What is the process of everyday life practice, this part of the path often named right livelihood?
I find this interesting as there are many potential positions to take on this.
We can take the directing the mind to this present moment. Intending to bare witness to our lives from moment to moment as we would upon the cushion when we develop a traditional mindfulness practice. As our practice matures over time we may find that we tend to become a bit more spacious in our directing which allows us to feel the effects of the different contexts we pass through in our lives and our relationship to them. I have found myself that as awareness matures there comes a point where I kind of just live life directing my attention from daily task to task,person to person, yet there is a openness and investigative attitude that seems to have its own momentum. This takes down the barriers created through different self views relieving the pressure of having to be a particular way( a good Buddhist who never swears, and is NICE all the time).
So that is about quality of intending and the directing of attention, but what about our actual day to day choices? This is where to me renunciation comes into right livelihood. I have found since leaving the monastery, that I have become good friends with Google. Google is a kind of neutral space(apart from the companies own agendas) where you can follow wholesome or unwholesome tendencies. Contemplating how to live a harmless life(or at least as harmless as I can) I find in this day and age we can research our needs and desires. In terms of this I mean researching diet, clothing, medicine and whatever takes our fancy. Finding out where these things our made, is the process of them being made, grown, one that is beneficial to the environment/ context they come from. I could get all idealistic and spout of about organic foods e.t.c but I will try not too.
Products which seem to create the least harm in their growing and production process unfortunately tend to be more expensive. This I feel is the hard crunch in daily life practice and right livelihood, need versus desire. Can my let go of having our plasmas,having a 1000 channels to watch, driving our cars(everywhere),buying new shoes when the old ones are fine e.t.c and directing our money towards products that are beneficial to the environment and the communities that make/grow these products . Is it possible to take the letting go from the cushion into everything ? If we gave up some comforts could we afford to live more harmlessly? Not just lay Buddhists or spiritual persons of any inclination, could monastics express a preference for wholesome products? I remember when I was a monk another monk tried this and I thought it was wrong, as my view was to receive what is given and did not want to stress people to spend more money on environmentally friendly products. But now having been exposed to more information I realise that what he was suggesting would be a good idea,I feel he was coming from an attachment as he was into environmental issues and this was part of his drive in learning meditation was to find balance as he found himself getting angry around these issues. Yet through expressing a preference for products that don't damage the environment the monastics could be supporting the process of renunciation and generosity in the lay community, helping to take the lay support away from dependence on rights and rituals and bringing food and other requisites as a merit building activity to one of investigation and integration involving the arousal of energy to create a community that is intending and creating less harm. With today's technology it is hard to claim ignorance about the way we live and its effects on this planet as a whole.
I am not perfect in the above, I find I buy a product only to find out later it has been tested on animals or made in some sweatshop in Asia.I am intending to live harmlessly and have made many changes to my life to make my life more harmless, this to me is the Bodhisattva path. As my desires wane, as I grow to understand their drives, and I attune to my needs as a human being I feel I will become more harmless.
Happy travelling.
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