Stepping into Clarity by Taking the Path of Fearlessness: Basic Goodness Training Part 4

 Have you connected to and noticed moments of Basic Goodness this past week? As we open our heart more and more to these moments of Basic Goodness, we may feel joy, wonder, delight, and magic.

And, we may also feel a sadness. A deep genuine sadness. If we slow down, and contemplate all that happens in the world, and really open our heart to it, we begin to feel the depth of impact that our confusion carries. The wars, the aggression – there is a chaos throughout history that continues to occur, where people violently hurt each other, not realizing that we are all part of each other, that when we hurt others we hurt ourselves.

The confusion that covers over all our Basic Goodness is not just a simple confusion, it has massive impact in the world. Contemplate for a few moments the scale of impact that this has had. So much pain and suffering wrought on this world, in so many ways, for millennia after millennia. Deep, entrenched, torturous suffering inflicted on women, on children, on other sentient animals, and on men.

Or, staying connected to this feeling of sadness, and feeling deeply into your own personal experience, do you feel loneliness? Exclusion? Not-a-part-of? Rejection?

Be careful here not to get carried away with our stories about who does what and why, because that is using more our head than our heart. Just put your hand on your heart, slow down for a few moments, and see if you can connect to the sadness that underlies this. This is the sadness of a raw, open heart. The genuine heart of sadness.

Now turn your attention to the natural world, the world of seasons, of animals, of the moon and sun. Here there is a natural order to things – lions hunt gazelles, winter comes after summer and autumn, night comes after day, and is followed again by day. We do not question this natural order and way of being. It simply is, it is not right nor wrong. So too does the human nature contain passion, ignorance and aggression. We are of this world, and our existence in it, however we or anyone else shows up, is basically good. It is unconditional. 

A quote from a teacher I respect – Timber Hawkeye – is:

“The opposite of what you know is also true, to somebody else, somewhere else, because of their time, place, or circumstance. One person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter, and someone is deathly allergic to what somebody else takes as medicine; what you call a meal someone else considers murder, and while some people are passionate about rescuing dogs, for example, somebody on the other side of the planet just had one for lunch.”

There is so much wisdom and benefit in coming to know that the beliefs we hold are patterns, they are thoughts that we repeat to ourselves so often that we forget that they are thoughts. There is a beauty in the fullness of the expression of our human nature. All beings are basically good, even if they are doing something that you have a strong set of beliefs and opinion around.

We are not promoting the idea that we should simply revert to being as animals are and go out and rip out our enemies’ throats with our teeth… The joy of having this very precious human birth is that we have the opportunity to train in reducing our confusion, indeed this is what the Buddhist teachings point to. We have the opportunity to train as warriors in overcoming war.

The genuine heart of sadness that we feel is a clarion call to continue to train, to practice seeing through our confusion, for ourselves and for our entire world of loved ones. Training in moving through the fear and uncertainty that arises from this confusion. Training in bringing our purpose work to light. In connecting to each other deep down in the ocean of Basic Goodness, rather than fumbling through the fogginess of our confusion.

Can you contemplate on that for a few moments – what a world of humans connecting to each other in the ground of Basic Goodness would be like.  How would this show up in your life, how would it be different?

Is this a world worth training for? Not because there is anything wrong with what is here right now, but because we, in this moment, with our precious human birth, have the opportunity to use the magic of our awareness to pierce through our confusion, and then to reach out a helping hand to others, from the ground of our Basic Goodness.

Homework

1. Continue to listen to the guided meditation, and to practice the mantra at the end.
2. A few times this week, go outside and find a spot to sit outdoors. Dress up warmly as needed. Sit somewhere, and rather than focusing on the breath or other meditation technique, focus on your sense perceptions. Just let them happen around you, without labeling them, get curious about all the things that are going on around us all the time.
3. While you sit, connect with a sense of being on your spot, sitting on your seat, fully taking your place in the world.
4. Connect to the genuineness of your heart, and let it feel the sadness that is there because of our confusion, but also the joy of the outside world.
5. Recommendation: Make some small steps to cut down on the amount of non-intentional input you receive, i.e. online news sources, social media feeds, and TV. Use that time instead for the practice above: spending time outdoors experiencing the basic goodness of the world all around you.
6. Share your experiences with me.