Living in Our New World Part 2: Sleeping Beauty and the Fairy Godmother

Reading about our new "normal world" can trigger a deep sense of grief and hopelessness about our future. If we're not very careful, we can get stuck in trying to imagine what that world will be like and forget that we have the ability to impact it positively with what we do now. The Buddha taught that with our thoughts we create the world. Our selfish, self-centered thoughts created the world we live in today. A world where bumper stickers declare "It's all about me!" and people live lives of isolation and loneliness.

Thoughts of considering the needs of others, of returning to a simpler way of life, of making sacrifices for the general good, and realizing what can bring us real happiness—not a selfish craving for more stuff happiness—but the happiness that comes from placing others before self. Of giving to others. Of caring for others and being cared for in return. 

Sleeping Beauty and Why You Should Think About Peak Oil (Even If It Seems Much Nicer Not To)

Sharon July 16th, 2008

...I thought it might be good to do a post not so much on what peak oil is...but on why it is better to know what’s going on than it is to not, even when it is scary and overwhelming. And it can be. But there are a lot of resources out there to help you. And the truth is that we need people to screw up their courage and look hard at difficult stuff - because the problems caused by Peak oil, and the related crises (yup, they all go together) of climate change and the financial collapse are not something any of us can afford to ignore.

My guess is that most people reading this have some investment in the future - maybe in their own personal future, maybe in the future of their children or grandchildren, or the children of someone they know and care about, maybe in their dedication to the good of humanity. The truth is that you are needed, right now, to safeguard your own future, and the future of our posterity - that’s not campaign rhetoric, or storytelling - that’s simple truth. If you don’t participate in creating a decent future, we won’t have one. We need you, and you need you to take as hard edged a look as you can.

A lot of what you read about Climate Change, Peak Oil or economic crisis focuses on the future. Their goal is to motivate you to action by describing what may happen. I do some of that, but over the last year or so, more and more I’ve found myself replacing the future tense with the present, describing not what might happen, but what is. Unfortunately, the hard times I’m talking about do not lie in the conveniently distant future but have begun already. The only question is whether you or I have felt them yet.

By this I mean to say that though we do not know the exact shape of the long-term crisis we face from energy depletion or environmental degradation, we miss the point if we focus only on models and hypotheses. Right now we are in the midst of an environmental disaster, at present experiencing the high personal costs of energy depletion, at present losing economic ground to policies designed to increase inequity. I know that many of the people who read this blog won’t necessarily see the makings of a crisis — yet. Others will already be caught up in the early stages of the problem, experiencing job losses, foreclosures or the struggle to keep afloat economically as prices rise. So while we speak of the future, my case that the world is about to change, irrevocably and deeply, rests primarily on the painful fact that it already has begun to do so.

And is there really any doubt that this is true? Is it possible to imagine any other time in American history when we would have consented to see an entire major city laid waste, without ever rebuilding even its most basic infrastructure? Is it possible to imagine another time when we would have shrugged and accepted the knowledge that our basic infrastructure, things like highways, sewers and subways, are simply falling apart and that we have no intention of fixing them? Is it possible to imagine another time when we knew we were in danger of handing our children a future of hunger, poverty and drought, and sat around debating whether congress might want to consider raising fuel efficiency standards? Has there ever been a time in history when citizens felt so powerless to stop the forces that were driving them to disaster?

If, in the face of all the evidence, we find we doubt that things really are falling apart, we might listen to the respected voices issuing the same opinions. There are some out there — despite the overwhelming lack of responsiveness of our government. For example, in the summer of 2007, David Walker, comptroller general of the US General Accounting Office said,

The US government is on a “burning platform” of unsustainable [ad1] policies and practices with fiscal deficits, chronic healthcare underfunding, immigration and overseas military commitments threatening a crisis if action is not taken soon, the country’s top government inspector has warned … there were “striking similarities” between America’s current situation and the factors that brought down Rome, including “declining moral values and political civility at home, an over-confident and over-extended military in foreign lands and fiscal irresponsibility by the central government.” (http://www.newstarget.com/020930.html) [ad2]

Few of us have put all the pieces together, but when we failed to rebuild New Orleans, when we accepted that we can’t afford the tax base to keep bridges from falling on motorists and sewers from backing up, when we accepted that electric grid failure will kill people in the inevitable heat waves, we implicitly acknowledged what we have not yet faced up to consciously — that things have changed, and many of our problems are going to continue getting worse because we either lack the will or the money or the energy or the time to fix them

When I realized that everything was going to change, I was at first afraid. Because, I thought, if my government or public policy or other choices weren’t going to fix everything, what could I possibly do? What hope was there, if I had to take care of myself, if my community had to take care of itself?

But when I began looking for solutions that could be applied on the level of ordinary human lives, that involved changes in perspectives and pulling together, the reclamation of abandoned ideas and the restoration of strong communities, I began to feel hopeful, even excited. Because I realized that when large institutions cease to be powerful, sometimes that means that people start being powerful again.

And that’s the other reason you should look, even when your instinct is to look away, why you should learn even when it is hard, and frightening to learn these things - because simply learning that we’re in the midst of something very difficult is not the end point. Learning about peak oil doesn’t stop with “we’re doomed.” We’re not doomed - we’re facing very difficult times, and the way we face them will determine whether they are just hard, or disastrous for us. There is an enormous amount of mitigation we can do - personally, on the community level and at the political level. It probably won’t be enough for your life to stay the way you want it to be - I feel like I have to say this upfront. We’ve been told enough lies - we need to know the truth, and the truth is that we waited far too long to fix the energy crisis.

But this is when I remind people of the story of Sleeping Beauty. You see, a King and Queen wanted something desperately. And finally, bounty was showered down upon them, gifts beyond their wildest dreams - a wonderful daughter, one they named Beauty. And in their delight and joy, the forgot something important. They forgot that with gifts come responsibilities - and when they were planning a vast celebration of their good fortune, they forgot to do the unpleasant responsibility of inviting the fairy no one liked very much to the Christening.

Well, the fairy, the embodiment of what we have left undone, what we neglected, she noticed that we’d left it undone. And she came to the Christening, after almost all the fairies invited had given wonderful gifts, and took from the King and Queen what mattered most to them - their posterity. At just the moment that Beauty was coming into her full potential, at just the moment her parents were most proud, she would prick her finger on a spinning wheel, and die.

Well her parents began to keen their grief, and all the guests did too - it was so terribly unfair, they had never intended this consequence, it was all just a mistake. The King, in denial, began to order all the spinning wheels in the kingdom burned, believing that he could control the situation - even one so obviously out of his control.

But over the cries of grief, up spoke one voice. It was the very last fairy godmother, the one who had not yet given her gift. She said, “I cannot break the curse, but I can soften it a little. I can make it so that you don’t lose everything. Instead of dying, Beauty will fall asleep for a 100 years.”

I think this story is remarkably analagous - we received this enormous bounty of fossil fuels, and while we did not mean or intend it, while we did not know what the consequences were, we face consequences for what we have left undone. We can’t make the curse go away.

But each of us a little like that last Fairy Godmother - we can soften the curse a little, we can make it possible, if we have strength and courage, that we in this generation, we who are now adults, can take on the burden of changing our society and our lives, and give our children and grandchildren, if not a perfect happy ending, a great deal more hope.

How often do you get to be the Fairy Godmother? How often do you get to do so much, for something most of us value so deeply?

That's why you need to know.

(Tomorrow: Living in Our New World Part 3: Peak Oil)

Living in Our New World Part 1: Time for a New Normal

For the next week, I am going to focus on a subject that a good number of people will not want to read about. I understand. But I still need to speak. If the subject makes you uncomfortable, I am sorry. If it frightens you, again, I am truly sorry.

But our only hope for the future is to understand the present.

When our leaders and those who have pledged to serve us fail to do so, it is our responsibility to look after ourselves and one another, and to protect our children. And all children are our children. We are in the terrible situation we are because at first we didn't know better. Our parents didn't know better either. But things have changed and now we do. We can't claim ignorance any more. Besides, looking around for a suitable candidate to blame will accomplish nothing. It will only exhaust us and rob of us of valuable time. The reality, which we all know at some level, is that each of us is to blame to some degree.

Earlier this year, I wrote a paper about Climate Change and Peak Oil. I imagine my experience leading to the writing of that paper was similar to that of others who write on these subjects. At first, those of us who stumbled across the right sources of information learned about climate change. Gradually, we read the more frequent reports of what respected scientists, like James Hansen director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, were discovering. It seemed that the forecasts were no longer about the next century or even just five or six decades in the future, they were sliding down the timeline towards us. Rapidly.

Then we began to read increasingly of peak oil, which seemed even closer to us on the timeline than climate change. We realized that these changes were not going to happen many decades away. They were going to happen in our lifetime.

Some people became aware of climate change and peak oil a few decades ago. Some of us have learned much more recently. But I imagine each of us went through a similar learning curve whether it happened gradually or has come rushing at us so fast it's been a constant struggle to adjust.

Recently, as we felt like we were beginning to adjust just a little bit, we began to read more about financial difficulties in the United States. So then we moved from climate change being a few decades off and peak oil affecting us in five or ten years to a financial crisis that was unfolding on the evening news. With the evening news came the realization that we just slid down that timeline so far, that we're no longer in the future. We're here.

We now have a subprime mortgage crisis. Freddie and Fannie, banks, and insurance companies are failing. Retail stores are closing and companies are cutting back their workforce and days worked. Shortages of food and gas are being reported from different cities around the country.

But this is not just a US problem. Whether you look at it from the perspective of globalization or the principle of interconnectedness in Buddhism, one thing is clear—we’re all connected. We’re all in this together.

What is happening in the US will affect every country in the world to some degree. Countless financial institutions worldwide hold US dollars as well as US investments and packages of those subprime mortgages. Also, imports and exports lie at the heart of almost every national economy. Over the past few decades, as the US closed factories and sent production overseas to cut back on operating expenses, it no longer focused on making things. Instead, it became the world’s consumer; a consumer with one very large shopping cart.

A major filler of that shopping cart is China. So the Chinese economy is tied to that of the United States. The interconnectedness doesn’t stop there however. According to an article in the Asian Economic News on May 12, 2008, “China has overtaken Japan to become Australia's largest two-way trading partner in 2007 [and t]he United States is Australia's third-largest trading partner.” So what affects the United States, affects China and Australia and Japan. And then there’s Vietnam, India, Cambodia, and Korea who we have been increasing our trade with. You get the point. One pebble (and the US financial collapse is one extremely large boulder) tossed into the pond of our globalized world will quickly send out—not ripples—but waves of economic repercussions.

So we here sit. I’m in Australia as are a good number of readers. Maybe you’re in the US or Malaysia or Canada. Or maybe you’re in Europe or in one of the dozens of countries that people come from periodically to read this blog. If you’re still with me (and I hope you are :-)) you’re probably wondering where this is leading. Or perhaps you’re thinking that you really don’t want to know and are calculating when this week will be up and you can safely come back and start reading again. ;-)

If we let it, what we have learned can lead us to despair. But we know by now that we have the capacity to focus and control our minds if we try hard enough. I wrote that our only hope for the future is to understand the present. Hopefully, we now understand our “present” just a little better. It’s not the rosy picture we have been lead to believe.

But just because it’s not, doesn’t mean it has to be such a bleak picture that we want to go out and spend like there’s no tomorrow or climb back into bed and never leave again or pretend that the world situation is just a blip in the timeline and that soon everything will return to normal.

The truth is we need a new normal.

And the reality is that it’s already begun.

(Tomorrow: Living in Our New World Part 2: Sleeping Beauty and the Fairy Godmother)

The Best Learning Environment

Because we have cultivated good roots and formed Dharma relationships in past lifetimes, we are able to encounter Buddhism, especially Mahayana Buddhism, and to learn together in this lifetime. We need to practice according to the teachings. The most important thing in doing this is to put aside one’s own personal opinions.

I often teach people to put aside their views about life and the universe, and their thoughts, speech, and behavior toward all beings. Why? Because these are all wrong. If we do not put aside these mistakes, we will fail in our attempt to emulate Buddhas and bodhisattvas. If we put aside all these mistakes, we will succeed in emulating them.

Today we have afflictions and residual habits within us. We all admit this fact. Indeed, we have many karmic obstacles. The power of temptations is very strong. In Buddhism, temptation is called mara, or more specifically, deva-mara. Deva-mara refers to the temptations of all worldly pleasures, prestige, and wealth. It is hard to succeed in cultivation today. If for one moment we are not careful, we will forget our aspirations. This is the reason why there are many Buddhist practitioners but few succeed in their cultivation.

Because of this reason, the Buddha introduced to us a place that provides the best learning environment—the Land of Ultimate Bliss. When we are in the Land of Ultimate Bliss, it does not matter that we have many afflictions and residual habits within us because the external environment will not cause those afflictions and residual habits to arise. In that world, we “can be together with all these Beings of Superior Goodness.”

In this world, it is hard to hear and learn the Dharma. In the Land of Ultimate Bliss, Amitabha Buddha and great bodhisattvas lecture on the Dharma continuously, so that we will be able to study and practice continuously. Whichever Dharma door we want to learn, there will always be bodhisattvas to teach us. The learning environment is truly wonderful there.

But in this world, it is hard to find a good teacher and a good learning environment. In addition, there are many unexpected obstacles blocking us from learning and making progress. Therefore, the Buddha urged us to go to another learning environment—the Land of Ultimate Bliss. Is it difficult to attain rebirth there? It is not difficult, but it is not easy either. We must have three requisites: good roots, good fortune, and favorable conditions.

Having good roots means that we have firm belief and firm vows. We have firm belief when we do not have the slightest doubt about the Pure Land teachings. We have firm vows when our one and only wish is to attain rebirth in the Land of Ultimate Bliss, and we let go of everything in this world except this wish. We must have these two conditions to be considered as having good roots.

~ Based on Ven. Master Chin Kung's 2003 lecture series on the Amitabha Sutra

Oops! That's Not What I Meant!

The other day, I wrote about being mindful of what we think. Today it's what we say.

Last night, one of my brothers (we call our fellow nuns, not just monks, brothers) and I went on a last minute errand to the office supply store. We needed to get something for the office here at the Pure Land Learning College in Toowoomba. This is a dangerous place for both Venerable Wu Chin and I because while nuns don't do much "shopping," both my brother and I are unusually fond of pens and pads. It must be the colors. (What can I say—it's hard to eradicate ALL of one’s attachments!)

Since we were there, and knowing I don't like to go shopping, my brother thoughtfully suggested I look around to see if there was anything I needed. I quickly got some pads and pens (honestly, I'm hopeless) and a few other things and we went to check out.

The checker asked if I wanted a bag. I don't like to use plastic bags and while I carry a fold up shopping bag in the regular bag I carry when going out, I felt it wasn't necessary. I replied that I didn't need a plastic shopping bag and concluded with "I'm used to putting things in my bag."

Oops.

Realizing that hadn't come out quite as I had intended. I quickly added "After I pay for them!"

Sigh...

We really do need to be careful of what we say...

Shoot Me First

I've been doing a lot of editing in the last few days and am now working on Teacher's address that he gave at UNESCO Headquarters in Paris in October 2006. He was talking about Chinese education and the importance the Chinese placed on "benevolence and justice, love, and supreme harmony." When I came to that line, I remembered something that happened in the US almost at the same time Teacher was giving his talk.

It began with one of those senseless acts, when a person is in so much pain that the suffering overwhelms him and he lashes out at the most innocent beings he can find.

In a Lancaster County schoolhouse in Pennsylvania, a man entered an Amish school and bound several girls. One of the girls, thirteen-year-old Marian Fisher, realizing what the gunman was going to do and trying to save the younger girls in the room said "Shoot me first."

Then Barbie, her eleven-year-old sister, said, "Shoot me second."

Barbie survived. As did four other girls.

Five girls died: Naomi Rose Ebersole, 7; sisters Mary Liz Miller, 8, and Lena Miller, 7; and Anna Mae Stoltzfus, 12.

And Marian Fisher.

Benevolence and love and supreme harmony. They are possible in our world. But to such a degree, I'd say they are rare. And yet they existed, surely in pure perfection, in two young Amish girls. To have such love for another human being to be able to quietly say:

"Shoot me first."

"Shoot me second."