracted and worried to be able to concentrate, please know that pretty much everyone starts off too distracted and worried to concentrate. And this is exactly WHY we have to learn to meditate. Meditation is the medicine for distraction and distress. Not taking it is like saying:

“I am too sad to be happy.”

(Or as someone just said on Facebook “Actually, not meditating because it’s too hard is like saying “I’m too sad to take my Prozac.”)

Our uncontrolled mind is in a state of apparent chaos, lurching from one chaotic situation to another; we feel caught in that small space. But if we can step back and see what is arising from a bigger place, we can realize the bigger story. We can step back and then CREATE the bigger story.

So the first thing to do is to allow our mind to just settle, relax, and get bigger. Our mind is naturally peaceful, as explained here – our problem is that we keep shaking our mind up with uncontrolled thoughts, rather like a clear mountain lake being churned up by speedboats. Let the mind just settle through breathing meditation and we’ll discover that we already have peace, lucidity, and calm within.

Worries fill our mind, so we need to empty our mind, for a while at least. Things feel less overwhelming in that space. We realize we can cope. We realize we can feel good. Anxiety, as they say, is a misuse of the imagination. We realize we can think differently.

There are inner and outer problems, as explained here. I was thinking how each of those outer problems listed above requires different advice and solutions – the car may need to go to the mender, you may be able to enlist other people to help you with your work, your friends may have good suggestions on your hair, or you may be able to do something proactive to help prevent the forces of darkness from descending on our world. But internally, the advice is similar – control our mind and replace the anxious thoughts with helpful ones.

Breathing meditation is increasingly popular because it really helps people relax. Even a small amount of time and effort can yield surprisingly big results. The breath may not be the most profound object, but this meditation teaches us something profound – that we don’t need to add peace from outside, it is already there inside us. If we allow our inner problems to temporarily subside by taking our attention away from them by single-pointed focus on the breath, our natural peace comes to the surface. And we can know that even if it is only a little bit of peace to begin with, (a) it feels so much better than anxiety and (b) there is plenty more where that came from. Phew.

Plus we now have some space, control, and perspective to deal with the outer problems, as needs be.

You can find out how to get started in a breathing meditation here. And there may be meditation classes in your area if you check this link.

We’re out of space, so I’ll explain more next time. Meanwhile your comments are welcome.

Don’t worry, be happy

Getting perspective on hurt feelings

Ever had self-loathing?

How do I get rid of problems?

How to avoid stress and burn-out at work

Problem-free days

What is modern Buddhism for?

I watched 13^th recently. And “I Am Not Your Negro”. (You can get them on Netflix and Amazon, respectively.) They are both such well observed and eye-popping documentaries that I now want everyone to watch them – well, especially if you are anything like me and have been living in a bubble of privilege, uncomprehending and shocked as to why the USA “suddenly” seems to be so racist and mean, suddenly seems to be going “backwards” (when perhaps it was never progressing quite as forwardly as some of us thought.)

The questions stirring my mind these days are how I, as a modern Buddhist, can help bring an end to racism and all other forms of discrimination, selfishness, and intolerance – and not just in some distant, delayed Pure Land, but here and now in this world, given that we are all in this together. I know Buddhism has the ideas. I know some of these ideas, such as love and fairness, are of course shared by other traditions too. My questions are how to share these ideas wider, most effectively and appropriately.

It is a work in progress and I welcome your comments on how you are doing it – some of you have already shared some useful observations on the last two articles. For me, I will contribute by chatting on this blog and to anyone else who may be interested. I have been listening most recently to people, both lay and ordained, who have brought Buddha’s insights into prisons, to great effect, and into the favelas in Rio and townships in Cape Town, and into film-making, and into brave new visions for renewing our broken social systems.

Modern Buddhism is surely not about escapism; it cannot be about navel-gazing. I think we need to gain gradual experience of these teachings while sharing them in as many practical ways as we can. I know Buddhist software developers, social activists, doctors, healers, artists, directors, performers, prison officers, entrepreneurs, and so on, who are increasingly bringing these ideas into play to change their professions and their own and others’ lives, to change society, to reimagine our world.

This may sound obvious — that there are Buddhist practitioners appearing in all fields — but it was not always so. When I first got involved with the Kadampa Buddhist tradition 36 years ago, it had just come out of Tibet, not surprisingly dragging along the cultural accretions of a monastic-oriented and somewhat archaic values of a very static society. I hate to say this, but there was a view for a few years back in the day that if you were not a monk or a nun, you were not a full or proper Buddhist. If you were not living in a Buddhist center, you were not a proper Buddhist. If you had a regular day job, you were not a proper Buddhist. And if you had children, goodness me, you had pretty much thrown your precious human life away.

Those anachronistic basically Tibetan notions all went out of the window a very long time ago and surprisingly rapidly, thanks in large part to the vision, skill, and courage of Geshe Kelsang Gyatso. Working closely with his students, he has modernized the presentation of Buddhism in umpteen far-reaching and radical ways, all while managing to keep the meaning of the teachings intact and flourishing the lay and ordained community. This means that there is an ever increasing number of good examples of how to be a Buddhist, Bodhisattva, and Tantric Yogi.

As a result, this tradition has exploded in size and relevance. And I believe this modern Buddhism is still evolving to catch up with Geshe Kelsang’s vision!

Which of Buddha’s insights could be of benefit to help our modern world? If you ask me, all of them! They are all methods for purifying and transforming our minds and actions, and thereby purifying and transforming our actual world, including everyone in it. And they boil down to wisdom and compassion, as explained in this last excellent guest article. As Geshe Kelsang says:

Developing compassion and wisdom and helping those in need is the true meaning of life.

For example, wisdom can be seen to range from an understanding that happiness and suffering are states of mind whose main causes depend upon the mind, right through to an understanding that everything, even the tiniest atom, depends upon our minds. The things we normally see, vis a vis things outside the mind or independent of the mind, do not exist — everything is mere name, mere projection. Everything is dream-like, everything is illusion. Our ignorance veils the truth; we need to pull that veil aside. We need to help ourselves and everyone else overcome their ignorance on every level because ignorance is what keeps us trapped in systems that have never worked and never will.

Compassion ranges from an understanding that we are all equal and interconnected, breaking down the pernicious “us and them” mentality, through to a universal empathy that finds the suffering of all living beings more unbearable than our own and seeks to permanently dispel it.

All these ideas are rooted in the idea of our potential for change — our innate compassion and wisdom — a potential that is enormous, infinite, and that can start functioning right now if we let it. And if we add the transcendent vision of Tantra, we are able to bring about results very quickly indeed.

It also seems to me that Geshe Kelsang Gyatso — in many ways the modern Buddhist master for our time – has been pointing for a long time to the possibility of Buddha’s teachings bringing about actual world peace. In his Buddha Maitreya teachings of 2009, for example, he said, as I quoted earlier:

If everybody followed this view — sincerely believe there is no enemy other than our delusions — all our problems that come from fighting and war will be ceased permanently. Following this view is the best method to make world peace. Unfortunately, everybody denies or neglects Buddha’s view, his intention. So we want world peace, everybody says, “World peace, world peace!”; but no-one understands how to do this.

My feeling is that it is on us to help people understand, alongside gaining experience ourselves. How? Through our own practice, example, conversations, and social engagement. Through not hiding away these ideas or ourselves out of modesty or a fear of offending, but engaging our bodhichitta into the world around us, sharing any experience far and wide in as many contexts as we can.

Not trying to make everyone into a Buddhist either — most people will not become Buddhists but they are still welcome to apply these ideas.

To finish, here is some food for thought from a comment on this last article:

Compassion that is based in wisdom is the only effective way to change this dreamlike world. Geshe Kelsang explains why so eloquently at the end of the Great Compassion chapter in How to Transform Your Life. Changing our mind directly changes the experience of the world because there is no world outside of our experience of it! With wisdom and faith, we can experience that change directly and others will experience it through our example and influence. World peace is possible if we change our mind today.

More to come, including hopefully some of your comments and/or guest articles. Also, the Kadampa Summer Festival is about to start, meaning that thousands of lay and ordained practitioners from around the world will be sitting around chatting in cafes … maybe see you there.

A Buddhist way to world peace

A vision of hope in troubled times

A modern Buddhist master

Hey, what’s going on!

Time to rebel!

A vision of hope in troubled times

A guest article.

Extract: “It all starts with a social dialogue, openly considering the Bodhisattva (“friend of the world”) ideal and way of life in all areas of society, not just in Buddhist Centers.”

Do you think world peace is possible? We want your comments on this subject! And please share this article if you can.

It’s fair to say that we live in troubled times. Whether it is the growing divisions in society, the threat of global terrorism, global warming, or the potential for conflict (or indeed all-out war) in parts of the world such as the Middle East and North Korea, it’s clear we live in volatile times. While we may not be expressing it externally so much, it seems to me that many people are living with a sense of quiet hopelessness for the future of humanity and our planet.

Thankfully all is not lost. There is a way we can all emerge stronger and more resilient in spite of the times we live in. Many people have found that within the teachings and practices of Buddha – for example, in the practical, modern Buddhist approach of Kadampa Buddhism – we can find a universal vision of real hope for everyone, Buddhist and non-Buddhist alike. It also seems there has never been a time in the history of humanity when this vision of hope was more needed, at all levels of society.

Why? It starts with understanding the goal of Buddhism, which is the realization of world peace. Just as importantly, it offers methods to accomplish this vision. To explore how Buddhism offers very real and practical solutions for our troubled world, the key is to be clear about what is the biggest problem we have in the world today. It may surprise you to hear that it’s not the divisions in society, the growing threat of terrorism, or even global warming.

The biggest problem in the world today

The biggest problem in the world today is the current lack of wisdom and compassion in the hearts of living beings. I say the “current” lack of wisdom and compassion because all is by no means lost, and this present situation can truly change. As I will explain below, we can all evolve our current levels of wisdom and compassion, and in this way realize this inspiring vision of hope, a peaceful and harmonious world.

At present, the external problems in our world today – on which we are focusing most of our energies — arise from this inner problem that we largely ignore, our universal lack of wisdom and compassion.

Due to lacking compassion we face many problems on a micro and macro level in society and in our world. Lacking compassion, and due to grasping tightly at what “I want” to be more important than what “you want”, we experience so much conflict and breakdowns in our relationships. Terrorism is the result of a fundamental lack of compassion for others. In this case, what I want or my world view is more important than your life, even if your life happens to be the life of an innocent child.

Every major world religion without exception advocates love and compassion at the very heart of its teachings and way of life. Yet much of the terrorism we see in the world today is carried out in the name of religion. Lacking compassion, we cannot tolerate and embrace the differences in others, whether those differences are based on politics, race, religion, or sexual orientation. A brief glance at the daily news stands testament to the fact that we have never lived in such divided and intolerant times. For too many people today, it seems that if you are not like me, I don’t like you, or indeed I hate you. Also, lacking compassion, we close our hearts and borders to our fellow humans who seek only to live in peace, free from the traumas of war.

Due to lacking wisdom, our elected politicians believe the way to solve potential regional conflicts is to follow a path of diplomacy until that appears to have failed. Then, history shows that the final solution of our leaders seems to be imposing world peace through the force of guns and bombs.

Due to lacking the wisdom that understands the true causes of happiness, the prevailing world view is that we can buy our way to happiness. This leads to the problems of a consumer society working too hard, spending too much, eating too much, drinking too much, and ending up paying for it all in rising debt levels and decreasing physical and mental health and well-being.

When our accumulated stuff does not bring us the happiness and contentment we seek, we discard it. This then ends up on ever-growing land fill sites that contribute to a polluted world and potential global environmental catastrophe.

In reality, as the well-known modern Buddhist teacher and author, Geshe Kelsang Gyatso, explains in many of his books:

Happiness is part of our mind that experiences peace of mind, it does not exist outside ourself.

Ironically, the cause of real peace and real happiness is, in essence, simply wisdom and compassion!

A note of caution: it is important that we direct our blame in the right direction, which is never toward other living beings. All too often people get angry at all the angry people they see in the world, which simply perpetuates the problem, never solving it.

Other people are never a valid object of judgment, yet always a valid object of compassion.

Everyone — whether they are painters or politicians — is simply working with their current levels of wisdom and compassion, which sadly at present can often be quite un-evolved. Unless people have consciously trained their minds to grow and strengthen their qualities of wisdom and compassion, it is unrealistic to expect anything better than what we see in our world today.

Everyone everywhere has the same potential

The solution is both simple and profound. As a starting point, as Geshe Kelsang puts it:

If everyone practiced cherishing others, many of the major problems of the world would be solved in a few years.

We have tried everything else — perhaps it is time we embrace a new way of solving the problems we experience in our own lives, society, and world. This is not a nice to have, rather an absolute necessity if we are to successfully navigate our way through these difficult times.

The changes in society and our world need to start with a change in our relationship with ourself. To begin with, we need to come to know through our own experience that we all have the potential for limitless love, compassion, and wisdom already in our hearts.

In truth there is natural and limitless peace and goodness that lies at the heart of humanity and indeed all living beings. Whilst at present this natural peace and goodness is obscured by our negativity and delusions, Buddhist meditation gives us proven methods to connect to and fully liberate this peace and goodness. And we can start right here and now.

How? Any small experience of peace, joy, or good hearted qualities such as love, compassion, and kindness is revealing the essence of who we are, and the potential for who we can all become. In Buddhism, we call this inner potential our “Buddha nature”, and the good news is that everyone has the same potential.

Therefore, the solution to the biggest problem we have in the world today — the lack of wisdom and compassion in the hearts of living beings — is to simply recognize, through our own experience, this universal truth of our own Buddha nature and then learn how to access and fully actualize this potential.

When hope becomes reality

How do we accomplish this? Instead of living from greed, aggression, and intolerance, we need a new vision of how we relate to ourselves, others, and our world.

To put it simply, we need to become a friend of the world. This in the Buddhist tradition is known as the “Bodhisattva” ideal. A Bodhisattva is someone who identifies deeply with their Buddha nature, and motivated by a universal compassion for all and guided by wisdom, views themselves as a friend of the world. On this basis, they dedicate their life to the goal of accomplishing world peace. World peace is when everyone in the world is truly at peace, happy, and free from suffering. This is also enlightenment.

The way to accomplish this is simple yet profound. As Gandhi put it ‘Be the change you want to see in the world’. Find real and lasting peace, freedom, and happiness within your own heart (enlightenment) and work to help everyone – without exception – to accomplish the same.

In one of his earliest books, Geshe Kelsang Gyatso wrote:

Nowadays, with the world in turmoil, there is a particular need for Westerners to cultivate bodhichitta. If we are to make it through these perilous times, true Bodhisattvas must appear in the West as well as in the East. ~ Meaningful to Behold

Although written nearly 40 years ago, for me this a compassionate message of real hope for our modern times and troubled world. If we are to solve the problems of our world and make it through these perilous times, people everywhere need to embrace and live at least some aspect of the Bodhisattva ideal. If we can create a shift in the global paradigm, and a lot of people can embrace this ideal even a little, we can change our world beyond recognition.

We shouldn’t see this as an impossible goal, and in fact this kind of change is not entirely new or unnatural to us. It is often in the periods of great darkness in the history of humanity that our Buddha nature seems to manifest as a force of light to oppose this dark, and some aspect of the Bodhisattva mind manifests. For example, the civil rights movement arose as a powerful and compassionate response to the inhumane segregation and repression of the rights of African-Americans. I also vividly recall the outpouring of compassion that arose from the images we saw on our TV’s of the terrible suffering during the Ethiopian famine of the 1980’s. This was the catalyst for the Live Aid concerts and the millions of dollars that were raised at that time, and the humanitarian projects it funded.

However, these positive shifts in humanity’s consciousness and the social movements that arise from these shifts all too often either dissipate or even sometimes turn from compassion to frustration and anger. We still have major racial divisions in the US and around the world, and we all too often turn off our TV screens at the latest global catastrophe or famine due to ‘compassion fatigue’, the result of the present limitations of our compassion and wisdom.

Towards an enlightened society

In my own experience, this is where the modern Buddhist approach can truly help. With its focus on integrating the principles of wisdom and compassion into all aspects of our daily life, and its universal applicability, everyone can learn what it means to live and grow from a truly peaceful, wise, and compassionate heart. This is the Bodhisattva’s way of life. If everyone could do this, one day we will realize this vision of a peaceful and harmonious world. World peace is simply the day when the world is at peace — this is an enlightened society.

The practical way to realize this vision is to create a more enlightened society right here and now. It all starts with a social dialogue, openly considering and practically exploring the Bodhisattva ideal and way of life in all areas of society, not just in Buddhist Centers.

In this way we start a conversation about a better way for humanity and ultimately all living beings. The wonderful thing about Buddhism is that it offers proven meditations and practices for daily life that empower everyone in our society – regardless of your race, religion, or background – to at least begin to live the Bodhisattva’s way of life, right now!

When people in all areas of society — whether you are a father or a mother, a painter or a politician — try their best to live and grow from a genuinely peaceful mind and good heart of wisdom and compassion, we will begin moving towards a truly peaceful world, an enlightened world, and this vision of hope can one day be fully realized.

This guest article was written in response to my request at the end of this last article, A Buddhist way to world peace.

I am sincerely hoping that it will encourage more conversation around this subject, and not just on this blog but by you talking about compassion and wisdom as a viable answer to the world’s problems with the people around you, wherever you are.

I have met a number of people already finding ways to share these ideas at work and so on, changing people’s lives, and maybe you are one of them? And I am hoping we can collectively find more and more ways to spread these universally applicable solutions far and wide.

A Buddhist way to world peace

In this most recent article, we saw how to view others as kind to us, as necessary to us, so that we could love them.

But a question may arise, “How can I see people as kind when they are mean or unjust?”

This is the question that came up in my mind when I saw the footage of Philando Castile’s girlfriend being comforted by her child in the aftermath of his terrible shooting. As a friend said on Facebook:

If this doesn’t humanize the outrageous event, I don’t know what will.

The worst of it, it seems to me, is that this has been going on forever. So how to respond constructively, how to see the “kindness” in this situation? As someone else put it on Facebook:

One day I hope I can learn to react to things like this with genuine compassion, rather than it make my blood boil.

I have been wondering how Diamond Reynolds will explain to her little girl what happened. How would a Buddha explain it in such a way that he could help the child, perhaps saving her a lifetime of sadness, victimhood, and distrust?

It pretty much goes without saying, but needs to be said again and again anyway, that if this had been a white family the man would still be alive. This family are victims of the ignorance and prejudice of others. The cop shooter was a victim of his own ignorance and delusions, and he was also a victim of the age-old system that allows this discrimination to carry on.

It seems to me that when it comes to the 400-year-old history of racism in this country, Black or white we are all trapped in this corrupt system together. The sooner we realize that, and the sooner we pull aside the veil of ignoring, maybe the sooner the prejudice and complicit behaviors can end. As Martin Luther King Jr put it, the struggle against racial discrimination is

… not a struggle for ourselves alone, but it is a struggle to save the soul of America.

Delusions are our real common enemy

But, even deeper, we are all victims caught up in the corrupt system of samsara, and this is our real problem. As Geshe Kelsang Gyatso explains in How to Solve Our Human Problems:

Our real problem is not the physical sickness, difficult relationship, or financial hardship that we might currently be experiencing, but our being trapped in samsara.

Whatever problem we are having, whether individually or collectively, we are having it because we are trapped in the prison of samsara, the cycle of impure life, by our delusions. If we are still in samsara, this means we are dominated by our bad habits of anger, selfishness, attachment, jealousy, etc, and above all by our ignorance. These are the source of all our negative thoughts and actions and of all our suffering experiences.

If we are in a prison, whatever problem we are having individually or collectively — whether with cold porridge, moldy surroundings, no money, or violent prison guards — the real problem is always that we are in prison in the first place.

And if we are in this prison of samsara, then even if some other prisoners seem to be having it worst than us at the moment, this is no cause for feeling superior or complacent. We are all in this together, lacking freedom, and we will have similar if not worse problems soon enough.

Delusions are our common enemy, the real enemy. It is essential that we separate people from their delusions. They are not their delusions, just temporarily controlled by them, as are we. Every living being is in fact kind, is even our mother from past lives; and our mother is never our enemy. In How to Transform Your Life, (available as a free ebook), Geshe Kelsang says:

It is because they distinguish between delusions and persons that Buddhas are able to see the faults of delusions without ever seeing a single fault in any sentient being. Consequently, their love and compassion for sentient beings never diminish. Failing to make this distinction, we, on the other hand, are constantly finding fault with other people but do not recognize the faults of delusions, even those within our own mind.

We are all slaves of our delusions together. They are like some master race enslaving us all, so there is power in opposing them together. To borrow a phrase from Martin Luther King Jr:

When the slaves get together, that’s the beginning of getting out of slavery.

World peace is possible

We need vision and hope based on reality — based on a realistic, helpful view. A Bodhisattva has huge vision, wishing to end all suffering everywhere with the understanding that everyone has the potential to be suffering-free. Is this what MLK Jr meant when he said:

I have seen the promised land.

We need to know and believe that an alternative way of thinking and living is possible. That world peace is possible. Geshe Kelsang said in 2009:

If everybody followed this view — sincerely believe there is no enemy other than our delusions — all our problems that come from fighting and war will be ceased permanently. Following this view is the best method to make world peace. Unfortunately, everybody denies or neglects Buddha’s view, his intention. So we want world peace, everybody says, “World peace, world peace!”, but no-one understands how to do this.

Everyone, Buddhist or not Buddhist, can apply these practical teaching on blaming the delusions, not each other, for our suffering. If enough people follow this simple but profound view, world peace is a possibility.

Does this view help me consider the situation with more compassion, for a start? Yes, it does. It increases my wish to help everyone caught up in that situation become deeply free, not just from this horror but from all suffering.

More importantly, could Diamond’s little girl benefit from this idea? I believe so. I believe it could help empower her and give her peace if she took it to heart. I believe it could help the cop, too, to see the error of his ways. And it could help everyone trapped in the system see that it doesn’t have to be like this, that there is another way out of this mess for all of us.

Temporarily we can be working to improve these particular situations by changing our minds and changing our society. Ultimately we can be working to break everyone out of samsara’s prison altogether. And can we not be doing all this at the same time?

An idea whose time has come

Our modern age is a time of momentous and lightning-fast change. It seems as though a lot of things are going downhill fast, but this rapid change can also open doorways in people’s minds as they struggle to figure out another, better way to be, given that the old certainties are no longer working.

What MLK Jr said some decades ago seems even more the case than ever:

Men, for years now, have been talking about war and peace. But now, no longer can they just talk about it. It is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence in this world; it’s nonviolence or nonexistence. That is where we are today.

Given that, I believe that Buddhism is an idea whose time has come.

I have been thinking recently of how Buddha Shakyamuni himself appeared in India at a time of great social change, 2500 years ago. There was a lot of population upheaval from the rural areas to the towns, and a chance to shake things up a bit – and with his teachings on the equality and interdependence of all things, as well as his example of teaching, ordaining, and treating princes and paupers alike, Buddha upheaved the caste system.

I submit that Buddha’s teachings would be equally capable of ending racism, and the ignorance and fear and greed that underlie it.

I found this interesting quote the other day by a Sri Lankan monk, Walpola Rahula, who said in 1978:

Buddhism arose in India as a spiritual force against social injustices, against degrading superstitious rites, ceremonies and sacrifices; it denounced the tyranny of the caste system and advocated the equality of all men; it emancipated woman and gave her complete spiritual freedom.

Buddhism is all about liberation from suffering. Mainly this means getting ourselves and everyone else out of samsara permanently. But this doesn’t mean that we all have to GO somewhere — samsara and liberation are mere reflections of our minds. We need to create this alternate peaceful liberated reality right here and right now by purifying our minds and our actions.

What is modern Buddhism if not applying the ideas of Buddhism to the problems of the modern world? In the modern world, we are not sequestered in caves and monasteries, as were the practitioners in Tibet. In this world we are all interconnected and interdependent like never before, and we ignore this fact at our peril. Far better to take advantage of it to spread the ideas of wisdom and compassion to bring about genuine, lasting improvement.

So, I am asking you, how are we going to get these ideas, such as the one above, out there?!

More in these articles: What is modern Buddhism for? and A vision of hope in these troubled times.

What do we do now?

Buddhism and creativity

How do I get rid of problems? Buddha’s advice

Choose love

What are delusions?

Month: July 2017