In his book Living Between Worlds, (c) 2020 Sounds True, Dr. James Hollis, asks:
“What betrayal of the soul transpires when we collude with our debilitating fears? And who, besides us, will pay those debts of unlived life – our children, our partners, our colleagues, our society? Do we not see the best thing we can do for others is really to bring our best, most nearly authentic selves to engage them?” (p. 42)
Over the years, Thanissaro Bhikkhu has cleared up a lot of misunderstanding about what metta – and its companion mindstates – is and is not.
The brahmavihāras, or sublime attitudes, are attitudes of goodwill, compassion, empathetic joy, and equanimity that you spread to all beings, without limit: in other words, with no limit to the amount of goodwill, etc., that you spread, and no limit on the number of beings to whom you spread it. Each of these attitudes is an antidote for mental states that can get in the way of training the mind.
• Goodwill, a wish that beings will be happy, is an antidote for ill will, the desire to see beings suffer.
• Compassion, a wish that those who are suffering will be freed from their suffering, is an antidote to cruelty, the desire to actually harm others when they’re in a position to be harmed.
In some ways, dogs would be better off without people.
It’s easy to look into the adoring eyes of our pampered pups and think they’d be totally helpless without us. Even the thought of a pet dog living out in the wild is enough to make some owners despair. But imagine if humans suddenly disappeared and dogs had to fend for themselves. In such an apocalyptic scenario, could dogs survive in a world without people?
“I have no doubt that dogs would survive without us,” Jessica Pierce, a faculty affiliate with the Center for Bioethics and Humanities at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus and author of “A Dog’s World: Imagining the Lives of Dogs in a World without Humans” (Princeton University Press, 2021), told Live Science. “Dogs are descended from wolves and they still have much of the behavioral repertoire of wolves and other wild canids, so they know how to hunt and scavenge.”
Without humans, our former pets would likely roll back the clock on their domestication and live as wild species do. Not all dogs would survive this transition, though. There’s a great variety of dog breeds today, and some are less equipped for the wild than others. For example, flat-faced dogs such as pugs and bulldogs are prone to various health problems, including those that restrict their breathing, which would hinder their ability to hunt. They are also bred with short tails, which would hurt them socially when they interacted with wild dogs.
“Tails are an important part of the communicative toolbox,” Pierce said. “Even if you’re slightly less skillful at communicating something like an aggressive feeling or a submissive feeling, you’re more likely to wind up in a fight than if you’re able to send clear signals.”
Dogs that are likely to wind up in a fight are more likely to get injured and less likely to survive. Fortunately for our barking buddies, humans wouldn’t be around to dictate the canines’ reproductive habits any longer. As a result, different breeds would mix, allowing natural selection to forge the fittest mutts.
These doomsday dogs would also interbreed with wolves to create hybrids where their ranges overlapped. Stray dogs and wolves already mix in Europe in countries such as Italy, according to a 2017 study published in the journal Global Ecology and Conservation. Friederike Range, an associate professor at the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna who studies both dogs and wolves, told Live Science that the main thing that really separates the two is us.
“While wolves are primarily hunters and dogs primarily scavengers, it’s a continuum,” Range said. “And wolves can also scavenge and dogs can go hunting.” For example, wolves can be found living in human garbage dumps just like stray dogs do, and stray dogs can be found hunting wild prey just like wolves do.
But even if dogs could get by in a humanless world, wouldn’t they be miserable without any morning fetch or evening fuss? Neither Pierce nor Range see the dogs suffering psychologically without owners.
Pierce noted that, in a domestic setting, humans suppress a lot of dog behaviors — such as roaming, digging and peeing — because we find them annoying. Ownerless dogs don’t have such restrictions, and while they also don’t have the same home comforts as pet dogs do, they may be better off psychologically. “What they do have that pet dogs lack is freedom,” Pierce said.
Having studied dogs living independently from humans, Range has seen dogs form their own social groups and believes that food is a more important consideration than human companionship in these canines’ well-being.
“If we were to disappear, the food would be the main problem for the dogs, not losing the human as a social partner,” Range said. “As long as they could find food, they would be perfectly happy without us.”
Patrick Pester is a freelance writer and previously a staff writer at Live Science. His background is in wildlife conservation and he has worked with endangered species around the world. Patrick holds a master’s degree in international journalism from Cardiff University in the U.K.
The mother of expectation is patience. The French author Simone Weil writes in her notebooks: “Waiting patiently in expectation is the foundation of the spiritual life.” Without patience our expectation degenerates into wishful thinking. Patience comes from the word patior, which means “to suffer.” The first thing that Jesus promises is suffering: “I tell you . . . you will be weeping and wailing . . . and you will be sorrowful.” But he calls these birth pains. And so, what seems a hindrance becomes a way; what seems an obstacle becomes a door; what seems a misfit becomes a cornerstone. Jesus changes our history from a random series of sad incidents and accidents into a constant opportunity for a change of heart. To wait patiently, therefore, means to allow our weeping and wailing to become the purifying preparation by which we are made ready to receive the joy that is promised to us.
“‘Our vocation is not simply to be, but to work together with God in the creation of our own life, our own identity, our own destiny.‘
The search for true identity requires an honest self-love. Love of self is not selfishness but a humble recognition of our lives as true, good and beautiful. Without real love of self, all other loves are distorted. “
“If we rely on stories to drive behavior, we can’t accomplish anything, and relationships deteriorate … Teams can only grow and flourish from the hunger and drive of each individual … Team success isn’t always about what the group does but how each member contributes.“
Are you ever impatient with impermanence? Does time marching on ever bring solace? Is life itself exasperating? Just three questions on a Friday morning resulting in three senryus linked below.
I’m listening to Bhikkhu Bodhi‘s audio book The Noble Eightfold Path – The Way to the End of Suffering (c) 1984. Here are a couple of early passages:
“It would be pointless to pose the question which of the two aspects of the Dhamma has greater value, the doctrine or the path. But if we did risk the pointless by asking that question, the answer would have to be the path. The path claims primacy because it is precisely this that brings the teaching to life. The path translates the Dhamma from a collection of abstract formulas into a continually unfolding disclosure of truth. It gives an outlet from the problem of suffering with which the teaching starts. And it makes the teaching’s goal, liberation from suffering, accessible to us in our own experience, where alone it takes on authentic meaning.
To follow the Noble Eightfold Path is a matter of practice rather than intellectual knowledge, but to apply the path correctly it has to be properly understood. In fact, right understanding of the path is itself a part of the practice. It is a facet of right view, the first path factor, the forerunner and guide for the rest of the path. Thus, though initial enthusiasm might suggest that the task of intellectual comprehension may be shelved as a bothersome distraction, mature consideration reveals it to be quite essential to ultimate success in the practice.
The search for a spiritual path is born out of suffering. It does not start with lights and ecstasy, but with the hard tacks of pain, disappointment, and confusion. However, for suffering to give birth to a genuine spiritual search, it must amount to more than something passively received.”
From another perspective, I’m fond of the book The Knowing-Doing Gap by Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton (c) 2000 where the authors explain “knowing comes from doing and teaching others how … in a world of conceptual frameworks, fancy graphics presentations, and, in general, lots of words, there is much too little appreciation for the power, and indeed the necessity, of not just talking and thinking but of doing – and this includes explaining and teaching – as a way of knowing.”
The book goes on to quote a senior executive who says, “Where we go from an awareness state to a real knowledge is where we have problems. We are aware of it but we don’t have the knowledge because we’ve never had to teach it or implement it. And I see that’s a huge gap.” p. 248-249
Can we ever truly know without actually doing something with that knowledge?
Gil Fronsdal has a wonderful series of published talks called “The Issue at Hand”. The following is from Chapter 6: Heartfelt Practice –
Whatever a mother, father Or other relative may do, Far better is the benefit From one’s own rightly directed mind.– Dhammapada 43
The English word “mindfulness” is the usual translation for the Pali word sati. Most generally, sati means to hold something in awareness. When the Chinese translated Indian Buddhist terms into Chinese characters, sati became a character with two halves: the top half is the character for “the present moment” and the bottom half is the character for “heart.” The combination suggests that mindfulness is connected to the heart, to being “heartfelt in the present moment.” It points to the possibility of holding our experience in our hearts, to having an accepting, soft, and spacious awareness toward whatever is occurring. …
The Tibetan singing bell invites us to relax … the facilitator invites us to be calm and quiet our mind … and then the trip begins.
when was the first time I meditated? Oh yeah, 8th grade, Sister Del Rey, at that parochial school in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin, what was its name? …. Oh well, can’t remember everything …
it was a homework assignment: find a quiet place and let your mind float …
I remember a green jade Buddha statue floating … I wasn’t attending a Buddhist school … ha!
was it 30 minutes, I’m sure I’m exaggerating, probably only 15 at most … must write down what thoughts come and go during this experiment … I only remember that floating Buddha today, but I also remember feeling refreshed afterward even after all these years …
thoughts come and go like clouds on a windy day … oh, Thay’ you made this Zen Buddhist thing so easy for us
it was maybe fifteen years later that my significant other (now my second wife of many years) invited me to try TM … transcendental meditation … that was a nice experience … I even purchased a mantra … did that for a while but
something about Zen Buddhism … Thomas Merton … D. T. Suzuki … Thich Nhat Hanh … sangha … bellmaster …
“The feminist image of God is humble and feeling, nonviolent and empowering. Jesus, the feminist image of God, cures and loves, is vulnerable and receptive, laughs and dances at wedding feasts, cries tears and feels pain. This glimpse of God is the glimpse of otherness at its ultimate. It is in this model of otherness that the feminist puts hope for equality, for recognition, for respect, for the end of the sexism …
The world needs the voice of this otherness in order to hear the cries of the whole human race. The world needs the presence of otherness to redeem it from its headlong plunge for profit, power, comfort, control, individualism, and dominance. The world needs respect for this otherness, not simply patronizing approval.“
Perhaps another equation worth considering comes from the Tao Te Ching, verse 42:
Tao gives birth to One, One gives birth to Two, The Two gives birth to Three, The Three gives birth to all universal things. All universal things shoulder the Yin and embrace the Yang. The Yin and Yang mingle and mix with each other to beget the harmony.
Life Matters 