Tag: human condition

slogan one, reminder one: the preciousness of human life

Point One The preliminaries, which are the basis for dharma practice

Slogan One First, train in the preliminaries (the Four Reminders or the Four Thoughts)

Reminder One Maintain an awareness of the preciousness of human life

I have been trying to reflect on slogan one this week, but not that much has been coming up that has caused me to remember to reflect. I didn’t nearly die, which is nice. We did have a pretty serious mental-health scare with our son though, which happened after I started long-handing this draft. Consider that a trigger warning I suppose.

I guess without a trigger, the first reminder of slogan one is a pretty broad sweep as far as philosophical subjects go, the idea that human rebirth is a rare opportunity to work on our karmic balance and move some way to a more enlightened way of being. In our culture we’re not exactly trained to do anything more with the idea of human existence than take it for granted. Maybe the Tibetans weren’t either and that’s why it was made the number-one slogan. Daily meditation would be a good way to bring these slogans to the fore each day, but I’m only just restarting my pogrom this week, and slowly at that.

When I grumbled at Zane recently for being selfish I thought (after a while), Hey, maybe a slogan like this could help me to be more patient. (He’s 12, so selfishness is almost a natural expression of emergent self-identity, considering he’s only just beginning to realise he may or may not actually have a self that’s independent from others – so the suffering begins.) This is a rare opportunity for Zane as well, and if awareness of this slogan meant he got a skerrick more compassion from me, that would be a leg up for him. Some of the other slogans will be a bit more specific to this kind of thing though I suspect.

Something else that came up while reflecting on this slogan was when we helped a guy at work who nearly fell off a ladder. And then my friend had a close call at work and texted me to stay safe. Two indirect encounters with mortality in one week (the week I was reflecting on this slogan …) combined with my dim awareness of this slogan has meant that I’m appreciating my own human life more at the moment, which makes tribulations easier to bear and makes the small triumphs more brilliant. Such is the power of a millennia-old psychotherapy.

I said to Nikki the other day that the human experience is both a blessing and a curse: we are, it seems, acutely more aware than other species that our suffering could be avoided, yet we are equally unable to avoid or assuage or mitigate that suffering. I mean, we could – that’s exactly the point of a psychotherapy such as Buddhism and teachings like the lojong, but who can remember this all the time? It is when we forget these teachings and practices that the tribulations begin to feel like a curse. The teachings remind us that being human is a blessing, the result of good karma and the opportunity to accumulate more, not something that should be squandered by, say, cursing our own existence.

This taps into something that is near and dear to my heart: the idea that thoughts are (mental) actions and therefore each thought comes with a karmic result; wishing to not exist (even without the intention to act on that wish), when considered alongside slogan one, must constitute a considerably negative mental action, with attendant negative karma.

Remember the Rage Against the Machine cover?

Journalist Malcolm Browne’s photograph of Quảng Đức during his self-immolation

Even in the 90s before I knew more than rudimentary ideas about Buddhism, my friends and I knew the karmic sacrifice this monk had made by burning himself to death as a protest.

Even thinking about suicide has negative karmic consequences as far as I know, especially when considered alongside this slogan, and that might be all the take-away I need from reflecting on this slogan. I’m not going to mention this to Zane – introducing him to the dharma at a time in his development when everything we say is wrong by virtue of our having said it would be unskillful to say the least. Reflecting on this slogan has helped me enough to respond more compassionately to his our mental-health crises.

The slogan also came to mind when I was picking up some steel in the work truck. A trucker was grumbling at the office counter about how it’s always the drivers who suffer when the distributor is disorganised as they were on that day. That sort of ignorant and self-absorbed grumbling kind of annoys me: like everyone doesn’t suffer from how most adults these days are absolute numpties who couldn’t organise their way out of a wet paper bag! And I thought later that I’d like to have dropped some pithy comment about how rich we would be if we could transform such suffering into gold. Maybe it would have been taken literally, but sowing the seed of such a metaphor might have ended up yielding some sort of valuable reflection down the truck … um, track … for the poor suffering fellow.

I like the idea that dharma can be dropped among the most mundane situations if we have enough knowledge, experience and eloquence to do so without sounding like some kind of preacher. If we can thus enrich one person’s rare opportunity of human experience, then we are living the dharma and making good use of our own opportunity.

It’s been a great slogan to start on, and I’m enjoying the practice of reflecting on these slogans “weekly”. It’s probably been more like two weeks on the first slogan because I barely get time to scratch myself now that I’m working full-time for the first time since 2008, and I’m only just chipping away at the project, but I find it enriching to just know this project is in my peripheries. Ecoscaping is noble and rewarding work that means a lot to me, but there will always be a part of me that craves and needs a bit of intellectual and spiritual fodder in his diet.

a digressive introduction to the lojong ( བློ་སྦྱོང་) blog series

This year I started working as a landscaper, which has been something of a departure from my earlier career in publishing and academia. A year ago I took a twelve-month leave of absence from uni for a few reasons: studying on campus during covid was either a nightmare or impossible; it was always part of the plan for me to take on more of the bread-winner role so Nikki could study permaculture; working as a professional student and freelance editor was just no longer suitable for me, who has been looking for more direct ways to influence change since my publishing career began to seem like an abortive idea in my late twenties (I’m now in my late thirties). Ten years later I can now finally accept that publishing was a wild chapter of my life, which is over for now. This job … um, I mean … this blog is a hobby and an exercise in self-reflection.

Beginning work as a landscaper is also not a departure, because publishing is the path that lead me to landscaping, as landscaping is a path to what I have recently conceived of as ecoscaping. I will be doing all I can to bring the ecological awareness of permaculture to the landscaping work I’m doing. I am very fortunate to have been lead to a business run by a couple of young blokes who understand the value of permaculture. It feels a bit self-evident to say that one career path leads to another, but who ever heard of a book editor becoming a landscaper?, and sometimes it helps to be explicit about accepting that life paths are never linear.

We’ve all heard the archetypal story of the working-class kid who pulled themself up by the bootstraps and made an artistic life out of the suburbs. I did it myself. I was raised working class in the suburbs, escaped from there to middle-class creative work in the cities, and am now escaping back into the suburban working-class, which I always wanted and felt I needed to avoid. It was a kind of rebellion against the culture of my parents: I didn’t want to squander my life in what I thought was menial labour. By my early twenties I was convinced that I would spend the rest of my life in publishing, so was surprised (to say the least), when I started feeling disillusioned about that path as soon as my late twenties. Even then I started to realise I needed to be doing work that would have a more direct impact on the social and environmental issues I had started to learn about through my work in publishing. It took me ten years mixing travel with vagrancy, freelancing with study (creative writing and permaculture, at different times), and spiritual teachings with meditation/yoga to stumble upon the idea that ecoscaping is actually a suprising blend of all these, in the weird way I have managed to interpret the trade of landscaping. It wouldn’t be me doing the trade if I didn’t manage to weird it somehow.

Reflecting on this I realised that I needed to go down the urban creative-intellectual path to get a few things out of my system before I could confidently and happily move back to the suburban working-class path, doing work that combines physical, intellectual and creative labour in one outdoor package. I mean, I needed to pick up some values and principles that I could bring to working-class culture, so that I would feel my work is meaningful. If I had gone into working-class culture as an NDT technichian (as nearly happened before I landed my first opportunities in publishing) without the “training” of my urbane stage, I might not have had the confidence to make sure my working-class efforts were contributing good to the world. Nothing is linear, really. If it was, I would never have become a book editor in the first place, who is now becoming a pre-apprentice ecoscaper with a business that values the permaculture principles I may not have enountered or acquired through the tail-end of the publishing path.

But this has been a digression: this point about the path; not the path itself. May all the digressions be embraced.

Now that I am working as a landscaper with a business that values the principles I bring to the landscape of the industry, I can settle in to a creative, spiritual and intellectual project that I have been contemplating for sometime. I have the degree of stability and security and lifestyle structure I need to embark on the project and practice of reflecting each week on one of the 59 slogans of lojong (བློ་སྦྱོང་) mind-training.

The first slogan, being made up of four points under the heading, “First, train in the preliminaries”, reminds me of a teaching I was interested to learn already through Tibetan Buddhism, which is that human rebirth is fortunate and must not be squandered by wanton ignorance. I’ll reflect on that this week and see how I go at posting something vaguely weekly about each slogan. [Here’s a link.]