I’m sure most of you
have no idea that I suffer from anxiety disorder. Anxiety used to paralyze me
with fear. My mind would go 100 miles an hour with “what if” thoughts. What if
I die? What will happen to the kids? What if I lose my job? What if I can’t pay
bills? What if I crash? What if the kids hurt themselves? What if they hurt
others? What if. What if. What if.
The fear and anxiety was
so great that I could barely leave my home sometimes. I lost jobs because of
it. I missed a lot of work because I couldn’t overcome the fear, and when I did
go to work, it was a task just hiding my anxiety from others, so in the end, I
got more anxious. What if I faint? Then they’ll find out. Then they’ll make fun
of me. Then. Then. Then. Then, the anxious tremors would begin, and I’d
have to go hide out in the bathroom until the Xanax kicked in.
Like me, most people
squander their attention on the anxiety, on the worry, and on the fear in their
lives. It’s a rollercoaster. In the words of the poet John Prine “You’re up one day, the next you’re down. It’s a half an
inch of water and you think you’re going to drown.”
Buddhism teaches that
life is suffering, and that there is a way to end the suffering. In your life,
you will have pain, but you don’t have to cause yourself extra pain. The
eightfold path, with its eight elements, is the way to train yourself morally,
mentally and emotionally, to be free from suffering from the thoughts you have
about the what ifs.
Not long before the
Buddha achieved his insights and attained
enlightenment, he realized that the true way to happiness was to avoid the
extremes of life, to follow a moderate a way of life. Those who follow this
way, avoid the extremes of indulgence and denial. They do not seek endless
pleasures, and they do not torment themselves with pain, lacking and
self-torment. He called this way of
living the Middle Path. The Middle Path leads to the end of suffering.
The central teachings of
Buddhism can be found in the Four Noble Truths. The first teaching the Buddha ever did was to five student monks in a deer park. The Buddha spoke of the Four Noble Truths he had discovered while struggling for enlightenment. It was the Buddha's first awareness that life brings with it illness, age, miser, and death that led him to search for a deeper understanding of how we live, and ways to end suffering. These noble truths are:
- The truth of suffering (dukkha)
- The truth of the cause of suffering (samudaya)
- The truth of the end of suffering (nirhodha)
- The truth of the path that frees us from suffering (magga)
Within the fourth noble
truth, you will find the Eightfold path. The Eightfold Path is not like eight
steps, or little boxes you check off one by one as you accomplish each. It is a
path of eight elements interwoven, braided together, having to do with
understanding, practice and behavior that Buddhism says will take you on a
journey away from suffering and toward freedom.
A couple of weeks ago,
during joys and concerns, I mentioned that I was agitated, and I asked for help
with this. I had been so worried about so many things, mostly my business. I
was dwelling on the worries, and then, I found myself becoming anxious again:
the mild heart palpitations, the pressure on my upper chest, mind dizziness,
and of course, agitation. So, even though I function well, my anxiety now
manifests itself with mostly agitation. So, when I was asking for help with my
agitation, I was really saying, help me. pray for
me, send positive vibes because I am a wreck, and I’m losing control.
I took the following week
off. After resting for a week, when I went back to work, I was still agitated.
Then, the morning I went back, my niece, who works for me, was fretting over
some student loan issues, and when she got off the phone, I told her, “go light
a candle. Let it go.” (I have a chalice in my office). Then, it hit me. Let it
go. So I lit a candle and said, help me let it go. That’s what I wasn’t doing.
I wasn’t letting go. I was holding on to suffering. By suffering, I mean not
only material things like mortgages and leases and payroll, but mental
things. Embarrassment
of not paying a bill if that insurance back pay doesn’t come in on time. What ifs….
I should have lit that
candle and let it go. Those of us that were once catholic might understand
this. You light a candle for a saint, and ask that he or she pray for you. You
leave it to faith that it will work itself out. As a UU, I should know this, tell everyone your concern, light a candle, and let it go.
These are the elements
of the eightfold path:
right understanding,
right intention,
right speech,
right action,
right livelihood,
right effort,
right mindfulness,
and right concentration.
Today, we will focus on
the first element, right understanding.
I should tell you this in the interest of intellectual honesty, the rest of my talk will be heavily based on a sermon given by Meg Barnhouse of Austin's First UU on January 27th of last year. So heavily based on her sermon my talk will be, that you professors here would mark me with a red P for plagiarizer. Most of what I'll say is mine, but citing her would become so cumbersome that the message could be lost.
I don’t know how many of
you have seen the classic, turn of the century, Buddhist movie “The Matrix.” In it, Keanu Reeves plays a young computer hacker named Neo who
wakes up to the reality of the Matrix, a vast virtual reality grid that feeds
off of human energy. Humans are kept asleep in embryonic eggs while a virtual
life is played in their brain. The first message Neo gets from the deeper
reality is: “Wake up, Neo!” In the movie, once Neo
woke up to the fact that the reality of the Matrix was an illusion, he grew
capable of grasping that the bullets coming at him weren’t real, and he was
able to move around among them. He was able to move around in the pseudo reality
of the Matrix, aware of it as an illusion, more and more aware of the deeper
reality.
The first component of
the path is “Right Understanding.” “Getting it” is the first and continuing job
of the person on this path. You get, “wake up, Neo,” messages. You catch a
glimpse of the truth of how things work. You have a glimmer of a sense that
many people create their own suffering, that disquietude lurks at the corners
of most lives, that grief, hope, fear, hunger for security or pleasure or
acceptance drive people to do what they do and that satisfaction is elusive. A
deeper reality crooks its finger at you and whispers in Laurence Fishburn’s
voice: “Wake up. There must be satisfaction somewhere, let’s go look for it. ”
Right understanding involves
seeing how things are. Getting it. You understand that you suffer because you
have attachments to how things should go. You crave, you cling, you hope, you
fear. You have hopes that an interview will go well. You are anxious about it.
You worry afterward about whether they liked you. If you get the job you worry
about doing it well. If you don’t get the job you wonder why they didn’t like
you. You have ideas about how it should go. You have interpretations of how it
went, ideas from your interpretations, and you suffer over those.
In your thoughts is a
way you wish things would go. You have fears about how things could be. All of
these things, hopes and fears, cause you suffering. When you are anxious about
these things you miss a lot of your life: seeing your other friends, you can
barely hear what people are saying to you, you don’t enjoy your food, sleep,
sex, beauty, things seem garbled and dim. You are suffering. How could that
stop?
Wake up. Get that if you
calm and focus your mind you can see reality more clearly. Get that what
happens happens. There are certain things you can do to make the interview go
well, and you do them. Or not. Then it happens. You get the job. Or not. You
can interpret it any way you want to. They didn’t like you? Maybe. Maybe they
had someone else who was a better fit. Maybe this is not your job; maybe yours
is coming. If the job wouldn’t have been a good fit for you, you would have
been miserable in it. Is that what you wanted? We need to be unattached to
outcomes. We need to do what we do and leave what
happens then to the Spirit or the Universe.
So, am I asking you not
to care? If caring means you suffer and your suffering adds no good to the
situation, do you want to keep doing that? Can you care in a way that holds the
outcome lightly? Can you care in a way that understands that your loved ones
have to find their own way, make their mistakes, feel your support but not your
direction.
Buddhist practice is the
foundation of this possibility. Meditation, spending time in quiet with your
breathing allows you to see more clearly, gives you spaces between your moments
in which to understand what part of this is pain that exists and what part is
suffering you are bringing on yourself and can stop if you practice. Some
spiritual paths attempt to give meaning to suffering – this one says it can be
avoided, eventually, with practice and understanding. Wisdom will be cultivated
and ignorance will be shed like an outgrown snake skin.
In meditation we have
the chance of seeing the story we are telling ourselves about our life. You can
notice the thoughts you are having about what is happening in your life. There
are a hundred different stories, and seeing your story is part of getting it.
Another part of Right Understanding, of waking up, is understanding the law of
Karma. Its literal name is “right view of the ownership of action” The Buddhist
teachers say: “Beings are the owners of their actions, the heirs of their
actions; they spring from their actions, are bound to their actions, and are
supported by their actions. Whatever deeds they do, good or bad, of those they
shall be heirs.” The Buddhist scriptures, like the Christian scriptures, talk
about results of actions as “fruits,” All actions
bear a kind of fruit (Ud 9:8).is
stated in the Udanavarga. “Ye shall know them by their Fruits,” the New Testament states. If
our lives are like a river, it’s as if we are all living downstream from our
actions, and the dirty or clean water that runs because of those actions
catches us later. Good actions are morally commendable, helpful to the growth
of the spirit, and productive of benefits for yourself and others. Unwholesome
actions, to use a more Buddhist word than “bad,” ripen into suffering.
Getting it means that
you see that suffering occurs from craving, desire and attachment, that the way
to end suffering is to end craving and attachment, that the way to end craving
is to attend to the eightfold path of right wisdom and right behavior. To own
your actions, your part in any situation, to let go of blaming and clean up
what you are putting into the water upstream from where you live.
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