Avoiding the Road to Hell

Practice Tip: avoiding the road to hell This practice tip was motivated by people have written or spoken to me over the last year or so to express their concern and frustration about what they perceive as a shift in focus in many Buddhist teachers and many Buddhist centers. One person, who gave me permission to quote their email, asked, "How is it that I see around me so many Buddhists who don't seem to be nearly as serious about practicing and studying Buddhism as they are serious about pushing liberalism, social justice, intersectionalism and so forth?" This question points in may directions. One is the cultural changes that are taking place in our society, changes that some feel are long overdue while others feel they are problematic and misdirected. More than a few feel disoriented and uncertain about how to respond to these changes even though they recognize and often concur with the good intentions motivating them. An old proverb says that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. I've devoted my life to helping people. Arguably that is a good intention, so for me, one of the most important questions has always been how do I avoid taking the road to hell? Don't do what you know does not work. My own variation on the well-known definition of insanity, i.e., doing the same thing but expecting to get a different result. I adopted this principle when I first came to Los Angeles and it served me well. Residential centers do not work. Doing a practice when you don't know the intention does not work. Poor translations don't work. Adopting another culture's way of doing things does not work. Etc., etc., etc. The world we live in is not designed to reward the life most worth living. This wonderful sentence comes from a blog post in which the author compares Chinese and American culture. It's good to keep in mind in case you fall into the delusion that you can actually change how the world functions.  Among other gems from this post: "Degraded and disgraceful as American culture may be, it is still possible to live a life of integrity within it." Don't try to make the world a better place. Instead, address imbalances in the world you experience.  The bodhisattva ideal is not about making the world a better place. It is about helping others find peace and clarity in the circumstances of their lives, whatever they may be. If you hold a utopian ideal, you are lost in belief. As noted below, belief blinds. You are trying to make the world conform to what you hold inside. This is always a recipe for disaster. Among the hells this idea has generated are The Inquisition, The Gulag, The Cultural Revolution, any number of wars and any number of cults (Buddhism, unfortunately, is not immune to cults).  Instead, take a look at your life and see what is out of balance, internal or external. Take steps to address that imbalance. Your life will never be in balance, but you can keep moving in the direction of balance. Note, however, that as soon as you take steps to address one imbalance, everything changes. Now look for the next imbalance to address. Belief blinds.  James Carse explores this theme in depth in The Religious Case Against Belief.Perhaps best encapsulated by his characterization that belief is the point at which thinking stops, but not in the good way. It's amazing to see how people's thinking stops at a certain point. Almost always, it's because a belief has been engaged. To avoid the road to hell, take note where you stop being able to think, to question, to entertain a different perspective.  Morality binds and blinds. This observation comes from Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind. Morality is how a group determines who does or does not belong. In doing so, morality blinds us to the values of other groups. The moral of the story, for the aspiring mystic? Forget morality and focus on ethics. in You Must Change Your Life, Peter Sloterdijk defines ethics as how you live your life to support and give expression to your practice. Footnote: there is no morality in Buddhism. Only ethics. If you have to use force or coercion, the results you want to achieve are not possible at this time. A conclusion that I came to from working with the four approaches to conflict (calm, enrich, magnetize, sever). This principle applies in a wide range of contexts: international affairs, political and cultural changes, organizations, and families as well as internal change. If you have to magnetize or sever (i.e., coercion or force), you inevitably create imbalances. The results of those imbalances are unpredictable. You just don't know what they will set in motion or how they will come back to you. Frequently, those imbalances negate exactly what you are trying to achieve and you quickly end up in an escalating vicious cycle. This is one reason why Sun Tzu says in The Art of War that the military is an ill-omened tool. Instead, focus on creating the conditions in which the results you are seeking arise naturally. This principle applies both to change in the world and internal change. Control is an illusion. You can only see to the limit of your perception. You can only do what you can. The world is a complex place, and you cannot know everything and you cannot do everything. While you may be able to take many factors into account, you simply don't know what you don't know, you don't know what other people hear and you don't know what other people will do with what they hear. Thus, the only way to proceed is to address the imbalances you are able to see, receive whatever the result is, and then take the next step. For a more philosophical approach to similar ideas, this video of Karl Popper's work is worth watching: https://aeon.co/videos/a-doctrine-against-doctrinaires-the-enduring-radical-modesty-of-karl-popper