Here's to Freedom (Well, Sort Of)

Happy 4th of July! Celebrate independence!

While honoring this day, let's also take a moment to reflect on where we came from, and the people we exploited and murdered to get here.

July 4th is a bitter pill for the Native American/Indigenous people who had all of their land and resources stolen and were virtually wiped off the face of the earth in a long, intentional campaign of genocide.

July 4th is also a bitter pill for the descendants of enslaved Africans in America, whose backs were broken to build our economic prosperity. A prosperity they still don't fully share in.

As a country that asserts itself as a moral authority in the world, let's start with a searching and fearless moral inventory of our own history, which is bloody and cruel beyond imagination.

We owe apologies and reparations to those whom we've hurt. We all know it. Some of us just don't want to admit it.

And when I say reparations, I do mean money. Because money talks in America. It's one of the only things that does. Our blood is green from placing the value of money above all other things. From Day One.

Why reparations, so long after the fact? Because they are still hurting. Black and Indigenous People of Color in America — the descendants of those who were slaughtered and enslaved — still suffer from mass incarceration, police brutality, restricted access to employment, healthcare, and educational opportunities, economic disparity, and just plain old bigotry.

Let's start using July 4th as an occasion to celebrate all of what we are as a nation, and not to whitewash the past away. Because it's still haunting us. And until we do right by it, it will always haunt us. That's what ghosts do.

Be Grateful to Everyone

This article is part of a series of short commentaries on proverbs or slogans from the Lojong ("mind-training") teachings of Tibetan Buddhism. Several other such commentaries will be offered soon, in addition to the ones that have already appeared here in previous months. To see the whole series of commentaries on Lojong slogans, click here.


Be Grateful to Everyone

This slogan is closely related to the previous one, "Always Maintain a Joyful Mind." When we maintain a joyful mind in every life situation, then we are able to see that everyone we encounter — including and especially the people who irritate us and push our buttons — is giving us opportunities to transform our negative patterns and awaken from our own delusion. Just as Atisha realized that his difficult and temperamental Bengali tea boy was his greatest teacher, so each time we meet someone in our lives who tests our patience we are given a choice: to do the habitual, instinctual thing — or to wake up.

The teacher Krishnamurti is said to have had a student like Atisha’s Bengali tea boy, someone who was very temperamental and difficult to work with. All the other members of Krishnamurti’s spiritual community loathed and avoided this man. One day the man got fed up and stormed out of the community. He got in his car and drove away, determined never to come back. Most people in the community secretly breathed a sigh of relief. But Krishnamurti got in his car and went after the man, and persuaded him to come back. When a student later asked him why he had gone out of his way to bring back this man who was so difficult and caused so much trouble in the community, Krishnamurti is reported to have said: “Are you kidding? I pay him to be here!” Krishnamurti knew that the one thing his students needed most was the continued presence of this man who tested their patience and pushed all their buttons.

The other side of “being grateful to everyone” is recognizing that our own well-being depends entirely upon the endless network of sentient beings of which we, ourselves, are part. Almost no blessing or comfort that comes to us is solely the product of our own hands or our own minds; everything is shot through with interdependence. Consider something as simple and ordinary as a cup of coffee at your local coffee shop: thousands of people were involved in serving, brewing, roasting, transporting, harvesting and growing that coffee. A team of hundreds was busy ensuring that clean water would flow to the coffee shop, and providing electricity to run the machines and light the shop so you could read your newspaper while you sip your coffee. You might never meet any of those people, but your happiness in the moment of enjoying that cup of coffee depends on all of them.

The simple fact that you’re reading this would be impossible if not for the kindness of the many teachers who patiently taught you, step by step, how to read and write, how to comprehend and communicate abstract ideas. And standing behind them was a network of teachers stretching back thousands of years, to the dawn of written language, and beyond. How often do you think with gratitude of the kindness you have received from those generations of people and all the ways it has benefited you?

Our habit of taking everything and everyone in our lives for granted means that we seldom see how interdependent we are with everyone around us, and how indebted we are to other beings for providing us with the causes and conditions of our own happiness.

All Things Are Connected

On Sunday I went camping at Pollets Cove with a friend from the Abbey. We built a campfire as evening was setting in, fueled with driftwood and logs from fallen trees. At one point I added a large log to the fire and watched as the flames from the logs below crept up the sides of the new log and it began to burn. After a few minutes, a long-legged spider emerged from somewhere inside the log, panick-stricken, running this way and that, looking for a way to escape from the searing heat of the flames now consuming its home.

My heart swelled with compassion for the spider's dire situation, tinged with a keen sense of responsibility for having put this little creature in its deadly predicament. If the spider died, it would be because of me. Without pausing to think, my body sprang into action. I stood up, reached into the fire, took hold of one of the spider's long legs, and moved it to the grass, where it promptly disappeared. I did not linger over my basic fear and mistrust of spiders, or the fear of getting burned. Seeing what had to be done to preserve the spider's life, and how quickly it had to be done, the action flowed spontaneously. Thought was not involved.

There are, undoubtedly, many people who would find it a little odd to care so very much about a spider, or to look for the spiritual lesson in meeting one under any circumstance, but the opinions of those people are not my concern. More and more, I am simply trying to live my life in a way that aligns with what I understand as very fundamental ethical principles. Foremost among these is to respect the life of all living creatures and to refrain from taking life deliberately, which is the first of the five basic precepts in Buddhism.

One of the results of making a conscious effort to follow any of the Buddhist ethical precepts is that you see, much more clearly, the many small and large ways in which you *don't* follow them, the little ways you break them inadvertently. Trying to follow the precept to refrain from taking life, for example, makes you vividly aware of how connected you are to the lives -- and deaths -- of innumerable sentient beings. A walk in the forest means stepping on countless bugs, most of them never even seen. A drive on the highway brings about the sudden death of a squirrel who runs under your tire (this actually happened while I was driving a few weeks ago). If you eat meat, you become much more aware that it came from a living creature with consciousness and feelings, not altogether different from yourself. (By contrast, if you're a vegetarian, you can't honestly look down on carnivores and pretend that you're blameless -- millions of insects died in agricultural operations to bring you your vegetables.)

The web of life sprawls infinitely in all directions, and at every moment we are profoundly connected to the lives and deaths of countless beings. Through lack of awareness, we never even see most of these connections, but occasionally one of them jumps out at us and we are presented with a choice. I believe that in such moments, how we act has repercussions that stretch further into that vast web than we can possibly fathom.

What is man without the beasts? If all the beasts were gone, man would die from a great loneliness of the spirit. For whatever happens to the beasts, soon happens to man. All things are connected....

The earth does not belong to man; man belongs to the earth. This we know. All things are connected like the blood which unites one family. All things are connected. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons of the earth. Man does not weave the web of life; he is but a strand within it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.

-- from a speech attributed to Chief Seattle, 1854