Wise Discrimination

The Buddha, the most practical of teachers, defined the wise man or woman in a thoroughly practical way: "One who will gladly give up a smaller pleasure to gain a greater joy." That is discrimination, the precious capacity to see life clearly and choose wisely. When it is understood, every choice becomes an opportunity for training the mind.
--Eknath Easwaran, Conquest of Mind, p. 66

Easwaran has written that he loves great symphonies, novels, and other works of art but that what he loves most is the "perfectly crafted life." That to him, and to me, is the supreme work of art, more beautiful and inspiring even than Michelangelo's David. Indeed, it seems to me, we can look at how we live our lives as a process of sculpting. Every choice we make chips away a piece of the precious stone we've been given. Every bad choice makes it that much harder to craft a great work of living art; every good choice fosters our effort. Sooner or later, we will run out of stone, and the potential we once had to sculpt a moving, breathing David will have crumbled into dust. Why waste time when we don't know how much we have left? Why make bad choices that undermine the most important project of a lifetime?

I have made countless bad choices, and I'll be fifty-five in March. I don't know how much stone I have left, and I have many, many mistakes to overcome to forge my modest masterpiece from what raw material remains.

The Nature of "I"

"When the Buddha confronted the question of identity on the night of his enlightenment, he came to the radical discovery that we do not exist as separate beings. He saw into the human tendency to identify with a limited sense of existence and discovered that this belief in an individual small self is a root illusion that causes suffering and removes us from the freedom and mystery of life. He described this as interdependent arising, the cyclical process of consciousness creating identity by entering form, responding to contact of the senses, then attaching to certain forms, feelings, desires, images, and actions to create a sense of self.
In teaching, the Buddha never spoke of humans as persons existing in some fixed or static way. Instead, he described us as a collection of five changing processes: the processes of the physical body, of feelings, of perceptions, of responses, and of the flow of consciousness that experiences them all. Our sense of self arises whenever we grasp at or identify with these patterns. The process of identification, of selecting patters to call "I," me," "myself," is subtle and usually hidden from our awareness."
--Jack Kornfield

Emptiness

If everything is impermanent, then everything is what we call empty, which means lacking in any lasting, stable, and inherent existence; and all things, when seen and understood in their true relation, are not independent but interdependent with all other things. The Buddha compared the universe to a vast net woven of a countless variety of brilliant jewels, each with a countless number of facets. Each jewel reflects in itself every other jewel in the net and is, in fact, one with every other jewel. Think of a wave in the sea. Seen in one way, it seems to have a distinct identity, an end and a beginning, a birth and a death. Seen in another way, the wave itself doesnt really exist but is just the behavior of water, empty of any separate identity but full of water. So when you really think about the wave, you come to realize that it is something made temporarily possible by wind and water, and is dependent on a set of constantly changing circumstances. You also realize that every wave is related to every other wave.

-Sogyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying

Dispelling the Nongospel of the Freaky Jesus, P. 4

Christianity has universality, or catholicity, only in recognizing
that Jesus is one particular instance and expression of a wisdom which
was also, if differently, realized in the Buddha, in Lao-Tzu, and in
such modern avatars as Ramana Maharshi, Ramakrishna, and, perhaps,
Aurobindo and Inayat Khan. (I could make a very long list.) This
wisdom is that none of us are brief island existences, but forms and
expressions of one and the same eternal "I am" waving in different
ways, such that, whenever this is realized to be the case, we wave
more harmoniously with other waves.
--Alan Watts from Was Jesus a Freak?

Change Your Thoughts, Change Your Life, and Vice Versa

Easwaran’s thought for today quotes the Buddha: “All that we are is the result of what we have thought.” That is, our lives today are shaped by what we have thought and, consequently, done up till now. Furthermore, Easwaran elaborates, what we think from now on will, by implication, determine our deeds and shape our lives from now on. Thus, if we want to change our lives, we can begin, must begin by changing our thoughts. We have the power to choose how we think, and we can increase that power and our capacity to make the right choices by daily, disciplined adherence to Easwaran’s eightfold path.

I’m not sure that either Buddha or Easwaran are correct when they suggest that every aspect of our lives today is the result of what we have thought and done in the past. I suspect that it’s a little more complicated than that. But I have no doubt that our thoughts have a tremendous influence on our actions and, consequently, on the circumstances of our lives, and that the right thoughts and, consequently, actions can help to create a good, happy life.

Conversely, I believe that our actions can influence our thoughts and feelings. If we act confident or happy, we are more likely to think and feel confident and happy than if we don’t. This, in turn, can help us to act more confident and happy, and so on in the very opposite of a vicious circle. What is the opposite of a vicious circle? A virtuous circle, perhaps?

What I am trying to do today is think the right thoughts AND do the right deeds based on my best understanding of what’s right and what’s wrong. It sounds simple, doesn’t it? Simple in principle, but enormously difficult in practice. However, I would like to think that sages like Easwaran, Ken Wilber, and, yes, even Tony Robbins can help me to do precisely that.