Conditions

With palms together,


Good Morning Everyone,



The morning sky was delightful. Tiny ribbons of clouds were illuminated against the stars by dawn’s light. Apparently, it rained sometime through the night as I stepped into a mud puddle and felt the goo of the earth come up between my toes. Suki and I both enjoyed this.



As a child growing up in Miami Florida, I rarely wore more than a pair of cut-off shorts: no shoes, no socks, no shirt. My feet could handle the roughest pebbles and the hottest pavement. It is all a matter of conditioning. Just as my feet became conditioned to the conditions by the conditions,, they also became unconditioned when the conditions for conditioning were not present. (Such a sentence!)



So it is with everything. When the conditions are correct for something to arise, it arises. When the conditions are no longer correct, the conditioned thing falls away. This is the core teaching of dependant co-arising.



We human beings have an advantage of sorts. We can see this process happen; note its sequence and change its course. Want to become more fit? You know the conditions for fitness to arise, do them. Want to be healthier? Do the things necessary to create the conditions for a healthy life. Want peace? Create the conditions for peace to arise.



Our science is getting to a place where we may be able to alter all sorts of conditions, changing life expectancy, making us smarter, changing the face of the environment, making food and water more plentiful, and so on. Yet, these things require a degree of wisdom I do not believe we yet possess. Wisdom requires the ability to see and think with a systems eye. Specialization is an anathema to wisdom. Specialists are smart, but not always wise. Wisdom requires contemplation, a deep prajna, as the sutra teaches us.



Our world moves very fast, our specialization increases the sharpness of its point, and we are more and more in the dark. So, while we can see on an individual level what we as individuals must do, it is very challenging to get whole societies to look at themselves and their relationship to the whole.



The message of this post, I think, is that engaged Buddhists must model casting a wide eye. Our cushion is only square one. What is square two, three, four, and five?



Be well.