How To Make A Real Change In Your World

What exactly does it mean to step outside the box in order to make a better world? How can you really effect change in your life that makes your world better. This is a extremely personal matter. What does a better world really mean to you personally? What will really result in a meaningfully positive change in your life? Two of the world’s most prominent religions point to an answer.

The Buddhists speak of the fourfold Noble Truths. In a nutshell, they say that the reason for suffering is attachment to desires. Desires amount to wanting to get certain things and wanting to avoid other things. It’s a very simple concept because the road to lack of suffering is to simply give up attachment to desires. In other words, as long as you cling to the ideas and emotions of having certain things and not having other things you are bound to be disappointed and suffer. Easier said than done!

Desires also form one of the foundations of Christian thinking, although the concept is rarely discussed in those terms. It is desires that form the foundation of sin, but not sin in the conventional sense. Today it’s common to think of a person who sins as some sort of bad person who will have to pay for his/her sins and may not go to heaven. This is actually a throwback to Old Testament thinking because in the New Testament Paul wrote that the path to heaven is not through works, but through the grace of God. The Greek word that is translated as “sin” actually has a very different meaning than doing some evil thing. It is used in other Greek literature in the sense of missing the target, as in throwing a spear or shooting an arrow and missing the target. According to Paul, the Christian target is experiencing the grace of God. So, sin is missing the target of experiencing the grace of God, and we miss that experiencing as a consequence of our desires. The mechanism that prevents us from experiencing grace is temptation. Temptation works through the desires to cause us to miss the target of experiencing the grace of God… and that is suffering. So, the desires in both Buddhism and Christianity result in suffering.

At a practical level, temptations and desires also form the basis of being stuck in a rut. For example, suppose you are suffering because you are overweight. The temptations arising out of the desires for certain kinds of food keep you stuck in the rut of being overweight and suffering. As long as you are experiencing this suffering you will not be fully experiencing the grace of God.

Taking these ideas to one further level of subtlety, suffering arises as a consequence of your mind’s interpretation of events in the world. It is your mind that interprets what you see, hear, smell, taste, and touch to discern what they are. Your mind turns the sensory input into what appears to be independent, objective things with particular attributes. The mind recognizes one set of sensory input as a table, another as a rose, another as a friend, and another as a foe. It is the mind that classifies things as good or bad, pleasurable and painful, even hot or cold.

The mind also contains ideas of how things should be, and the difference between how your mind thinks things should be and how your mind perceives they are is what causes suffering because your ideas of how things should be dictate what you want and don’t want. If you believe that you should have a house in the Hamptons and you don’t have one, then you suffer. Returning to the overweight model, perceiving you are fat and thinking you should not be fat is the cause of suffering. In addition, perceiving that you want the food that makes you fat is the source of temptation.

The problem is compounded because the mind tends to not distinguish the abstractions and categorizations it creates from reality. We tend to believe that an abstract concept like “freedom” has the same degree of reality as a rock sitting in front of us. The rock can be thought of as “What Is” because our mind’s eye sees it based on direct experience with a thing in the world. Freedom, on the other hand, can be thought of as “What should be” because our mind’s eye see it based on what we learn from other people. The problem is that different people use the same words to describe totally different realities and interpret the same reality with totally different abstractions. If you doubt this consider the different interpretations that different political parties place on exactly the same events.

It is the nature of ego to perceive things in a manner that reinforces the abstractions, ideas, and beliefs that the mind already has. Therein lays the dilemma of really changing the world to make it better. You are stuck in the rut of temptation, desire, and suffering because at the most basic level you believe that your temptation, desire, and suffering is exactly how things should be. It’s an incredibly vicious cycle and every step you take tends to reinforce this cycle. It is, in fact, karma. The crisis in consciousness that Krishnamurti talks about is precisely to break free of this mental karma. Again, it’s easier said than done.

At the most fundamental level your world is better if you experience less suffering. Less suffering does not come from fulfilling a desire like buying that new Mercedes because before long the Mercedes will get a dent and you will again experience suffering. Instead it comes from breaking the endless cycle of temptation, desire, perception and belief. In Buddhism, you escape suffering by the process of self reflection to understand exactly how your mind works to create desires. In Christianity you escape suffering by surrendering you temptations and desires to God. The tools that God gives you to help are hope and love and the guidance to finding the right change is in the two simple commandments to love God and to love your neighbor as you love yourself.

The shift in consciousness comes about by surrendering the notion that the things we perceive have some sort of objective, independent reality and worth and then giving up the egotistical idea that happiness comes from possessing those things. Whether taking a Buddhist or Christian perspective you see that the suffering arises from the desire to get the Mercedes and thinking of it as “your” Mercedes. It comes from giving up the notion that your desires and the ideas that support them actually have any meaning at all.