|
Practice Tip: right livelihood in today's world
One of my favorite books is Uchiyama’s How to Cook Your Life. I have read it several times, a couple of times with students, going through the book sentence by sentence. More recently, I’ve been dipping into two of his other books, The Roots of Goodness and The Zen Teaching of Homeless Kodo. Today I read an excerpt from Stephen Batchelor’s new book, Buddha, Socrates, and Us.
All of these books are, essentially, about right livelihood: not as the rules for ethical conduct laid down in the cultural and economic context of ancient India, but as a living inquiry into how we live in today’s world.
The main point in all of these books was summed effectively up by Paul, in Corinthians I 13:11:
When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became a man, I put away childish things.
What does it mean to put away childish things?
In Chapter 7 of Wake Up to Your Life, I addressed this question in some detail in describing how the four immeasurables take apart reactive patterns. In the section Shredding Pattern-Based Existence (pg. 301-307), I break down these “childish things” into four levels of reactive patterns:
- childhood struggles to survive,
- adolescent struggles to find a place in the world,
- adult struggles to solidify identity and worldview, and
- spiritual struggles to realize idealized longings.
Now, in retrospect, it’s clear that I didn’t go far enough.
Virtually every system of thought (communism, fascism, capitalism, existentialism, humanism, absurdism, libertarianism, originalism, fundamentalism, etc.) is, in the end, based in some childhood longing. Only those traditions that take you into a mystery that cannot be understand with the conceptual mind can offer you any possibility of freedom. As it says in the Diamond Sutra:
...the unconditioned is what differentiates worthy persons.
and
Because true experience is not an object of knowing,
It cannot be known by ordinary consciousness.
Thus, Buddhist practice is not about how to live in the world "out there". As Uchiyama and others have noted, that world is constructed out of the world that we actually live in, namely, the world of thoughts, feelings, and sensations. Buddhist practice is about how to live in this world, not the world “out there.” As I wrote in a prayer of refuge:
Knowing there is nothing outside or inside to free me, I take refuge in buddha.
Knowing that experience and awareness are not two, I take refuge in dharma.
Knowing there is nothing to grasp or oppose, I take refuge in sangha.
Imagine you are dreaming, and you know that you are dreaming. You experience a world, the world of the dream. What is the dream world made of? It is made of the sensations, feelings, and thoughts that arise in your dream. Who is responsible for that world? Well, you are. It’s your world. You are responsible for not only everything that you do in that world, but everything that happens in that world. The dream is not something apart from you. You are responsible for that world, for each and every being in your dream, and everything that happens to them, because you are that world.
But that’s an impossible responsibility! Yes, it is. And that’s where the bodhisattva vow comes in. Again, from the Diamond Sutra:
One who has correctly entered the way of the bodhisattva sets this clear intention by thinking, ‘I shall bring all sentient beings all the way to nirvana, to the vastness of the nirvana in which no aggregate remains. Further, although sentient beings beyond measure come all the way to nirvana, no sentient being comes all the way to nirvana.’
In other words, the vow is to free all beings without conceptualizing them as beings!
The bodhisattva vow is not about making the world “out there” a better place. It’s about taking responsibility, full responsibility, for the world in which we actually live, for all the thoughts, feelings, and sensations that arise, for every time we are overwhelmed and fall into confusion and reactivity, and so on. We can only do so if our intention goes beyond ordinary thought and we know, through our own experience, that what arises is in our lives is as groundless as what arises in a dream. That’s why we have to put away childish things.
To bring this down to earth, then, what does right livelihood mean? It means that we live in such a way that we are not dissipating the resources that make it possible for us to cultivate those qualities that, in turn, make it possible for us to avoid falling into confusion and reactivity.
As Kilung Rinpoche described in his most recent book The Free Mind, it is all too easy for us to dissipate time and energy on social media, never-ending scrolls, and keeping up with the barrage of information that pours into our electronic devices. As Yuval Harari in his book Nexus, the purpose of this information overload is to elicit in us a constant state of anxiety, distraction, and confusion, in other words, to make us confused and reactive. And, as Yanis Varoufakis argues in Technofeudalism, not only we as individuals, but whole companies, organizations, and communities, are being systematically drained of our time, energy, money, attention, and our ability to organize our own lives, all for the profit of a small group of large and powerful companies. For instance, we tend to spend less time cultivating strong in-person relationships and spend more time in ephemeral and less satisfying virtual connections. Instead of reading substantial books, we opt for pre-digested summaries or overviews, and never have to put out any substantial effort to learn something. We no longer own anything, but have to secure access or use through subscriptions, a constant outflow of money. And so on.
This is the cultural setting in which we live. What does right livelihood look like here? For me, anyway, it means that I take care not to let the powerful cultural forces and seductive technologies drain my time, energy, money, attention, creativity, and imagination. To do this, I have to look at what I do each day and ask “How is this activity shaping me? How is it shaping the world I actually live in? How is it helping me to cultivate the qualities that are most meaningful to me?”
More and more, and I don’t think this is solely due to my age, I value in-person meetings over virtual connections, phone calls and actual conversations over texts and emails, and so on. I take a hard look at all the different ways rent is extracted from me in the form of subscriptions, time, energy, and attention. I examine time and again the information that is fed to me and take care, as much as possible, not to fall into group think and other forms of stupidity.
I’m not saying that we should avoid all these technologies. Many of them are immensely useful and make things possible that were all but unthinkable even a few years ago. But they tend to be all-consuming and extractive, and that is where the practice of right livelihood comes in.
Right livelihood means to bring attention to how we are living our lives. This is how we put aside childish things and take responsibility for the world that we actually live in.
| 
