If we practice the Five Mindfulness Trainings, we are on a path that will bring us to happiness and the transformation of our own suffering and the suffering of our loved ones. If our practice can be this powerful individually, imagine how powerful it could be if we practiced collectively.
Our lives are more interconnected globally than they have ever been. Our food, our economy, the physical tools we use, our politics cross national and international boundaries. But economics, politics, and education are not the only things being globalized. Our ethics and morality can also be global. We need an ethic that speaks to the whole of humanity. Every culture has unique contributions that they can bring to the creation of a global ethic. And every nation, every people, can contribute aspects of their culture and religion that can make a global ethic something beautiful and appropriate for their country.
In order to practice the Five Mindfulness Trainings we need the support of others. If a group meets regularly, then they can support each other. After reciting each training, someone can share how they have practiced that training since the last gathering. It’s important not just to talk, but to make sure there is time to breathe in and out mindfully so we can look back at how we have practiced.
In Buddhism there’s a practice called the Three Trainings. The Three Trainings are defined as ethics (shila), concentration (samadhi), and insight (prajña). Sometimes they’re defined as mindfulness (smrti), concentration, and insight. Ethical behavior and mindfulness are very closely connected; they’re slightly different approaches to the same thing. When we practice the mindfulness trainings, we refrain from performing actions that we’re aware would cause suffering. In order to have this awareness, we need mindfulness in our daily actions. The insights embodied in the mindfulness trainings come from our practice of walking, sitting, breathing, and eating. The Five Mindfulness Trainings come from our own experience of being aware, peaceful, and clear-minded. We’re aware that killing brings suffering, so we’re determined not to kill, but rather to nourish life. Our own awareness helps us know what to do and what not to do and we can see things in a deeper, more compassionate way.
When we breathe mindfully and walk mindfully we are truly present and we are aware of what is happening in us and around us. We recognize strong emotions and negative states of mind as they arise and we know what we should do and what we should not do. In a difficult or dangerous situation, if we panic we could make many mistakes and things will become much worse. When we are able to come back to our breathing (mindfulness) and stop the confused activities of our mind (concentration), we shall know intuitively what to do and what not to do (insight). The practice of the mindfulness trainings helps us develop concentration and insight. To live our life in mindfulness and with concentration is to continue to produce insight for our own liberation, healing, and nourishment, and for the liberation, healing, and nourishment of the world.
There’s a deep link between the ethical and the spiritual. If you can’t see the spiritual in the ethical, your ethic may be empty. You may do things without knowing why and there may be no joy in your actions. For example, inspired by the Fifth Mindfulness Training, you may decide not to drink alcohol or use drugs. But if you resent the training, and you suffer because you still want to drink alcohol or use drugs, the ethic that you follow is empty, because you don’t really see the value of it. The mindfulness trainings are based in insight and love, not on prohibition and withholding. The same is true with any of the trainings. If you’re a vegetarian because you think you should be, but you wish that you could eat meat, then you aren’t really following the trainings. But if you feel that you’re lucky to be able to eat primarily vegetables and legumes and to not be causing suffering to other living beings, then there’s joy, insight, compassion, and spirituality in your eating. Eating becomes a very spiritual thing. There’s no barrier dividing the ethical and the spiritual.
The Five Mindfulness Trainings are an offering that doesn’t contain dogma, religion, or sectarianism. Each of us can use the trainings as practical ethical principles for our life without being part of any particular faith or tradition. You can just be yourself, but try to make your life beautiful by following the wisdom of these trainings. The Five Mindfulness Trainings are, for each of us, the result of our own deep looking and of the collective deep looking.
The purpose of the trainings is not to follow them perfectly and then feel superior about following them. The trainings are a guide; it’s not possible to practice them so perfectly that we prevent any suffering at all. For example, it’s not possible to avoid killing. The cultivation of vegetables, the purification of the water we drink, and other necessary human activities cause the death of small living beings. The vegetables, too, are living things. Compared with the suffering of animals, it seems that the suffering of plants is less; but it’s not the case that there’s no suffering. We can’t abolish suffering altogether, but we try to reduce it. We can try to reduce the suffering a little bit every time, every day. The Five Mindfulness Trainings are there to study, to learn about, to recite, and to practice so we can deepen our experiences and understanding, and so we can share that with other people. If we do this as a big community, insight will grow and that will profit many people. If during your practice of the Five Mindfulness Trainings you feel that your compassion and loving kindness have become bigger, that your understanding has grown, that you can share your insight and make things better, then you are on the right path.
Our ethic needs to be an ethic without dogmas, without views. No one imposes the trainings on us, no one is asking us to practice. We ourselves can see based on our own insight and experience that it is our path of joy, compassion, and love. The Five Mindfulness Trainings include the practice of not being caught in a dualistic way of seeing things. Dualism is the view that good and evil, holy and profane, happiness and suffering oppose each other and that it is only by destroying evil that we have good and by destroying the profane that we have the sacred. According to the insight of interbeing, good and evil inter-are. Good is a skillful way of dealing with evil that leads to transformation. It is not something we fight against. Good and evil are organic and are present together. This insight is the only way we can remove all discrimination and fear. It is the foundation of the practice of the trainings. Then the trainings very naturally become the way we live and the source of our happiness.
Our lives are more interconnected globally than they have ever been. Our food, our economy, the physical tools we use, our politics cross national and international boundaries. But economics, politics, and education are not the only things being globalized. Our ethics and morality can also be global. We need an ethic that speaks to the whole of humanity. Every culture has unique contributions that they can bring to the creation of a global ethic. And every nation, every people, can contribute aspects of their culture and religion that can make a global ethic something beautiful and appropriate for their country.
In order to practice the Five Mindfulness Trainings we need the support of others. If a group meets regularly, then they can support each other. After reciting each training, someone can share how they have practiced that training since the last gathering. It’s important not just to talk, but to make sure there is time to breathe in and out mindfully so we can look back at how we have practiced.
In Buddhism there’s a practice called the Three Trainings. The Three Trainings are defined as ethics (shila), concentration (samadhi), and insight (prajña). Sometimes they’re defined as mindfulness (smrti), concentration, and insight. Ethical behavior and mindfulness are very closely connected; they’re slightly different approaches to the same thing. When we practice the mindfulness trainings, we refrain from performing actions that we’re aware would cause suffering. In order to have this awareness, we need mindfulness in our daily actions. The insights embodied in the mindfulness trainings come from our practice of walking, sitting, breathing, and eating. The Five Mindfulness Trainings come from our own experience of being aware, peaceful, and clear-minded. We’re aware that killing brings suffering, so we’re determined not to kill, but rather to nourish life. Our own awareness helps us know what to do and what not to do and we can see things in a deeper, more compassionate way.
When we breathe mindfully and walk mindfully we are truly present and we are aware of what is happening in us and around us. We recognize strong emotions and negative states of mind as they arise and we know what we should do and what we should not do. In a difficult or dangerous situation, if we panic we could make many mistakes and things will become much worse. When we are able to come back to our breathing (mindfulness) and stop the confused activities of our mind (concentration), we shall know intuitively what to do and what not to do (insight). The practice of the mindfulness trainings helps us develop concentration and insight. To live our life in mindfulness and with concentration is to continue to produce insight for our own liberation, healing, and nourishment, and for the liberation, healing, and nourishment of the world.
There’s a deep link between the ethical and the spiritual. If you can’t see the spiritual in the ethical, your ethic may be empty. You may do things without knowing why and there may be no joy in your actions. For example, inspired by the Fifth Mindfulness Training, you may decide not to drink alcohol or use drugs. But if you resent the training, and you suffer because you still want to drink alcohol or use drugs, the ethic that you follow is empty, because you don’t really see the value of it. The mindfulness trainings are based in insight and love, not on prohibition and withholding. The same is true with any of the trainings. If you’re a vegetarian because you think you should be, but you wish that you could eat meat, then you aren’t really following the trainings. But if you feel that you’re lucky to be able to eat primarily vegetables and legumes and to not be causing suffering to other living beings, then there’s joy, insight, compassion, and spirituality in your eating. Eating becomes a very spiritual thing. There’s no barrier dividing the ethical and the spiritual.
The Five Mindfulness Trainings are an offering that doesn’t contain dogma, religion, or sectarianism. Each of us can use the trainings as practical ethical principles for our life without being part of any particular faith or tradition. You can just be yourself, but try to make your life beautiful by following the wisdom of these trainings. The Five Mindfulness Trainings are, for each of us, the result of our own deep looking and of the collective deep looking.
The purpose of the trainings is not to follow them perfectly and then feel superior about following them. The trainings are a guide; it’s not possible to practice them so perfectly that we prevent any suffering at all. For example, it’s not possible to avoid killing. The cultivation of vegetables, the purification of the water we drink, and other necessary human activities cause the death of small living beings. The vegetables, too, are living things. Compared with the suffering of animals, it seems that the suffering of plants is less; but it’s not the case that there’s no suffering. We can’t abolish suffering altogether, but we try to reduce it. We can try to reduce the suffering a little bit every time, every day. The Five Mindfulness Trainings are there to study, to learn about, to recite, and to practice so we can deepen our experiences and understanding, and so we can share that with other people. If we do this as a big community, insight will grow and that will profit many people. If during your practice of the Five Mindfulness Trainings you feel that your compassion and loving kindness have become bigger, that your understanding has grown, that you can share your insight and make things better, then you are on the right path.
Our ethic needs to be an ethic without dogmas, without views. No one imposes the trainings on us, no one is asking us to practice. We ourselves can see based on our own insight and experience that it is our path of joy, compassion, and love. The Five Mindfulness Trainings include the practice of not being caught in a dualistic way of seeing things. Dualism is the view that good and evil, holy and profane, happiness and suffering oppose each other and that it is only by destroying evil that we have good and by destroying the profane that we have the sacred. According to the insight of interbeing, good and evil inter-are. Good is a skillful way of dealing with evil that leads to transformation. It is not something we fight against. Good and evil are organic and are present together. This insight is the only way we can remove all discrimination and fear. It is the foundation of the practice of the trainings. Then the trainings very naturally become the way we live and the source of our happiness.
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