Right Action
Before there’s action, there’s often a lot of talk inside of the mind and talk openly expressed. What’s brewing in the mind can lead to action, but the problem with actions are that you can’t take them back, and you can’t reverse your actions like changing your mind. Thinking a bad thought, is not as important as the action itself. A lot of the purpose of developing all these contingencies in the mind is to develop a positive narrative in the mind of progress and maintaining a clear conscience. When you embark on an ethical journey you are most likely not in a great place ethically based on parental and cultural influences, but when these views and intentions move into expressible motivations that follow a working compass, then the subject is less likely to be lost and is able to find fresh water, a place to camp, and enjoy the stars. The direction of a life story turns towards redemption, and a clearer conscience makes it easier to meditate.
Right Action includes actions that avoid killing, stealing, and illicit sex. Right Action also helps the intentions because if you can’t do certain activities you don’t need to think about them and then the thinking has to move to better pastures by necessity. It also works in a positive way where one can determine, “does this harm anyone else? Does this harm myself?” It helps to develop foresight when the mind inevitably wanders into daydreaming about one pleasure or another. “Can I predict damage before it happens and prevent it?” It increases a healthy self-esteem because one can see dangers ahead of time and disengage before it’s too late, and one can also lose paranoia about activities that are perfectly okay. There will be mistakes, but the learning process allows one to make ever better predictions as skills refine.
Right Action also helps with understanding habitual intentions. Animals that are too small to see and are killed by accident does not carry the same blame as when killing with intention and glee. The goal is for the habit of sadism to decrease, not to worry about killing bacteria or parasites that are harming you. Killing a disease that involves microscopic invaders is not going to be as concerning as torturing a pet. The problem with stealing or illicit sex is the problem of creating a sense of guilt, remorse, and escalating a feeling of vengeance in others. All these areas poison any possible pleasure in engaging in Wrong Action because of the unpleasant consequences. Contemplating these consequences and drawbacks also helps to deal with daydreams and intentions in the mind, and especially the hindrances of ill will, sensual desire, envy, and greed. Again, for lay people they will be letting in more of those desires but even lay practitioners can see drawbacks to many of them so that desires move into more socially acceptable territory and carry less blame.
The Eightfold Path reminds practitioners of cause and effect and that cause and effect has to be heeded and tended to in order to bare peaceful fruit. The momentum of this thinking can move back in the sequence of intention and action by breathing properly with each breath and to let go of hindrances one breath at a time. Because actions are part of the conditioned mind, it’s most important to realize that most actions are motivated by a push to remove what is unpleasant and a pull to bring in what is pleasant. Actions that have rewards are conditioned to repeat. The value of renunciation is the relief that happens when we have less property to organize, fund, and maintain, and the relief of a clear conscience when we have less conflict with others because we don’t desire their possessions.
In SN 35:145, those consequences from action, a definition of Karma, illuminate hidden stress and there is a bliss in dropping actions connected with needless stress. This goes right to the level of perception and the insight that the mind is already searching for typical human activities right at perception. Mindfulness is important to the practice but mindfulness improves when actions are more and more blameless. Little actions build conditioning over the years into reinforced habits. Actions are also imitated from culture. If people look like they are enjoying themselves there’s often no reflection on how imitating those people will mean taking on their burdens related to those enjoyments. Again, it’s not to be paranoid with desire, but reflection on it can find pleasure in self-preservation from karma associated with those activities. Actions form a feedback loop that affects thoughts and future behaviors. There’s a lot of triggering of complexes with discussions around Right Action, but there is a pleasure to be had which is a sense of peace. The simple way of looking at it is to try and predict if there will be a cost to pay financially, a health cost, a psychological cost, and if there’s conflict, in a particular activity.
To keep a sense of boundaries, the Dalai Lama does bridge healthier uses of anger, a compassionate anger that is proportional to what is unjust. Even if one is scrupulous with action, it doesn’t mean that you are free from the injustice of others. “Here the issue is how to deal with anger. There are two types of anger. One type arises out of compassion; that kind of anger is useful. Anger that is motivated by compassion or a desire to correct social injustice, and does not seek to harm the other person, is a good anger that is worth having…Anger brings more energy, more determination, more forceful action to correct injustice…If we act out of consideration for the other person, if we are motivated by affection and sympathy, then we can act out of anger because we are concerned for that person’s well-being…Conversely, if the anger is directed toward the person rather than the action, if there is ill feeling toward the person, then that feeling will persist for a long time. When someone tries to harm you, or you feel that you have been harmed, then you have a negative feeling toward that person, and even if he is no longer acting in that way, you still feel uncomfortable toward him…[Anger should be] directed toward the social injustice itself, along with the struggle to correct it, so the anger should be maintained until the goal is achieved. It is necessary in order to stop social injustice and wrong destructive actions.”
Examples of this is withdrawing reward for people who persist in injustice and fostering social change so that the conditions for injustice decrease, then that has a sense of teaching and allows for people to grow and learn without being permanently stigmatized. Again, this has to be controlled because any attachment to views that are debatable will lead to fresh scandals and injustice when righteous anger is unleashed on the wrong target. There shouldn’t be too much anger invested when solutions are uncertain, complex, and controversial. The problem with anger and action is when people start building the tension without a really solid grasp of the subject. This is true with complex political situations and controversial scientific opinions. A lot of people who are righteous in their anger based their anger on a false premise and many views are couched in scientific sounding jargon, but that jargon only hides a Freudian displacement, a scapegoating, a vested self-interest. People also have to look at their sphere of influence and decide if they are over-extending themselves and trying to solve problems of the world while ignoring what’s in front of them. Taking care of your own security, developing your own ability for self-defense, will often do more for society than totally abandoning one’s goals and focusing solely on a giant geo-political situation that one doesn’t have the resources to counter. The meditation on consequences becomes imperative to reduce bad karma coming from good intentions. A lot of destruction of the world is based on heroic plans that turn into conflict when we directly try to change people in a hostile way. The best way to change people is to be a happy person and to be an example of how to be happy, while at the same time using anger judiciously to protect oneself from predators who undoubtedly exist.
Right Action – Thanissaro Bhikkhu: https://www.dhammatalks.org/Archive/Writings/CrossIndexed/Published/Meditations7/071128RightAction.pdf
SN 35:145: https://www.dhammatalks.org/suttas/SN/SN35_145.html
Right Action – Jill Shepherd: https://dharmaseed.org/talks/player/65822.html
Be Angry – Dalai Lama, Noriyuki Ueda: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781642970074/
Contemplative Practice: https://psychreviews.org/category/contemplativepractice/