I was reading an article which summarises the book “The 7 habits of highly effective people” today.  One of the habits is getting a proper understanding of the other person in any situation or dialogue.  The point is made that we all want to be understood, but we don’t try to truly understand.  I think this goes for more than just people and applies to working practices, technology and belief systems as well as everything else.

It’s a well made point, in my view, we never really see, hear or understand clearly.  Everything is coloured by our minds desires prejudices or conditioned thinking, that we rarely see clearly, if ever.  This point if made by Steve Hagen as well, that a fundamental point of Buddhism is to simple see properly and that a Buddha is simply someone who has awakened and sees clearly.

One thing I noticed was that speech wasn’t mentioned in the article, which is odd as I think that the factors that cloud our perception also cloud our speech.   Seriously, how often do we say what we really mean?

Think of all the times the message didn’t get across when you were talking or when you said something that just came out completely wrong.  The more I think about it, the more I realise how right the Buddha is, our speech is not from a position of awareness, how often do we stop and actually consider what we mean to say properly?

I was thinking today about the way we conduct ourselves generally.   Workplace politics with constant striving for advantage, clashing of egos.  In the gym, the subtle pressure that you should be working harder, lifting more, etc.

I asked myself; Why?  You can engage in all the politics you want in the office to “get ahead”, eventually you have to retire you have to hand you position to someone else.  Same with the gym, there is a limit to what you can lift, how fast you can run, etc.  This limit can only diminish with age, eventually you’ll have to back off.

Eventually we all die, we enter the world with nothing and guess what we take with us, so why on earth bother?  The more I look at it, the more I see the futility of all the striving for these goals that are as real as a puff of smoke.

We strive for things to try and make us happy, even Buddhist can strive for enlightenment, but that just makes it one more chain.  I wonder what would happen to society if everyone realised the futility of this?

An interesting thought exercise, yes?

I lost my path very badly recently, partly because I started to take things a little too seriously and in doing so let them get me down. I was amazed at how a situation like that sneaks up on you and before you know it, you’re stuck. Luckily I’ve  started reading The Way of Zen by Alan Watts, which is helping me move back on track.

It really brought home to me how right the Buddha was that our problems stem from our grasping at things, our attachment to things.  I’d become too preoccupied with results at work, then I’d stressed out and my mental state suffered, followed by my performance. It’s a timely lesson, and I suppose really, the hard way is the only way to truly learn it, if you’re going to get too attached to the results of your actions, you run the very real risk of ruining those results.

In my case because I diverted time, effort and attention into worrying which would have been better used elsewhere.