Perspective

My key to compassionate behavior is always realizing my own perspective is uniquely mine.

My upbringing, my genetics, my body chemistry, my body architecture, my neural wiring...these are what make me who I am and how I perceive reality. Even if I had an identical twin, my twin would have different perspective from me, because my twin would be seeing through his own eyes and hearing with his own ears and feeling with his own touch. His experiences would be different from mine. That would shape a different perspective, no matter how much we would share in common.

In stressful situations, I have to fall back on my practice to take a deep breath and find this key to compassion. And, as I age, life becomes more stressful on a basic biological level. Practice offsets much of the biological stress. Yet, in my interactions with those who are not committed to practice of any kind, I must rely on compassion to avoid conflict and promote peaceful coexistence.

Trying to leave my own perspective for even an instant is very hard at times. Doing this regularly by consciously trying to learn the perspective of others is another building block of my practice. This does not necessitate accepting the values of others. It simply entails listening and trying to understand.

The most compassionate behavior toward some people I encounter, after I listen and observe them to understand their perspective, is to walk away from them without any interaction whatsoever. Occasionally, I realize that the most compassionate behavior is to simply continue to listen, to offer a smile, a comment or some form of concrete assistance. Sometimes, the compassionate choice is to accept the concern and help of another.

When I center my own perspective on compassion, while trying always to be mindful of the realities of the moment, I find that peace and harmony, both internal and external, are quite achievable with work and persistence.

Work

I recently heard a weeping defendant of illegal immigration here in the US on a radio talk show. She said, "We all work so hard. Americans wouldn't want us to leave if they saw how hard we worked."

Well, I think this says a lot about the current attitudes toward work and law here in the US. Work for wages is considered moral. Respect for the law is considered dismissible. This is the Reaganite message: Money is good; how you get it is irrelevant. Ronald Reagan's own administration operated this way in international and domestic politics. The end, as long as it supported corporate power expansion, ruled the means.

The Reaganite myth is about to be toppled, like a statue of Lenin or Saddam. As the corporate promise of prosperity for all as an outfall of greed of the few becomes revealed as a big lie, as the world economies crumble from within due to the drunken greed of the rich, the uselessness of sacrificing one's life to the dollar will become quite obvious to the most gullible.

The most valuable work in life is the work of liberation. Liberation comes from detaching oneself from obsession and aversion. This is the Middle Way. Letting go of material obsession, anger obsession, family obsession, sexual obsession. Letting go of aversion to labor, aversion to difference, aversion to responsibility, aversion to risk, aversion to selflessness.

This is the work of mining the heart, the mind, the spirit. This is the work of study, social engagement, curiosity and generosity.

Practice is work. Its basis is daily commitment to doing the work of liberation.

Laborers

Like my spiritual ancestor, Walt Whitman, I h0nor those who carry and build and sweep and dig and sew and reap. Hard physical labor brings the body and mind together to focus on the battle with gravity and inertia, two humbling and unrelenting universal phenomena. Hard labor brings the understanding of one's place on the planet and of the planet's environmental forces.

Combined with education and meditation, hard labor is a clear path to enlightenment. Build something. Plant a garden. Paint your house.

Work

The value of work is the work itself. My practice entails routine and planned work. Usually this work involves simple and routine maintenance of my environment. Weeding the garden, painting the fence, sweeping the stairs. Absorption in simple and regular tasks is meditative and curative. The idle mind, when not engaged in tasks, meditation or learning, is prone to negative influences and worthless obsessions. Too often, work is equated with the earning of money. The work of living well is more fulfilling than working for money.

Infrastructure

The recent technology boom, primarily centered in the computer sciences, may indeed be less than a major advancement for mankind in the big picture. My thoughts on this come from my recent experience of having the water line to my house from the city water supply burst late on a Sunday night. Water, that precious resource, gurgled up from the asphalt in front of my house. The fountain was allowed to form a stream and several small icy ponds along the walks of my neighborhood. The police came. They stared. They were concerned, polite, responsive, but they really couldn't do a single practical thing to remedy the situation. They spoke of having to block traffic on the two-lane boulevard, where the flow was headed. Two days later, after many head scratchings, a temporary rubber hose hook-up to a neighbor's water supply, and a staggering quote from a contractor, two men showed up with a small, almost toy-sized excavating tractor. They spent the morning digging, uprooting, grumbling and removing tons of dirt. The broken pipe was extracted. The new pipe was threaded with great difficulty into the basement and to the water main. The several city representatives of the Department of Public Works inspected and laughed and blessed the work. The dirt was piled back into the hole. Everyone left well before nightfall. While the tiny tractor-cum-shovel may have been designed with the help of computer technology, the actual labor was mostly human and physical. No computer alone could have fixed the problem. The two diggers, working for the contractor, are immigrants. The contractor is an immigrant from another country of origin. It became obvious to me that the maintenance of our infrastructure, the utilities and other things that make life livable, has been jeopardized by loss of an educated native-born work force, which is dedicated to the timely and efficient fixing of things. The cost of maintaining infrastructure, especially in this case, is becoming exorbitant. And the accomplishment of timely repair of broken things is viewed as near miraculous. Where will this lead as world population both booms and ages? How can the obsession with technology benefit this impending crisis? Robots? Clones? Chimps with brain implants? Part of my practice is a consciousness that hard physical labor is honorable and necessary. In dealing with those who do hard labor, I strive to be fair-minded and expect to be treated fairly as well. But my consciousness alone cannot compensate for the general disregard of the value of hard labor and the general exploitation of our social ignorance of the problems of infrastructure.

Work

What constitutes hard work? Does sitting at a desk in front of a computer constitute hard work? Does attending meetings in board rooms constitute hard work? Does counting money and scheming to make more constitute hard work? Does bathing an invalid constitute hard work? Does cleaning kitchens, bathrooms and public spaces constitute hard work? Does carrying heavy objects all day constitute hard work? Does building or maintaining a building constitute hard work? I hear the words "work hard" and "hard work" bandied about quite a bit in the media. Usually these words are used in relation to making money by those who have made a lot of it. Does making peace rather than war constitute hard work? Does giving rather than taking constitute hard work? Does preventing your own fear from being harsh or inhuman to others constitute hard work? I find it very hard work to do that which is more compassionate or more righteous thing over that which comes easily to me. That is why it takes conscious practice on my part to choose hard work over habit or impulse.

Work

I recently watched a report by CBS-TV on the new American work ethic, as practiced by young entrepreneurial and mass-educated Americans. The workers interviewed were proudly proclaiming their seven-day work week and ten-hour work days. "I love what I do, " beamed one young woman, with the look of a trauma victim. And she is a willing victim. Human societies have evolved for centuries to the point of allowing a significant portion of humanity to have a life with ample time for recreation and personal evolution. In one decade, the corporate Fascist leadership of America has sabotaged that progress by indoctrinating the younger population to believe that they must sacrifice the leisure which allows for thought, personal growth and idealism. The threat of terrorism and the use of war, ancient methods, were used effectively in mass media to this goal. Now these automatons are joining ranks with exploited illegal aliens to support a wealthy and bloated upper class, which lives in total leisure and materialistic hedonism. The work of greed is never over. The work of living well with consciousness is over all too soon.