Everything we are witnessing right now, both at a personal level and at the larger societal level, is the consequence of a myriad of causes and conditions. It is the fruition of all of the choices that people have made over time along with the choices people are making today. It includes the choices that you and I make today as well as the choices our parents, grandparents, and ancestors made. It also includes the actions that they took and the state of consciousness in which they lived.
Buddhism teaches that just as our actions have karmic results, the state of our consciousness has karmic results as well. That’s why it is very important to look inside and make sure that we are choosing the state of consciousness we want to live in. We can choose to reside in an unenlightened state of consciousness, or we can choose to reside in a more enlightened state. In the more enlightened state there is more love, more compassion, and more of a sense that we are all in this together.
We have the power to reshape the future—our own future as well as the future of humanity. It teaches us that all of the circumstances and conditions we experience in life are a manifestation of the state of mind that we choose to reside in. This is true because the state of our mind determines the actions we take. From the point of view of collective karma, everything that is happening in the world is no longer someone else’s karma. It’s our karma. In the end your karma is my karma, and my karma is your karma. We all share the same fate.
We need to have compassion for ourselves and for all of humanity because we are all carrying this very heavy burden of karma. This heavy burden of pain and suffering. No one escapes this. So, we have to have acceptance and forgiveness for ourselves and all of humanity. Basically, we need to give everybody a little bit of time: time to grow, time to make mistakes, and time to become more mature. We are all here on earth for a very short period of time. We have to have compassion and understanding for all. We have to accept who we are, accept our suffering, our mistakes, the wrong choices we make, and the state of consciousness that we as a whole society live in.
There is a beautiful story, often attributed to Native Americans, about a grandfather and his grandson. The grandfather said, “There is a war going on inside of me. It is a very ugly fight.” His grandson asked, “What kind of war is it?” The grandfather replied, “It is a fight between two wolves. One is this evil wolf that is malicious, hateful, angry, stingy, passive-aggressive, self-pitying, and arrogant, with both superiority and inferiority complexes. The other wolf is very benevolent, carefree, joyous, forgiving, humorous, compassionate, courageous, loving, generous, and openhearted.” His grandson asked, “Who will win this war?” The grandfather answered, “The one you feed the most.”
The writer James Baldwin once said, “I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hate so stubbornly is because once the hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with the pain.”
Consciousness can be very extraordinary; we can experience love and compassion. But sometimes we can be a little bit lost, especially when our consciousness becomes aware of itself and develops the sense of a separate self. This is the experience that there is “me” and then there is the world “out there.” Then we develop the sense that I am separate from everybody and everything else. In Buddhist teachings, this experience is often described as the primordial delusion. When we experience that we are separate from everything else, we determine that there are things that are good for us. We naturally develop an attraction, a desire, and a grasping toward whatever we perceive those good things to be. These things give us comfort and security. Then we also determine that there are things that are not so good for us. These are things that usually present a challenge or a threat to us. We naturally develop an aversion, perhaps anger or feelings of being challenged or even repulsed by them. Sometimes we act out of those experiences of aversion and anger, and these acts can cause harm and inflict pain on others.
Experiences of liking are so strong that Buddha called them cravings. He put these cravings into three categories: craving for pleasure, craving for existence, and craving for nonexistence. These cravings are tendencies that are so deeply rooted in our system that we might not be able to change them right away. The concept of three cravings is important for understanding the primary root of human misery. Because Buddha discovered that all of our misery—anxiety, worry, fear, or hatred—originally came from one of those three cravings.
When we believe our mind, we often judge others and feel anger toward them. We can even feel hatred for them. This causes us to feel separate from others. Not only do we feel separate from them, we feel that they are different, and we lose our sense of the interconnection that we share. We lose touch with life’s great mystery. Our hearts can become closed, and we are not able to experience all-pervasive sacredness, the sacredness of everything that exists, the sacredness of each and every being in this universe. We can adopt the practice of questioning the beliefs and positions our mind comes up with. We can stop and pause and question if these thoughts are actually true in reality or if they are based on old assumptions and old patterns of behavior.
