So I want to start with a quote from a West African elder and teacher to me who has passed away his name is Maladoma Somay.
He writes,
Everyone is born with certain cargo.
We all have certain gifts that we must deliver to this world and our task in this life is to deliver our cargo to the world.
So this message is the essence of wise livelihood.
We are moving through the eight path factors that are teachings and characteristics of a person committed to living with the way things are without suffering.
And just to say that we have studied these path factors many many times over the years but personally I get something out of them each time the more I'm actively engaged with them in my life and I hope that's the same for you.
When I first came to this practice I was a little put off from all the lists associated with the Buddhist teachings.
You know the Four Noble Truths,
The Five Brahma Viharas,
The Seven Factors of Awakening and the Eightfold Path.
It felt like a lot of memorization and it felt really linear.
Do this,
Then that and tada you wake up.
That wasn't my experience.
So I had to experiment you know with right view,
The first path factor.
It's been a relationship with learning all the views I have,
Views that have gotten fixed in a way,
Views that were learned,
Views of understanding and permanence,
The view of taking the backward step.
We could practice just wise view as our primary practice for the rest of our life.
It's that full of wisdom.
It's amazing that way.
All these path factors really.
So in this iteration of teaching these path factors I'm offering you a very simple perspective and my intention is to offer an understanding that speaks to your life that maybe rings a bell in you.
Like hmm,
Maybe I'll practice wise view,
Understanding that my mind makes meaning in a snap and to start to see what meaning I'm making.
Is it based on historical meaning or maybe an ancestral imprint?
Is the meaning making make believe?
So meaning shapes the perspective and then the stories that we tell.
So to look at these path factors broadly,
Practically with genuine curiosity really makes them come alive for us.
So in these past weeks I've offered wise view as stepping back from making meaning,
Wise intention as the cultivation of purposeful life,
Wise speech as healing speech,
Wise action as acts of reconciliation in the hearts and in the minds of ourselves and the hearts and minds of others.
And today the path of wise livelihood I propose this is the path of agency.
Agency is kind of an extension of action.
It has momentum.
It's delivering your cargo as Melodoma would say.
There's this notion that meditation is a passive activity and that is just simply not accurate.
You know half the path of the eightfold path are these contemplative steps and half the steps are relational and engaged in relationship.
You know from the very beginning the Buddha sat between warring armies kind of like a peace activist with charitable intention,
Healing speech and restorative action,
Seeing the way things were and then bringing a suitable response to what was happening.
So the whole notion that somehow spiritual practice is a withdrawal from the world,
I think that's shifting.
I hope it's shifting.
As we were starting to see that when we tend to ourselves,
When we quiet the mind,
When we tend to our heart and our body,
This actually gives us the ability to move through the world and to bring benefit.
A big part of this Buddhist practice is about what seeds you're planting and watering.
That's agency,
How you are creating the future.
Livelihood is so much more than what we do to pay for our life in this culture,
In this society.
It's highly proactive and it can be as simple as putting the mind on an object.
Like huh,
What does that mean?
A sound,
A sight,
A physical sensation,
A thought,
Putting your mind on an object and remembering to keep it there.
So engaging in this process as a Dharma student,
We're involved in conscious intention,
Like the effort to put our mind on an aspect of our experience in the world.
We aren't passively just noticing experience.
We're making a choice of where we put the mind and then we're following through on that choice.
We're doing something with a sense of purpose.
So what does this process entail?
How do we put the mind on something?
And again,
It's really quite simple.
We put the mind on the breath or any object in mindfulness by telling ourselves that we're going to put the mind there.
We use the thinking mind.
The term the Buddha uses is directed thought.
One of the teachers in this tradition,
Thanassaro Bhikkhu says,
Experience is purposeful.
So mindfulness,
According to what the Buddha taught,
Is a practice of conscious decision making.
It's a practice of making choices.
It's purposeful.
We're practicing making decisions and shaping our lives.
We are making our lives.
Our ability to experience love,
To offer love,
Is determined by the decisions we make to act in a certain way.
And as we're learning to take action informed by the heart,
Informed by our practice,
We begin to see what maybe we previously weren't able to see.
A world of possible actions actually opens up for us.
So having more agency means taking responsibility for our life.
So the next time you sense something is happening around you or within you that doesn't feel quite right,
Don't ignore it and habitually just press on with your doing.
Exercise the discipline to stop and pay attention.
What is this?
And from that stopping and paying attention,
A wholesome path emerges in that pausing.
This is how we practice wise livelihood with more agency.
This is how we have more influence over our life and greater impact on the lives of others.
So thank you for your attention and consideration on this particular path factor this morning.
Wise livelihood as agency.
