Driving really can bring out the worst in me. Suddenly, I am impatient, judgmental, prejudiced, angry, generally lacking in understanding and caring. It’s a good reminder for when I think I’m reaching some great level of yogic-ness—all the qualities I may have thought I had transcended somehow are, of course, still there. Driving doesn’t make me impatient or judgmental—those are things that already exist in me that come up in this situation. Actually, all qualities exist in me and in everyone—we each have the potential to be loving and generous and an equal potential to be arrogant and hurtful.
There have been a couple times lately that I have been talking to someone where the question came around to “How could someone do that? How could they be that way?” The first was, you may have guessed, about the crazy gulf oil “spill” (which sounds more like a glass of milk than millions of gallons of oil). It is so terrible that people could have known about this potential problem but given the go-ahead anyway. The second, less horrifying on a global level, was Floyd Landis. Landis is a professional cyclist who had his Tour de France victory taken away and was suspended from the sport for drugs. He vehemently claimed it wasn’t true, taking money from fans to support his defense and writing a best-selling book, then after four years of fighting the allegations, just this week, he admitted that he had, in fact, been doping.
Things like this really seem unbelievable and I find myself pointing the finger and creating distance between me and “those kinds of people.” Which is mostly a waste of time, if not worse. I can think about how they are so selfish or small-minded or short-sighted or wrong, but it doesn’t change anything besides making the world a more judgmental and angry place through my addition of judgment and anger. Both of these incidents seem to involve an unwillingness to see or accept the truth, which would fall under the category of satya in yoga.
Now, anything that exists in the universe exists in me. And when I step back, I know that there is nothing that anyone does that I don’t also have the potential to do. Can I really say that I have never looked the other way when I thought something was wrong? Can I really say that I have never convinced myself that something wasn’t true when deep down I knew that it was? Can I say I have never made poor choices in service to maintaining an idea about who I am? That I have never been greedy? In fact, when I look at Floyd Landis or the BP execs and think that I don’t possess any of the undesirable qualities that they have exhibited, I am doing the very thing that they did—denying the truth.
I don’t believe these are bad people, just as I am not a bad person when I call people names when I am driving. I would like to think that were I in the shoes of someone at BP who agreed to a dangerous plan, I wouldn’t do what that person did, but there is no way to know. I improve my chances of acting skillfully by accepting that those parts of me exist and that I have that potential. Then when I am in a situation that elicits my selfishness or denial, I can see what is arising and make a choice about it.
The definition of yoga in the Yoga Sutra is “restraining the modifications of the mind-stuff” or calming the fluctuations of the mind. I can’t calm anyone’s mind but mine. So when I’m hearing about things happening in the world that are disturbing, I turn my attention back to myself. This is not because I don’t care about the world but precisely because I do. If I want more awareness in the world, then I can work to be more aware. If I want more truthfulness in the world, I can be more truthful. If I want kindness, I can be kind.
I know this can sound like a bunch of woo-woo baloney, but the name of the blog is Keepin’ It Real and I’m telling you this is real. Check it out for yourself—give out compliments all day one day and see if the world doesn’t seem like a happier place. Let me know what happens. Remember, the Buddha said, “A jug is filled one drop at a time.” We can change the world one moment, one thought, one action at a time.
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