My Journey of Conscience
Whether or not my conscience feels clean or dirty depends largely on where I’m looking. If I remain focused on my fairly pleasant, personal everyday life, I feel pretty good. If I look further out in space and time, it doesn’t take long for me to start feeling my actions are out of sync with my most deeply held values.
I’m starting to think I want to extend my awareness of life as far out in space and time as I can. If I can learn to live constructively with that awareness, this seems to be the enlightened and compassionate way. I don’t know exactly how I’m going to do it, but here’s my thinking:
The man who eventually became the Buddha (which just means “awakened one”), Siddhartha Gautama, was a prince of sorts who grew up in a palace. His father wanted to insulate him from every kind of misery because it had been prophesied Siddhartha would either become a great king or a great renunciate holy man – and the father was strongly in favor of the former. The king carefully excluded from the palace anything that might make Siddhartha dissatisfied with life or inspire him to give it all up to explore spiritual alternatives.
Eventually, however, this state of affairs was not enough for the young prince. He insisted on venturing outside the palace, where he encountered people suffering from illness, old age, and death. Even though Siddhartha himself was living in complete comfort and luxury, he was no longer satisfied. He renounced the life of a prince and went on a spiritual quest that has reverberations to this day.
There’s another image that applies here. In Buddhist cosmology there are heaven and hell realms but there are also human, fighting titan, beast, and hungry ghost realms. You never stay in one realm forever, but end up in different realms based on your actions. It’s acknowledged that enlightenment is very difficult in the painful, troubling and chaotic lower realms of hell, hungry ghosts, and beasts. What is interesting to me is the heaven realm is also considered a difficult place to achieve enlightenment. This is because the beings there experience such pleasant lives they get complacent. The human realm, on the other hand, has just the right amount of suffering – enough to motivate, but not enough to completely distract or consume the beings there.
Sometimes I suspect I’m living in a heaven realm. It isn’t perfect, but it’s pretty nice. I could live out my whole life here quite happily without taking on the daunting question of what’s going on in the other realms and how it relates to me. However, it seems to me there are at least two reasons to compromise my contentment by venturing out beyond my palace walls.
First, heaven doesn’t last forever. In the Buddhist cosmology, the good fortune of the beings in heaven eventually gets used up. Then the heaven-beings end up in some lower realm, and it is said the loss of heaven can be even more painful than the torments of hell. In the case of the Buddha’s story, although the prince might have been able to live most of his life experiencing only pleasure and ease, he realized the sufferings of illness, old age, and death will eventually be experienced by all of us. Learning how to acknowledge, accept, and live with the reality of suffering before it hits you is a smart thing to do.
Second, it’s impossible – even in the heaven realm – to be completely insulated from what’s going on the lower realms, or, when living in a palace, to be completely unaware of what’s happening to the people down on the street. The flashes of headlines, the misfortunes of neighbors, the late-night ranting of a mentally ill person pushing a shopping cart down the street… these remind me of a much larger world. The kind of happiness that requires me to shut out that larger world seems strained and limited.
I’m convinced there is another way, which is what I want to explore over the year of this blog. That “other way” is described by another Buddhist image, the bodhisattva. The bodhisattva is a being who has attained enlightenment but does not retire from the world to enjoy her own peace and liberation. Instead she attends to all suffering beings, vowing to free every last one of them before she disappears into nirvana. The amazing thing is, bodhisattvas are usually portrayed as very joyful beings – definitely not as martyrs who have sacrificed their happiness for others.
How do we do this? Do you know any bodhisattvas?
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