Training in Compassion 13: Do Good, Avoid Evil, Appreciate Your Lunacy, Pray for Help

For our Training in Compassion we have Four-in-one this time! Do good, avoid evil, appreciate your lunacy, and pray for help. These four reminders -- slogans to try to live by -- fit together, and bring us back down to earth.

If spiritual teachings are to really transform our lives, they need to oscillate between two levels, the profound and the mundane. If practice is too profound, it's no good: we are full of wonderful inspiring, lofty thought, insights and speculations but lack the ability to get through the day with any gracefulness or to relate to the issues and people in ordinary life. We may be soaringly metaphysical, movingly compassionate, and yet unable to relate to a normal human or a worldly problem.

On the other hand, if our spiritual practice is too mundane, if we become too interested in the details of how we and others feel and what we or they need or want, then the natural loftiness of our hearts will not be accessible to us, and we will sink under the weight of obligations, details, and daily-life concerns. We need both profound religious philosophy and practical tools for daily living. This double need, according to circumstances, seems to go with the territory of being human.

First, do good. Do positive things. Say hello to people, smile at them, tell them, "Happy birthday!" or "I am sorry for your loss, is there something I can do to help?" Normal social graces, but work a bit harder at actually meaning them. Cultivate a sense of caring. Try genuinely to be helpful and kind and thoughtful in as many small and large ways as we can every day.

Second, avoid evil. Pay close attention to our actions of body, speech, and mind, noticing when we do, say, or think things that are harmful of unkind.

Third, appreciate your lunacy. Give an inward respectful bow to your weakness, your own craziness, your own resistances. Truly it is a marvel, the extent to which we are selfish, confused, lazy, resentful, and so on. We come by these things honestly. So we make offerings to the demons inside us, we develop a sense of humorous appreciation for our own stupidity. We are in good company! We can laugh at ourselves and everyone else.

Fourth, pray for help. Pray to whatever forces you believe in -- or don't believe in -- for help. Whether you imagine a deity or God or not, you can reach out beyond yourself and beyond anything you can objectively depict and ask for assistance and strength for your spiritual work. Pretending to address something beyond yourself and asking for help and for strength to do what you know you must do helps you have that strength. Sometimes we forget this point and fall into the habit of imagining an illusory self-reliance.

Do good, avoid evil, appreciate your lunacy, and pray for help. Simple everyday instructions.

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