With palms together,
Good Morning All,
The morning newspaper reports that the investigation of the drowning of a child in our apartment complex will be ruled an accident. This stops any criminal procedings. Eyes now shift from criminal prosecution to civil responsibilities and compensatory damages.
An event such as this can create an opportunity for reflection on the many aspects of living and dying, as well as our sense of ethics, its extent and limits.
I believe we are a responsibility-adverse culture. No one willingly assumes responsibility for much of anything from war to peace, from love to hate, from conspicuous consumption to poverty. And I have often wondered why.
My sense is that we have created this situation by refusing to use a balanced and broad enough understanding of cause and effect. Moreover, we have a primitive need to punish those responsible for their part in whatever. So, which turkey wants to raise their head at the turkey shoot?
One of the most valuable teachings I received in graduate school and in life as a social worker was the lesson that all things are connected within systems all interacting in some way and on some level with each other. Complexity is the very essence of life. Zen Buddhists understand this complexity on an experiential level through our practice.
Correction should not be synonomous with punishment. A punitive attitude coupled with a punitive course of action causes us not to accept, enables us to put up a wall, protecting ourselves from further assault. Rather than building more courthouses, more prisons, more armies and weapons, wouldn't it make more sense to invest in treating the conditions which give rise to the problems we face in the universe?
As a priest and former therapist my work is to assist people in coming to terms with their responsibilty in life's choices. Overcoming an individual's fear of punishment is the first and most challenging task. The walls must come down in order for the mind and heart to do its work.
Fear is not a healthy emotion.
Be well.
2 comments:
"Our belief is, as insane as it is, that we should somehow be able to prevent every mis-step imaginable and if we don't then somehow we are remiss to the point of criminal culpability."
"I believe we are a responsibility-adverse culture. No one willingly assumes responsibility for much of anything from war to peace, from love to hate, from conspicuous consumption to poverty. And I have often wondered why."
sensei, my feeling is that society has to protect it's children. children will have accidents of course, and sometimes they cannot be prevented. but occasionally they are caused only by the negligence of adults. I feel terrible for the people involved but adults taking care of children have to understand what is at stake.
As an oddly shaped boulder tumbles down a hill, it does so first one side up and then another; lumbering and lumping along like an ovoid hunchback.
Is it better when one part of it is up and another down, or when another is up and the other down? This is an important question; not so much for the answer, but for the asking.
If we hold the image of a wheel to be the perfection of a rolling object, then we can hold a wheel up to the boulder as it passes before us and determine where the boulder's imperfections lie. This is a very good practice if you endeavor to then craft a wheel from the boulder, for it will show you which parts of the boulder must be changed; and there is nothing wrong with crafting wheels, they are useful and purposeful.
However, all of that aside, don't forget that when seeing a tumbling boulder--one may simply see a tumbling boulder.
Post a Comment