The Power of Words

As well as experiencing the power of words everyday through the news media and advertising, we also experience the power in novels, poetry and so on. Some of us may have changed our direction in life as the result of words we read or heard. Some of us may have gained greater understanding from someone's words.

Words conveyed most of what we know. Almost all of our knowledge has come to us via words and a great deal of our opinions and even our emotional life, is built up on the basis of words – things we heard in childhood that conditioned us, or things we heard during our education that excited us or broadened our horizons or things said in the schoolyard that hurt us or helped us. Words have been crucial in creating us, in creating our world. The whole world is mediated through words.

Words can move us to action. Words can cause wars or great acts of heroism or amazing self-sacrifice. Words are powerful. Words are moving. Words are expressive and capable of motivating us to great heights and depths. William Wordsworth said: “Words are too awful an instrument for good and evil to be trifled with: they hold above all other external powers a dominion over thoughts.”  It is worth reflecting on how words affect us for good or ill and also how our words affect others.

 

Morality

Often when people first encounter a Buddhist they ask what are you not allowed to do? The hidden assumption in this question is that there is some authority such as a deity or a pope or such like who lays down the rules and the rest of us obey them. But it's not like that at all. The ethical precepts and principles of Buddhism are advice and you are free to take the advice or not, there is no compulsion. Indeed compulsion of that kind would be considered unethical in Buddhism. So the advice is if you want to have a happy and satisfying life you will need to make some effort to live by these principles. The terms used for right and wrong behaviour are 'skilful' and 'unskilful' which indicates that being ethical is a skill, a capability, which we can develop. It is a matter of intelligence not obedience.

The path of ethics involves trying to live your life in accordance with the ethical principles of non-violence, generosity, contentment, honesty in communication and mindfulness. If we were to say those in terms of what not to do it would be – don't harm any living thing; don't take what you are not given; don't coerce or manipulate people, especially for sexual gratification; don't be untruthful or dishonest in your communication and don't get so intoxicated that you become unmindful or unaware.

Radical Religion

The Buddha’s message is still radical and even revolutionary today: firstly he says your suffering is largely caused by your own mental states. You can do something about that and nobody else can do it for you. You are responsible for your own states of mind and for your life. This is quite radical even today. We live in a culture of blame and complaining. Secondly he says religion is whatever works to alleviate suffering and transform people completely in the direction of wisdom and compassion. There is no God or Guru to save you, you need to follow the guidance or take the medicine and in that way save yourself. This is a radical redefinition of religion. Then he says spiritual practices are a means to an end not ends in themselves. This is also radical.

And in our materialist, shopping culture his message about where happiness comes from is still radical. He says there is no lasting happiness to be found in worldly things. Therefore accumulating wealth or possessions or even having children doesn’t bring lasting happiness. In the end we will have to let go of everything and we will be happier if we train ourselves in letting go.

And in a world where some people are willing to kill or be killed on the basis of some real or imagined insult to their teacher or teachings it is quite radical for the Buddha to say that he and his Dharma do not need to be defended. Buddhism doesn’t need laws against blasphemy. Anger because the Buddha is denigrated or pride because Buddhism is praised are equally unhelpful on the path. (Brahmajala Sutta, Digha Nikaya) Buddhism is a radical teaching. Strong medicine for a sick world.

Impermanence

We can experience people dying. We can experience the ending of a relationship. We can experience our computer breaking down. But that is not insight. Insight into impermanence goes beyond knowing that all things are impermanent, it goes beyond our experiences of impermanence. When we experience impermanence at work in our lives and when we acknowledge the impermanent nature of all things to ourselves, there is still a sense in which we don’t fully take it on board. There is still an inability to let this knowledge and experience really permeate our lives fully.

We can carry on having an experience that impermanence means that all things come to an end sometime. But it doesn’t mean that. All things are impermanent all the time. It is the nature of things to change and keep on changing all the time, always. There is no non-change. There is no non-impermanence.

There is only impermanence always. If we can let this truth really sink into our being, to the very depths, then it transforms our whole view of ourselves and the world. It takes us outside time. It takes away all fear. Fear is fear of change, fear of death. We are really impermanent, thoroughly impermanent, 100% impermanent and not just in death, but all the time, every moment, every infinitesimal fraction of a moment, we are a process physically, emotionally and mentally.

Nothing stands still, nothing is fixed. There is nothing to hold onto. There are no moments even. When we know this, when this is constantly before our vision, permeating our vision, then we have a completely different experience of the world; liberated from fear, joyful, completely in unity with the universal flow of energy that is life

A Simple Life

Our craving for things is being encouraged all the time by advertisers. That is their job and they are very very good at it. We may think we are impervious to advertising but the advertisers know better. So we need to be aware that our wants are not just our wants, they are the wants that we have been persuaded to have. Often what we want is what others want us to want. By living a simple life with deliberately few wants we remove ourselves from the sphere of influence of the advertisers to some extent and get to experience our craving as craving and our needs as needs. A simple life is also more ecologically sustainable and of course more in accord with the spirit of going forth.

Ecology

Ecology includes us. Nature includes us. What we do to ourselves we do to nature. What we do to ourselves, we do to the ecology of the planet. It is not just other people that we influence. We influence the whole planet. Our state of mind as human beings is a major factor in the ecology of the world. Much work in the sphere of ecology in recent years is about trying to get human beings to realise this. As Buddhists we have our part to play because we have available to us a whole toolkit to perform the work of transforming human consciousness. And transforming human consciousness is ecological work. Much of the damage we have caused to the delicate ecological balance has been due to lack of awareness. This lack of awareness was compounded by some ideologies which saw the natural world as separate from humanity and something that had been given to us to use a we wished.

This unawareness and these ideologies are no longer such a big factor, but there is still a great deal of unawareness around the issue of interconnectedness and interdependence and how each individual has an impact on the overall web of conditions. This is where the Buddhist perspective can be very helpful. The teaching of pratitya samutpada  (dependent arising) says that everything arises in dependence on conditions which in turn arise in dependence on conditions and so on until all conditions everywhere and in every time are encompassed. In other words, what pratitya samutpada shows, when we penetrate deeply into it, is that everything throughout time and space is inter-related. This is an awe-inspiring vision, which has implications on the cosmic level, and on the personal level. On the universal level it has ecological, political and life or death implications. On the personal level, where it manifests as the law of karma, it is a way to understand and penetrate more deeply into our minds. If we can work with pratitya samutpada we may find a bigger perspective opens up for us and we gradually move away from the narrow linear cause/effect interpretation of reality and come more and more to see everything in terms of interconnection or inter-relatedness. If we can do this kind of work on our own minds, our own emotional and mental states, then we will be doing ecological work at the deepest level, transforming the structure of consciousness. And it could be argued that a transformation in the structure of human consciousness is in the final analysis the only answer to the problem of a consciousness that blindly destroys it’s own nourishment.

Money

What is money? Perhaps we know how we feel about money but do we really know what money is? Money is not pieces of paper. Those pieces of paper or the numbers on your bank statement represent something, but what do they represent? Mainly what money represents is energy. It is the energy of production and trade and money is a convenient way of exchanging products and services without having to resort to barter every time. The money in your bank account or wallet in some way represents some of your energy. You have expended energy in some way and so much money has come to you. And it is lying there with unrealised potential, latent energy. What you do with it is buy somebody else’s energy or if you save it in the bank, you in effect, give it to someone else to use.

Money is not a thing. It is a movement of energy, with potential for creation and destruction. Money is full of possibilities. That’s why we like it so much. Our attitude to money can be seen as our attitude to energy and potential and possibility.

Another thing about money is that there is no security in it. It is a symbol of security, and a very potent symbol, but money itself is almost the opposite of secure. Security brings up an image of something fixed, safe, comfortable, but money is fluid, moving, never quite what it seems.