Buddhist Boot Camp (5 page)

Teaching Kids How to Think, Not What to Think

As a kid, Bible study was mandatory where I went to school, but I remember coming home at the age of eight and telling my parents that I didn’t believe everything in that book really happened.

Thankfully, that’s when my father gave me the key to think for myself. “You don’t have to believe everything you read, son,” he said. “Just think of the Bible as a book like
Snow White
or
Cinderella,
okay?”

Relieved by this freedom of choice, I said, “Well, in that case, it’s a great book with wonderful stories and lessons. I like it!”

I continued reading the first testament until I moved to the United States, where I was introduced to many other religions, which I began to study with equal enthusiasm.

When I discovered the following quote by the Buddha, it reminded me of what my father had told me when I was young:

“Don’t believe everything you see, read, or hear from others, whether of authority, religious teachers or texts. . . . Find out for yourself what is truth, what is real, and you will discover that there are virtuous things and non-virtuous things. Once you discover that for yourself, give up the bad and embrace the good.”

There is a difference between what we intuitively know is true and what we’ve been told by others to accept as the truth. I encourage you to never stop contemplating that difference!

I am not what happened to me. I am what I choose to become. —Carl Jung

Everyone Is Your Teacher

My parents disowned me when I was eighteen because they didn’t approve of who I had involuntarily fallen in love with. I remember trembling from the obscenities flying across the room when they finally yelled, “You’re dead to us!” and for three years, I was.

It was actually okay to not have them in my life for a while, but I was not okay with “I hate you” being the last words I would potentially ever say to my father. So I showed up at his workplace unannounced after all those years, and he dropped everything he was doing to hug me and apologize. “I just want you back in my life,” he said, and we started from scratch right there and then; not as father and son necessarily, but as friends.

My mother, on the other hand, is a different story. We’ve had some good moments in the past, but she still clings to grudges and resentments from her childhood, so you can imagine how fresh something as “recent” as seventeen years ago must be.

Interestingly enough, I’m very grateful for both of them. While my father continues to show me what letting go looks like, my mother’s behavior has taught me equally valuable lessons on how Not to be. It’s sad, really, and I hope she starts forgiving people she believes have wronged her in the past, and that one day she decides to forgive me too. Resentment is poisonous to our health, and it pains me that she suffers so much.

Please don’t be so quick to shut the door on people with whom you’ve gotten into arguments in the past. Disagreements aren’t conflicts unless pride and ego get involved, and people DO eventually grow out of those. Sometimes they just need to know that you have already forgiven them, and that it’s okay for them to approach you.

It’s true that we get comfort from those who agree with us, but we are offered opportunities for tremendous growth and maturity from those who disagree with us. This has taught me to value everyone as my teacher.

Life becomes easier when you learn to accept an apology you never got. —Robert Brault

A Pseudo-Problem with the Golden Rule

The sentiment behind the golden rule is great (treating others the way we wish to be treated ourselves). But nowadays we don’t even treat ourselves very well! We knowingly consume things that are bad for us, continue working at jobs we hate, and don’t spend half as much time relaxing as we do stressing.

Come to think of it, we ARE treating others the way we treat ourselves: poorly! We feed our children junk food, opt for cheap instead of quality even when it matters, rarely give anyone our undivided attention, and demand a lot more from others than what is reasonable or even possible.

Let’s try something new: let’s treat everybody as if we just found out they’re about to die. Why? Because it seems that’s the ONLY time we slow down enough to get a new perspective on life—either then or when we have a near-death experience ourselves. Be gentle, patient, kind and understanding.

We’re all headed in the same direction, so let’s start treating each other better along the way!

I want you to be concerned about your neighbor. Do you know your neighbor? —Mother Teresa

UNDERSTANDING

The Opposite of What You Know Is Also True

You don’t have to agree with, only learn to peacefully live with, other people’s freedom of choice. This includes (but is not limited to) political views, religious beliefs, dietary restrictions, matters of the heart, career paths, and mental afflictions.

Our opinions and beliefs tend to change depending on time, place, and circumstance. And since we all experience life differently, there are multiple theories on what’s best, what’s moral, what’s right, and what’s wrong.

It is important to remember that other people’s perspective on reality is as valid as your own. This is why the first principle of
Buddhist Boot Camp
is that the opposite of what you know is also true.

No matter how certain we are of our version of the truth, we must humbly accept the possibility that someone who believes the exact opposite could also be right (according to their time, place, and circumstance). This is the key to forgiveness, patience, and understanding.

That said, tolerance does Not mean accepting what is harmful. Oftentimes the lesson we are to learn is when to say “no,” the right time to walk away, and when to remove ourselves from the very cause of anguish. After all, we are the ones who create the environment we live in.

While staying with different host families around the world over the years, I noticed that people’s definitions of everyday words like “comfortable” and “clean” were often very different than my own. The opposite of what I considered true proved to be just as true for others, which was very humbling.

If two people can have very different definitions of what “walking distance” means, imagine bigger words like “right,” “wrong,” “God,” and “love.”

What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly. —Richard Bach

Rewriting the Stories We Tell Ourselves

I visited my teachers’ sanctuary on the Big Island of Hawaii for a weeklong retreat a few years ago, humbled to be in the presence of greatness with the opportunity to ask about the meaning of life, spiritual practice, and monastic ordination.

When my friend and I arrived at their organic farm and settled into the yurt they had arranged for us to sleep in, I was immediately torn by two very opposing reactions to the place: On one hand, I thought it was the most beautiful and peaceful home I had ever seen (it was secluded, quiet, and surrounded by koi and lotus ponds, Buddha statues, Tibetan prayer flags, and exotic fruit trees on the border of the property, next to a stunning bamboo forest with a view of the ocean and the neighboring island of Maui). But on the other hand, I wasn’t one for camping. Unreasonable as it may sound, I had a terrible fear of bugs, and I was extremely uncomfortable sharing a living space with them.

It’s silly, I know, but I was raised in concrete homes that were regularly sprayed to draw a definitive line between the wilderness outside and the bug-free environment for humans on the inside. At the farm, however, that line was blurred and sometimes non-existent. So instead of feeling calm and serene at the sanctuary, I curled up in the fetal position and constantly felt like something was crawling on me.

My friend suggested that I talk about my anxiety with our hosts, but I thought she was crazy. “Here I am,” I said, “with the opportunity to tap into their deep wisdom, gained from years of studying with gurus all over the world and silent retreats in the caves of India, and you want me to ask them about my fear of BUGS?!”

I shook my head and said, “No way, it’s too embarrassing.”

Just then our hosts walked into the yurt carrying a pot of split-pea soup, steamed vegetables and quinoa, and joined us for supper by the altar.

Listening to their spiritual guidance, I felt like we might as well be sitting around a campfire in biblical times, hearing the word of God from the mouths of sages . . . it was majestic.

“Don’t you have something to ask them?” my friend suddenly said out loud, and I wanted to magically disappear to avoid the ensuing conversation. But there was nowhere to go and my invisibility cloak wasn’t working.

“How do you guys do it?” I asked. “There was a scorpionsized spider in the bathroom; there are crickets and centipedes everywhere; frogs, bees, and who knows what else is crawling on the other side of this glorified tent! While I’m extremely grateful that you guys invited us here, I don’t think I can stay. I have to leave!”

With very few but carefully selected words of wisdom, they skillfully invited me to rewrite the story in my head about bugs. They adjusted my perception to better understand that perhaps the insects weren’t invading “my” space, but maybe I was invading theirs. “Who was here first?” they asked me, and I immediately realized that they were right. The spider was 1/100th my size and probably more terrified of me than anything else. They suggested that if I tried naming the bugs as I saw them (Richard the centipede or Maya the bee), I would shift my consciousness to accept each animal as someONE, not someTHING.

After a week on the farm with more opportunities to practice this new perspective than I care to admit, I realized that my fear was simply a learned behavior from watching my mother react to insects when I was growing up.

As soon as I found that “page” in my mind where I wrote that bugs are bad, I was able to erase it and write in something else instead: “All sentient beings are equal.”

I still don’t find bugs adorable or have a pet tarantula or anything. But a year or so later, while visiting my parents in their sterile home environment, I noticed that a small spider had managed to get into the house, and crawl onto my hand while I was having a conversation with my dad. Without even realizing what I was doing, I let the spider crawl onto my other hand and said, “Hey there, little guy . . . are you lost?”

I calmly took him outside where he leaped off my hand and onto the grass. I suspect he probably spent the next thirty minutes cleaning himself because an “icky human” had touched him.

When I sat back down to continue the conversation with my dad, he stared back at me in complete shock.

Isn’t it refreshing to know that just because we’ve always been a certain way, it doesn’t mean we have to stay that way forever?

Our beliefs are merely stories in our minds that we ourselves wrote long ago. Knowing that, don’t you feel empowered to rewrite them if they no longer serve you?

Scan your mind for viruses called fears, anxieties, judgments, doubts, hatred and despair, and put a little note next to them that says “Outdated; no longer valid.”

I’ve learned so much from my mistakes, I think I’m gonna go out there and make some more! —Anonymous

One Man’s Truth Is Another Man’s Blasphemy

I used to think of God, the Bible, religion, Jesus, and the church as one thing. So when I started questioning the validity of the church or the Bible, I started doubting the existence of God—and that’s just silly; they have nothing to do with one another.

It is very possible (and perfectly okay) to believe in God but not the Bible, to be religious but never go to church, and to even downright hate the church and religion, yet love God. Why? Because they have nothing to do with one another! One of the greatest misconceptions is that we have to believe in all of it or in nothing at all, which is why many people choose nothing at all (it’s certainly easier and more appealing than getting caught up in the confusing dogma).

This is challenging to explain, so please bear with me, and refrain from picking at what words simply make impossible to convey, but I’m gonna try anyway.

As I understand it now, “God” is not a creator nor responsible for the existence of things (we don’t know what is), but it’s the unseen energy that keeps our hearts beating and our lungs functioning. It is completely out of our control, yet we trust that it will wake us up every morning. Whether we admit it or not, we have tremendous faith that this energy will keep the earth spinning five minutes from now. We don’t know this; we trust it. We have faith in “God,” but that faith has nothing to do with religion, the Bible, or, least of all, the church. And the name you give this God doesn’t matter as much as the appreciation you have for it.

Buddhism is different from other religions in that there is no “Creator/God figure,” nor a theory on how the world came into existence. If you ask any Buddhist how the world began, he would simply say, “I don’t know.” You just gotta love that kind of honesty!

The Bible is a story depicting somebody else’s experience of God (the unseen energy described above). More precisely, the Bible is the story of someone else’s explanation of what they understood somebody else believed many years prior, before that story was translated, transliterated, edited, copied, and morphed for over 2,000 years of multiple revisions.

Religion is what happens when someone takes the concept of God as described in scripture (as a creator), and orchestrates a story about why we’re here and for what purpose.

As for the church? Well, it’s a business. And like any business, its business is to stay in business. It is easy to dismiss the church altogether because you’d think there would be some consistency in what they teach and there isn’t.

Many churches do amazing, incredible, and wonderful things to help people of all walks of life, but some churches still preach hatred and judgment, so it has naturally become easier to do away with the church altogether than to try and make sense of it. I truly feel bad for the churches that do good in the world. Because the other ones taint their validity. This is why I encourage everyone to do good without any affiliation, but simply for the sake of doing good.

As for Jesus . . . I love the brother! I have said this before and I will say it again: he was virtuous, had tremendous faith in love’s capacity to heal, and believed in peace, brotherhood, and understanding. Whether he truly existed or not doesn’t matter. We mistakenly worship the teachers instead of the teachings, and even idolize them to have been more than mere humans. We construct beautiful but unreasonably exaggerated tales of their lives, which wouldn’t be a problem, per se, except that the significance of their leading-by-example gets washed out in the process.

As Gerry Spence says, “My intent is to tell the truth as I know it, realizing that what is true for me may be blasphemy for others.”

We need not agree with, only learn to peacefully live with, other people’s freedom of choice. This includes (but is not limited to) political views, religious beliefs, dietary restrictions, matters of the heart, career paths, and mental afflictions.

That said, tolerance does NOT mean accepting what is harmful. So may all beings live in peace, and may all beings be happy.

You can safely assume that you’ve created God in your own image if it turns out that your God hates the same people you do. —Anne Lamott