This means, obviously, that we do not kill, steal, or have sex with people who are bound emotionally or ethically to others. We seek to be honest, to act impeccably, to respect our agreements. Every cause has an effect. Anything we do will be done to us, and what we withhold from others will be withheld from us. There is no greater call to Right Action than the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Because they, or someone else, will.
Particularly when we’re in pain, or when we feel the need to make something happen, the temptation is great to compromise with the principle of Right Action. Yet once we truly understand that every action calls forth a reaction—whether that action is ever seen or known by anyone else—then we understand that there’s no compromise with righteousness that does not ultimately compromise our own good.
Sometimes we might be asked to do something and find ourselves thinking: “Oh God, I don’t have the time! I don’t have the energy! I don’t have the bandwidth!” It’s also very common these days to run into people who ask us to consider whether we might be “giving too much.” But our response should always be determined by what we truly feel in our hearts. And the universe will support us. When your heart expands, your life expands; and when your heart constricts, your life constricts.
The ego, or Mara, often argues that our good lies in avoiding our responsibilities, cutting corners, resisting the ethical path. But only the good promulgates the good, and proactively seeking to do right by others is the only way we can experience the universe doing right by us. When we’re depressed is not the time to lessen our spiritual vigilance. By practicing spiritual principles, particularly during times of great sorrow, we conspire with the universe in putting our lives back on track.
Sometimes Right Action means we have to apologize to someone who is the last person in the world we want to apologize to. Or go somewhere that is the last place in the world we want to go. But if we feel in our hearts that it’s “the right thing to do,” then we will be blessed by having done it. A dysfunction very prevalent in our society is the notion that we should do something only if it feels good, or if we think it will get us something of value. Such a notion springs from spiritual ignorance and is the farthest thing from the truth.
Giving ourselves emotional permission to just do whatever we want is not freedom, but license. It does not liberate, but imprisons. Right Action—trying to do the right thing—is the only path of enlightenment, because it flows from the guidance of the heart.
Right Livelihood
Right Livelihood is the principle of making ethical career choices; it means not making a living in ways that harm people or animals, because doing so would obstruct enlightenment. Once we see our work as a channel for the extension of our love into the world, we seek to make a living in a way that aligns with a higher calling.
Challenges to the principle of Right Livelihood confront many of us at work these days. We might wonder whether we should speak up about an unethical practice on the part of the company we work for but we’re afraid we might lose our job if we do, and “it’s not that big a deal anyway.” Or we might overcharge for a product because we really need that extra money this month. Or indirectly promote violence by working on a gratuitously violent commercial, television show, or movie. Or sell an item that we know in our hearts will not deliver on what it promises.
Given critical ethical lapses in today’s global economy—huge corporate conglomerates putting their own short-term economic gain before the health and well-being of the world’s majority of inhabitants and of the planet itself—the issue of Right Livelihood has collective significance too. If we as individuals do all we can to be ethical in the way we conduct our own professional affairs, is that enough? Or are we not called to consider the larger picture of an economic system that is increasingly predicated on increased profits for the few at the expense of the many?
It’s easy to slide on this one, to think that if we don’t hurt anyone directly through what we do for a living, then surely we reap no negative consequences. But if we indirectly support an unethical business by providing a professional support service, for instance, then indeed we’re violating the principle of Right Livelihood. No principle on Buddha’s Eightfold Path is more relevant to the future of humanity than that which encourages the advanced nations of the world to consider the negative karma that accrues when we place business at the service of greed as opposed to love.
Much unnecessary suffering in the world today—from individuals cast aside by the global economy to economic crises brought about by unethical banking practices—has been caused by a lack of Right Livelihood, not necessarily on our part, but on the part of systems of which we’re a part. Spiritually, we cannot afford to care only for ourselves in relation to money or anything else. I saw a protester involved with the Occupy movement holding a sign that said, “Wall Street Should Practice Right Livelihood.” Indeed.
Simply knowing that Right Livelihood is part of the Eightfold Path puts the issue in front of us in a significant way. That is the gift of Buddhism, as of any spiritual teaching. It doesn’t put our spirituality “over there,” in some corner far away from our day-to-day existence. If we all try just a little bit harder to apply this principle more consistently, then changes both large and small will begin to occur in our financial affairs. The violation of this principle is at the heart of a lot of negative karma in our lives, as individuals and as a society. Beginning to honor the importance of Right Livelihood would have a radically positive effect on us all.
Right Effort
Right Effort is the proactive cultivation of enlightenment as the only antidote to the neurotic obsessions of the ego mind. The reason we want to practice it is because the mind is extremely powerful in whatever direction it’s turned. A mind that is not conscious and proactively attuned to the effort of right-mindedness is put at the service of wrong-mindedness. Mara is always seeking to triumph over love and uses any opportunity to take advantage of our lack of vigilance.
When we’re depressed, Mara specializes in negative thoughts and feelings such as victimization, hopelessness, cynicism, anger, revenge, attack, and blame. It takes effort to transcend such thoughts, to recognize them for the ego forces that they are, and to work at thinking otherwise. During a time of sadness, a commitment to Right Effort is more important than ever because one of the things that’s particularly debilitating about sadness is that it drains us of our energy. Mara feeds on laziness, procrastination, rationalization, and self-indulgence.
Sometimes Right Effort is to apologize to someone; sometimes it’s to start a payment plan to pay off a bill; sometimes it’s to clear the air in a relationship; sometimes it’s to start exercising more, or meditating more, or reading more; sometimes it’s to do service; sometimes it’s to write a thank-you note; sometimes it’s to do something gracious that you simply haven’t thought you had time to do; sometimes it’s to participate in your responsibilities as a citizen; sometimes it’s to donate to a good cause; sometimes it’s to clean up your house; sometimes it’s to call a friend or family member. In our hearts, we usually know what to do. Right Effort simply means that we choose to do it.
Sometimes, when suffering has us hunched over in pain, the Right Effort called for is merely to get up each morning and put one foot in front of the other, to muster enough faith in possibility to simply make it through another day. And that itself is a good thing. Whatever Right Effort we can make on behalf of compassion for ourselves and others, the universe will receive it and will respond in kind. When we make the effort to follow principles of enlightenment, the powers of enlightenment empower us.
Right Mindfulness
Mindfulness is an idea that’s in vogue today, its popularization having produced treatises on everything from mindful parenting to mindful work to mindful divorce. Being mindful is certainly the apex of the spiritual journey, as it’s the mental alignment from whence all compassion comes.
Right Mindfulness means “ri
ght awareness” or “right attention.” It means disciplining the mind to remember what is eternal beyond the temporary, embracing ultimate reality beyond the illusions of the world. Right Mindfulness is the attainment of a state of consciousness beyond all concepts, symbols, illusions, and false associations of the mortal mind. It is the intersection of the human and divine, the perfect alignment of the mortal mind with the Mind of God. There, in that place, there is no impulse to wrong-minded thought or behavior, no vulnerability to Mara’s dance of death, no hysterical voices screaming in our heads. The mindful mind is the whole, or holy, mind.
Not too long ago, I was visiting New Delhi. I was supposed to meet someone for lunch in the lobby of a hotel, but I didn’t know what he looked like since we had only communicated via email. The lobby was quite busy and I was late for the appointment. Looking around, I began to feel quite anxious. A lovely young woman who worked for the hotel came up and asked if she could help. I told her I was quite stressed due to the circumstances, and didn’t know what I should do. She told me I should go into a corner of the lobby, sit down, and find my calm; then surely it would become clear to me what I should do next. I chuckled and thought to myself, “Right. I’m supposed to know that.”
It can take years of meditation and practice to attain Right Mindfulness on a consistent basis. Sometimes we are simply delivered to such a state, like a gift of grace at certain moments when we least expect it. Whether we are looking ahead to the goal of Right Mindfulness, or remembering the moments when we knew we were there, it shines like a beacon of divine possibility for all of us. Buddha attained it, and in following his path, we are following that beacon to our enlightenment too.
Right Concentration
Right Concentration is the correct focus of the mind. By focusing the mind on what is true, we not only rise above suffering, but we transform it. It involves the cultivation of a quiet mind to still the forces of chaos within us.
Buddhist meditation, like A Course in Miracles and all serious spiritual practices, is a tool by which a suffering mind transcends its agony. Such practices train us to stay focused on the present when the mind is obsessed with past and future; to stay focused on compassion when the ego is obsessed with another person’s guilt; to stay focused on the deeper realities of life beyond the illusions of the world.
A Course in Miracles says that we achieve so little because our minds are undisciplined. We’re far too tolerant of the ego when it wanders into the temptation of negative, critical thought. Buddhists use meditation to focus the mind on what is really true as a way of dissolving that which is not.
There’s a Buddhist tale of a warlord who sent his minions into a monastery to announce that he was taking it over as his personal possession, and that all the monks there were to leave. One monk, however, refused to go. When his minions reported his refusal to the warlord, he asked, “Did you tell him he would be killed if he didn’t do as I say?” The minions said they had indeed relayed that message, but the monk didn’t budge from his seated position.
The warlord then decided to enter the monastery and speak to the monk himself.
He brandished his sword and pressed it lightly at the monk’s throat. “Did you know,” he barked, “that I could take this sword and cut you open from top to bottom?”
The monk looked at the warlord and answered very calmly, “Did you know that I could let you?”
With that, the warlord dropped his sword and fell to his knees. Realizing he was in the presence of a spiritual master, he gave up his life of violence and began the journey to his own enlightenment.
Through Right Concentration the monk had attained a state of mind in which fear could not enter. His spiritual practice had delivered him to a place beyond illusion and beyond its power. Unafraid of death, he lived in a fearless place. And this gave him power over worldly forces. His enlightened state did not weaken him in the world; it strengthened him.
This story is an example of the benefits of spiritual practice to the sorrowful mind; it changes our brain circuitry in relation to that which makes us suffer. It brings the mortal world into harmony with a greater truth when we see situations not through prescribed mental filters, but as they truly are. The monk, as it turned out, was more powerful than the warlord. This means that each of us, when in our right minds, is more powerful than the ego—and thus more powerful than our sadness and more powerful than our fear.
Right Concentration reminds us that simply trying to think positive thoughts is not enough to override our mental anguish. It takes the discipline of serious meditation to hone our attitudinal muscles. A vague and gauzy spirituality cannot succeed at this, but the serious practice of cultivating a thought system based on love and compassion cannot fail. Whether our meditation practice is Buddhism, Transcendental Meditation, the Workbook of A Course in Miracles, or any other, there is no more powerful tool for concentrating the mind on what is real.
Buddhism is a unique and precious gift to the planet, one embraced by many billions of people over thousands of years. As one’s primary spiritual practice or as an adjunct to another, the teachings of Buddha are as deep as the deepest ocean and as wide as the heart can expand. Buddha’s enlightenment furthered the spiritual evolution of humanity, and his teachings deepen our understanding—as well as our practice—of any other system of spiritual truth. The Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path are powerful directives for how to transcend the sorrowful mind. Buddha’s is a light that has illumined, and continues to illumine, a billion darkened nights.
TEN
The Light of Moses
Generation after generation, Jews gather every year at Passover to read the story of the Exodus, the journey of the Israelites from slavery to the Promised Land. The Exodus story never changes, but with each year we do. Great religious tales are reminders of things that do not change, that we might navigate more wisely those things that do.
Judaism is both intellectually sophisticated and emotionally profound. Like Islam, the theology of the religion is deeply entwined with the history of a people. Also like other religions, it prescribes not only a way of living in the world, but also a way of surviving its ravages. The Jewish people are not unfamiliar with suffering, or with hate or prejudice or oppression. Nor is their experience of suffering in a different corner from their relationship to God. The drama of the Jews cannot be understood outside the drama of a historical pattern of rejection, but it also cannot be understood outside God’s eternal promise to rescue and to deliver. The Jews take the hit—the historical pattern is obvious. But God has always delivered on His promise, and the Jews have developed a relationship with God that delivers not only Jewry but all the world to a space of possibility the ego can only temporarily disrupt. The greatest triumph of the Jews is that they have survived. In doing so, they have established a pattern of psychic survival—and triumph—that is a gift to all the world.
Every year at Passover, Jews retell the story of the Israelites being led out of slavery in Egypt, their wandering through the desert for forty years, and their ultimate deliverance to the Promised Land.
Their Exodus was led by Moses, one of the great figures of religious literature (whether or not he actually existed as one historical personage is a controversy that’s fascinating but ultimately irrelevant). All the great Abrahamic religions—Judaism, Islam, and Christianity—see in Moses a global and historic messenger to the ages.
At the time of Moses’s birth, the Jewish people were slaves in Egypt. According to one tradition, Egyptian astrologers told Pharaoh that on a particular day the liberator of the children of Israel was to be born, although they couldn’t specify whether this liberator would be Jewish or Egyptian. To guard against any possibility that such a liberator would appear, Pharaoh decreed that all male children born that day would be drowned in the Nile.
And on that day Moses was born. Upon his entrance into the world, the house he was born in became radiant with light. Light would be a theme throughout his life—f
rom the light that filled the house of his birth, to the burning bush out of which God spoke to him of the greatness of his mission, to the light that illumined his face when he returned from receiving the Terms of the Covenant, or the Ten Commandments, on Mount Sinai. That light—the symbol of spiritual understanding—is the light that fills any mind, or any environment, in which the thoughts of God are present. Moses, like all of us, was both informed by the light and protected by the light. Only light has the power to cast out the darkness of the ego mind. Only spiritual understanding can save us from all the insanity raging within and among us.
Moses’s mother Jochebed realized that she wouldn’t be able to hide Moses from the Egyptian soldiers. Heartbroken but desperate to save him, she made a waterproof basket, placed him in it, and set it down among the papyrus reeds growing on the bank of the Nile.
There is no greater pain than the pain of a mother separated from her child, and all of us have felt some aspect of violent separation from our own creations. Who among us has not felt the pain of being separated from our innocence, our happiness, our potential, our due? And have we not bravely done all we could to protect such things, to hide them away, to put them in a safe place?
Moses had a destiny greater than the forces that would defeat him, as do we all. And events unfolded in a way that provided for his survival. Pharaoh’s daughter, herself having rebelled against the cruelty of the royal decree of infanticide, found the baby Moses among the reeds at the side of the Nile and raised him in the palace as her own. Significantly, it was the love of Moses’s mother, her courage and her commitment to doing whatever she needed to do to protect and save him, that paved the way for his safe passage. That is a message to all of us. We may be heartbroken, but it is programmed into the nature of the universe that whenever the ego has hurt us or whatever it would take from us, the story isn’t over; it has just begun. Do the loving thing, and love will find a way.
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