'people are inclined to the good'—meaning, to what they think is good, for them. The problem is this: I've noticed for quite some time—and believe me I base this as much on self-observation as on my study of Other People—we don't do what we think is in our best interest all the damn time.
Now lots of traditions, dharma included, make the claim that in the largest sense, there is no distinction between self-interest and what's For The Best in the Best Of All Possible Worlds. But we don't experience it that way. When a madman is charging toward you with a freshly-sharpened razor and you're holding a pistol, and if you're a good shot, you may feel that it seems pretty clear that what's in your best interest is to shoot to kill.
But what's really in the best interest of everyone is for the madman to be entirely disarmed—in fact, for the madman to be entirely recovered of his mental health and happy and whole and at peace. What's merely expedient is to dispatch him with alacrity.
At this point, I start to hear a lot about how dharma is just a bunch of nicie-nice softie bullshit. But I certainly wouldn't claim it's best to stand there and get your jugular severed—and it's not in the interest of the person charging you, either, of course. The reason that the bullet to the brain is not one's best option (given options) is that, irrespective of the outcome, you're stuck with the traumatic memory of having blown a fellow sentient being's brains out.
You may say, "Doesn't bother me in the least—I'd do it again." Maybe so, but you'd still be better off without the memory.
Now to expand the scenario a little further: it seems as though ever since humans figured out how to record what they were up to, a pragmatic strategy for dealing with ones enemies was to crush them. And the justification for this is almost always an urgent sense of self-preservation. Every scenario has its w3apons of m4ss d3struction.
My major objection to this strategy is not novel and I am not anticipating getting a call from the Nobel Prize Committee any time in the next half-century. I'm not the first to point out that, for as long as we've been reading about the deployment of this strategy—for that long, it hasn't worked. It often works great in the short term, yes. You can beat people down for a decade, you can commit genocide; we may be even getting more efficient in the twenty-first century with our various technologies of termination with extreme prejudice, though it seems that machetes worked as well for a Rwanda of the nineties as two bombs in Japan fifty years earlier. Some parents beat the hell out of their kids when they misbehave because they observe that it makes for some very well-behaved and obedient children. Don't you let me ever catch you ... No'm, you may bet your ass that I will not let you catch me.
There's always payback, and that is never, ever going to change. The only way truly to dispatch your enemies is to figure out how to make them no longer your enemies.
The reason this doesn't happen much, I think, is that you have to be so extremely smart on the spot to know what to do when the madman is charging you. You have to know almost everything there is to know, it seems, to outweigh the risk that when you have to think fast, you'll perhaps fail to assess accurately the situation, and know just what to do or say to disarm it, so that no brains are spattered nor major blood vessels irreparably severed. There's not a lot of room for error.
That kind of smart is something that most of us just don't have at our ready disposal. Most of my life I've had people shouting in my ear about how damn clever I'm supposed to be, and I know that when I'm on the spot, I don't get it right just as often as I do. Dharma tells me that what makes you smarter is meditation. It's weight-training for the brain. Time on the mat correlates directly to knowing what the right thing to do is, in a given situation. You know what to say, you know what direction to step in. You don't end up with your throat cut, and the guy charging you doesn't end up dead either.
That brings me right around to my first point. I know it's in my best interest to keep up a sitting practice. Rarely does anyone have a sense of urgency about such things. I can't find the book, so I'll paraphrase: "If we really had a sense of how essential to well-being our practice is, we'd meditate as though our hair were on fire."
Still, I don't. And I don't know why I don't, but I guess I can't speak to the inadequacies of others very confidently when I am not able to take care of the basics myself.
And that's what I was unable to articulate recently.
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