Living Beautifully with Uncertainty and Change Read Online Free PDF

acknowledging our escape routes and not following them is the necessary foundation for understanding the succeeding commitments.
    The first commitment is often called the narrow way because it’s comparable to walking down a very narrow corridor. If you lose your awareness, you’ll veer off course and bump into the wall, so you have to keep bringing your attention back to the path and walking straight ahead. At bottom, the commitment is very simple: we’re either speaking or acting in order to escape, or we’re not. The further commitments are more flexible and don’t have such clear—and comforting—boundaries. So it’s important to begin with this very straightforward approach: we don’t speak or act out. Period. The first commitment requires us to be diligent about interrupting the momentum of habit, the momentum of running away. Otherwise, as the commitments become more challenging and more groundless, the moment we geta whiff of anxiety or uneasiness or dissatisfaction, we’ll automatically exit.
    Many of our escapes are involuntary: addiction and dissociating from painful feelings are two examples. Anyone who has worked with a strong addiction—compulsive eating, compulsive sex, abuse of substances, explosive anger, or any other behavior that’s out of control—knows that when the urge comes on it’s irresistible. The seduction is too strong. So we train again and again in less highly charged situations in which the urge is present but not so overwhelming. By training with everyday irritations, we develop the knack of refraining when the going gets rough. It takes patience and an understanding of how we’re hurting ourselves not to continue taking the same old escape route of speaking or acting out.
    I often hear people say, “Oh, I don’t need to make a commitment not to kill. I don’t kill anyway.” Or “I don’t steal, and I’m not a monk or a nun, but I’ve been celibate for twenty years, so what’s the point of committing to the precept against harmful sexual relations?” The point in keeping the precepts is that you’re getting at something deeper. At the level of everyday behavior, refraining from killing, lying, stealing, or harming others with your sexual activity is called outer renunciation, a sort of keeping to the list. On an outer level, you follow the rules. But outer renunciation puts you in touch with what’s happening inside: the clinging and fixating, the tendency to avoid the underlying queasy-feeling groundlessness. Refraining from harmful speech and action is outer renunciation; choosing not to escape the underlying feelings is inner renunciation. The precepts are a device to put us in touch with the underlying uneasiness, the fundamental dynamic quality of being alive. Working with this feeling and the neurosis it triggers is inner renunciation.
    If I make a commitment to not slander or gossip or use harsh speech, but I’m living by myself in a cabin in the woods with no one to talk to, then it’s easy to keep the precept against harmful speech. But if the second I’m with other people, I start gossiping, then I didn’t learn much about the damaging effect of engaging in hurtful words. And I didn’t learn much about the emotions that are motivating my gossip. Keeping the precept, however, means I’ll think twice before engaging in that conversation. So, whether we commit to four precepts, five precepts, eight precepts, or hundreds of precepts, having made the commitment protects us when temptation comes.
    As a practice, you can make a commitment to keep one or more of the precepts for one day a week or twice a month or the duration of a meditation retreat or a lifetime. The first four precepts are considered the most basic. The fifth, on refraining from drugs and alcohol, is often taken along with the other four. The wording of the five precepts as set out below is loosely based on a version by the Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh.
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