Setting or Rising?

In my last post, I wrote about the role of government and regulation in preventing disasters such as the financial meltdown and the BP oil spill. In this post, I want to tackle a smaller (but I believe related) issue, which is how we care for and manage the local world that we inhabit and share with others.

I was at my local coffee joint the other day, and a man came in and ordered an iced coffee. Upon receiving it from the barista, he moved to the counter to add milk and sugar. He put the milk into the coffee with extreme carelessness, stirring and sloshing the dark brew all over the counter. He grabbed three packets of artificial sweetener, tearing them haphazardly over the cup, spilling crystals onto the coffee on the counter. He snapped the lid back onto the cup and stormed out of the store, leaving a sticky mess behind for the next customer who wanted to doctor his or her drink.

The next customer came along, saw the mess, and set his cup down some distance from the coffee spill. He took some napkins and cleaned up the mess, as well as the rest of the area. After he was satisfied with his work, he carefully prepared his drink and left. As he departed, he noticed me watching him and gave me a sly smile.

In his classic work Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior, Chogyam Trungpa describes two very important concepts. First is the concept of basic goodness, the idea that at the core of our existence is a fundamental openness, cheerfulness, and intuition as to what needs to be done. Basic goodness manifests itself in our ability to enjoy things like the color yellow or the taste of a peach in an unconstructed and direct way. Basic goodness also shows up in the way that almost any situation is workable. A messy house can be cleaned, a wrong turn can be righted, and we can mourn and recover from a loss. Our situations may not be what we want, but we can work with them.

Another concept presented by Trungpa is the notion of setting-sun world. This is a worldview that embodies a type of depressed pessimism. In part, it is a refusal to be open to the reality of basic goodness, to the workability of our lives. It manifests in many ways, one of which is an unwillingness to take responsibility for the situations we create or encounter.

The careless man who made and abandoned his mess was living in a setting-sun world. Not only did he leave a mess for those who came after him, but he denied the workability of his situation, sacrificing a bit of his own dignity and power by doing so. The man who tidied up after him showed patience and equanimity. He was living in what Trungpa calls the land of the Great Eastern Sun, which is perpetually rising.

The goal of the spiritual warrior is to help create an enlightened society. We do this by embracing our basic goodness and working with our situation. The smallest actions ripple far beyond what we imagine. Picking up a piece of litter someone dropped, cleaning up our own coffee spill, working through our problems with a sense of faith and trust in the workability of things - all of these are revolutionary acts.

As for the connection to our larger global problems, Mohandas Ghandi said it quite succinctly, "You must be the change you wish to see in the world."