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The Peace Within Most of us live our lives so much on the surface that we forget there is anything deeper. Especially for activists, we move from action to action, from goal to goal, from engagement to engagement. Of course, the continuous routine of planning, implementation and evaluation is necessary; without it our activism becomes frivolous. From time to time we do feel an outburst of emotion. We suddenly realize we are angry, or we are sad, or perhaps we are joyful. At the moment when our experience of anger forces its way to the surface and to our notice, we think of ourselves as angry persons, as if anger is part of our personality. We don’t like the way we feel and we try to make the anger go away. Eventually, it does. At another time we may experience sadness. Again, we don’t like it. Again, we try to make it go away. Again, eventually it does. What we usually don’t reflect on is that there is a deeper level of our being which is not affected by these passing emotions. If we make contact with this deeper level, we can experience serenity and joy even when on the surface we are feeling agitated, fearful, or sad. A distinction is made between, for example, pain and suffering. Pain is our response to external circumstances, such as a physical ailment or a loss. Suffering is within, and one can learn to live without suffering, even in the face of pain. Similarly, there is a distinction between happiness and joy. Happiness is associated with external factors: a good meal, a loving friend, some unexpected money. It is notorious that happiness is fleeting. It has been reported that those who are lucky enough to win a lottery, in our society considered perhaps the highest source of happiness, indeed feel happy, but only for a few months. After that, life returns to the reality it has always been. Those who have been successful in our competitive society, winning a gold cup, climbing the corporate ladder, being elected to office, so often are reported to feel, “Is this all there is? Why am I not happy?” And yet their careers inspire emulation and perhaps envy. But not happiness. For most of us, we will not become number one. It is of the very nature of competition that there are many losers for each winner, so we will need to be content with being, at best, an also-ran. Our consumerist culture shows us the way to happiness: consume, consume, consume. The barrage of advertising messages never ends, and they tell us we will be happy if we would only buy what they are selling. Buying and spending, our search for consumerist happiness brings us credit card debt, second jobs, and stress. Consuming,
of course, is the opposite of conservation. Every consumer item encapsulates
a certain amount of material as well as the energy expended to manufacture
it, and recycling can never be more than partial. So
consumerism is bad for planet Earth. It is also bad for our spirit. Pema Chodron, the Buddhist nun and abbot of a monastery in Canada and a prolific writer, suggests a three-step process for overcoming destructive emotions like anger. It is a process which seems counterintuitive, but it is effective. The first is to know the emotion intimately. Let’s say we are working with anger. How does it arise? What does it feel like? How does it make us behave? Gradually, we become familiar with it without needing to judge or analyze. A regular practice of mindfulness meditation can be very helpful in this process, as we pay close attention to thoughts and feelings as they arise, without being distracted by the many calls for our attention in our everyday life. The second step is to own the emotion, recognizing that it is not caused by persons or events external to us. We own the emotion and we can have power over it. There is to be no scapegoating. We need to see reality as it is. Here it is important to be kind and gentle with ourselves. There is no need to be judgmental about our anger or to think of ourselves as failures. It is only necessary to understand that our anger only hurts ourselves; it does not affect anyone else. The third step is simple. After we become deeply familiar with our anger and we own it, we let it sit. Thich Nat Han refers to this stage as allowing the anger to “cook.” After some time, the anger we have become so well acquainted with becomes boring. We realize we don’t need it. We let it go, and it is gone. The Dzochen tradition of Bon Tibetan Buddhism holds that at a deep level we are already perfect, full of serenity, compassion and joy. We need not create these qualities, therefore; we only need to allow the obscurations, which have accumulated in our day-to-day lives and which cover up our deepest selves, to fall away. What are the benefits of being in touch with our deepest selves? For one thing, the joy and serenity at our deepest level does not fade away. Life then becomes richer and more meaningful. Besides, as we pay attention to what we are doing, as we live in the present moment, everything becomes filled with beauty, and we experience the awe which is a fundamental religious experience. Furthermore, our activism becomes more effective as we see reality with more clarity, without being side-tracked by our interior demons. Still
further, our spiritual growth is not confined to our
individual selves. Serenity and joy are contagious. As we begin to experience
how powerful it is to be present to the people we
encounter day after day, as we begin to see them brighten in our presence, we
will grow in compassion. Dom Roberti |