All people want to be happy. This is one of the common threads that bind us together. Yet many of us unwittingly predicate our own happiness on the unhappiness of others.
How do we seek the unhappiness of others? Win/lose thinking is the culprit. "For me to be happy, I need to win, and you need to lose," is the pervasive belief that places us on a treadmill to nowhere. We see it in sports, the "who's hot, who's not" celebrity gossip filling our media, competition at work, our economic and political systems, and even the competition among religions for adherents.
What if we realized that this mode of living was a guarantee that we will be involved in never-ending conflict, with occasionally satisfying "victories" but no lasting happiness? Imagine how it would change the world if instead we learned to hold our own views without believing we had discovered the only way to live. Imagine what could happen if we recognized that the people with whom we disagree are also seeking happiness. Imagine if we began to seek ways for others to have their happiness without sacrificing our own. Admittedly, this will require some creativity, but getting out of the win/lose mindset and giving it a shot seems worthwhile at this critical juncture for our world.
The ramifications could be enormous. The need for conflict and war would evaporate. Happiness would cease to be something we were in endless (but fruitless) pursuit of and become something real that we all reflect in the world.
Imagine if we could recite the Buddhist prayer known as the Four Immeasurables, and really mean it for all beings, understanding that if they find their true happiness, we will find ours as well.
May all beings have happiness and the causes of happiness.
May all beings be free from suffering and the causes of suffering.
May all beings never be parted from freedom's true joy.
May all beings dwell in equanimity, free from attachment and aversion.
3 comments:
Clay, this is a provocative piece. It is logical, but logic and human behavior are 2 wildly different things. Schadenfreude is very real in most of us, though hopefully not in the case of dear friends and family.
But, like Sisyphus and the rock, it's worthwhile to daily endeavor to be our best.
I enjoyed your writing.
Barry Collodi
Clay,
As I think I've mentioned before, one problem I have with Buddhism is the notion of freedom from attachment.
I was shocked when a work colleague told me that his wife left him and their children to become a Buddhist monk. When I expressed surprise, he told me that I should not be, that Buddhism was about getting beyond attachment.
So I have a problem with that part of the last line of the prayer. I can see getting rid of *unhealthy* attachment, and perhaps that is what it is referring to....covetous desire or something like that.
I believe that our Maker is passionately attached to us - so that one of the Names we give Him is PhilAnthropos - the lover of humans. And in the Summary of the Law he wants us to love Him and our neighbor. Perhaps even harder than giving up unhealthy attachment...
Barry - thanks for the feedback. My aspirations are barely recognizable in my own behavior. ;-)
Jack - your comment brings up a lot of concerns that I have struggled with as I learned some of the basic Buddhist teachings.
In my understanding, attachment is not the same thing as passionate engagement. Rather, it is a type of grasping and clinging in which the attached person predicates their happiness on the world being or remaining exactly as they believe it should be. Aversion is the flip side - it predicates happiness on the world being in some other state than it currently is. Attachment is the tyrannical, controlling father to passionate engagement's loving soccer dad. Attachment is "my way" and aversion is "no way." So, I'm not sure that attachment, as used in the Buddhist teachings, can ever be considered healthy or skillful. There are a lot of examples of spiritual giants from many religions using passionate engagement without getting sucked into this type of attachment. Ghandi, Martin Luther King, Jr., the Dalai Lama, and Desmond Tutu come to mind.
Thanks for the thought provoking comments!
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