Your Questions, My Answers ~ RISE
AND FALL
QUESTION:
"When we arrived in Australia
a few years ago, it was easy to find work and save
money, but with the economy in recession, with many
people out of work, and prices always rising, we are
finding it hard to manage. How can we apply the Dharma
to deal with these conditions?"
ANSWER:
You have asked your question well. If we
use Dharma in dealing with problems, we are already
on the way to overcoming them. They are magnified
if we put self at the center, but seen more clearly
with Dharma there. Problems compel us to find a way
out, but we must be careful, for if we go about it
wrongly, our efforts might make them worse. It’s
better to spend some time investigating the problems
and their causes, in order to find ways of dealing
with them.
Faced with problems of earning a living,
supporting a family, making ends meet, etc., we might
sometimes think: "Oh, how nice to be a bird,
free to fly wherever you want". But Bob Dylan
poetically looked at this from both sides when he
sang:
"Oh, my friends from
the prison they ask unto me:
‘How good, how good does it feel to be free?’
And I answer them most mysteriously:
‘Are birds free from the chains of the skyway?’"
Is not life for the birds—as for all
forms of life—a struggle for survival? If you
could be a bird for a week—or even a day —undergoing
all the hazards birds undergo—the constant search
for food, the inclemency of the weather and the need
to watch out for and avoid enemies—you would
probably soon be glad to change back to being human
again. If you expect life to be easy you will often
be disappointed; but expect it to be difficult and
you will sometimes be pleasantly surprised.
We have been robbed, weakened and emasculated
by the wonderful welfare systems we have developed
within the last 50 years. I’m not suggesting,
for a moment, that we should abolish such systems,
but merely wish to point out how quickly we become
used to good things, take them for granted, and become
dependent thereon; this tendency works to our own
detriment by making us lazy, greedy and unappreciative;
too much of anything good becomes not good, especially
if we did not earn it ourselves, but merely inherited
it.
People like the refugees from South-East
Asia, arriving in Australia over the last few years,
found fantastic conditions there that were unimaginable
in their own countries: a heaven like standard of
living, work readily available, unemployment benefit,
sickness benefit, Medicare, old age pensions, housing
grants, study grants, etc. Maybe they thought it had
always been like that, but if so, they erred. Australia
is a young nation, and everything that has been built
there—cities, towns, roads, railways, communication
systems, etc.—has been built within the last
200 years by people before us, struggling, suffering,
dying, and leaving their achievements behind for other
people like us to benefit from. When I hear people
complaining about the economic downturn, I feel like
reminding them that life does not always go on the
incline—from good to better—as we would
like, but more like the waves of the sea, rising and
falling. Our wishes and expectations often conflict
with the nature of life and thus cause us extra suffering.
By this, I don’t mean that we should not try
to change things, but that, if we understood better
the laws of life we would experience less suffering
when our efforts to change things prove unsuccessful.
We can draw many lessons from the past to
help us deal with the problems of the present. Are
you aware that of all the beings on our planet, humans
are the only ones with long term memory, and are able
to write and record their experiences, and thus pass
them on to posterity? This is known as history, and
although it is never recorded exactly as it happens—it
cannot be, because nobody ever sees anything exactly
as it happens; all that we see is our viewpoint of
it, which we then proceed to interpret according to
our bias—it still affords us contact with people
long dead, with their experiences, thoughts and discoveries.
Animals can know nothing of their ancestors who died
before they were born, but because of our ability
to record things, we can know of people and things
that ceased to exist long ago. Is it not wonderful?
And, since the advent and development of the camera,
we can replay events that took place before our birth,
almost as if they were happening in the present. We
can see and hear famous, infamous and non-famous people—artists,
musicians, sportsmen, statesmen, etc. And we can—that
is, it is possible to—learn from the experiences
and mistakes of our ancestors, without having to undergo
the same experiences and mistakes ourselves; most
of our knowledge is acquired in this way. Unfortunately,
it does not prevent us from making the same mistakes,
as the 20th century—the bloodiest of all—has
shown: there have been more wars than in any other
century and on a greater and more devastating scale.
Some things we learn very quickly, like computer technology,
while other things we learn very slowly, like the
importance of overcoming the stupidity of war and
putting it behind us forever.
From the comfort of our living rooms we
are able to travel the world, scale mountains, descend
to the sea bed, watch micro-surgery performed inside
the body, learn about genetic engineering and other
wonders that science has revealed to us, pick up the
telephone and talk with people on the other side of
the globe, and watch far-away events happening live;
we have even walked on the moon vicariously, you and
I, via TV cameras. What an exciting time to be alive!
But what has happened? In more cases than not it has
made us dull, and we complain about boredom, because
we have been presented with more knowledge and information—and
of a startling, stupendous nature—than we can
possibly comprehend or assimilate; we have been overdosed
with it all! Technologically, we are in the Space
Age, but psychologically, most of us are far behind;
indeed, many of us are still in medieval times, and
some are still living in mental caves! We are therefore
divided between the past and the present, schizophrenically,
unable to keep up with the rapid pace of change. As
I write this, I’m reminded of the case of the
Hmong hill tribesmen from Laos who were resettled
in San Francisco: noticing ducks swimming freely on
a park lake there, they made bows and arrows and went
to hunt them; they could not really be blamed for
this as it was natural for them to hunt wild birds
and animals that didn’t belong to anyone; more
to blame, perhaps, were the bureaucrats who placed
these refugees in a situation that they had not the
slightest knowledge of. But the same could not be
said about certain Vietnamese who caused a loud public
outcry in Australia by catching dogs on the street
to eat! They were not tribesmen who knew no better,
so they could not plead ignorance. The same thing
happened to some of my dogs in Bataan Refugee Camp
in the Philippines, and needless to say, I was not
very happy about it!
In recent years, we have heard the term
‘compassion fatigue’ regarding the continued
exodus of people from their native lands as refugees,
and the increasing reluctance of other countries to
grant them asylum. Some people find it hard to understand
that a country like Australia, with its vast land
mass and small population, should be unwilling to
take in a more refugees than it already has; I’ve
heard some refugees there complain about the government’s
stand on this. But there are other ways of looking
at it: Australia is now in recession; it has a foreign
debt of well over US$200 billion—an unimaginable
sum that increases at the rate of more than $1 billion
every month; how it will ever be able to pay it off
doesn’t bear thinking of! Also, it should not
be thought that Australia is morally obliged to take
in refugees. The idea of ‘rights’ has
been stretched too far; it is not the ‘right’
of the refugees to be accepted for resettlement, but
their great good fortune. By this, I don’t mean
that refugees should beg and grovel for resettlement,
but that, once they have it, they should demonstrate
their gratitude by taking care of it as the treasure
it is!
Years ago, when I heard people speak of
the ‘boat people’ as ‘economic migrants
in search of a better life’, I was quick to
defend them. But now, I sadly admit that what their
detractors said was true in some cases. I’ve
seen how some—unfortunately, not a handful—abuse
the hospitality of their host countries by engaging
in robbery, extortion, thuggery, drug dealing, cheating
the welfare system in whatever way they can, and various
other forms of corruption. Those doing such things
are in a minority, but because of them, many Australians
have a low opinion of Vietnamese people in general.
Such people might say that they fled Vietnam to find
freedom (most of them say that), but what do they
mean by ‘freedom’?, we might ask. Do they
mean the freedom to live without oppression, the freedom
to obtain education and employment, the freedom of
speech—things they were denied in their own
country, but which are available in Australia? Or
do they mean the freedom to do just whatever they
like, unrestricted, and regardless of the rights and
feelings of other people? If this, they should know
that no country wants or needs them. And why not?
Because every country has enough hooligans and criminals
already, without importing more! I love the Vietnamese
people as a whole, but will not be quiet about the
wretches who spoil it for others, for I have seen,
and cannot be quiet. Such people should have stayed
in their own country, as they don’t deserve
to live in a country like Australia.
To conclude: Try to realize that we ride
on the backs of all those who went before us and who
left as their legacy all the good things we have inherited.
We will then feel a sense of gratitude instead of
greed and an urge to exploit and destroy. And people
in whom gratitude flowers are able to make do with
less and ‘tighten their belts’ when the
need to do so arises. Nor will they mind this so much,
as they will have found something else to compensate
for it. To live with Dharma means to understand that
everything changes, even if not always in an upward
direction. So, we learn to make adjustments and compromises
to the changes of life. We have survived so many things
in the past; many other things await us. |
