I am deeply grateful to Jack Kornfield and to all my teachers, healers, mentors who have helped me in this journey of awakening. This is beautiful and much needed wisdom rooted in the heart. May we all be open to receive the blessings and gifts offered us on our paths. ~ Molly
Right Understanding
The path of awakening begins with a step the Buddha called right
understanding. Right understanding has two parts. To start with, it asks a
question of our hearts. What do we really value, what do we really care about
in this life? Our lives are quite short. Our childhood goes by very quickly,
then adolescence and adult life go by. We can be complacent and let our lives
disappear in a dream, or we can become aware. In the beginning of practice we
must ask what is most important to us. When we’re ready to die, what will we
want to have done? What will we care about most? At the time of death, people
who have tried to live consciously ask only one or two questions about their
life: Did I learn to live wisely? Did I love well? We can begin by asking them
now.
This is the beginning of right understanding: looking at our
lives, seeing that they are impermanent and fleeting, and taking into account
what matters to us most deeply. In the same way, we can look at the world
around us, where there is a tremendous amount of suffering, war, poverty, and
disease. What does the world need to foster a safe and compassionate existence
for all? Human suffering and hardship cannot be alleviated just by a simple
change of government or a new monetary policy, although these things may help.
On the deepest level, problems such as war and starvation are not solved by
economics and politics alone. Their source is prejudice and fear in the human
heart— and their solution also lies in the human heart. What the world needs
most is people who are less bound by prejudice. It needs more love, more
generosity, more mercy, more openness. The root of human problems is not a lack
of resources but comes from the misunderstanding, fear, and separateness that
can be found in the hearts of people.
Right understanding starts by acknowledging the suffering and
difficulties in the world around us as well as in our own lives. Then it asks
us to touch what we really value inside, to find what we really care about, and
to use that as the basis of our spiritual practice. When we see that things are
not quite right in the world and in ourselves, we also become aware of another
possibility, of the potential for us to open to greater loving-kindness and a
deep intuitive wisdom. From our heart comes inspiration for the spiritual
journey. For some of us this will come as a sense of the great possibility of
living in an awake and free way. Others of us are brought to practice as a way
to come to terms with the power of suffering in our life. Some are inspired to
seek understanding through a practice of discovery and inquiry, while some
intuitively sense a connection with the divine or are inspired to practice as a
way to open the heart more fully. Whatever brings us to spiritual practice can
become a flame in our heart that guides and protects us and brings us to true
understanding.
Right understanding also requires from us a recognition and
understanding of the law of karma. Karma is not just a mystical idea about something
esoteric like past lives in Tibet. The term karma refers to the law of cause
and effect. It means that what we do and how we act create our future
experiences. If we are angry at many people, we start to live in a climate of
hate. People will get angry at us in return. If we cultivate love, it returns
to us. It’s simply how the law works in our lives.
Someone asked a vipassana teacher, Ruth Dennison, if she could
explain karma very simply. She said, ‘‘Sure. Karma means you don’t get away
with nothing!’’ Whatever we do, however we act, creates how we become, how we
will be, and how the world will be around us. To understand karma is wonderful
because within this law there are possibilities of changing the direction of
our lives. We can actually train ourselves and transform the climate in which
we live. We can practice being more loving, more aware, more conscious, or
whatever we want. We can practice in retreats or while driving or in the
supermarket checkout line. If we practice kindness, then spontaneously we start
to experience more and more kindness within us and from the world around us.
There’s a story of the Sufi figure Mullah Nasruddin, who is both
a fool and a wise man. He was out one day in his garden sprinkling breadcrumbs
around the flowerbeds. A neighbor came by and asked, ‘‘Mullah, why are you
doing that?’’
Nasruddin answered, ‘‘Oh, I do it to keep the tigers away.’’
The neighbor said, ‘‘But there aren’t any tigers within
thousands of miles of here.’’
Nasruddin replied, ‘‘Effective, isn’t it?’’
Spiritual practice is not a mindless repetition of ritual or
prayer. It works through consciously realizing the law of cause and effect and
aligning our lives to it. Perhaps we can sense the potential of awakening in
ourselves, but we must also see that it doesn’t happen by itself. There are
laws that we can follow to actualize this potential. How we act, how we relate
to ourselves, to our bodies, to the people around us, to our work, creates the
kind of world we live in, creates our very freedom or suffering.
- Jack Kornfield
This excerpt is taken from the book Seeking the Heart of Wisdom
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