9/11/2023 0 Comments Lama surya das naropaNot only could I actually watch my mind, but there was a whole system for doing it! But karma intervened, and the Peace Corps sent me to Thailand instead. I applied to go to East Africa-I had this Hemingway-like vision of climbing Mount Kilimanjaro and living in the African bush. After three and a half years of school, I was ready for some adventure. I got to talking with these people and I invited them back to my apartment. This was 1964 and there was a lot of excitement about this new vision of service. Later in my college career I was riding on a subway in New York City, and there was a group of young people on the subway car who were in one of the first Peace Corps training groups. There is a Buddhist saying that “Everything rests on the tip of motivation.” Joseph at ordination in Thailand Before we speak, what is the motive? Before we give something, what is the motive? This is a core theme of how we practice in the world. Although we may have a whole series of mixed motives, if we are not lost in or identified with them, we can let the unwholesome ones go and act from what is skillful. We may not be as saintly as we feel ourselves to be. Motivations are subtle, sometimes mixed, and often hidden. But we do not often stop to examine them. Judging from myself and people I know, I think we assume that most of our motivations are pretty good. Is it based on generosity, on good will, on wisdom, on compassion? Or is it based on self-referencing, on greed, on anger, or aversion? One of the few things we do have direct access to, however, is insight into and purification of our motivation. We may decide to do something and engage in it with great passion but if we are overly attached to the outcome, it is going to be a setup for suffering. There are just too many different influences-other people, society, politics, economics. We all know we can not entirely control the outcome of our actions. Here was the Dalai Lama pointing to something else entirely, which was the importance of the motivation guiding the action. Mostly in our culture, actions are measured only by their outcome. He said the true worth of an action is not measured by its success or failure, but by the motivation behind it. Many years later, I heard the Dalai Lama expand on this core teaching, but with more subtlety and depth. So for me it was a completely revolutionary idea. I had come from a really small town of about a thousand people in the Catskill Mountains of New York State, and non-attachment was not something that was spoken much about-in fact, not at all. I think it was some intimation of the whole notion of non-attachment as a spiritual path. I did not really know what this meant, but there was something about it that resonated deeply. As we read this text, one line just jumped out at me: “…to act without attachment to the fruit of the action.” Then, in my junior year I was taking a course in Eastern Philosophy and reading the Bhagavad Gita, one of the great Hindu classics. Then after a couple of weeks of this inner questioning, something happened-unfortunately, I can’t now remember what (perhaps it was an upcoming exam)-and the intensity of the question seemed to fade away. I felt so deeply that if I knew God existed, my life would look one way, and if not it would look quite different. It felt like my whole life depended on coming to some resolution of this great question. My mind was filled with it, day and night. I became obsessed, as only a college freshman can, with the effort to figure out whether or not God existed. My first real inquiry into any kind of spiritual dimension happened when I was a freshman in college. These words have been extracted from that presentation. At a program held at the study center in September 2008, Joseph Goldstein was asked to reflect upon his long experience with meditation and the Dharma.
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