To sleep, perchance to dream ay, there's the rub: For in that sleep of death what dreams may come…”
Most of us assume that we are our body and mind, and we assume and that our body and mind are material. That is what we are taught. My high school biology teacher shared a fact with us, a fact I heard repeated many times when I was young: that all we are is 95 cents worth of chemicals. Speak for yourself, I told him, in my 14 year old imagination. If we believe we will simply go out of existence as the breath leaves our body and our mental activity subsides then what constraint on our behavior is there when we are alive? One can be decent or one can be corrupt and it all comes to nothing in the end. If my biology teacher believed what he told us young impressionable kids then he would be living his life for nothing much. If you believe in the conservation of energy and the conservation of matter it is not a stretch to believe in the conservation of mind. That our minds are caused by the previous instant of our mind, not by brain chemistry or cells, and that while our bodies return to dust our minds stream on. According to Buddhism the most important determinant of our next rebirth is the quality of our minds at the time of our physical death in this life. Next most important are the mental habits we form over our lifetime. A materialist may deny this. He or she may yell and scream, eat, giggle and mate, sleep and crave and croak, but whatever they do they will do it while inhabiting an inexplicable nonsensical universe, a world of chance and injustice. Which is probably about as well as 95 cents worth of chemicals can do. But what if everything matters? What if the things you value form your world? What if the mental habits you develop shape the life you are living now, touch the lives of the people all around you, and echo on for good or bad for all time? Then you would use each moment well. Then kindness and courage would matter. There would be a reason to be honest and strong, to take care of others not just serve yourself, to choose not to participate in the cons and rackets all around you but to find a noble path to walk through life. Then the quality of your life would be beautiful and admirable and something worth living. The great Buddhist master Atisha was making the long trip from India to Tibet on horseback a thousand years ago. With good weather it could take months but he could not depend on good weather crossing the Himalayas. Atisha was a great teacher when set out to revive Buddhism in Tibet, and he had many attendants, students and monks travelling with him. Atisha was a great practitioner as well as a great teacher and any time a mental disturbance would arise in his mind he would dismount, kneel on the ground and perform a brief ritual. He was scrupulous in his mental awareness and made sure to settle his mind and remove the disturbance – the desire, anger or misunderstanding – that clouded his mind. He knew very well that each harmful thought that would arise, a result of infinite negative habits and mental disturbance, would plant a seed in his mind which would blossom and inevitably cause suffering in the future, and would increase in magnitude, unless it was completely eradicated. He was able to do this karmic purification because he noticed the condition of his mind, he knew the difference between helpful and harmful mental states, and he was able to create a good mental habit to replace the harmful one. Even though his retinue really wanted to get where they were going, warm up and have some tea, Atisha was the boss and if he was stopping every 30 feet on the road to Lhasa to do his prostrations and repentance then that’s the way it goes. But little by little, as the months passed, they began to pay a little more attention to the quality of their own minds. And understand how serious the consequences were if they left their minds uncultivated. When I was in police academy training I aspired to be someone who could be of help in an emergency. I wanted to be sure I could do it well. At the beginning I did not have the skills to do it well. No one does. That is why they have academy training. The training makes demands on you which require you to change. The training makes physical demands on your body, so you get stronger and faster. It requires you to study, to memorize, to know the law and the rules and the procedures to follow, to perform skillfully and make good decisions under pressure. The training requires you to learn that you can do more together than you can alone. Some of these lessons are easy for some and difficult for others, but everyone needs to learn them all to be effective and to pass the academy and to play the role you wanted when you started. Not everyone succeeds. With good instructors the sincere and able ones do. My class had been on the firing range since 6 in the morning. It was an outdoor range and this was mid-February, with snow knee deep on the ground. We shot all day. Pistols, rifles, and shot guns. We stood and shot, kneeled and shot, proned out in the snow and shot, ran from barricade to barricade, drilled, reloaded, moved, and did it all again and again. We had limited days on the range and now, after 13 hours in the cold we were just about wrapping up training for the day. If the Himalayas are colder than this, or have more snow or heavier winds than we had then those people must dress for it. Because we pretty well froze once the sun went down. Dozens of boots moving up and down the courses of fire all day pounded the snow into a hard gray slush with thousands of rounds of brass shell casings embedded in it. The head instructor, who had our careers in his hands, who we respected for his skill and leadership, who could split a blade of grass with a rifle at a hundred yards using iron sights, who had seen it all and done it all himself over the course of his career, said “Okay, pick up the brass and let’s get out of here.” We began. You have to pick up the brass after every time at the range. It’s always done. Because its cleaner, safer for the next shooters, and you can recycle it. But this late, this cold, this tired, no one was thinking about it. Fingers were frozen but you couldn’t really grab the cartridges out of the snow with gloves on. There was less enthusiasm for the job than there might have been. People ambled around with their buckets, stooping now and then… One of the guys, a little older than most, someone with experience, looked around at these young guys half heartedly filled their buckets with snow and brass and looked at me with an expression that said “There is a better way to do this.” It might not seem that you could communicate that with an expression but we had worked together many times before and I knew what he meant immediately. He set his bucket down by his left foot. He knelt down on both knees. He dug into the snow with both hands, and plucked out a frozen metal cylinder. He did it again and again. He cleared a few inches. A few feet. He moved his bucket over and did not look up. He continued. He was not trying to take it easy, or get away as soon as possible. He was going to use this moment. He would do this like he would do any tedious job that was required of him. He knew that if you are collecting evidence at a crime scene you need to be meticulous. If you are conducting an interview with a suspect, or canvassing a neighborhood, or searching a database it can take a long time and you have to pay attention the whole time. Because that is what it takes to do what we are asked to do every day. There are no shortcuts. Doing it right is the shortcut. One of the guys saw him kneeling in the snow, bent over like that and asked him “What are you doing?” The guy said “I am going to stay here as long as I need to to get this done.” And everyone knew everyone was staying as long as it took to get it done. And all the half hearted efforts, all the guys who would stoop down and grab a cartridge and place it into the bucket and shuffle here or there, one by one, staked out a square of ground and kneeled in the snow and got it done. If we are going to be of real service we need to be that meticulous. With our work. With our practice. With our lives. If you are not paying attention to what really matters you will end up as 95 cents worth of chemicals. |