Attaining Right Livelihood
by Rick Lewis
The
straight-up and simple standard for right livelihood is that we find work that
does not harm others and, ideally, which serves others with maximum benefit.
That's pretty self-explanatory. We don't have to elaborate on the difficulties
of attempting to be in the present moment if we're in the habit of pushing drugs
at the local school or trying to market nuclear warheads to third world
countries. If the work we engage gives us some degree of satisfaction and serves
in general as a point of connection and opportunity for cooperation with others,
then we're way ahead of the game.
The corollary of this principle is to consider the effect that our work has
on us. Are we in a high-stress situation at work that makes it very difficult
for us to remain present with ourselves or with others? What kind of company do
we keep at our workplace, and if it is not good company, do we have the strength
to practice while remaining in that atmosphere or, practically speaking, do we
need a more supportive environment while we establish a foundation for our
meditation practice?
Sometimes we don't have the luxury of choice when it comes to the specifics
of our work environment or our work partners. Other times, we ourselves
unconsciously seek out stressful circumstances to avoid having to become
vulnerable to ourselves and others.
Many of the Eastern traditions that have been the birthing grounds of rich
spiritual wisdom have been mimicked in form in the West while being
misunderstood in context; we've thrown out the baby and kept the bath water.
India, for example, is spiritually rich in tradition, but not oriented toward
material riches as a culture. The combined result of this circumstance was
asceticism -- wandering beggars who renounced all possessions as a formal
declaration of their dedication to spiritual practice. The relinquishment of
possessions was intended to symbolize the surrender of personal identity. Yet we
in the West imported only the poverty aspect of the ascetic equation and mistook
it for the essence of India's spiritual teaching. This alongside Jesus'
admonishment that a camel can fit through the eye of a needle sooner than a rich
man can get into heaven, and suddenly our entire culture has shackled poverty to
the ankles of spirituality and now we are tripping all over ourselves.
One of the fundamental teaching lessons which Indian spiritual master Osho (Rajneesh) demonstrated consistently was that spirituality and poverty not only
are not synonymous but are, in fact, in direct opposition. He became
famous in America for his collection of Rolex watches and Rolls Royce cars.
Having been a resident myself at the Oregon property while he was active there,
I witnessed how adamant he was about wanting to address the insidiousness of the
"spirituality equals poverty" equation.
Spiritual practice requires energy. Money and material goods, used
skillfully, are valuable resources. In fact, if we wish to make any headway in
our practice life, we could do with an abundance mentality in all areas of our
lives. The mentality of abundance gives us a foundation on which we can build
toward the skillful use of various types of energy assets and toward learning
the kind of good husbandry of those resources which will benefit the path. If
we're coming from a place of scarcity -- financially, emotionally or physically
-- we have little to work with for practice.
Often those who would be able to engage in spiritual practice are not
willing, and those who are willing are not able. By virtue of our fortuitous
circumstances in Western culture, many of us have been given the ability to
practice; we are endowed with the basic education, maturity and earning
potential that could support spiritual life. Our willingness depends upon to
what extent we're inclined to dedicate those circumstances to this end.
What,
for instance, do we do with the free time we earn from working hard? Do we waste
that time in idle pursuits? Would we be willing to devote our precious vacation
time to a meditation retreat or to a four-day workweek that would allow us time
for study, exercise, and meditation?
But even if we set aside time for formal practices, or manage to arrange an
occasional retreat time, we are not a culture of ascetics. We're not going to
last very long going door to door with a begging bowl, eschewing the
responsibilities of an ordinary householder so we can meditate day and night.
Once again, the name of the game for us in the West is integration.
To integrate the essential value of asceticism is how we get the baby back
and let the bath water go. Finding that essential value requires that we make a
distinction between actual life-in-a-loincloth renunciation and our willingness
to renounce anything that compromises our ability to be present in any given
moment. Fundamentally, we're speaking about examining our attachments and
confronting them with an investigation of our motives and hidden agendas. What
are we afraid of losing? What are our material attachments a replacement for?
The reality of our lives at the level of money is very telling of our
attitudes about energy, abundance versus scarcity, and success. We can hardly
move forward effectively with our spiritual practice if we're harboring
deep-seated emotional wounds which demand that we remain in scarcity in order to
honor a pact we made with our father when we were three. Maybe we unconsciously
agreed to never be more successful than he was. Or perhaps our parents wanted
nothing more than our own success at a financial level, yet their neglect of our
emotional needs led us to express our anger by defying their material
orientation to the world. On the other hand, we may be so attached to our
earning potential and to climbing the corporate ladder that the integrity of our
practice life is undermined by our inability to stop accumulating and achieving.
Success on the spiritual path, whether we are attempting to generate profit
for our own evolution or make progress on the path possible for others, depends
upon our ability to shrewdly manage an energy balance sheet. As in business, if
we want Spirit Inc. to grow, we have to wisely manage the company's resources,
saving where appropriate, spending where appropriate, making the right short-
and long-term investments, and acquiring assets.
Right livelihood is one such asset in the successful organization of
presence. My teacher recommends to his students that they find work that yields
the most amount of money in the least amount of time. Of course, that work has
to be legal, and not just legal from the standpoint of legislated law, but legal
in the context of spiritual law. If making very good money in a minimal amount
of time involves acting with a lack of integrity that deepens our own sense of
separation from others; creates mistrust, fear and anger in them; or even takes
advantage of others without their knowledge, we are not operating within the
legal limits of our practice.
A life of right livelihood can serve as the offering that a dedicated
practitioner makes to be a bridge between the needs of evolving consciousness
and the resources of the material world. This is the crucial difference between
the cultural context of asceticism in the East and the spiritual context of
renunciation that is appropriate for us in the West.
It's much like the relationship a hunting dog has with its master. If we have
one eye glued to our intention for spiritual practice, then presence becomes the
master. We then allow the "dog" -- which may be our passion for, skill at, or
interest in earning money, developing property, writing, or cooking healthy food
-- plenty of leash. We allow the dog to hunt and retrieve energy in the form of
wealth, beneficial circumstances, networks of individuals, or educational
resources, but at the same time we train the dog to bring that which it tracks
to the feet of our intention to practice. So the "dog" never keeps and eats
these things for itself, but delivers them for us to make best use of them and
to integrate them into our lives.
If we borrow the Eastern cultural model of asceticism, we wind up training
the hunting instinct out of the dog altogether, training him not to bark or
taking him to the vet to be neutered, which doesn't help us renounce or
transcend anything in our culture. It only represses our own preestablished
cultural drives, which are basically life positive-drives to contribute within
the context of our own culture, to evolve and expand ourselves.
On the path we come to view wealth not from the perspective of holdings or
portfolios, but as an ability to participate, to give and receive. Wealth then
is redefined as a system with a lot of energy flowing through it. When we know
how to earn and how to spend and invest wisely, we become responsible for the
living process or flow that is actual wealth. The acquisition, nurturing and
deployment of energetic resources on behalf of presence is right livelihood.
 This
article is excerpted from:
You Have the Right to Remain Silent: Bringing Meditation to Life
by
Richard Lewis.
Reprinted with permission of the publisher, Hohm Press. ©2002. www.hohmpress.com
Info/Order this book.
About the Author
Rick
Lewis is the author of The Perfection of Nothing: Reflections on Spiritual
Practice, and a longtime student of spiritual work. He works as a professional
writer, speaker and entertainer. His twenty-five years of disciplined sitting
practice allow him to clarify common myths and confusions about meditation and
its applications to life. Rick is based in Vancouver, B.C.
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