You probably won’t find it by turning on your TV. You can’t bid for it on Trade Me. You won’t usually hear it on a bus, but sometimes you may. Occasionally you might be stunned by recognizing it in the eyes of a shopkeeper, offering you kind words as you go about your day. Or the beauty of it may strike deep in your heart as someone sits beside a homeless person on the street and asks them how they’re doing.
The Buddha emphasized a dimension of everyday consciousness, or a resonance of heartfulness called sila as essential for living an awakened life, and as an indispensible basis for liberating the heart from suffering. His teaching was pragmatic, rather than based on arbitrary standards appealing to outside authorities. In essence he encouraged: ‘Do beauty, get beauty. Do harm, get harm’. Not only that, but he emphasized that the potential in activating and abiding in a beautiful resonance of heart is actually immense, and can have very powerful results. On the other hand, the resonance of harm, or damage, has equally powerful effects – no matter how we rationalize it, argue for it, get off on it, or claim that we are not attached to it.
Yet 21st century media ecourages the opposite. Computer games ecourage participants to kill and enjoy killing. Mainstream movies often promote ‘righteous’ violence (the more dramatic the better) – and arthouse movies often dispense with ethical justifications and just go straight to the blackness. You will very rarely find síla in music. Mostly we will find themes of craving, if we are lucky, and just outside of the mainstream (and even in it) we’ll find revenge, malice and pain.
The media is also obsessed with a kind of beauty – physical beauty. It is a testimony to our innate longing for the good, the fortunate and the bright. However, this longing mostly remains on the level of appearance, and fools the mind into believing that there is an ideal world in which we should be living – where everything is glossy and perfect, and we can have what we want (if we try hard enough). When we attend to the ordinariness of our lives, the imperfections of our bodies and the reality that even though we actually have quite a lot, we still feel like it’s not enough, we may begin to contract around a sense of ‘there must be something wrong with me’, ‘I’m not one of those people’, and ‘I don’t measure up’.
Sila offers us a way out of this. It is an attuning to and bringing forth of an intuitive intelligence that can actually manifest good fortune in our lives and our relationships, by being beauty, rather than seeking it as a particular ideal, a particular person, or anything ‘outside’. And it does so through an intimate inquiry into the nature of cause and effect itself. It also takes a kind of courage – to step outside of the conditioned packages, limitations and stigmas of popular culture and dig deeper for that which has more profound value than quick fixes or the illusion that I am getting ‘ahead’ in the world.
The Buddha taught five ways of training, sikkhapada, that he said were fundamental to living our lives within a resonance of harmony, happiness and ease. While often framed up in terms of the negative, I have found great benefit in inquiring into the positive potential to which they are pointing.
Underlying the first four of these is an invitation to begin to open to an empathetic consciousness that feels others in the same way that we feel ourselves. Within this is also a sensitivity to the principle of karma – that actions done towards others ultimately bear fruit in their mirror image in terms of our own stream of being. So, me harming others is me harming myself. As our meditation practice unfolds, and we begin to clear some of the hardened negative patterns of constriction and suffering in the heart, we automatically begin to value our own well being, and also begin to see the pain or happiness of others in a much clearer light. From this place we can start to sense into what effects our actions generate – in others and in ourselves. The world begins to look quite different.
The first training is to respect all life, and to refrain from harming other people, animals, and even insects. To dwell in this quality fully there has to be a sensitivity alive in the heart that can first feel into the question: ‘What is this other being?’. It is a heart inquiry, rather than a conceptual one, and depends upon an open, responsive awareness. I have found it useful to spend time looking at beings I was conditioned to disregard in my youth. Take the ordinary housefly, for example. If we take the time to look at what a fly is, close up, we will begin to notice that it is alive, and sensitive, just like us. We may notice how it washes itself with its feet, or how it looks around sensing for danger. When we open to this perspective, the perception ‘fly’ begins to dissolve, and there is less of a sense of seperation between ‘me’ and ‘it’. If we can do this, the heart naturally recoils from the impluse to kill – we realize that there is a living, breathing consciousness there, and it is almost as if reality finally becomes three dimesional, rather than just a static projection of my own mind. This feels very good.
The second training is to only take only what belongs to us, what is given, and to honour the boundaries and possessions of others; to be cirumspect in this area. I myself have experienced directly the pain of muddying this aspect of human life – in my teens I, like a lot of other boys surfing their newfound testosterone, had a few powerful experiences of taking what wasn’t given. When I was caught, the result was feeling mistrusted by others, being looked upon with suspicion, and ultimately not feeling like my boundaries were safe. On one occasion I even had a large amount of money stolen from my bedroom… Even then, before engaging in meditation practice, I had a sense, a feeling, that this was the result of my own attitude to the world, and could feel the bitter taste of that misfortunate resonance. So, on one hand, stealing leads to unfortunate results on the social level, while on another something in us begins to doubt that we can trust others, and ultimately, ourselves. If this feeling isn’t understood and cleared it can become a major obstacle when we come to sitting meditation – we will come across edges of self-doubt, guilt, or just an underlying feeling of ‘it’s not safe’. It is a wonderful thing to be free of that particular pain.
The third training encourages us to apply this same principle in the domain of sexual relationships. If we are connected to what is really of benefit to our partner or spouse, and what is not, it will become heartfully clear what the effects of infidelity are. Although we can adopt theories and justifications as to why this ‘shouldn’t be true’, the Buddha was again just pointing to a natural law of causality – it hurts. While relationships have the potential to bring blessings and nourishment to our lives, they also have the potential flip-side of immense hurt, fall-out and broken-ness. So it is a great gift to ourselves and others to be careful, to feel clearly, and to value compassion and concern for our loved one’s welfare over the primal urges, impulses and dreams of ‘what could be, somewhere else’. Of course, we can choose to end our relationships, for a variety of reasons, many of them compassionate – these trainings are pointing to the way in which we do this, and encouraging us to protect and nurture a field of blessings for ourselves and others in this life.
The fourth is around speech. In it’s most simple form it suggests: ‘Be truthful’. Sounds easy… But many of us will know how sneaky the mind is at telling the odd little white lie, particularly when our self-image is at stake. When we do this, how does it feel? If we are sensitive, we will feel the unease that arises with such speech – the sense of having acted upon the intention to deceive, and therefore feeling like we have deceived ourselves. In terms of karma, when we are not truthful it generates a quality of consciousness that means we will either be told untruths, or on a more subtle level, will be on the lookout for others, believing that they are lying! This doesn’t feel good, and can lead to a lot of confusion in the mind, and even states of paranoia. Of course the arena of speech has many shades, from coarse, blatant lying to the more subtle knee-jerk reactions, but the invitation here is to pay attention to how we speak, why we speak, and equally important, what the effects of our speech on others are. As with the other trainings this requires us to dwell in and open to a sensitivity of heart that is beneath the stories and rationalizations that can so easily plague our conscious mind. Our speech then becomes a vehicle for bringing about happiness and connection, and is a powerful way to manifest beauty in our relationships and the social fabric of our lives.
The fifth training is to value and protect our clarity of awareness. While this differs slightly from the others, in that it doesn’t necessarily involve other people, or other beings, it is said to be an essential foundation to avoid the blurring and disregarding of the the other four. There are many views on what this means in terms of putting things into our systems – from total abstinence from any form of intoxicating substance, to mindful awareness and caution around their use – but the essence of it refers to cherishing and protecting a particular quality of mind: appamada, or heedfulness. We know when we’ve lost it. So it is a wise training to begin to look into this quality of heart and to sense its preciousness, its immense value in terms of the practice of awakening and of manifesting beauty in the world. When we are heedless we lose touch with the sensitivity that can hold another being in full awareness and resonate with their pain, their happiness, their sadness or their hurt. We close up into ‘my world’, and things once again become a means to my gratification rather than an opportunity to open into and nurture a field of blessings. And we may even forget that it was possible to even be open at all. There is great tragedy in this.
So sila, then, can be seen as a potential that lies within the causal fabric of human life already – if we attune to it with sensitivity, we begin to experience a positive feedback that invites us to open some more. When we taste the effects of living from a place of love and respect for ourselves and for the other beings with whom we share this planet, we begin to sense how it supports our aspiration to be free of suffering and dis-ease. By connecting to the ground where we can stop planting the seeds of suffering in our relationship with others, and with all forms of life, we bring great benefit to the world, and in turn, ourselves. In the words of the Buddha:
‘One gives to all beings freedom from fear, freedom from hostility, and freedom from oppression.
In doing so one also enjoys freedom from fear, freedom from hostility and freedom from oppression.’
This is the great blessing of síla.