Three Orders of Practice

West, Texas, the Boston Marathon bombings, theNewtown shootings4/21/13Three horrific tragedies, powerfully fueled by greed, hatred, and delusion. What did wenotice?The bodhisattvas who turned toward the incomprehensible and ran to helpThose who piled rage on top of rageThose who add greed to greedThose who are deluded about delusionThere is a kind of fatigue that sets in when the events are too vast, too numerous, toocomplex to apprehend. The world is filled with events and forces and with our globalnetworks we are instantly informed about many more situations than we can possiblyrespond to.In the past week, there were 30 earthquakes above 5.0 magnitude in the world. Tenmajor wars continue to take lives, and every time you read or hear the news there aremore stories of violence and cruelty, selfishness, and pure human stupidity.What are the teachings of massive acts of violent hatred, monumental greed,staggering delusion? How can we as practicing Buddhists contain and respond to allthat is moving through us and through our culture, with energetic, mindful care? Wemay feel helpless or despairing or angry but we know our work is to practice with allthat is arising. Meanwhile, we have our everyday lives to manage, and that seems likea full-time job. Sometimes we may try to block out what is going on beyond our ownsmall concerns, at other times we may find ourselves obsessively fascinated by somestory or another far away. Or is that just me? So there is a kind of practice that is asecond order practice. Our first order practice is paying attention to present momentexperience without judgment.Our second order practice is to notice what we are and are not paying attention to. Thisis a critical issue. In our evolutionary history, we learned to scan the horizon and payattention to the immediate threat. We did not ruminate over the past or fear the future.That came much later; even the concept of past and future had to be constructed. Sowe are hardwired to pay attention to immediate experience, actually. However, thereare many flows of information and energy that are very slow moving and we havedifficulty sustaining attention on them, even though they may be far more damaging orcritical to our survival than our moment-to-moment experience suggest.It’s terrible, of course, when something like the Boston marathon bombing happens; itis dramatic and horrific. The news captures our attention. Meanwhile, global climate---2change continues; hunger in the world continues; pollution continues; epidemicscontinue. It is hard to sustain our attention so that we can advocate clearly and acteffectively, especially when it is not clear what to do, what to say that has not alreadybeen tried.It is the difference, I think, between a tweet and a novel. That’s a trivial comparison, butit demonstrates what I am getting at. Twitter is the quintessential contemporarycommunication: it is 140 characters long, typically trivial and personal, and yet itcommands attention because it is immediate; it is usually about present momentexperience. There is a gratification in it. And certainly it has been a kind of nervoussystem that has allowed the intimate sharing of information like no other form ofcommunication.But the story of our species is a novel, hopefully a long one. I hope we realize that weare in this world for the long haul. Our story has depth and meaning and a longnarrative arc, with many characters, major and minor. We write this story together andit includes both individual and collective actions, forces of history, and a multitude ofevents. Only time will tell if it is a story of triumph and survival or collapse and failure.The difference, it seems to me, will be in an enormous transformation ofconsciousness that is required to turn our collective attention toward healing our worldand finding sustainable ways of living in it. We need to be able to maintain thatattention and a coherent will and purpose so that we can, together, act withcompassion and wisdom. There is a path for cultivating that kind of transformation ofconsciousness, forging that coherent will and purpose, and engaging in action that iscompassionate and wise.We need to be able to think beyond the individual without becoming overwhelmed. Weneed to keep our attention on what is wise and kind, heartening, healing, creative, andinspiring. That doesn’t mean to ignore the tragic, horrific, or terrifying. It means to turntoward it with that mind, the mind of Buddha, not the conditioned mind that istriggered and reactive. Notice how your attention is mobilized, co-opted by the vividand shocking, numbed by overwhelm or horror. That is second order practice.Third order practice is even more difficult, because it is subtle, profound, and hard tosee. This is the practice with sunyata: to recognize the intimate interdependence weshare, our mutual influence and enormous sensitivity to all that is unfoldingeverywhere. This is actually becoming clearer to us. The burning of fields in Mexicostings our eyes, global climate change brings extreme weather, the collapse ofhoneybees affects our food supply. A bomb in Boston echoes religious conflict inRussia. We know through our communication technologies more about happenings indistant parts of the world than ever before. Nothing is separate from us, and we cannot---3find any safe place that offers us comfort and care and purity and holiness. Even at themall.Furthermore, “this present moment” extends back to the formation of this earth, andforward all the way to its demise. We are the product of all that has already happened,and we are shared authors in the future that lies ahead.Scientists with their sophisticated sensing devices have been picking up vibrations inthe cosmos that go back to the birth of the universe. The karmic frequencies we createsimilarly echo throughout space and time. The karma of everyone everywhere is ourshared karma. We live with the consequences of it, from beginningless time. Doesanyone doubt that we are still feeling the karmic effects of slavery—or of thecourageous and selfless acts that fueled the civil rights movement? Or the Vietnamwar and the peace movement, the struggles between settlers and Native Americansback in the 1800’s and the enormous human cost of it? And even though this karma isshared by everyone, we must still think, act, and speak individually and collectively,hopefully from our deepest aspiration. That is our present-day koan.We must learn to think in cosmic terms for the benefit of all life on earth, and we mustlook at the decisions and actions we take with clear eyes so that we can express ourbodhisattva vow together. This profound wisdom and care reflects the Buddha’s farsighted teachings that have reached across two millennia to instruct us now in waysthat could never have been so deeply understood in his own time, the teachings ofimpermanence, suffering, and non-self, the teachings of the four noble truths, theteachings of mutual causality. They are so much larger now. We cannot afford to ignorethe depth and urgency of these teachings.So let’s, by all means, attend to our first order practice, zazen and the practice ofpresent moment attention in our everyday lives, our moment to moment meeting.Let’s also attend to our second-order practice, noticing where we are placing ourattention, and how that is conditioning our experience. And most of all, let us maintainawareness of our third-order practice, which is being the Buddhas and bodhisattvas ofthis time, in this place, together.