Sitting practice makes you more aware; it sensitizes you to the little nicks and bruises
that the heart is subject to. Hurtful things you used to say and do,
painful things said and done to you that you formerly brushed off or hardly noticed,
you now see as painful. It pains you to say, even to think, hurtful things,
and you notice even more—though you probably noticed before—
when such things are said or done to you. The more you are familiar with all this
in your own mind, the twists and turns of which increasingly come into view
as you go on practicing, the more it dawns on you that others are like this too.
You see you are not unique—there’s a human pattern here.
The human mind is a swirl of activity mostly centered around self-preservation
and self-justification (which can, oddly, sometimes take the form of self-recrimination)
and all sorts of scheming to get one’s own way. After some initial dismay,
you realize this is normal. You are a mess, and so is everyone else. And when you don’t
take the mess into account, when you insist on pretending that it doesn’t exist,
that it is reasonable to take all the hurts and slights and confusion seriously
and thrash around in them—you make things much worse. But appreciate the mess,
know that it is a shared mess, and even have a sense of humor about it,
and you can be much more forgiving and generous with yourself and others.
So naturally, your thoughts, words, and deeds in relation to others
will be more relaxed, generous, and kind.
Morality is more about others than it is about you.
Mostly, the sphere of ethical conduct has to do with how you interact with others.
Some people think that meditation makes an already self-concerned person hyper self-aware,
thereby increasing causes for worry and upset. There might be some truth to this.
But, mostly, meditation practice has the opposite effect: it makes much more vivid
the feeling that you are living in a world with other people whose lives, hearts, needs,
and pains matter as much as yours do. Meditation increases empathy.
It makes you quite loath to hurt anyone—you see that hurting someone is the same
as hurting yourself. In fact it is worse. You would rather hurt yourself than hurt someone else.
If you hurt yourself, you can deal with it, somehow. But if you hurt someone else,
you can’t necessarily help them deal with it. They are stuck with the effects of what
you have done to them. And so are you. You have to live with it.
Morality comes out of this sensitivity and empathy. Kindness toward others
and one’s self is what morality is fundamentally about. Not a set of rules.
The Buddhist precepts offer a different approach to conduct that creates suffering
for ourselves and others. More of a helpful guide to happiness, they are offered
as behaviors that stated as negatives create problems and as positives lead to happiness.
There is no sense of sinfulness or any thing like divine retribution, only actions that are
very practical to avoid or helpful to develop.
I vow to cherish life, not to kill.
I vow to accept gifts, not to steal.
I vow to respect others, not to misuse sexuality.
I vow to practice truthfulness, not to lie.
I vow to practice clarity, not to intoxicate mind or body
of self or others.
I vow to speak with kindness, not to slander.
I vow to practice modesty, not to praise self at the expense of others.
I vow to practice generosity, not to be possessive of anything.
I vow to practice love, not to harbor ill will.
~ Norman Fischer
excerpts from Compassion without Calculation
with thanks to Lions Roar
