Eight Steps to Freedom | Page 9

them only happiness.
All this does not mean that we degenerate into a kind of idiot compassion that allows others to do destructive things when we have the power to stop them. It simply means that whatever action we take towards others is driven by compassion. Now it may very well be that compassionate action can be extremely severe. For instance, if a madman were to walk into a hospital with a gun and start shooting people and the only way he could be stopped was by killing hem, then that would be compassionate action. Even such extreme action would be done without anger or regret.
Buddha stated that whatever one consistently reflects upon becomes the natural inclination of the mind. This is something that is easy to understand, yet there is one area of our lives where we fail to take notice, and that is the way we entertain ourselves. The average dharma student in the west works hard at his or her practice and attempts to follow the precepts as best they can. In spite of this, many of them are repeatedly overcome by the passions and delusions that have plagued them all through their practice.
The problem doesn't seem to be their intentions, but how insidious some of the sensory input, that comes to them from living in this society, can be. We are constantly bombarded with stimuli whose sole purpose is either selling us goods or appealing to our basest instincts. The media, specifically commercial television and films, offers a steady diet of world view so poisonous that for a dharma student to watch much of it would be tantamount to him committing spiritual suicide.
The violent destruction of human life is the primary agent of entertainment of this poison, with secondary doses of glorification of wealth, power, and denigration of women and some men as sex objects. It is pitifully lacking in moral judgment, aesthetic taste, and anything that would exhibit spiritual values.
Even those aspects of culture that have been traditionally healthy outlets for recreation and entertainment such as athletics, have been soiled by the dirty hands of Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and the television industry.
The average American child watches hundreds of hours of this excreta each month, becoming totally inundated in this inane, salacious, superficial view of the world. Most adults today have also been exposed to countless hours of this drivel which is stored up in their memory like some latent virus, ready to erupt.
Pathetically infantile individuals in sport and entertainment, who ridicule opponents and denigrate common decency, are held up to be heroes. The influence of this negative programming on our unconscious and its effect on spiritual practice can not be underestimated. For a student to make progress in the eight fold path, it is absolutely necessary that they carefully police their own leisure time to ensure that the influences they expose themselves to are consistent with their right resolution and right view.
One has to remember that for the eight fold path to be effective, there has to exist a harmony of influence between all of its respective elements. This is a consistent view in all of Buddhist teachings, that spiritual life mirror the natural order. There is no separation of creator and creation that requires a leap out of the system for salvation to occur. Salvation must occur as a result of the system itself, and therefore be an inherent part of nature. For the Buddhist, enlightenment is salvation and the enlightened mind we call Buddha nature, is the ground of reality.
This organic world view requires an absolute consistency of effort on the part of the practitioner to be successful. This is why it is of paramount importance for the dharma student not to negate his or her efforts by allowing the insidious effects of the entertainment media's world view to invade their own.
RIGHT SPEECH
The noble path of perfected speech is the doorway to an effective moral behavior, because moral practice begins with the control of ones speech. For a dharma student morality is something which is intrinsic to his way of being in the world. There is no external power, in the form of God, who one has to appease. We act with moral conviction because we understand the connection between moral action and its immediate effect on our well being.
Morality is not a set of laws that is imposed on us, but the effect of living in the world in a balanced and harmonious manner. There is probably no principle in Buddhist thought which has so little parallel in the traditional western world view. In the west, morality has always been seen as a matter of secondary effect. That is to say, the western view is that the effect of morality is a ramification of another process or system, outside ourselves, which then effects