Ripples of Peace Amidst Chaos

One of the harshest ironies of life is that practically all people long to live a life of peace and yet we find ourselves entangled in dissonance, involved in relationships rife with tension, pitting one heart against another. Open hostility, backbiting and stress are everywhere we look. This is what the Buddha called dukkha, a fact of life as we experience it in samsara, the wandering from one state of mind to the next. The process of life becomes especially heartrending because we understand that pleasant and convivial relationships are necessary if we are experience our own authentic happiness. Such relationships help us follow the goals we regard as indispensable to our personal contentment and fulfillment without serious commotion. These relationships bring us joy and a sense of complete, valuable and even needed.

In marked contrast living in conflict in most often fundamentally painful. In order to protect ourselves we “armor up”. We don’t want to feel the pain; we are averse to it. The greater the aversion the more armor we don.  Eventually shells of anger, hate, frustration and disquieting sense of worthlessness imprison us. No matter what the outcome of the conflict both the victor and the defeated suffer. In this process of “suffering” there is a bitter sense that life is merely an episode of chaotic events without rhyme or reason. Life is not fluid; at least not life as one in conflict and confusion is living it.

The Buddha often speaks of life in the world as an uneven path that constantly defies us to try and walk evenly. We can just as easily use the metaphor of walking on quicksand. Every step is perilous as the ground shifts constantly underneath us. Each day countless obstacles threaten to obstruct us, to divert us, to knock us off poise. Steady mindfulness and firm determination are needed to prevent us from losing our way in the murky hinterlands of greed and anger. To stumble may be unavoidable but we need not sink.

There is an axiom in psychology that maintains that happiness is the most basic drive of humankind. It’s probably important to note that the apparent singularity of the drive for happiness is set within the boundaries of other sets of drives that are just as deep and all-encompassing. Even the desire for happiness doesn’t exist in a vacuum. The other drive is the need for security. No matter how strong the urge to have pleasure may be it is usually tempered and control by the need for personal safety, sometimes called the survival instinct. We feel most at ease when we feel no immediate threat and within our comfort zone amongst objects and thoughts we are familiar with. It is at times like this, the whole world seems friendly, peaceful, and maybe even a little serene.

When we finally get to the point where we begin to take the Buddhadhamma seriously there often comes along with it a troubling and unsettling sense of foreboding – a perception of incompatibility. This feeling comes from a very real clash between the depictions of the world respecting that which we hold as crucial to our normal sense of security and the new point of view of life laid open to us by the Dhamma. Of course, we try to pick and choose the parts we like from the Dhamma and recoil from the parts that we find disturbing or inharmonious with our views. To the extent we are prepared to seriously work with the Dhamma – on its terms instead of our own – much of the Buddha’s teachings can be quite jarring.

The truths the Buddha taught were never really meant to be comfortable truths. They seem inconvenient and somehow run counter to what we expect and what we have been conditioned to believe in our culture. The Buddha tells us in very blunt terms that the predictable and calm superficial routine of our day-to-day lives is very delicate and at best, tenuous. At its worst this predictability is a shared delusion, a hoax designed to lull each other in mass, and you and me, in particular, into a false sense of security. Scratch the surface we find what is usually out of view. Beneath the superficial predictable calm are turbulent currents that are in constant motion always threatening to shatter the surface.

An inconvenient reality is that everyone and everything is dying. From the moment we are born we slide inevitably toward old age, misfortune, sickness and death. We think of ourselves as being somehow immortal possessing a permanent soul or spirit, some kind of eternal nature that will never pass away. Instead a different reality exists. The very matter of our lives is nothing more than an accumulation of five heaps of psychophysical without permanence or substance. It is like a man swept along by a flash flood. In his desperation to get to safety he grabs on to a tree limb or a rock but every time he grabs a limb it breaks off, when he holds on to a rock it slides into the water with him. He finds no safety but is only swept along in the flood. We are much like that man.

We understand that everything is constantly changing. In the Dhamma, anything that is impermanent and conditional – interdependent – is also dukkha, unsatisfactory. This pretty much includes everything that we can experience in our world, both our pleasures and our pains. Even though we know nothing satisfies completely or even for long, we still ignore that truth. It is intellectually graspable yet not emotionally. This deliberate ignorance of what our reality consists of was called avijja by the Buddha and translated simply as “ignorance”. It doesn’t mean that we are stupid nor does it mean that we are indifferent; it means that we just don’t want to see it.

It is as if we are looking at life through a long cardboard tube. With one eye closed and the tube over the other everything we see of the world is contained in the hole at the other end. We see only the two-inch (5 cm) circle a hand’s span away from us. We cannot see to the left or right, up or down, but only what the tube’s hole allows us to see. The whole world becomes invisible except for that tiny bit we can see. We can move our head of course, but then we are still looking through the tube. We can no longer see what was there before; it is only a vague memory. Our whole experience of the vast world is severely limited to the tube’s viewpoint. If you collect tubes and tape them together you get a longer tube, yes? The more tubes you collect the wealthier you become amongst those who have tubes to look through. We can make a game of it and say the person with the most tubes taped together is the winner; but, the longer the tube the less you see. The hole at the end is farther away from you and is therefore smaller.

Would it not have been simpler just to put the tube down?

Viewpoints are every bit like looking through this tube. The longer tube only constricts our view even more. If we try to move, actually try to get somewhere while looking down this tube we will find it very difficult. We have only a very narrow picture of what the landscape looks like. We are bound to stumble or even fall. We will probably hurt ourselves as well. The world will seem chaotic, your footing will be unsure. Perhaps you will want to stop walking altogether and you will never reach your destination. You might continue, but seeing only a small bit of what you need to see, like landmarks that would tell you what direction to go, you will surely get lost. If others along the way are also looking through a tube they may not see you or you them. There are bound to be collisions. The person with the shortest tube sees the most.

This is actually how we see the world in our day-to-day lives. We are so fixed on our view that we cannot see a bigger picture. We start to make judgments based on what we expect and not what is actually there. The phenomenon is called “tunnel vision” and it strikes everyone at some time or another. We bump into each other because we cannot see what they see. Tunnel vision is a very dangerous way to go through life because if looking through the tube is the only reality I know then I will have to defend my view over that of others. Likewise, they will defend their view.

Would it be simpler to put the views away?

I felt a little of this conflict when I was first became involved with Mahayana Buddhism. The conflict arose between what I knew and believed and that with which I had been familiar. I was a Theravada monk many years before and studied the Theravada teachings and the Pali Canon. In Mahayana the Pali Canon was shunned and the Theravada disparaged. Whole different sets of scriptures were offered to me – and these scriptures that seemingly contradicted the Buddha’s original teachings. I shared these concerns with a friend, the Abbot of a Theravada community. He told me, “The conflict is not with Mahayana; the conflict is within you.” I had a similar discussion with a Mahayana Master. Unlike the Theravadin who challenged me to look within to resolve the issue the Mahayanist began defending his lineage and criticizing the Theravada monk.

At once I understood what the Theravadin meant and he was right I came to a personal agreement to let the struggle go and dismiss my view as one among many. I was expecting Mahayana to be one thing and was shocked when I discovered it was something completely different. In cognitive psychology this is called cognitive dissonance. It happens when reality as we experience it does not match up with the reality we expect. We also call this phenomenon the experience of chaos.

Chaos is defined as behavior so unpredictable as to appear random, owing to great sensitivity to small changes in conditions. Chaotic behavior can be observed in many natural systems, such as weather and the human heart.

With the human heart it is a little different. The chaos we experience is all internal. The world outside is constantly shifting and changing but we are not changing inside. It is as if we expect the things we experience today to be the same as yesterday. Of course they cannot be. There is a man I know that never eats at the same restaurant twice. He knows that the delicious meal he experienced yesterday will not be the same if he eats it today. Circumstances and conditions will have changed. The food may be cooked a minute longer or a minute less. The temperature will be different. His mood will not be the same. Perhaps he is terrified of experiencing aversion. Other people are a little like heroin addicts, always looking for the same pleasurable high but not getting it, still they go back to the same restaurant and have the same meal every time because it gives the illusion of continuity to his life. The food never tastes quite the same but he says, “I know what I like. I don’t want to risk being disappointed by eating at a place I don’t know.” Both men fear disappointment so much that they go to extremes to avoid it.

When we experience chaos it is because what we expected did not happen but it can also be because we do expect it to happen. An interesting story, perhaps anecdotal, is that when Columbus’s ships landed on Nuevo Espanola the Natives did not see the ships, which were only a few hundred yards off the shore. It is often related that because they had never seen a ship and could not apprehend what they were simply did not see them – deliberately ignoring them. Eventually they were suddenly able to see the ships when the pattern was made clear to them. The Indians could see the waves, see the effects of the ships in the water, see the sea birds acting out around the ships but could not see the ships themselves. This too is a kind of chaos. The effects can be seen but the causes are invisible. Perhaps this is because the Natives had existed as a community for thousands of years without ever seeing such a thing as an ocean going vessel. Maybe because of this they were conditioned not to see what they could not label, codify or fit into their pre-existing knowledge bank.  Maybe the story is simply apocryphal.

Apocryphal stories can be helpful. This one is about avijja and the dangers of it. Avijja is not about innocence; it is about ignorance.

If we can somehow put away our views we can live with less conflict. If we can somehow stop looking down tunnels we can have a broader view. Life will become more consistent, less chaotic and the ripples of peace will begin to wash over us. If we continue in this way the ripples will grow into an ocean of peace.