American Buddhist Perspectives
I’m reading Matthieu Ricard’s book, Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life’s Most Important Skill, and it’s simply wonderful. I skipped right to the end for the juicy stuff (being an expert on all of this as I arleady am 🙂 – just kidding), and I’m working through the early material now. One of the sections in the late chapter, “The Path” is titled, “Like a Wounded Stag.” There he praises the act of separating oneself from society, like a wounded stag would do, to help heal the wounds “of ignorance, animosity, envy” (p.262). This is a temporary process, but a necessary one.
“In the whirlwind of daily life, we often feel so hurt and drained that we are too weak even to do the exercises that would give us strength” (ibid.).
How true. In my own life this has happened to an extreme a couple of times. Life simply became day-to-day crisis management, tasks looming, frantic activity, breathing shallowly, exhaustion masked by anxiety. How much we all need pause from this – but not just pause, but escape to something positive so as to find peace, and “finding our own peace, we learn how to share it with others” (ibid.).
I find this whole idea of getting away from society so as to deepen oneself (and then to return) as very difficult for many of my friends, family, and students.
“Isn’t that self-indulgent?”
“Shouldn’t you focus on getting involved instead?”
“How is avoiding people going to make you better around them?”
There is of course some degree of self-indulgence in getting away from society. It is/should be based in a recognition of one’s own dissatisfaction with the status quo. “Get involved?” Do you mean “stick around and fight – fight with yourself, fight with others, find scapegoats, place blame, point fingers?” What good are the gravely ill in treating the gravely ill, the blind leading the blind? We all know of plenty of people, from politicians and talk-show hosts to our more opinionated acquaintances, that stick around and, in their own ignorance, only exacerbate the problem. Even some very good people working on issues of incredible importance can become so isolated by their views and self-righteousness that they become simply ineffective.
Those people who are here, in society, helping selflessly already have that hard won mental clarity and most of them have won this (and it is no surprise that many of our greatest spiritual heroes have as well) through extensive work alone on themselves. This isn’t to say we need no teachers, no friends; we need the teachings, we need support, but ultimately it is upon us to use them, and that is a very personal process.
It is in this personal process of healing our selves that we grow and expand beyond the whirlwind of daily life, we get “a new perspective on things, broader and more serene, [which] helps us to better understand the dynamic of happiness and suffering” (ibid.). It is by stepping into this broader perspective, this deep breath of fresh air, the piano song slowly playing, the bird chirping in the tree, that we overcome many of the mental barriers that we’ve placed between ourselves and our friends, family and others. With this work, this newfound freedom from our mental afflictions, we also have freedom to act more genuinely with people in our lives.
Community is good, but for true happiness, we need solitude.
See Mattieu Ricard on Google-talks: Change your Mind Change your Brain: The Inner Conditions for Authentic Happiness
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