We’ve decided to offer the remain­ing 3 tele­sem­i­nars for free / or a dona­tion! There’s no signup nec­es­sary! Here’s the FREE web­cast and phone num­ber to call on June 10th at 8PM ET, 5PM PT: Phone-Number to Dial: 1–218-862‑1300 Use Con­fer­ence ID: 779550 Link to Web­cast & Action Guide (will be avail­able on 6/10) Here’s the page for view­ing the resources from the first call.

Last week, I started talk­ing about the 4^th of what I call the 4 Descrip­tors. I wrote:

For the next three arti­cles, let’s look at the 4^th descrip­tor, what is called the 8-fold Path.

Each of the 8 paths is typ­i­cally pref­aced with “Right,” as in Right View, Right Voca­tion, etc. For pur­poses of our dis­cus­sion, I’ll fol­low Glenn Wal­lis (I’m using his ideas for this entire series, as con­veyed in the book, Basic Teach­ings of the Bud­dha.) He notes the lan­guage trans­la­tion issue, and sug­gests that “Right” has the con­tem­po­rary mean­ing of “cor­rect,” as in right and wrong. He pro­poses using the word “sound,” as in “that which leads to the result we seek.” I agree. “Sound” it is!

The 8 can be put into three groups:

1. Under­stand­ing – Sound View, Sound Inclination

2. Con­duct – Sound Speech, Sound Action, Sound Liveli­hood, Sound Effort

3. Atten­tive­ness – Sound Aware­ness, Sound Concentration

About Con­duct

First off, break­ing the list of the 8-fold Path into three is pretty com­mon. How­ever, there is vari­a­tion between authors about what goes on which list. As with the lan­guage, as I noted above, I’m fol­low­ing Glenn Wal­lis’ cat­e­gories and divi­sions in this series. Let me note, though, that “Sound Effort” as been known to appear under Atten­tive­ness on other lists.

First off, the Bud­dha made it clear that he wasn’t par­tic­u­larly inter­ested in offer­ing up a list of things to do or not do. That being said, the present dis­cus­sion comes from what is con­sid­ered the Buddha’s first “ser­mon.” I sus­pect that he knew human beings all too well.

The wise crave inspi­ra­tion, while the aver­age per­son craves rules and permission.

Under the Sound Con­duct cat­e­gory
are 4 areas of concern.

This list became the basis for mul­ti­tudes of rules and reg­u­la­tions for the dis­ci­pline of monas­tic life. One of the nice things about Zen, and prob­a­bly why I like it so much, is that the trap­pings and long lists are elim­i­nated, and our pre­set topic could be reduced to one rule:

“act con­sciously.”

As I noted above, we’ve decided to do three more tele­sem­i­nars, and the topic this week (Wed. June 10, 8 pm east­ern time) fits with today’s arti­cle. I’m dis­cussing two themes: Notic­ing and Accept­ing.

Let’s think of it this way: last week, we talked about Under­stand­ing.

Now, the ten­dency in the West is to come up with more and more com­plex and elab­o­rate the­o­ries, and then to bend our unadul­ter­ated expe­ri­ence to fit what we already believe. I pro­posed a Sound View and Sound Incli­na­tion that I described like this:

From this place of expan­sive­ness, I can choose. I can engage, or I can step back. I can let go, or I can embrace. I can shut down, or open up. Noth­ing is right or wrong (the non dual part) and noth­ing is required, other than pres­ence. I begin to see my life as a series of com­ings and goings, with no per­ma­nence to attach to. Things are as they are, and then they are some­thing else.

In other words, we learn to take the work­ings of our mind as just another phe­nom­e­non.

Quot­ing Steve Hagen, in Bud­dhism is Not What You Think,

“The upshot is that we don’t engage the world as it actu­ally is. Instead, we react to the world as we assume it to be—or, worse, as we think or wish it ought to be.” p. 205

So, the Notic­ing part of liv­ing with integrity is to see, truly see, the games our minds are play­ing with the essen­tially mean­ing­less life we are a part of .

Time and again, I see clients stuck in the morass of their real­ity not match­ing their desires, and blam­ing real­ity. And not notic­ing that this is what they are doing.

The way out is through accep­tance of the
real­ity of our shortsightedness.

Once you begin to actu­ally notice how you are fram­ing your exis­tence, you can pull back a bit, have a breath, and get over your­self. The get­ting over is get­ting over the need to keep doing the stuff you’ve always been doing—choos­ing instead to live in accor­dance with a much more lightly packed under­stand­ing.

Sound Speech—one of the biggest lessons I had to learn was to mod­er­ate my mouth. I spent the first 30 years of my life being the sar­cas­tic critic. I was a quick study, and sel­dom wrong about what I was see­ing, and had a ten­dency to “not suf­fer fools gladly.” This, among other things, caused me an ini­tial adren­a­lin high, fol­lowed by remorse. (You can read more about this in my book, This End­less Moment.)

Sound speech is the idea that the way we express our­selves ought to match our world-view, or under­stand­ing. If I pro­fess peace, deep com­mu­ni­ca­tion, and clar­ity, then whin­ing, com­plain­ing, yelling, bul­ly­ing, or blam­ing ought not to be things escap­ing my lips.

Because we do not notice, we tend to jus­tify (as I did, for decades) our Unsound Speech by say­ing “Under the cir­cum­stances, what else could I do?”

Yet, here we are again.

There are no cir­cum­stances act­ing upon you. Not ever. Stuff is hap­pen­ing out there in the “real world,” and you are fil­ter­ing the incom­ing data, and decid­ing (in a split sec­ond) what the thing means, and what to do about it. If you are com­mit­ted to a par­tic­u­lar path, you must real­ize your ten­dency to exter­nal­ize, stop your­self, and act in accor­dance with your under­stand­ing. There can be no excuse for lapses. (see Sound Effort, below)

Now, this does not mean I can­not speak my mind. I do it here, every arti­cle, I do it with clients, and I do it with my near­est and dear­est. What I do not do is take cheap shots, or speak in an inten­tion­ally harm­ful, cruel, or manip­u­la­tive way. I say what I say with con­sis­tency, and clarity.

Sound Action—Fol­low­ing right along, we come to Action. Again, the oper­ant prin­ci­ple here is, “Do no harm.”

In Buddhism’s The Three Pure Pre­cepts, this is described as:

* Do not cre­ate Evil

* Prac­tice Good

* Actu­al­ize Good for Others

Cool, eh?

Back to notic­ing. Remem­ber, your ten­dency is to blame your inter­nal state on exter­nal influ­ences, and then to blame both for the out-of-control actions you per­form. Once you notice this pat­tern, there seems to develop a gap between stim­u­lus and reaction.

In other words, you gain a moment for a response.

Do not cre­ate evil—this is the first step. (They’re actu­ally in log­i­cal order.)

Not cre­at­ing evil is a process of stop­ping, which is often eas­ier than start­ing some­thing new. When I first got my mouth under my con­trol, I did it by say­ing that I would no longer rip any­one a new one. The last time I slipped (April 1986, if you are curi­ous) I saw (I noticed) the result as soon as my lips started mov­ing, and I haven’t slipped since.

What I did, for a while, was shut up and said nothing.

This became a mantra for me, this “no evil” pledge. While I now talk quite freely, and push peo­ple hard, I do so not to pun­ish or crit­i­cize, but to encour­age. In a sense, I have taken myself out of the equation.

Prac­tice good—stage 2 is to replace the “evil” with some­thing “good.” Many of my clients are quite harsh and quick to blame others—lip-whipping any­one who crosses them. And, again, they are quick to jus­tify their behav­iour. So, the first step is to get them to shut up, and sec­ondly to do some­thing counter-intuitive.

The counter-intuitive part is this: your judg­ing mind will be there until you die, squawk­ing about how hard done by you are, how the other per­son doesn’t under­stand. You hear it (notice!) accept that this is what you are doing, and then head down the path you want to go.

So, if you say you want to com­mu­ni­cate, and notice your­self com­ing up with excuses for doing so, you pull up, and sim­ply ask your­self, “What do I actu­ally want here?” You then imple­ment that, as opposed to the knee jerk thing you were going to do.

Actu­al­ize Good for Oth­ers—stage 3 takes “good” to the next level. Prac­tic­ing good is all about stop­ping your­self from being an idiot, and learn­ing to prac­tice what you preach. Now, the moti­va­tion shifts to being of ser­vice to oth­ers in their process of wak­ing up.

Now, let me be clear here—this is not eat­ing the burnt end of the roast.

I use that idea to talk about how peo­ple (mostly women) will sac­ri­fice for oth­ers. They end up so busy res­cu­ing oth­ers that they die with­out ever reach­ing 1/10 of their poten­tial. The prob­lem with this approach is that is not clean. It’s the ulti­mate in manipulation.

It’s the idea that if I am good, I’ll reap a reward, in the form of get­ting oth­ers to do what I want. So, the per­son stops grip­ing and com­plain­ing, and tries “being self­less,” in the hopes that the peo­ple they are giv­ing to will, I don’t know, let them move into the base­ment apart­ment when they get old, or some­thing. (hey, Jim!)

Actu­al­iz­ing Good for Oth­ers, on the other hand, does what is “good” for the sake of doing what is “good.” There is no hid­den agenda, no secret intent. And there is no “See how good I am being, res­cu­ing others!”

Made you smile! I love my vocation!

Sound Liveli­hood—No, I don’t know what you ought to be doing with your life. What I do know is that what­ever you are doing needs to ful­fill you, while not harm­ing oth­ers. The ful­fill­ment part is, as usual, an inter­nal sense.

What I mean is that if you do what you do in order to receive praise, money, or a sense of iden­tity, you might want to Notice! what you are doing. You can tell that you have a liveli­hood prob­lem if you think that what you are doing will even­tu­ally lead to sat­is­fac­tion, as opposed to sat­is­fy­ing now.

As to the “no harm” part, nope, no list. You really have to look at this one, with a ther­a­pist, or teacher. But if what you are doing is pro­duc­ing a prod­uct or ser­vice that harms the health, well­be­ing, or life of oth­ers, you might want to have a look. It is likely not OK to make your liv­ing, for exam­ple, get­ting peo­ple to spend their money on dubi­ous products.

In Bud­dhist thought, karma is cre­ated by thoughts, deeds, and inten­tions. Karma is the San­skrit word for action. Noth­ing more. It’s not the Chris­t­ian idea of rewards and pun­ish­ments. It’s about cause and effect. If you push some­thing, it moves. If you rip some­one off, you set in motion a loop that brings around the “vibe” of that action, and you get smacked.

Best to make your way of earn­ing a liv­ing exactly mir­ror the depth of your under­stand­ing.

Sound Effort ties it all together.

Sound Effort—None of this means any­thing if all you do is think about it. Every part of this process revolves around doing what you say you will do. Any­thing else is hyp­o­crit­i­cal. Thus, we move from end­less think­ing about how things will be once I fig­ure all of this out, to actu­ally doing it.

I’ll end with a story. A few years ago I was a par­tic­i­pant at a Come Alive, at The Haven. Part of this course is to prac­tice the Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Model. This is pretty easy for me, as I’ve been doing and teach­ing it for decades. My part­ner for the exer­cise was this sweet lit­tle lady. We both had a go at it. She said, “I’ve been tak­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tion courses for 2 years, because my son is now a teenager, and I need to talk with him well.”

I asked her how it was going.

She looked con­fused, then said, “Well, I haven’t tried it with him yet. I don’t want to get it wrong.”

I sug­gested that she’d done a great job with me, and that maybe talk­ing with her son while he as still home was a good plan.

In other words, if what I write here, makes sense to you,
stop agree­ing with me, and go do it.

End of story.