Welcome back everyone to the fourth session on the Paramitas. To recap:
- First paramita is Generosity.
- Discipline: I talked about this as “knowing what to do and what not to do”
- Patience: Thich Nhat Hanh describes this beautifully as “inclusiveness, the capacity to receive, bear, and transform the pain inflicted on you by your enemies and also by those who love you.”
Today we are going to talk about Effort a bit, but I also want to spend time on the motivation for all four, and what makes some action either beneficial or not.
- Effort: “diligence, energy, perseverance.” Sometimes people put “Joyful” in there, so it’s Joyful Effort, which might make you feel better. If Discipline is knowing what to do, Effort is the energy to do it again and again.
After Effort the tone changes a little and we go to Meditation and then Wisdom. So the first four are really common - human even. If you aren’t a spiritual person, you probably still value being generous, disciplined, patient and able to make an effort.
As with the first three paramitas, there’s two kinds of Effort - the Paramita of Effort, the perfect Effort, and non-perfect, normal, conventional, everyday effort. And then, of course, there is laziness, the opposite of either kind of effort.
I’m not going to talk about laziness here, because we all here are making the effort to practice, study and learn. We are trying to be better people, to help others. Of course, we could be less lazy. I certainly could be less lazy. But we are trying and I’m the last one who should be giving a talk subtitled “Don’t Be Lazy”.
Instead, I want to explore the difference between the Paramita of Effort - perfect effort - and normal, conventional effort.
One way of contrasting the two types of effort is “Ego building” or “Ego destroying”. You can say “Wearing away” or dissolving or pacifying or whatever more gentle term you like but the meaning is the same - Is the effort pro-ego or anti-ego? Does it build up your self-conception or does it dissolve it?
This is a very psychological way of looking at actions. But what exactly is the ego anyway? We can’t really point to it. It’s very often hard to know if the effort you are making is in service of the ego or not. And we are very good at fooling ourselves!
So let’s look at another dichotomy: connected or isolated. Does the effort we are undertaking result in being more connected to ourselves, other people, other beings, the world? Or does it make us more isolated?
This is much more tangible. Like you can feel it as you are doing it and especially afterwards.
And you can apply it to any activity. Making the Effort to wash the dishes: Perfect Effort would be to wash the dishes in a way that makes you more connected to the world. Conventional effort would be washing the dishes in some other way… that makes you more isolated.
I mean pick a way that washing the dishes would make you feel more isolated - washing the dishes with resentment, with anger, with boredom, with ulterior motives.
Thinking about it this way makes me more conscious of my motivation and my mindset while doing the activity.
Here’s a third dichotomy that is halfway between the very theoretical ego/non-ego and the very tangible connected/isolated: Free or imprisoned.
Are you doing the dishes in a way that makes you free, or imprisoned?
If you answer “imprisoned” that’s good! You notice something about your mindset or your motivation or your circumstances that are not as perfect as the paramitas are pointing to! You are not making the Perfect Effort because something is in your way. Now that’s your path.
If you answer “I’m doing the dishes in a way that makes me free” that’s good! Notice how that feels and use that feeling to ask yourself where are you making Effort towards something not making you free? Or where are you being Generous or Patient or Disciplined in a way that is imprisoning you?
That’s why I never get tired of studying dharma. There are layers and layers. It goes deeper and deeper. Next time we will shift gears a bit and talk about the Paramita of Meditation, which applies a bit more specifically to us as practitioners.
But for now, let’s actually meditate together. Let’s make an Effort to be Disciplined. Let’s be Generous and Patient with ourselves and others.