OM

I thought I might take a break this week from chronicling the latest abominations of our pathocratic paradigm and talk about a positive personal experience instead. The abominations will be there when we return.

This past week has been revelatory for me on a couple of levels. This revelation began when I attended a talk by Kadampa Buddhist meditation teacher, Anika Trancik, titled “Seeing Kindness” at the Yoga Sanctuary here in Key West. Anika is a student of Buddhist monk, Geshe Kelsang Gyatso, and she read from one of his books, “Eight Steps to Happiness”. FYI, Kelsang Gyatso means “Oceans of Good Fortune” and Geshe is an academic title meaning “virtuous friend”, both given to him upon his ordination as a novice monk at age eight. Anika explained the first step of the eight steps in Kelsang Gyatso’s book was the need to see kindness in others. This sounded rather simplistic at first, but Kelsang Gyatso’s interpretation of kindness in this context doesn’t mean “niceness” as in someone being pleasant or generous, but rather the opposite. He advocates being happy when someone is rude or argumentative because we “benefit” from this “kindness” by learning patience and in turn wisdom; happiness, if you will.

I know, I can see your eyes rolling, but think about it for a minute. Being pleasant and kind to others and having that reciprocated in the traditional fashion is good for our serenity and well being, but there will always be unreasonable, inexplicably angry and negative people in our lives so we could increase the amount of time spent being serene and content by that much if we were to adopt Kelsang Gyatso’s view of “kindness” and “benefit”. It’s so crazy, it might work!

On the heels of this epiphany came another synchronistic moment at church this past Sunday. I am not a regular church goer, but I was there because my wife, the mother of our children, was singing and it was Mothers Day. She sang like an angel, by the way, but the synchronicity was in my meeting a man there that told me he enjoyed my essays in The Blue Paper, but did not always agree with what I wrote. Shocking! We sat and had coffee after the service and in a short period of time we discussed everything from the cause of the U.S. Civil War to Putin’s legitimacy as a world leader and managed to agree to disagree when necessary, but in general, I’d say, we enjoyed our gentle debate. He told me that his habit is to read pros and cons from different angles on all subjects that interest him in order to be better prepared to draw a well informed opinion on that subject. I thought that wise and told him so.

This had been another opportunity to learn from someone, not necessarily to agree with or have preconceptions reinforced, but an opportunity freely given by the cosmos to simply learn. This is old news to the enlightened, but I am a starry eyed neophyte and have been road testing Kelsang Gyatso’s kindness method and find that if I give it a chance it does work! That is not to say it is easy or I don’t instinctively want to go back to my old ways of reacting to those that I perceive as “wrong” (and I will, being a mortal after all), but to trade that negative energy for positive is quite a gift when successful.

There is no silver bullet, no correct one-size-fits-all solution to our amazingly complex lives. In fact, that false concept might be one of the strongest causes of un-happiness; the unobtainable, ever desired simple answer. The more likely truth is we are fortunate if we can obtain a simple tool kit for learning and gather a few tools along the way. I think of the comforting words of the historian, mythologist, writer and teacher, Joseph Campbell, when asked about aging and nearing the end of life, he put it this way, “The candle is shorter, but the flame is still as bright.” My hope and my prayer would be that I will remain teachable until my last and be grateful to all the people “benefitting” me with their “kindness”.

And now back to the show! “Obama engineered the Boko Haram kidnapping nightmare to deflect attention from Benghazi”. Yup, still there.