Really?
Ok.
There’s some background here. I have a friendship, for the last half-century, that has been of considerable influence. He and I happened to be in several classes in both Middle and High School, and we were on the same swim and water polo teams. Our social groups overlapped, and, although we were not best friends, the connections ran deep.
At the funeral of an old friend’s wife recently, he told me that my posts would be “significantly enhanced” if there was “… more of a Buddhist slant” to my commentary. Since I see him, still, as dialed-in to the Zeitgeist way before many of the rest of us even notice, I thought I’d play along in a way that may rattle some cages.
First off, there is this misconception that those of us who have dug a little deeper into formal practice are universally “OK” with everything. Opinions… checked at the door; simply fine with the way the world is in this moment without taking a side on anything.
Big misconception here.
Being a Buddhist does NOT mean that you don’t have a position or an opinion. Rather, the core teaching supports taking a position without attaching to an outcome. The predicate (‘without attaching to an outcome’) is confusing to most Westerners whose lives are, generally built on the relative success or failure of meeting outcomes. I can only say as a former monk, the core of the Dharma pointed us in a different direction. The outcome wasn’t the issue. Rather, a person’s ability to meet an outcome that differed from their preference with grace and ease would ultimately act as a determiner of their depth of practice. It’s easy at this point to take issue with this aspect of the teachin.
“No one gets to judge me or my ability to meet challenges with either grace OR ease.”
Sit down, shut the fuck up, and recognize that you’re tightly held opinions about this issue are limiting your ability to be an effective agent of change. You are clearly afraid of being judged. The key to your happiness and your peace is to meet this fear with the kind of openness that will allow for you to become more intimate with any, and all, situations with curiosity and wonder RATHER than any expectation of any kind of outcome.
Probably sounds obvious, but holding on to an outcome is the problem. The situation, whatever it might be, is merely a context for the tests that challenge our capacity to cling to expectations. Letting this tendency go is not easy. But hanging on to it is more difficult.
Imagine your life in ways where clinging to a past, or a future, took a backseat to a life where the present moment dominates your immediate experience. It’s a difficult practice around which an entire wisdom tradition was built, but, for thousands of years, it has offered a path for those seeking a freedom that is oriented around the stability that Truth offers. Fearlessness abounds in this place, where one’s ego lets go of the wheel and allows for inspiration to inform the gaps offered by our terminal sense of lack.
Sounds like a good friend who loves you. 🙂🦋🙏