What in the World Are We Doing?

Photo by Alessandra Oddi, Flickr Creative Commons

Last week I gave the dharma talk at Upaya Zen Center with that title — “What in the World Are We Doing?” If you’d like to listen, you can find it here in Upaya’s extensive podcast collection.

While I shared a lot of words in the talk, the message can be distilled down to something pretty simple:

In certain spiritual circles, we often hear people say something like, “I need to work on myself before I can work on the world.” Or, “I need to be peaceful in myself before I can work on peace in the world.”

While there is some truth to that, think of the privilege behind these sentiments. The fact that we even have the choice to wait before we act tells us how much privilege we live in. If we lived in a place like the Democratic Republic of Congo, where women and children are terrorized every day, we wouldn’t have the luxury to sit back and “work on ourselves.”

Heck, if we even lived in a different part of our own towns, if we had grown up in a different economic class, we’d be dealing with survival issues every day.

I believe we need to drop that idea that we have to get ourselves completely together on our meditation cushion before we deal with any of this.

That duality we set up between our personal practice and what’s going on in the world doesn’t serve us or the world.

That leads to one of my favorite quotes from the wonderful Buddhist teacher, Joanna Macy:

It is my experience that the world itself has a role to play in our liberation.
Its very pressures, pains, and risks can wake us up — release us from the bonds
of ego and guide us home to our vast, true nature. For some of us, our love of the world is so passionate that we cannot ask it to wait until we are enlightened.

But here’s the kicker: the most important thing is that we act from a place that is utterly grounded in our spiritual practice, so that what we are generating in the world is not more layers of suffering, but an actual relief from suffering.

At the end of my dharma talk, I shared this 12-minute film from my days of working at the Buddhist Peace Fellowship (and I’m even in about 5 seconds of it!). I love it because it perfectly captures what it means to bring our practice out into the world.

I hope it inspires you, and I’d love to hear — what in the world are you doing? Please leave a comment below.

By the way, the video doesn’t start until about 30 seconds in, so don’t panic if you don’t see anything for a while. Use that time to enjoy your breath : )

__________________