The goal of Buddhism is to put an end to suffering for yourself and others, forever. Anything that does that is Buddhism. Anything that does not isn’t.

The method for achieving this is training in three dimensions of human action: personal conduct, condition of mind, and understanding of how things exist.

The things you do to train in one of these areas will support the training in the other areas. They are not separate.

Avoid things like killing, stealing, lying, sexual misconduct, using intoxicants and indulging in disturbed states of mind like rage, envy or jealousy – and your ability to meditate deeply and see phenomena without distortion increases. The three trainings happen at once.

But pursuing the goal of Buddhism and undertaking these three trainings are highly countercultural now. The most potent forces in the world conspire to prevent us from living a life directed toward training well and putting an end to suffering.

On the contrary, we are continually urged — by human voices and our cultural and physical environment — to do things which increase our suffering and the suffering of the people around us.

How difficult is it to get a quiet half hour to meditate? It’s hard to fit into your schedule regularly, it’s hard to remember why it’s that important, it’s hard to sit, undistracted, with the sounds of the traffic and the TV and the computer, the tension in your knees and to do list that keeps hopping around your mind like a caged kangaroo.

Of course, you can go off to a meditation center for a $600 weekend retreat. But then you have to get back to reality and sell some more stuff and sit through all the meetings and the road trips and the conference calls and the power point presentations to do what you need to do to get back there again on your next vacation. 

We stay informed about the thousand controversial issues of our day. We have consumer choices; a thousand flavors of soda, our preferred micro brews, smooth or chunky, plain or peanut, classic or crispy, infinite channels to watch and sites to click, and we choose as we glance at our phones, tweet, facebook, like and dislike.

Watching actors is taken for granted. Body slack, mind slack, we engage in the imitation of action, watch other people pretend to do things — we forget that they are not actually doing the things we are watching them do but are pretending, and that they are not there, but are recorded. We forget that we cannot influence them, that our response to them is irrelevant to them, that we cannot engage in a discourse with them in which our humanity will be significant, but instead are relegated to the role of an impotent passive consumer of their actions, with our only option to sit still and slack or change the channel and sit still and slack in front of another set of pretenders.

Most people do this for hours and hours a day. Most of us take for granted that we must live with minds churning, hearts unfulfilled, lives vaguely or profoundly dissatisfied. If we do not question this, we are easy to manipulate, degraded in will and vision, overwhelmed with trivia, sinking deeper into physical and mental weakness, seeking someone – some great leader, someone cool, someone powerful, someone focused, someone — anyone — who would help us dispel our unhappiness.

But no fuehrer — no matter how appealing, no matter how much we yearn for him or hope for her to do it — will put an end to human suffering. Only we can do it. Only by engaging whole heartedly in the three trainings of conduct, mind and wisdom.

Yes, it is countercultural.  We are like paratroopers, dropped behind enemy lines, surrounded, with no option but to do our jobs as human beings, with complete commitment, and no thought other than rescuing all those who can be saved.

In the past, when I have questioned watching television, movies, computers, and so on, as a way of life, people have said, yeah, well, meditating is just sitting there wasting your time, so I would rather watch something. 

This is a good misunderstanding, because it points to the heart of the matter.  Achievers in all walks of life have powerfully focused minds. Watch a championship tennis player, a race car driver or for that matter a surgeon, musician, a Wall Street trader or a pilot. What you will see, as they perform, is focus. Part of the delight we get from observing their mastery is not the physical performance itself, but the utter unification of body and mind in skillful, purposeful action. That is achieved only after years of intentional practice.

Watch someone watch TV who has watched TV relentlessly for ten or twenty years, and the thrill will not be there.

But spend a moment with someone who has extracted themselves from the degradation of the modern cultural environment and who has spent a decade or two cultivating clarity of mind, and you will never forget them for as long as you live.

Better yet, you can be that person.