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Talk: 19970309-Larry_Rosenberg-UNK-daily_life_some_guidelines_to_practice-42353 Leandra Tejedor.json Start_time: 00:48:07 Display_question: The more I practice, the more I see that what I do to earn money is very silly. Can you speak about right livelihood? Keyword_search: Buddha, right livelihood, miccha samadhi, Cambridge, playwright, waiter, cab driver, self, comparative mind, labor organizer, depressed, communist, socialist, Marxist, social virtuosity, awareness, conditioning Question_content: Questioner: The more I practice, the more I see that what I do to earn money, is very silly. And I always hear…I see where people at certain point tend to leave and… retreat centers or live other types of ways of making a life. So, what kind of life… Larry: I understand. Questioner: For those of us who continue to function in a poison. Larry: Which is many of us. Questioner: Which is most of us. Personally, there’s sort of a magical…there’s no separation of practice, use of practice. I always start meetings with a moment of silence. And some people know what I'm doing, some people don't, and I don't care. But some suggestions? Larry: Yes. It's a very big one. In the Buddha’s teaching, right livelihood, is a major part of the path. Why don't we finish with this? I'll say a few things about right livelihood. The guidelines are to take work. Obviously, it would be good to have work that you love, that's meaningful to you. But also, in addition to that, it should not be harmful to others. I mean, if you love being a hitman, that wouldn't be right livelihood. There's even a word for it, miccha samadhi, which means wrong samadhi, because you can be very concentrated. So that's always an issue, to try to find work that enables you to flower as a person, but also, it's not at other people's expense. Now, the issues of when you're doing work, it's not so cut and dried sometimes, because we're in a world and people have standards of purity, which sometimes are unrealistic, because everything is interrelated. But you have to do the best you can. And you have to take a hard look. Sometimes it means leaving the work you're doing. It does. And that can be a difficult decision. But I think what you're getting at is, where most often we find ourselves in work, that is not exactly perfect, but yet we have five children, and we have to pay the bills, or we have this, or that. One thing that the practice…and this I've had a fair amount of experience with is, you can reinvent the job from the inside, and it can be done. I've seen people do it. I'll give you a few examples. Break_line: One was someone who was… this is very common in Cambridge, someone who was working as a waiter. And I got to know him. He would come to the center. And what he said was he was really a playwright, but he'd been working as a waiter. And when we would talk sometimes, he would always put that down. I got to go into work today. I just hate being away, and very condescending, or frustrated, and so forth. And often dropping that he was working on a new play. And he was really a playwright. I don't remember the exact, but I asked him, how long have you been a waiter? So, he said something, I don't know, something like, oh, twelve or thirteen years. I said, you're not a playwright. You're a waiter, who likes to write plays. Okay. The point is the way he was looking at it, had all kinds of self in it. It had the self as the playwright, of course, is wonderful. It's an ideal. He had respect for it. Being a waiter was menial. He came from an educated background and so forth. Break_line: So, through the practice, what he was able to do, to make it shorter, he was able to begin to see that if he could look at the very same job, but with fresh eyes, he could see that, for example, people come to eat. They're often lonely. And if you treat them in a nice way, greet them, and are friendly, and give them good service, you're actually helping them to feel better. Sometimes it's the most exciting time in the day. People will come to meet good friends, or couples, or whatever it is. So, it actually can be quite a useful job. But it requires letting go of this comparative frame of reference, that you've gotten from society, but that you've taken on, and which you're suffering very much, as a result, because you've made self, out of being a waiter. And since you don't value being a waiter, then it's a low estimation. If you were playwright, then you'd be up here, but it'll go on for the rest of your life. They love your play. You're up here. It gets banned. You're down there. And also, one-person same thing with driving a cab. Very same thing. Break_line: Another person. This is a story that I think is quite remarkable, was a labor organizer. And he came to the center very, very depressed. He was a communist, a socialist, a Marxist. He went through all the different shadings of it, and had been a labor organizer, and a successful one, for almost 20 years. And his job was based on, getting workers worked up, angry, so that they could make demands on management. And then he would…so, part of his job, he had a lot of anger. This is him telling me this. I didn't know him. And he used that anger, to help other people get angry. Workers. So that was part of the fuel, in order… that was his job. And he just hated it. And he was starting to meditate. And he was getting very, very deeply into it. He still is. He's quite committed to it. And his whole character started to just decompose. I mean, happily for him, he was… but then the implications of it is that, what do I do for work now? Because I can't…. Break_line: So, then the question became, is the only way to be a labor organizer, is to get people angry? And is that the only way to accomplish this. And it came out of a dialogue over, actually many months. And what came out of it was, in a kind of Gandhian, labor organizer. Is it possible to not discredit anyone? To have respect for management, to have respect for the workers, to objectively examine the conditions, and see where there was need for improvement, whether it's salary, or working conditions, or health benefits, and to be able to present it to management, without insulting them. To be able to talk to workers in such a way, in a sense, to reeducate them. And in order to do that, of course, he would have to change dramatically, which he was well on the way to doing. And he was able to do it. And I don't fully know where he is now, but there was one very successful negotiation that he completed, where he said, in his words, he behaved like a gentleman, and brought everyone to communicate back and forth. And the workers got what they wanted. And management, at least two of the people from management were so impressed, that they wanted to know if they could come to the party, that they had about when they signed the contract. Break_line: So, I mean, this sounds like a Hollywood ending, I know. He's probably in... he's probably in prison now. I don't know. He couldn't keep it up. Told him to do one more retreat. Okay, so it's really up to your ingenuity. There's a kind of social virtuosity that can come out of awareness, whereas you begin to understand yourself better. It's not manipulation. And you begin to understand people better. And there are many more ways of living that we've never dreamed of, because we're basically living out an old pattern that we've been conditioned into. And once you start weakening the condition, you make room, at least for the possibility, of new ways of living. Whether you take advantage of that or not, it's up to each one of us. End_time: 57:27
