Vision for Unfettered Mind
People usually interact with the institutions they create in ways that undermine their ability to be present and awake in their lives. Institutions, in the end, are nothing more than communal projections. They are made of people, but the projections generate an agenda to which people sacrifice the energy of their lives. This is an old problem, but the answer is straightforward: don’t believe the projections.
One of my favorite quotations on this subject is from John Le Carré’s The Spy in His Prime. George Smiley is addressing the British Secret Service at his retirement:
The guarantee of our virtue is our compassion. And if you allow this institution, or any other, to steal your compassion away, wait and see what you become. The man is everything. And if your calling is anything, you will always prefer him to the collective because the collective is humanity’s lowest and the collective is most often spoken for by people who are nothing without it.
Compassion has always been central in Buddhism, but recent reading, reflections, and conversations have reminded me that compassion is the definitive spiritual quality. The compassion at the heart of Buddhist practice is not just the compassion that arises from reflection on the sufferings of others, nor the more natural compassion that arises when we see someone struggling with difficulties we know through our own experience, for these are, in the end, emotions. It is the unrestricted expression of direct awareness itself, an expression that arises because emptiness frees awareness from the restrictions of self, thought, and projection, frees it to respond to the imbalances that generate struggles and suffering in this world we experience, and frees it to respond in any appropriate way.
This is an unfettered mind.
Values
- Individual responsibility (for practice, path, balance in relationships)
- Unflinching willingness (passionate connection with awareness, willingness to go into the dark)
- Creative pragmatism (drawing on both tradition and what is needed in the situation)
- Strong ethics (situational ethics based on awareness, not self)
- Tangible quality (in programs, publications, teachers, students, etc.)
Purpose
- To create environments of awareness for people whose paths lie outside established institutions and traditions
Goal
- To create a contemporary model for Buddhist teaching and practice that integrates the traditional and the modern, drawing on the strengths and remedying the weaknesses in both. This model may be the test bed for a larger network.
