Buddhism v. Capitalism: How the path to enlightenment is paved in the crumblings of our corrupt broken system
Before we get into the words I first start writing about 'Buddhism v Capitalism' back in April 2021, I figured I’d offer you an opportunity to listen to this great conversation between Duncan Trussell and Jack Kornfield first/instead — as it really is a great example of how logically sound Buddhist wisdom is when applied to the anxious modern world we have to figure out how to live in now (ps - you'll probably want to jump to the start of the conversation around the 7:20 mark if my embed below doesn't automatically take you there)↓OK… before we get into this essay with Western world triggers like talking about the wisdom of an Eastern tradition or the foolishness of organizing our society around the faulty pipe dream of infinite growth, let’s first hit upon how that old etiquette rule about “avoid bringing up topics like politics & religion” is just some really bad advice and a major reason why the planet is in the sorry state that it is. And I know that old saying came about as a surefire way to avoid conflict in polite company, but maybe the reason why surefire conflict exists when bringing up the topics of religion & politics is because people have been encouraged to have such shallow, narrow-minded, stubborn, and unchallenged opinions about what they believe & follow.
“Just mindlessly believe in whatever your family/culture/group tells you to believe in and, for god’s sake, don’t talk/question/think about any of the hypocrisies & contradictions you see on a daily basis — and if someone tries to engage you with different viewpoints, just shout the headlines and catchphrases that have been conveniently handed down to you and, if all else fails, just confuse your doubts & embarrassment for faith & pride and either metaphorically or literally stick your fingers in your ears and refuse to listen. Now, let’s get back to our work & distractions.”
The problem with this approach, besides it being a sad way to go through one’s one life, is that it opens the door wide open for an ignorantly passive populace to be easily controlled and taken advantage of. One might even say that is the intent of this approach. I mean, I don’t think it is some weird coincidence that modern Christianity and corrupt Capitalism are working so well together, to the point where the religious right can be at a worship level with a guy like Donald Trump and see nothing wrong with it (a scenario that seems super contrary to what that Jesus guy had to say about the rich and the poor, which is probably why if Jesus were to come back saying the things he said back in biblical times, he’d be labelled a ‘libtard’ and crucified all over again by the very people who claim to be his number one fan—which is probably why they carry around figurines of his old self nailed to a cross as a ‘f*ck around and find out’ reminder for anyone else who dares challenge the establishment by practicing what he preached).
But, again, once you have a mass of people in the mindset of not talking about / questioning anything & anyone they’ve been told to agree with & support for generations, it’s pretty easy to spread that manipulation around and lead them wherever you want to take them. Sheep gonna sheep.
Whether we want to think about it or not, political decisions affect every aspect of our life. So when the majority of us treat political parties like home town sports teams that we blindly back our entire lives, no matter what, loudly shouting about everything wrong the other team does while ‘sweeping it under the rug’ whenever our team does the exact same thing, we’re missing the fact that all the teams are financially backed by the same corporate interests. When we don’t have open minded conversations about this stuff, when we’re more concerned about sounding right and agreeing with whatever our branded news source is saying rather than trying to see what’s really going on, we end up missing out on the reality that the same agenda of ‘the rich get richer’ gets carried out no matter which of the same 2 teams is in charge of the government. And when this same mentality is applied to our home team religions, we end up intentionally ignoring long histories of red flag atrocities and red flag corruption, all in the name of wanting to feel like we’re backing ‘the right side’, which is usually whatever side we were told our family supports no matter what and just don’t ask questions or you’ll upset your grandma.
We’re letting misplaced stubborn pride & encouraged ignorance get in the way of us having meaningful conversations about important things that massively impact our experience of getting to be alive—and the results of doing so are, well… just pick your favourite worst problem facing society today from the never-ending list of Problems Facing Society Today.
Where Does Buddhism come into this & why?
First of all, I’m not trying to convert anybody to Buddhism. I wouldn’t even consider myself a proper Buddhist, and I’m not even certain if that’s a label I’d ever be fully working towards (I like the Ram Dass approach to spirituality of ‘be open to everything… but trust your intuition and just keep the stuff that feels right for you and get rid of the rest’). I’ve just found having a daily meditation practice to be very beneficial & grounding + the more Buddhist non-fiction I read (which is something you end up doing when you start getting into meditation) the more I realize how much the other self-help / life advice people out there are really just repackaging ideas the Buddha dropped thousands of years ago. And I heard it’s best to go to the source whenever possible.
I don’t even think Buddhism cares if you call yourself a “buddhist” or not—as long as you are working on being a more mindful being who is always striving to be more compassionate & considerate towards all living things, whether you want to call that practicing “Buddhism” or by some other name (for example, just being a “good person”), it doesn’t really matter what you call it, as the results will still smell just as sweet.
Not trying to “convert” people to Buddhism and talking positively about the core messages of other religions is actually a pretty common occurrence in all the modern Buddhist literature I’ve read. You can almost bet money that you’ll find a ‘Jesus said the same thing’ quote in any western Buddhist book you pick up (there’s even full books on the common ground) — and, in general, I don’t think most Buddhists think of the other big name spiritual teachers throughout history as frauds or heretics, but rather they see them as mostly enlightened beings for their time and culture who, at their core, were kinda saying the same things about compassion and oneness and please could y’all just try to be kind & unselfish to each other for more than a goddamn minute, goddammit!
The Dalai Lama, who is like the Pope of Buddhism (but way more spiritually legit if you’re down with the concept of rebirth), even has a book called ‘Beyond Religion’ where he talks about how the world needs to move towards a secular approach to universal ethics, beyond specific religious dogma, even Buddhism; how, at their roots, all religions have a shared value system and that it’s only in the man-made definitions and rules that we all start separating into groups of others; groups of others that either openly hate each other or politely tolerate each other while internally thinking that an eternal bath in the fires of hell is awaiting the other on the other side (and that kind of thinking is deeply rooted in polarization, which probably explains all the polarization going on). As the Dalai Lama often says, “my religion is kindness,” which is exactly the kind of “religion” a lot more of us could do with practicing.
Furthermore, Buddhism doesn’t ask you to believe in anything that doesn’t make sense to you—in fact, it openly encourages you to question anything that doesn’t logically check out or jive with your own experiences, including things that the Buddha said. That’s how confident they are in the solidity of their ancient life advice. There’s no fear-mongering or guilt-trips or magic-daddy-in-the-sky-is-watching, just a whole bunch of “this is the reality of being consciousness in an impermanent human body where our actions have consequences, but take your time if you feel differently or unsure about anything, because enlightenment is not a switch you turn on but rather a challenging path you work towards your whole life, and this is all a pretty deep & layered topic that requires a lot of contemplation and conversation, and real wisdom comes from experiencing truth for yourself not taking someone else’s word for it, so why don’t you start with just trying to be a more mindful & compassionate person and see what kind of results & insight you start seeing/feeling.”
Or, as the Buddha said:
The Buddha also said this: "Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense." — although some people on Reddit say that it says somewhere that the Buddha didn’t actually say these things… which kinda seems appropriate considering what was supposedly being said : )
By some definitions, Buddhism isn’t even technically a religion. For starters, you don’t worship anyone or anything. So if you’re into one of those religions where almost half of the 10 most important rules involve appeasing a low-key low-confident all-powerful god (ie. thou shall not have another definition of god on my level or above me, and also no worshipping idols, and don’t you dare say one of my names in vain, and also one day a week needs to be about honouring me… and oh yeah also I suppose thou shouldn’t kill and steal and covet the people who own oxen & stuff). You don’t need to worry about ending up on a holy naughty list for checking out some Buddhist concepts, because the person that we all know as THE Buddha was just that, a person. Not a god. Not an idol. A person. Just like you, just like me, just like everyone else.
All Siddhartha Gautama did some 2500+ years ago was wake up to the reality of life and then try to pass on what he figured out to others. He didn’t claim to be holier than thou or ask to be worshiped, he just said “you can do it too, here’s how”. And then he just explained it, over and over again, often in very simple ways.
In fact, one of the cool things about Buddhism is the belief that every sentient being is a potential Buddha (“buddha” just means enlightened one or awakened one). Which feels a lot more empowering and inspiring than being a sinful sheep that has to pray to the higher ups for forgiveness for being a flawed human with flawed human desires. With Buddhism, you’re on the same level as THE Buddha… or at least you have the potential to be, if you’d only just start waking up to it (side note: do you think this is why a certain demographic is trying to get people so wound up about the word “woke”?).
And this, for me, is where the appeal of Buddhism lies. You get the spiritual meaningfulness of being told that YOU are a potential Buddha, all you’ve got to do is put in the personal work to wake your spiritual ass up… BUT, hold up, don’t start developing a messiah complex yet or don’t start thinking you’re superior, because everybody else, INCLUDING that person you think is an ignorant mouth-breathing neanderthal, they’ve also got that untapped Buddhahood potential sleeping inside them. And so do your parents. And so does that dog. Which, if you’re open to it, creates a much more meaningful way to not only start looking at yourself in the mirror, but also to how you look at your fellow planetary roommates (the humans and the animals).
What are you supposed to do with this information? Well, Buddhism teaches that we work on attaining our own enlightenment, unlocking that Buddha-ness in ourselves, so that we can be of use to help others wake up too. Because seeing the Buddha in ourselves involves seeing the Buddha in others, and vice versa, and once we start doing that, it becomes a lot harder to want to keep doing stuff like exploiting another Buddhas’ labour for our own personal gain. But first you gotta work on waking yourself up, because nobody can do it for you, no matter how many 852Hz Chakra Healing Youtube videos you try falling asleep to (even if you do end up having a kick-ass sleep).
So how does one work on attaining their enlightenment? Well, the shortened version is that the reason we suffer so much / life feels so difficult is because we are always craving and clinging to impermanent things, BUT, and here’s the good part, it is possible to liberate ourselves from our attachments by leading a compassionate life of virtue, wisdom, and mindful awareness (aka: shoutout the Four Noble Truths and The Noble Eightfold Path).
Which is exactly the kind of message needed for taking on our destructive, alienating Capitalist system: You are special (you is kind, you is important), but so is everyone else on the same equal level, and together we can realize that by patiently developing compassion for ourselves & each other while individually working on our selfish attachments that capitalism/consumerism is so good at amplifying and manipulating. Because not only should we not want to continue letting massive amounts of fellow sentient beings go hungry and homeless and suffer unnecessarily while we allow ourselves to be distracted from the reality that we’re doing all of this irreversible damage so a small amount of people can hoard more wealth than they can spend in a hundred lifetimes, BUT, oh yeah… we’re also literally destroying the only habitable planet we have to live in & we’re running out of time to act—so we also can’t continue on like this.
Sounds A Bit Too Hippy-Dippy So Far
In my opinion, where Buddhism really separates itself from a lot of other ‘religions’ is in its logic and practicality.
Yes, so far, this concept of “we’re all potential Buddhas” is not too much different from someone saying that the spirit of God is inside all of us or that God is everything—which isn’t a bad thing, it’s just another example of how all religions are kinda saying the same thing at their cores—but where the rubber meets the road with Buddhism is in the mental & spiritual work you have to actually put in if you want to start feeling your enlightened potential grow. You don’t just get to confirm that “yes, I totally believe in what it says in the old book” or publicly say that you accept someone as your saviour to confirm your membership and then go through the choreographed motions every Sunday while carrying on living in the same ego-centric ways that the real powers that be encourage, even though doing so seems to contradict everything that the old book was banging on about (and I say this as someone who grew up Catholic-lite in rural Alberta, so I have some first-hand experience seeing this approach played out—not to mention the fact that I grew up above a very Christian-centric America and, I mean, no offence to Americans, but just look at the stuff Mega-Church of ‘Merica does).
With Buddhism, it’s on you to live the advice. Otherwise, all you did was read some words & nod in agreement and your personal/spiritual progress will be just as superficial. Buddhism doesn’t baby you with “all you gotta do is believe” — as Rhianna would say, and I’m paraphrasing here: “you have to put in the werk werk werk werk werk.”
And when it comes to walking the walk towards enlightenment, all signs point towards taking The Noble Eightfold Path—which is also the 4th truth in The Four Noble Truths, which, when combined together, kinda gives you a Buddhist baker’s dozen version of the more westerly famous 10 Commandments. Except, if you ask me, the Buddhist version of ‘commandments’ is a lot more logically sound as it is based around reality and not taking some bearded man’s word that he, “totally just talked to god up on the mountain top and this is what he said… so if you don’t want to be struck down with lightning or burn in hell, you better believe what I’m telling you — and, so yeah, Jebediah… that means you better stop coveting my god-will-damn-you oxen!”.
Now, there are whole books written on The Four Noble Truths and The Noble Eightfold Path, so I would definitely recommend reading deeper on the expansive topics of ethical conduct, wisdom, mental discipline and the general reality of our existence according to Buddhism (Buddhist literature covers a lot of different ground, but for a focus on ‘the Nobles’, I got a lot out of reading ‘Awakening The Buddha Within’ and ‘Eight Mindful Steps’ + listening to this ‘Buddha's Noble Eightfold Path’ audiobook also gives a good overview). I will do my best to give a brief summary below, especially in regards to how the Noble Truths/Path can help us develop the mindset for kicking our destructive capitalist habits to the curb and replace it with something more compassionate and sustainable, but definitely go dig deeper if you feel any of this stuff ringing true (I promise you will find the rationality of it all very calming & helpful).
Because, at the end of the day, this is just a blog post (albeit, a long blog post) written by a music blogger (albeit, a music blogger who has been meditating daily since November 2017 + who has read a decent amount of secondhand Buddhist books). The full scope of helpful Buddhist life advice runs a lot deeper than what I’ll be able to pass on with my interpretations below—but here I go anyways (as this post is meant more as an introduction):
The Four Noble Truths
The first Noble Truth is that there is suffering / life is difficult—which might lead you to say, “no duh, just look at my Twitter feed”, BUT, just keep in mind that the Buddha liked to cut right to the point when trying to make a point (one time he gave a sermon where he just held up a flower & didn't say a word and someone had their mind blown, allegedly). The important thing is that, so far, we can all agree on the existence of suffering (hence why it is an undeniable truth).
The second Noble Truth is that our suffering / difficulties are caused by our craving and clinging and attachments. We are unsatisfied with what we have because we crave more or we want something else. We are saddened by where we are because we cling to the past and/or fantasize about the future. We get attached to impermanent things (people, feelings, thoughts, material objects, etc) and we suffer when they go and do predictably impermanent things like not last forever. We’re mostly talking about ‘mental/spiritual/emotional’ suffering here and not physical suffering, so don’t think that the pain that comes with getting a bone broken comes from you craving non-broken bones too much (although physical pain is also an impermanent thing and can last longer / feel more intense when we cling to it — which is why meditation/mindfulness has proven to be an effective part of treating chronic pain & illness, shoutout Jon Kabat-Zinn).
The third Noble Truth is a little bit of a cheeky tease in that it says it is possible to end the suffering / difficulties, all we have to do is stop our craving and clinging and attachment. You see, we may not be able to control everything that happens to us in life, but we can control our actions/reactions—which is easier said than done, which is probably why the fourth Noble Truth is actually 8 things.
The fourth Noble Truth is that there is a path that leads one away from suffering and towards enlightenment, a path that involves living a compassionate life of virtue, wisdom, and mindfulness, and that path is called The Noble Eightfold Path.
Before I do a brief summary of the ‘8 folds’ that make-up the Noble Path towards living an enlightened life, I’d just like to touch a bit more on Noble Truth #2 (“our suffering is caused by our craving / clinging / attachments”), as I think this truth translates extremely well to our hyper-consumerism over-marketed modern world of feeling like we need to buy our way to happiness, only to continually discover that buying stuff never satisfies our craving to feel good about ourselves, which always leaves us feeling empty and desperate for the next fix. The fact that the Buddha could have this realization back in 500 BC, when one has to imagine they didn’t have even a fraction of the non-stop targeted advertising & emotional manipulation we get bombarded with all these centuries later, I mean, talk about foresight.
I think one of our biggest hinderances to actually getting rid of our corrupt planet-destroying system is we’re all still too attached to the enticing wants & promises that Capitalism dangles in front of us. Because it’s great that a lot of people will say that they think food and housing should be a basic right for all, but if at the same time we’re all clinging to the idea that we personally want our own 5-bedroom 3-bath house with a water-sprinkled yard and 2-car garage where we can drive our weekly financed SUV to-and-from the latest big chain grocery store where we expect there to be individually packed fresh avocado sushi ready for immediate pick-up if we just so happen to be craving it in the middle of another surprisingly mild North American winter—or so help me god some social media intern is going to be dealing with my entitled rage on TwitBook—our Capitalist overlords are going to continue calling our bluff on all our calls for real change.
Because it’s not realistic that we can ALL have all the stuff we’re told all the time that we should continue wanting to want forever. The waste and exploitation will never stop unless we all stop clinging to our god-given right to crave whatever we want whenever we want it.
Luckily, we don’t actually NEED all that much to be perfectly content with getting to be alive. As corny as it sounds, having the time to enjoy being healthy & alive in the company of other thriving living things is more than enough (in fact, you’ll probably notice that most of your fondest memories involve doing just that—and hopefully you don’t wait until you’re terminally ill to realize it). We have the capabilities to restructure our society around the priority that EVERYBODY has access to the basics of life, we just have to make that an uncompromisable priority.
But first we need to drop all those wants that we carry around like needs. And we need to drop those wants on the level where we genuinely don’t want them because we realize they’ll never make us content and we’ll never stop craving more. We can’t just pretend we don’t want all those wants to try and make a temporary point or a fall-on-the-sword sacrifice. Because Capitalism will see through that and offer you a limited time offer of 20% off + free shipping. And then a day or 2 will go by and you’ll kinda miss when your profile pic wasn’t a coloured square showing feigned solidarity to a cause that affects others more than it actually affects yourself anyways, and before you know it you’ll tag yourself back in to being a willing participant in the very system that causes the cause you were temporarily thinking about fighting for (as long as you don’t have to do anything too out of your way).
And it’s not that we shouldn’t demand stuff like minimum wages being raised to a level that affords a more comfortable standard of living, it’s that our craving of things we don’t need and our clinging to fantasies of fame & fortune & success within this intentionally exploitative system—and our obsessing over the lives of those who currently have the finite amount of fame & fortune & success available in the market, to the point where we pay more attention to their experiences & opinions than we do our own—this is the stuff that keeps the necessity for there to continue to be exploited people working dead-end, unnecessary, low-paying jobs in the first place.
If this global pandemic could teach us anything, besides the obvious missed lesson that we should have compassion even for people we don’t personally know, I would hope it’d teach us that so much of this work that we are doing, so many of these jobs that we spend all of our waking hours on, they’re only needed because we’ve let our society be designed around the idea of people needing to be constantly producing and consuming in order to barely stay alive enough just to keep the unnecessary wheels of Capitalism rolling over top of everything & everyone until we eventually roll right off the very cliff that a consensus of scientists keep trying to warn us about.
Also, let’s not pretend that if the powers that be ever decide to finally ‘cave in’ and raise the minimum wage, that the cost of living won’t just rise accordingly like it always does. So if we’re going to talk about wages in the meantime, we should at least be talking about maximum wages not minimum wages, or maximum salary caps at companies or etc (ie. shoutout ‘profits are unpaid wages’ and ‘it should not be possible for billionaires to exist’).
Things get even more f*cked if we—as well-off out-of-touch Westerners—if we zoom out of our own broken communities/countries and see how much parts of the rest of the world would kill to earn even a fraction of our minimum wages for being forced to keep producing more & more of the cheap stuff that we don’t need yet can’t stop consuming long enough to ever give them a day off from the sweat shop factories we try not to think about existing because doing so just makes us feel sad & guilty & culpable… which just makes us want to buy even more stuff we don’t need so we can temporarily drown out those unpleasant feelings.
If we really want to reject this unjust & wasteful society and replace it with something better—and we have the technology, resources, know-how and human-power to do so—we first need to actually reject it. Outright. We can’t continue to want more than others, more than we need, while also saying we think everybody else should also have enough somehow too. We can’t be anti-Capitalism, we can’t be against all the issues caused by a Capitalist system running exactly the way it is designed to run while, at the same time, hedging our bets & making plans for how to be personally successful within that very system in the meantime… y’know, just in case it doesn’t magically change on its own. It won’t work (which is why it hasn’t worked).
But if more and more of us can start becoming content with the basics of life and all the extra living that’ll come with freeing ourselves and each other from the always-working-always-consuming grip of an exploitive materialistic system that benefits a few instead of the many, if we can reprogram our ambitions of individual success to instead aim towards a compassionate collective goal of equality that delivers everybody with the kind of simple, happy, meaningful life we’re currently chasing incorrectly through our competitive accumulation of impermanent things, well, that sounds like a very needed move in the right direction for the future of the planet and humanity.
All we gotta do is stop wanting things we don’t need, and instead start wanting EVERYBODY to have what is needed. Enter Noble Truth #4.
The Noble Eightfold Path
Before I try to summarize the eight parts of this noble path, I’d just like to point out that the 8 things are all interconnected and by working on one, you are also working on some, if not all, of the other things unilaterally. This isn’t a “complete step 1 and move on to step 2” sort of list, this is a “you can’t perfectly realize part 4 without being on top of part 6, which means you need to work on part 7 more in order to fully understand part 1, which will help to further unlock parts 2 and 3, which will directly affect the development of part 5, which will help part 8 grow stronger… and vice versa & every other eightfold number arrangement you can imagine”. Also, your growth and understanding for each part of the path is accumulative, but that accumulation towards ‘perfection’ will only take place if you’re attempting to walk that noble walk every day. Because ‘practice makes perfect’ didn’t become a cliche accidentally.
So, with those caveats in mind, here’s the 8 things you need to be individually working on if you fancy the idea of becoming an enlightened being (aka: a kind, compassionate, mindful, wise and content person) who, at the same time, also happens to be helping dismantle the parts of our rigged capitalist system that you can personally reach by hitting it back with unwavering compassion & kindness & mindfulness while also starving it from your previously uncontrolled craving and clinging attention—which is some pretty sweet ‘2 birds, 1 eightfold stone’ level stuff, eh?
THE WISDOM SECTION of the path
Right View/Understanding: This part is about seeing things for what they really are and coming to understand the true reality of life. So don’t expect to totally get it on the first day. It involves recognizing the noble truth in the connection between suffering and attachment, but it also runs deeper than that. If you’ve ever had an ‘aha’ moment about the interconnectedness of you and everything in the universe—maybe you were staring up at the stars or maybe you were high or maybe both, or perhaps you were looking in the eyes of your newborn child or just reading a profound book and were suddenly hit by a deep insight—that fleeting feeling of knowing there’s more to all this life stuff than what our day-to-day 9-to-5 existence tells us, Right View/Understanding is about unwrapping that ‘aha’ feeling so it becomes less fleeting and more of a permanent touchstone in your life.
Right Thought/Intentions: This part is about working on purifying our internal thoughts and feelings and desires, about working towards freeing ourselves from the ignorance and negativity and delusion and selfishness that can sometimes sit below the surface of a smiling face that knows how to say the polite thing in a social situation even if they don’t mean it. Because there is a difference between not stealing because you’re worried about the ramifications of being caught and not stealing because you have no desire to take something that is not yours. There’s a difference between not saying racist/hateful things out loud and not having racist/hateful thoughts inside you at all. When your thoughts and intentions are truly rooted in kindness and compassion, you don’t need to think about what would be considered the right thing to do, you just do it naturally. And that’s a good foundation to be building a life on.
THE ETHICS SECTION
Right Speech: This part is about being honest. It’s about not telling lies. It’s about not talking smack and trying to turn other people against someone else. It’s about not gossiping or spending all your time obsessing over trivial things. It’s about not saying rude and hurtful things. It’s following Thumper’s advice about not saying anything if you don’t have anything nice to say. Which is not to say that it’s not about speaking truth to power or saying things that might be considered controversial by others. It’s about speaking truthfully and being mindful about when and what you say and why. It’s about listening and not just waiting for your turn to speak. And like all the other parts of the path, it’s something that takes a lot of work and awareness to truly put into practice at all times (something you’ll notice more & more when you’re around friends & family and another juicy gossip/slander session kicks off in your presence).
Right Action: This part covers most of the stuff you’d expect to find in ethical conduct, stuff like: don’t kill, don’t steal, and refraining from sexual misconduct. Basically, it’s the ‘do unto others as you would have them do unto you’ part of the path. But Right Action is not just about things you shouldn’t do, it’s also about things you should do. So it’s not just about not stealing, it’s about practicing generosity. And it’s not just about not killing, it’s about cherishing & respecting all living things. And, like most things in life, there’s a lot of grey areas that you need to personally figure out where you stand and how to work towards doing better. For example, it’s easy to be against not killing another sentient being yourself… but where do you stand on others killing animals for your food and where do you stand on your country killing other humans on your behalf? There’s also the suggestion to avoid intoxicants, which would include things like alcohol and drugs, but this suggestion comes more from a place of avoiding things that negatively affect your ability to be present and make mindful decisions, which can leave some personal wiggle room to using such substances responsibly (for example, there’s a difference between having a couple pints with your friends and getting aggressively blotto before driving home drunk). Again, Buddhism is not about things being ‘sinful’, it’s about acknowledging the reality that our actions have consequences (aka Karma) and those consequences can affect ourselves and others in very negative ways, so we need to be fully responsible for all of our actions and completely mindful of what all the connected consequences could be—and THEN choosing accordingly. Lodro Rinzler’s book ‘Walk Like A Buddha’ does a good job of talking about how someone interested in being more Buddhist-minded might approach Right Action stuff in the modern world (ie. in case you’re looking for a second opinion on whether masturbation will make you go blind).
Right Livelihood: This part is about making sure that we don’t separate the way that we earn our living from our path towards enlightenment. Because it’s all well and good that you’re trying to be a good & honest person in your personal life, but if you throw all that out the window for 40+ hours a week for the rest of your life while you make a living doing things that involve taking advantage of others, lying, cheating, creating/selling things that cause harm and/or just general typical Capitalist shadiness, well, you’re never gonna get far down the path towards enlightenment. This is actually my favourite part of the Noble Eightfold Path as it seems super relevant to our current exploitive ‘economy over everything’ state of the world, which makes it seem extra prescient coming from over 2500 years ago. So maybe it’s time we all give this one some extra focus?
THE Mental Discipline SECTION
Right Effort: This part is about putting in the effort to do the inner work required to be able to avoid/prevent new unwholesome or negative thoughts from arising, to overcome any unwholesome or negative thoughts that already exist within you, to develop only good and wholesome thoughts going forward (which you do by practicing generosity, virtue, patience, effort, meditation, and wisdom), and to maintain the goodness that already exists in you. Because avoiding/overcoming bad vibes while also developing/maintaining good vibes, well, that takes some serious ongoing effort. Especially with… *gestures at everything going on in the world right now*
Right Mindfulness: This part is about being attentively aware and present to what is going on in your body, what’s going on with your feelings and emotions, what’s going on in your mind, and being on top of your thoughts & ideas and all the phenomena that’s going on around you. It’s about pulling your head out of the cloud of constant media-induced distraction and learning to be ok with just being with yourself every now & again. Basically, it’s all that advice you hear all the time about ‘living in the moment’ and ‘stopping to smell the roses’ and ‘be here now’ and ‘slow down’ and ‘breathe’. One way we work on our mindfulness is by having a daily meditation practice (which takes Right Effort to keep going, and the effects of keeping that daily practice going will be felt in all the other parts of the path, one of the many examples of how this is all interconnected—ps: here’s a blog post I wrote about how/why to get started with a daily meditation practice if interested).
Right Concentration: This part is about working towards the transcendence and equanimity that can exist when we are able to harness all our energy & attention and focus it beyond all the layers of thoughts and distractions and experience that seem impossible to separate from when first getting into meditative practices, eventually reaching that point of awareness that is beyond the observer and the observed. Which sounds like some pretty heady stuff. So a good way to think of Right Concentration is what some people refer to as ‘flow’, when an athlete or artist is completely ‘in the zone’ with what they are doing that everything seems to slow down and time just drops away. Well, you don’t need to be Michael Jordan to get to experience that level of concentration, you don’t even have to play a sport—but, like Michael Jordan, you gotta put in the work. You gotta… just do it. And then do it again. And again.
And that’s the gist of The Noble Eightfold Path, at least according to my current understanding. But, like I said earlier, there’s books that go much deeper into it, with each ‘fold’ getting full chapters to themselves, as there is way more nuance to each part of the path than my point-form gist-ness has covered above. So definitely go dig deeper if at any point you felt a hunch that there’s probably some useful wisdom to be uncovered & incorporated into your daily life.
But, like most things, no matter how much you read up on a topic and study it, you won’t really understand and internalize the knowledge until you start putting it all into practice. So you might as well start walking the path now while you read more about it all as you go (you can just start with keeping a couple folds in mind throughout your day/week/month). Because I hear the path to Enlightenment is a long trip… so it’s best to get steppin’.
The Middle Path, The 3 Jewels, And What If You Have To Keep Coming Back To Ride This Ride Again
A common misconception about working on our personal attachments and having as much compassion for others as we have for ourselves is that this would obvs require us all to live the unsexy life of a possessionless monk walking around poor & barefoot in a dusty robe. But that’s just your ego being dramatic and trying to talk you into continuing to think more about yourself than others and wanting you to keep chasing after all those addictive hits of temporary ego-satisfaction at the expense of everything & everyone else (including yourself). Because that’s what egos are wont to do, especially egos raised on an ego-stroking diet of capitalist consumerism & unfettered individualism designed around pumping up all your ego’s worst traits (which is why defeating Capitalism first requires individually getting our egos in check AND THEN we’ll actually be able to start doing the hard work of making real, lasting progress on systemic changes that benefit the whole — because it’s our collective out-of-control egos that are the real head of this snake).
The Buddha specifically talked about walking ‘the middle path’ or taking ‘the middle way’—which came from his experience of once being a spoiled prince who had every indulgence you could imagine to being an ascetic who abstained from everything to the point of almost starving to death, which led to him realizing that the true experience of life fell in between the two extremes. And right now, far too many of us are fantasizing about the life of a spoiled Prince (and with our modern life, even the middle class is probably pretty close to living some of the luxuries of ancient royalty) while turning our noses to the fact that chasing this fantasy is forcing many others no choice but to live at the extremes of poverty. The global sweet spot involves us all meeting in the middle (shoutout massive wealth redistribution & fair resource allocation & using technology intelligently).
Realizing the wisdom of the 4 Noble Truths and adopting the practice of The Noble Eightfold Path does not involve making some big noble woe-is-me sacrifice—even if we’ve been programmed by our ‘always gotta be consuming’ world to feel that way—because the reality of where we are at as a society in regards to the technological & material advances we’ve made, if we start using them smartly and fairly and stop doing idiotic things like normalizing dumb sh*t like planned obsolescence and throwing good food into locked dumpsters and et cetera & etc, walking ‘the middle path’ can be one of comfortable equality for everybody.
We have enough stuff already (ESPECIALLY us in the West), so we can afford to stop living / producing / consuming the way we are now and pivot our focus to doing things smarter & fairer without having to give up the things that truly make our lives enjoyable. Creativity & art and physical activity & sport and meaningful conversations & stories & relationships & orgasms & laughs & joy don’t need to go away, but maybe we could start checking more of those boxes ourselves instead of thinking of those things as ‘content’ that more talented people do better and we just consume their output when we’re not too tired from working our low paying “essential” jobs. We need to stop thinking of everything and everyone as a commodity that can be bought & sold, including ourselves; we need to get out of the mindset that if someone won’t pay us to do something for them than that must mean what we do has no real value or that we shouldn’t do it anyway.
We can still have stuff in a world where we prioritize everybody having their basic needs met, we just don’t need to keep buying slightly-different fractionally-improved versions of the same stuff we already have every new invented holiday season because some boardroom is banging on about projected 3rd quarter profits. Making the change to a more simplified life is not the ‘all or nothing’ scenario that the people who benefit from us not changing anything at all keep trying to tell us it will be.
Because it seems to me that the one thing we can all agree upon right now is that A LOT of things are pretty f*cked. We might not agree on which things are the most f*cked or what the right reasons are for why each thing is f*cked or how all the f*ckedness is connected, but, we can all look around and see some combination of poverty, homelessness, climate change, addiction, hate, income inequality, pollution, stress, waste, anger, depression, crime, greed, corruption, ignorance, hopelessness, republicans, democrats, liberals, conservatives, manipulation, exploitation, racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, abuse, murder, war, colonialism, imperialism, genocide, extinction… and I’m sure you’ve got a bunch more issues you could add to the list. That’s not a good list.
And the point is that at some point we have to pump the brakes and go:
“What the f*ck are we even doing anymore? Why are we keeping all this horrible stuff going? And for who? And at what cost?”
And the challenge is that, individually, you can’t change the world and you can’t fix any of the world’s problems on a global level yourself, which can make it all feel a bit ‘what’s the point / why bother?’ if no one else is going to do anything. Especially with how bad we all are at having productive conversations on complicated topics, which leads most of us to feel like it’s best to just keep going along with it all and get back in line trying to fight for one of the limited less shitty spots available in this poorly written play that rewards bad faith actors (and hopefully you were born in the right part of the world with the favoured genetic makeup & accents that the casting directors are looking for).
But what gets lost is the fact that you CAN take control of changing yourself, and by doing so, you CAN start changing the parts of the world that you interact with (or at least how you interact with those parts). And, yes, that won’t stop the rest of the world from trying to overwhelm you with all the horrid stuff that is still going on despite your best efforts to be a more mindful and compassionate person, but once you start to realize that you can at least separate yourself from mindlessly participating in that distracted experience of the world, you start to realize you have more power over your own life than the powers that be want you to realize.
And by working on sorting out your own contradictions and hypocrisies and getting your compassion and attachments in the correct order and turned to the right levels—by calling yourself out rather than defensively trying to call out others louder & faster than they can turn around and call you out—you can also start having an affect on how people in your orbit experience the world, even if just through their temporary interactions with you, which can have an affect on how they choose to continue to participate in this clown show farce of a cruel pyramid scheme.
And if enough people start walking that same noble path of being a kind & mindful person who prioritizes the needs of everybody over the wants of themselves, as long as our basic needs are being fairly met too, that’s when we start seeing how our personal change can actually accumulate into meaningful collective change. Because the accumulation of a bunch of people with a shared foundational core, that’s a powerful thing to organize around. That’s when you start seeing real momentum and change. Which, to tie things back to the age-old wisdom of what the Buddha was going on about all those generations ago, this collective awakening would be the third jewel of Buddhism called the ‘Sangha’ or community of beings working towards the same goal (FYI- the other jewels are the Buddha, aka the teacher, and the Dharma, aka the teachings).
As David Graeber once said somewhere and was later quoted in an Adam Curtis docuseries where I took a screenshot of the wise words:
But in order to start making the world differently, we all have to start with ourselves. We can’t keep waiting for someone else to make the changes for us or expect that someone else is going to perfectly explain everything that we need to do next. Continuing that approach is what has given us one disappointing/corruptible broken promise movement after the other.
If we’ve learned anything from politicians/leaders over the years, it’s that they aren’t going to change a damn thing if they feel like they can continue to get away with taking turns blaming the other side for why nothing ever gets done. Although, since politicians seem to go wherever the wind blows, or rather wherever the money goes, if enough of us start putting in the work and making collective individual change without them, putting our money where our mouths are & giving our attention to what matters most, perhaps a few more representatives will see the benefit of growing a spine and come join us (and eventually we can maybe get government back to being what it’s supposed to be: a bunch of unglamorous civil servant positions that involve doing the work of the people rather than being a bunch of power-hungry celebrity debaters available to argue in circles for the highest bidder).
But, as much as we like to blame everybody else, our politics are just a reflection of us. So, first things first, we need to change ourselves. And I can only change me, and you can only change you. We can help each other out—for example, I can read a great book called The Red Deal and then highly recommend that you go read it too and then we’re both working with some more shared knowledge, and you can vice versa with anyone else in similar ways—but until we each start realizing that we can start governing ourselves around collective values & universal truths DESPITE the fact that our special interest governments encourage us to do otherwise. For example, businesses CAN pay people living wages — but will they do so even if the “minimum” wage is never increased to levels that keep up with always-rising living costs? And, if not, are we open to having honest conversations around why it’s not possible to pay someone a “living” wage (and maybe start by addressing those issues)? Because if we keep looking the other way on all these collective issues we’re just going to keep going in circles until we roll over each other right past the last few ‘It’s Going To Be Too Late Soon!’ warning signs.
Personally, I feel like Buddhism lays out the best path for taking on the kind of personal/spiritual work that can lead up to the right kind of collective mindset & will to change that the world needs to hurry up and get on with before it’s too late (ie. those predicted climate change tipping points are THIS decade, not to mention all the other ongoing and never ending problems our current system creates that should be reason enough on their own to want change), BUT, if you feel more comfortable removing all the ‘Buddh’ isms & ists that go along with the above Noble Truths/Path, that’s fine—all the logic and wisdom will still hold up if you want to reframe it as something more secular or apply some of the wise rationale to your current religious beliefs. After all, for the most part, Buddhism is really just ancient self-help and spiritual psychology that’s rooted in logically looking at the way things really are while being a compassionate & mindful HUMAN being. And you don’t have to be an Einstein to see how that’s a good thing.
For example, I recently read a great book called ‘Voluntary Simplicity’ (I highly recommend reading the revised 2nd edition that came out in the 2000s) and it is chock-full of Buddhist-like wisdom delivered in a secular way, and Kate Raworth’s smart ‘the Doughnut of social and planetary boundaries’ idea feels a bit like the Buddha’s ‘middle path’ concept got put into a global economic model, and I’m sure you’ve read plenty of books and watched plenty of documentaries that all advise a similar prescription of more compassion + less consumption to help pull us out of the sick societal mindset we’re currently in that is not only going to destroy our lone habitable planet, but it is also going to continue to force millions/billions to suffer unnecessarily in the meantime.
There’s a reason universal truths feel universal.
Although, personally, I like keeping the ‘Buddh’ isms & ists attached to these ideas and concepts because I feel like it shouldn’t be overlooked how meaningful & impressive it is that someone was dropping all this still relevant knowledge over 500 years BEFORE that story about a god impregnating a virgin started to catch on. I also like the thought of thinking of myself and others as potential Buddhas in need of a little waking up—I don’t know, but I feel like there’s a humbling, unifying power in adopting that outlook on life (it’s also less depressing than the atheism thought that we’re all just temporary chemical reactions biding our time until we become worm food).
Also, maybe the Buddhist idea of rebirth could be that final extra persuasion needed to get more people on board with making the individual changes needed to avoid turning the world into an unliveable wasteland later this century. I mean, clearly people thinking about what their kids and grandkids will have to live through in the very near future has not been a good enough argument to persuade most people to confront their defensively selfish egos and make some inconvenient changes for the greater good, but what if it’s true that you have to keep coming back to live on this earth after you die? I mean, if you won’t think of the children… at least think of your next incarnation on the planet we’re destroying :)
Which is why I also find some comfort in the thought that even if working towards personal enlightenment doesn’t help lead to a collective movement that takes down this destructive & exploitive system during my time on Earth, even if I end up just trying to incorporate the noble truths / noble path for my own sake & sanity, maybe I’ll at least get to that level of personal enlightenment and non-attachment where I’ll be able to be a little more calm & in control during that unavoidable transition period where my conscious awareness has to leave this gradually decaying body behind (aka: inevitable death, the other big reason why we work on our clinging).
But, ideally, there’s a whole bunch of other modern dharma bums out there interested in working on putting in the individual ego work needed right now, and hopefully we can all start bumping into each other and realize that we can organize our blossoming Buddha-natures (or whatever you want to call it) around the urgent collective work & compassionate solutions required to achieve the common goal of not destroying the planet & each other before it’s too late
In other words, we need less #BossBabes & #BernieBros and we need more #BuddhaBabes and #BuddhaBros (and just to be clear, Bernie is a #BuddhaBro — I just couldn’t think of a good #bossbabes for bros that still had the same B-B alliteration).
Because it seems to me that the path to personal enlightenment, if walked by enough of us at the same time, it is kinda designed to be paved in the crumblings of this corrupt capitalist system. And that’s a good foundation to build something better on.
Which would also be nice.
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JEREMY / @HI54LOFI
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