If you were raised in or near the neighborhood of the Judeo-Christian tradition, you cannot easily forget the Adam and Eve allegory portrayed in the Old Testament. Branded as “original sin,” Adam and Eve’s disobedience of their maker’s instruction not to partake of the tree of knowledge became and remains the source of human suffering through successive generations. Lacking discipline and restraint, the first humans succumbed to their greed, thus losing the utopia of Eden for themselves and their offspring. They were not told of the negative consequences arising from giving in to desire, from ignoring this subtle dictate of wisdom. They were simply given an instruction to follow, not always the most effective way to encourage desired behavior. The inexperienced, naive couple did not take the warning seriously.
Many centuries later, in another part of the world, the Buddha discovered the same truth, not through admonition handed down from on high, but rather through his own personal searching: suffering arises through greed and ignorance. However, unlike the biblical legend, Buddha’s understanding of the human condition does not envision us to be hardwired to suffering because our first ancestors were thoughtless, too casual about what was in their own best interests. Rather than a permanent “original sin,” we inherited “original foolishness,” a treatable condition, if we can be serious and attentive to the dynamics of our nature. The Eightfold Path specifies how we can avoid being seduced by the many attractive apples of this world and the unintended consequences of desire. Specifically, the teaching encourages us to retain the character and discipline to keep in mind the ethical practices of:
Right View
Right Attitude
Right Speech
Right Conduct
Right Livelihood
Right Effort
Right Mindfulness
Right Meditation.
To lead a righteous life—to treat ourselves, each other, and our environment with attentive care—is, in Buddhist understanding, the antidote to desire and foolishness.
This formula has not been taken to heart on a scale large enough to help the world. Not much has changed since the authors of Genesis recorded what was going on with people and how they get themselves into trouble. In an interview on CNN on September 10, 2010, well-respected theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking told television host Larry King,
Mankind is in danger of destroying ourselves by our greed and stupidity.
During a follow-up interview with King six years later, he said,
We have certainly not become less greedy or less stupid.
And he warned,
With advancements in technology, there are new ways things can go wrong.
He was referring to the powerful technologies of the last eighty years or so. Despite the promise of benefits professed by scientists and futurists, including extended life spans, treatments and cures for stubborn diseases, and improvements in the quality of life, Hawking’s negative assessment has supporters. Bill Joy, cofounder of Sun Microsystems, introduced his famous article in Wired Magazine in April, 2000 this way:
Our most powerful twenty-first-century technologies—robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotech—are threatening to make human beings an endangered species.
Technology has been the key to the progress and improvement of the life of mankind. The scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries brought new knowledge, clearing away unexamined beliefs about the world. In the mid-eighteenth century, the industrial revolution saw machines starting to do the work people had been doing by hand, increasing productivity, economic activity, and availability of the material goods people wanted and needed. Technology has improved the standard of living in the developed world not just materially but also in medicine, food, and sanitation. Yet despite such advances, the world is still not at peace. Nations, tribes, enclaves, and individuals continue to squabble and threaten each other with harm, even annihilation; hunger and poverty continue while the earth becomes more polluted, without an end in sight.
Something is needed to balance the “progress” of the past five hundred years. To provide what the world really requires, technology needs a partner. That partner is our spiritual dimension, the mind expanded beyond logic and rational thinking, embracing its intuitive capacity and arousing its inherent wisdom. It is not “otherworldly”; it is accessible. Its mother is awareness—mindfulness of ourselves and what we are doing; its father is the continued determination to be authentic in relationships, to create meaningful, intimate, intentional bonds with people, things, and the environment, without being so overwhelmed by visions of “progress” that we lose our soul.
In his 1999 classic, Ethics for a New Millennium, the Dalai Lama argues that we need to understand what makes people truly happy by recognizing—and accepting—that it is neither material progress nor pursuit of knowledge. He advocates turning our attention to our interdependency and learning how to support each other, and our world, with humility, love, and compassion.
Here is where we will discover our true value, not just our personal or commodity or economic value, but rather the universal value that we share with each other. Living according to our universal value, we will regain utopia.