(This is continued from yesterdays post. If you haven't already done so, please read March 6 first. As always comments are appreciated!)
Can you NOT judge? Try this exercise: try to go through a whole hour without even once making a judgment of good vs. bad about ANYTHING. Not about whether the coffee is too weak, not about whether you feel good today, not about whether the political candidates will save the nation or send us off the deep end, not even about the latest mass shooting. No judgments. Accept these things and try to convince yourself that it is above your pay grade to do the judging of them. It’s hard to avoid judging. We were trained to judge right from wrong from the time we were potty trained. How can a gunman killing X number of innocent students not be Wrong? Of course it is not Right, but does your condemnation of the act help your karma or is it just done to prove to yourself that you are on the side of Right? How many of our so-called values are really held as identification badges so that we will be seen by others and ourselves to be on the winning side, to be in the right tribe? How much judging is just displaced fear?
If you can’t quite avoid any judgment for a whole hour, try at least not to program your own reactions or emotions to the judgment, if you must make it. For example if you can’t help forming the judgment that the kitchen floor is really just too filthy, don’t leap to the conclusion that you are a bad person for letting it get that way. If you feel that the Universe needs your condemnation of the random shooting, then does your body and your karma need the righteous anger you feel in your gut? This debate is at the center of the reason many Christians condemn Buddhists for their apathy. The Buddhists believe in keeping a distance from the passions involved in signing on to the hue and cry of emotional involvement with things and issues.
I do not wish to idealize or proselytize Buddhism. Buddhism isn’t perfect, Judaeo-Christian isn’t perfect. I don’t think anyone should ever feel they have to buy into an entire system of belief, no matter how sensible and fulfilling some parts of it are. That’s why you won’t find me in anyone’s church. The non-judgmental aspect of traditional Buddhism has contributed over the millennia to a very laissez-faire attitude regarding the physical living conditions of many of its adherents. Main-stream Buddhist sects have failed to recognize the degree to which the suffering they deplore can be caused by social and political factors. Even today in Asian countries, “Buddhist Activist” is pretty much a contradiction in terms.
Those of us brought up “Christian”, hammered on by parents, siblings, teachers, nuns, etc. for the purpose of teaching right from wrong have a hard time with non-judgment. Judging EVERYTHING in our environment as Right versus Wrong is so basic to our culture that it is almost impossible to be here at all without indulging in it. Not to have opinions about politics is considered apathetic, not to be constantly scolding your kids is considered spoiling, to have dirty kitchen floors—what would your Grandmother think? To refrain from jumping on the violent retribution bandwagon after a crime against society is considered sociopathic. After the Virginia Tech shootings a certain member of my extended family actually maintained that “I wished I would have known about that guy—I woulda drove right down there and blown his head off!” OK, thank you Mr. Avenger from God, we’ll call you next time . . .
All living things are making judgments about their environment all the time—it’s what saves us from the sabre-tooth and allows us to evolve. But there is a basic difference between sorting out the good-for-you and the bad-for-you as contrasted with the beat-yourself-up-about-it judgment that we are taught to make in the tradition of the worship of fire-slinging vengeful Jahweh, Zeus, Dios, le bon (yeah, right) Dieu. Right is Might, Godly vs. Evil—it’s what makes the Western world go around. It’s what spanks children for innocently speaking a “profane” word, it’s what fills George Bush’s head and is why we are in Iraq. It warps the thoughts of over-stressed fathers who feel they must murder their wives and children to save them from Evil. It contributes to untold numbers of men, women, and children feeling a vague sense of worthlessness all their lives, feeling sure they have failed God, the saints, their parents, or SOMETHING, but not quite sure how or why.
It’s really interesting to trace the historical flow of these ideas and see how humanity has actually come a long way—2000 years ago it was pretty radical to conceive of an Absolute Good against an Absolute Evil. The earlier religions didn’t go there, they just tried to keep their pantheons happy, you propiate the kitchen god today, make the garden goddess happy tomorrow, a simple, easygoing life, not too many worries. Kind of like ants. Manicheism was an old religion that started about the same time and place as Christianity but spread east into Persia as Christianity spread west into Rome. Its main precept was the absolute incompatibility of good and evil. It heavily influenced the early Christian thinkers and we have it and its sister religion Zoroastrianism to thank for this fierce dysfunctional duality that cripples our spiritual life now, for the concept of Sin.
The “guilt” societies are organized differently. There is good and bad, but the good is to be in a state of harmony with your body, your family, your neighborhood, your city, your whole society. Think: The Teachings of Kun Fu (Confucius). Bad is caused by acting outside the norm, by doing anything that might disrupt the harmony of the group, for which the properly brought up Asian person feels guilty, not sinful. Buddhism tends to use terms which translate “unskillful” or “unhelpful” instead of “bad” or “evil”. This ties into a whole chain of concepts regarding the state of a person’s karma and how the person is acting to improve that karma. In life most of us want to be happy but instead we end up being miserable a lot of the time-- we lack skill in following our karma to a higher plane. A Buddhist never regards a person or an act as totally bad, only with a feeling which might be stated: “It’s a shame—by doing that, this person has not only delayed his/her own peace and enlightenment but by his/her ignorance has seriously complicated the karma of the entire world and put off all of our eventual enlightenment by just that much.”
Whether or not any of this is going to save us all, you can definitely help improve your own life if you step back from the issues. Take things as they come, let the Universe be the judge of things, you don't have to do it. Try to separate yourself from the tribal fear that comes gushing into the pit of your stomach when something “wrong” happens. Take lots of deep breaths, walk skillfully through the world. Have a Nice Day!!
Can you NOT judge? Try this exercise: try to go through a whole hour without even once making a judgment of good vs. bad about ANYTHING. Not about whether the coffee is too weak, not about whether you feel good today, not about whether the political candidates will save the nation or send us off the deep end, not even about the latest mass shooting. No judgments. Accept these things and try to convince yourself that it is above your pay grade to do the judging of them. It’s hard to avoid judging. We were trained to judge right from wrong from the time we were potty trained. How can a gunman killing X number of innocent students not be Wrong? Of course it is not Right, but does your condemnation of the act help your karma or is it just done to prove to yourself that you are on the side of Right? How many of our so-called values are really held as identification badges so that we will be seen by others and ourselves to be on the winning side, to be in the right tribe? How much judging is just displaced fear?
If you can’t quite avoid any judgment for a whole hour, try at least not to program your own reactions or emotions to the judgment, if you must make it. For example if you can’t help forming the judgment that the kitchen floor is really just too filthy, don’t leap to the conclusion that you are a bad person for letting it get that way. If you feel that the Universe needs your condemnation of the random shooting, then does your body and your karma need the righteous anger you feel in your gut? This debate is at the center of the reason many Christians condemn Buddhists for their apathy. The Buddhists believe in keeping a distance from the passions involved in signing on to the hue and cry of emotional involvement with things and issues.
I do not wish to idealize or proselytize Buddhism. Buddhism isn’t perfect, Judaeo-Christian isn’t perfect. I don’t think anyone should ever feel they have to buy into an entire system of belief, no matter how sensible and fulfilling some parts of it are. That’s why you won’t find me in anyone’s church. The non-judgmental aspect of traditional Buddhism has contributed over the millennia to a very laissez-faire attitude regarding the physical living conditions of many of its adherents. Main-stream Buddhist sects have failed to recognize the degree to which the suffering they deplore can be caused by social and political factors. Even today in Asian countries, “Buddhist Activist” is pretty much a contradiction in terms.
“Although Mahayana Buddhism has a grand vision of universal salvation, the actual achievement of Buddhism has been the development of practical systems of meditation toward the end of liberating a few dedicated individuals from psychological hangups and cultural conditionings. Institutional Buddhism has been conspicuously ready to accept or ignore the inequalities and tyrannies of whatever political system it found itself under. This can be death to Buddhism, because it is death to any meaningful function of compassion. Wisdom without compassion feels no pain.” Gary Snyder, Buddhist Anarchism, 1961
Those of us brought up “Christian”, hammered on by parents, siblings, teachers, nuns, etc. for the purpose of teaching right from wrong have a hard time with non-judgment. Judging EVERYTHING in our environment as Right versus Wrong is so basic to our culture that it is almost impossible to be here at all without indulging in it. Not to have opinions about politics is considered apathetic, not to be constantly scolding your kids is considered spoiling, to have dirty kitchen floors—what would your Grandmother think? To refrain from jumping on the violent retribution bandwagon after a crime against society is considered sociopathic. After the Virginia Tech shootings a certain member of my extended family actually maintained that “I wished I would have known about that guy—I woulda drove right down there and blown his head off!” OK, thank you Mr. Avenger from God, we’ll call you next time . . .
All living things are making judgments about their environment all the time—it’s what saves us from the sabre-tooth and allows us to evolve. But there is a basic difference between sorting out the good-for-you and the bad-for-you as contrasted with the beat-yourself-up-about-it judgment that we are taught to make in the tradition of the worship of fire-slinging vengeful Jahweh, Zeus, Dios, le bon (yeah, right) Dieu. Right is Might, Godly vs. Evil—it’s what makes the Western world go around. It’s what spanks children for innocently speaking a “profane” word, it’s what fills George Bush’s head and is why we are in Iraq. It warps the thoughts of over-stressed fathers who feel they must murder their wives and children to save them from Evil. It contributes to untold numbers of men, women, and children feeling a vague sense of worthlessness all their lives, feeling sure they have failed God, the saints, their parents, or SOMETHING, but not quite sure how or why.
It’s really interesting to trace the historical flow of these ideas and see how humanity has actually come a long way—2000 years ago it was pretty radical to conceive of an Absolute Good against an Absolute Evil. The earlier religions didn’t go there, they just tried to keep their pantheons happy, you propiate the kitchen god today, make the garden goddess happy tomorrow, a simple, easygoing life, not too many worries. Kind of like ants. Manicheism was an old religion that started about the same time and place as Christianity but spread east into Persia as Christianity spread west into Rome. Its main precept was the absolute incompatibility of good and evil. It heavily influenced the early Christian thinkers and we have it and its sister religion Zoroastrianism to thank for this fierce dysfunctional duality that cripples our spiritual life now, for the concept of Sin.
The “guilt” societies are organized differently. There is good and bad, but the good is to be in a state of harmony with your body, your family, your neighborhood, your city, your whole society. Think: The Teachings of Kun Fu (Confucius). Bad is caused by acting outside the norm, by doing anything that might disrupt the harmony of the group, for which the properly brought up Asian person feels guilty, not sinful. Buddhism tends to use terms which translate “unskillful” or “unhelpful” instead of “bad” or “evil”. This ties into a whole chain of concepts regarding the state of a person’s karma and how the person is acting to improve that karma. In life most of us want to be happy but instead we end up being miserable a lot of the time-- we lack skill in following our karma to a higher plane. A Buddhist never regards a person or an act as totally bad, only with a feeling which might be stated: “It’s a shame—by doing that, this person has not only delayed his/her own peace and enlightenment but by his/her ignorance has seriously complicated the karma of the entire world and put off all of our eventual enlightenment by just that much.”
Whether or not any of this is going to save us all, you can definitely help improve your own life if you step back from the issues. Take things as they come, let the Universe be the judge of things, you don't have to do it. Try to separate yourself from the tribal fear that comes gushing into the pit of your stomach when something “wrong” happens. Take lots of deep breaths, walk skillfully through the world. Have a Nice Day!!
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