by Harry Palmer
In the Buddhist philosophy there is a concept known as right view. It is frequently referenced as a necessary element on the path to enlightenment.
I first encountered the idea of right view when I was in college in the ‘60s. I assumed that it had something to do with faith or someone’s belief on how you should look at things. In other words, it was an indoctrinated viewpoint. And since I considered myself a nonconformist, I had a lot of resistance on indoctrinated viewpoints. So I just held my breath and hurried past this concept.
Sometime later, I was listening to a Buddhist monk lecturing at Cornell University and he said, “Until you understand right view, you will never make any spiritual progress.” That turned me off so badly that I walked out of the lecture. I was still stuck in the misunderstanding that right view was someone else’s view that I had to accept. Not me, oh no! I was a free thinker. (The egotism of youth!)
In my junior year, I was assigned as an intern teacher to the head of the English Department. Basically, that meant I carried his books to class and graded a lot of papers. After a couple of weeks of following him around, we became friends, and he invited me to his home for dinner. After a few pleasantries, I learned that his wife was a devout Buddhist.
“Well,” I thought to myself, “I will just see how indoctrinated this pretty lady is by asking her to explain right view to me.”
A moment later I asked my question and she answered. “It means that you don’t impose your own beliefs upon things.”
My rolled forkful of spaghetti and clam sauce stopped in mid-air. “That’s it?”
“Basically, yes. Right view means you see things as they are, and when you see things as they are, the nature of things begin to make sense.”
After dinner I became her instant disciple and dish drier. I urged her to elaborate on this method of seeing things in a way that makes sense.
“This moment of reality doesn’t just happen by accident. It’s the result of the moment of reality that went before it, and before it, and so on. Right now is a momentary experience of a continuous, logical wave of cause and effect events. As our lives interact with this wave of events, we change what is to come.”
The part that took me so long to really understand was, “that our lives interact with this wave of events.” At that point my life was more of a product of events rather than a determiner of events.
It was not until twenty years later after several weeks of sensory-deprivation tanking that I really understood that you don’t just have to make the best of this continuous logical wave of cause and effect events. You can go in and out of the wave and deliberately interact with it. You can steer it. You can ride it. You can interact in a way that will trigger predictable results. But the first thing you have to acquire is right view.
Where does this continuous wave of cause and effect reality begin? Where does it end? I have no satisfactory answer. But over the years it seems more and more logical to me that there are causes before the birth horizon of a lifetime that ripen and produce their effect within a lifetime. And there are choices that one makes within a lifetime that will ripen and produce their effect beyond the death horizon of the current lifetime.
One of the things that I think Avatar allows you to do is to back out of the wave and see reality without any distortion from your own judgments, conclusions, opinions, assumptions, beliefs, emotions, memories, or ego-identity. Whew! It allows you to acquire this concept called right view.
This is not as easy to do as it is to talk about, because the mind is not only filled with old agitated mind stuff, but it is continuously creating new mind stuff. And ego-identities are not that easy to transcend. There is a lot of room for self-deception, but I believe it can be done.
Every authentic spiritual path (and I think there are many authentic paths) has the foundational goal of freeing the mind from distortions. This is a necessary first step. It has taken me a while, but I’ve come to agree with what the Buddhist monk said at Cornell, “Until you understand right view, you will never make any spiritual progress.”
If a spiritual path is not directly or indirectly helping people to achieve better control over their minds, it’s probably bogus. It’s some kind of belief indoctrination rather than an awakening.
Avatar is a combination of the best methods I have discovered or practiced for acquiring right view. I hope that someday someone will come up with an even better, faster method of quieting the mind and transcending the ego-identity. Now that we’ve got something to measure by, we’ll wait and see.
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