Welcome to the Buddhist Boot Camp Podcast. Our intention is to awaken, enlighten, enrich, and inspire a simple and uncomplicated life. Discover the benefits of mindful living with your host, Timber Hawkeye.
I'm going to start by sharing a scenario I've used in the past, and then I'm going to take it to the next level to see if it makes you uncomfortable; that's the indication that I'm doing my job: raising awareness of biases we didn't even know we had because it's only after we acknowledge them that we can work on letting them go.
If you and I were to walk down the street together and suddenly see a big dog running toward us, I personally love dogs more than people so I'm thrilled and I think the dog is the cutest in the world. If you were perhaps attacked by a dog at some point, you might think this is a very scary moment. So, is the dog cute or scary? Well, Buddhism teaches us that the dog is neither cute nor scary; it's just a dog. We, on the other hand, are meaning-making machines, who assign value to everything
we see, thereby creating our own unique experience. Whether it's pleasant or unpleasant is apparently completely up to us. And whether our perception is accurate or not is completely irrelevant. To get to the core of why bias and segregation is so detrimental to us, imagine walking down the street again, but this time instead of a dog, you see, let's say a white man in a "Make America Great Again" hat. What experience does that trigger in you?
What if you see a black man wearing that hat? Or a woman? What if, let's forget the hat, you see a soldier in uniform, a doctor in scrubs, a monk in robes, or a firefighter in full gear. What sort of thoughts and assumptions get triggered then? In reality, the person in front of you is just a person; multi-faceted, and unlike anyone else. But we assign meaning and labels to everything we witness, which triggers all sorts of emotions within us.
And all too often, nowadays, way too many people are then acting on those emotions, unreliable and inaccurate as they may be. It wasn't until recently that I realized my utopian dream is unrealistic.
While I envision a world without labels that segregate us based on ethnicity, religion, age, income, skin color, sexual orientation, political affiliation, gender identity, or physical ability, many people are extremely precious and protective of those labels because their very identity is wrapped up in them. They see my suggestion that we drop the labels as a threat asking them to deny who they are rather than an invitation to see ourselves and others as so much more than
the labels we wear. For example, I am a lot of things and not one of them defines me. So when I meet someone else, I want to know WHO they are regardless of WHAT they are. Even if something about them is different from me, be it skin color or tax bracket, I think they are so much more than just that. But what I'm slowly realizing is that it doesn't matter if I see them as multi-faceted as long as their core identity is wrapped up in one or two things.
And it's not that I don't care if you're liberal, vegan, gay, Christian, rich, poor, in AA or the PTA, let's talk about our common humanity instead of making assumptions based on hashtags. I have no idea how old some of my best friends are, how much money they make, for whom they voted, or what curls their toes because I don't think it matters. We have been in each other's lives for more than 30 years, through many ups and downs.
Some have remained my friends whether I was working in the corporate world, or playing volleyball, living in a monastery, or touring the world. When I was drinking, smoking, meditating, single, married, financially secure, or barely making ends meet. So I got to thinking that even though that stuff doesn't matter, some people make it matter.
And perhaps for a certain time in their lives, the labels were healing, comforting, and even offered a sense of belonging and pride, but now that label segregates and separates them, maybe even confines them into a little box of their own making that initially brought comfort but by which they are now being suffocated. The very medicine that heals us at one time in our lives can become poison in another. The question to ask ourselves is if our labels are working FOR us or AGAINST us.
And only you can answer that for yourself. As always, I never offer any answers, I only ask questions. Just like the book, the answer is within you, Buddhist Boot Camp is just a map guiding you back to your own heart. Enjoy the journey! Timber Hawkeye is the bestselling author of Faithfully Religionless and Buddhist Boot Camp.
For additional information, please visit BuddhistBootCamp.com, where you can order autographed books to support the Prison Library Project, watch Timber's inspiring TED Talk, and join our monthly mailing list. We hope you have enjoyed this episode, and invite you to subscribe for more thought-provoking discussions. Thank you for being a Soldier of Peace in the Army of Love. 🙏🏼