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Dear Still Water Friends,

This Thursday evening, after our meditation period, Scott Schang will guide the community in a recitation of the Five Mindfulness Trainings and will facilitate a discussion of the first training:

Aware of the suffering caused by the destruction of life, I am committed to cultivating compassion and learning ways to protect the lives of people, animals, plants, and minerals. I am determined not to kill, not to let others kill, and not to condone any act of killing in the world, in my thinking, and in my way of life.

Scott wishes to especially focus on the cultivation of compassion and the protection of life, the behaviors which are encouraged in the training. He writes:

The first mindfulness training urges us not to kill in any fashion. The English word "kill" is believed to come from the Old English "cwellen," which also gave us the modern English word "quell." In considering how the first training urges us not to kill or to condone killing in our thoughts, this relationship between "kill" and "quell" seems important. We rarely consider killing or condoning acts of killing, but we do often seek to quell, "to overpower, to subdue, to put down" as the dictionary defines that term. We say we love and have compassion for others, but we then find ourselves seeking to excise parts of our loved ones or suppress traits we find unpleasant. This process is also reflected in how we treat ourselves.
How easy is it for you to abide by the encouragement to cultivate compassion and protect life--all life--not just in your actions by also in your thoughts? Do you kill or quell others in your thoughts? Does this rob the other person of some aspect of life, of wholeness? Do you seek to kill or quell aspects of yourself, and how does that work for you? What does the alternative of protecting life mean in practice?

Scott has chosen the Albert Schweitzer reading below to prepare us for this discussion.

You are invited to join with us for our meditation, recitation, and discussion.

You are also invited to join with us on January 6th, at 9:00 am, in Oakton, Virginia, when the Still Water MPC will join with other local mindfulness communities to formally transmit the Five Mindfulness Trainings and the Fourteen Mindfulness Trainings of the Order of Interbeing. If you would like to receive in January the Five Mindfulness Trainings and the Three Refuge vows through the Still Water MPC, please let us know as soon as possible. Everyone in the community is warmly invited to attend to renew their commitments and to  support those who will be receiving the Five Mindfulness Trainings and Scott Schang, who will be receiving the Fourteen Mindfulness Trainings.

Warm wishes,

Mitchell Ratner
Senior Teacher

THE VOICE OF THE TEMPTER, AND DEEP SATISFACTION

[A] threat to our capacity and our will to empathy is nagging doubt. What is the use of it?, you think. Your most strenuous efforts to prevent suffering, to ease suffering, to preserve life, are nothing compared to the anguish remaining in the world around you, the wounds you are powerless to heal. Certainly, it is dreadful to be reminded of the extent of our helplessness.

It is worse still to realize how much suffering we ourselves cause others without being able to prevent it. You are walking along a path in the woods. The sunshine makes lovely patterns through the trees. The birds are singing, and thousands of insects buzz happily in the air. But as you walk along the path, you are involuntarily the cause of death. Here you trod on an ant and tortured it; there you squashed a beetle; and over there your unknowing step left a worm writhing in agony. Into the glorious melody of life you weave a discordant strain of suffering and death. You are guilty, though it is no fault of your own…Then comes the voice of the tempter: Why torture yourself? It is no good. Give up, stop caring. Be unconcerned and unfeeling like everybody else.

Still another temptation arises - compassion really involves you in suffering. Anyone who experiences the woes of this world within his heart can never again feel the surface happiness that human nature desires…And the tempter says again: You can't live like this. You must be able to detach yourself from what is depressing around you. Don't be so sensitive. Teach yourself the necessary indifference, put on an armor, be thoughtless like everybody else if you want to live a sensible life. In the end we are ashamed to know of the great experience of empathy and compassion. We keep it secret from one another and pretend it is foolish, a weakness we outgrow when we begin to be "reasonable" people.

These three great temptations unobtrusively wreck the presupposition of all goodness. Guard against them. Counter the first temptation by saying that for you to share experience and to lend a helping hand is an absolute inward necessity. Your utmost attempts will be but a drop in the ocean compared with what needs to be done, but only this attitude will give meaning and value to your life…The small amount you are able to do is actually much if it only relieves pain, suffering, and fear from any living being, be it human or any other creature. The preservation of life is the true joy.

As for…the fear that compassion will involve you in suffering, counter it with the realization that the sharing of sorrow expands your capacity to share joy as well. When you callously ignore the suffering of others, you lose the capacity to share their happiness, too. And however little joy we may see in this world, the sharing of it, together with the good we ourselves create, produces the only happiness which makes life tolerable.

And finally, you have no right to say: I will be this, or I will be that, because I think one way will make me happier than another. No, you must be what you ought to be, a true, knowing man, a man who identifies himself with the world, a man who experiences the world within himself. Whether you are happier by the ordinary standards of happiness or not doesn't matter. The secret hour does not require of us that we should be happy - to obey the call is the only thing that satisfies deeply.

(Sermon, February 23, 1919; quoted in Albert Schweitzer: Essential Writings)