Given that our goal is enlightenment for all sentient beings, and that we have to get money for food, clothing, shelter, council tax etc, then the question arises what are the issues to be aware so that we can work towards both goals at the same time.
It is an extremely important issue. More so for younger people who have more working years ahead of them, and more choice over which direction to take.
A good starting point is Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, where we have to satisfy our physiological and safety needs first, then our love/belonging and esteem needs, and once we have all of those, comfortably met, we are ready to work on our self actualization needs.
I think this is good analysis.
If we are starving or have psychological issues like feeling unloved, it is good to fix those first so that we are a happy healthy human being before following more advanced spiritual practices.
Fortunately, in this country, the state helps us fix our basic needs. This gives us more opportunity than someone in the third world. Opportunity to follow a dharmic path, and also opportunity to follow the path of self gratification.
It is possible to practice metta and mindfulness in any situation. Some people in long term prison situations manage, and it can’t get much tougher than that.
From my own experience, I remember a job I had where I did find a conflict between my job and meditation.
I was a trainee auditor in the City, back in the early 80s. In those days, I used to meditate a lot.
Auditors can attract a lot of negative energy, as they are checking up on people, looking for mistakes, and reporting these back to senior management. In addition, they always turn up at year end which is the busiest time of year. We had to ask admin staff lots of complicated questions that we barely understood, and had to fake our way through understanding the answer.
At the same time we were under continual pressure to meet our deadlines, and had our own bosses breathing down our necks and writing reports on us.
We also had to spend about 15 hours a week of our spare time studying for our chartered accountancy exams.
This period of three years was a hard time for me.
I remember having very strong meditation experiences in the morning before going to work, and then I got blasted by stress and fear during the day.
In those days, I was shy, withdrawn, and tip toed around apologetically.
I remember coming back to work from retreat one time. I was full of bliss and joy. When I sat at my desk watching my breath, or shuffling my papers around pretending to work, I was able to hold onto my meditative high.
But when I engaged with my work, and started to think about complicated subjects, I lost my high.
So this dynamic resulted in me working slowly and inefficiently with a lot of resistance.
To practice mediation at such a level, I think it is preferable to live and work in a protective environment such as a monastery or community which is designed for this purpose.
So to solve my conflict, I decided to reduce my meditations to twenty minutes a day. This dramatically reduced the problems.
Everyone is different, and some people can handle certain situations better than others. I could probably handle that auditing job a lot better these days, although I would still hate it.
So, whatever job we end up in, it is important to have an awareness of the big picture, of how it is affecting us. Is it something we bound out of bed in the morning looking forward to the start of our working day? Or is it something that we dread and want to push under the carpet?
I used to have a friend who was a GP. I remember asking him about his job. I saw this look of anxiety come over his face, and he said he would prefer not to think or talk about his job.
Sometimes it is right just to walk away and drop out.
Meditation does not always make a job easier, as it can increase our awareness, and our feelings of pain as we encounter difficult situations.
Sometimes we have to choose.
Either give up the job, and find something easier, like packing the warehouse at Windhorse, or alternatively, reduce the amount of mediation we do until our work conditions change.
We also ought to look at other things we can do to improve our working environment.
We can learn to strengthen our boundaries. This means we don’t let people walk all over us and start to stand up to our bosses and co-workers when they dump another load of jobs, deadlines and stress on to us.
“Just say no”, as Nancy Reahan would say. Do not let them turn us into a nervous wreck so that our employers can squeeze a bit more profit out of our increased workload.
Looking back at my career, that is something I should have done a lot more of. Somehow I ended up trying to please everyone all the time. This path has not worked, as it just lead to a lot more stress.
I have seen others who were much more assertive, who did a lot less work, but always seemed to have good rapport with the boss. These people seemed to have a much happier time than me, and often got promoted higher.
So this is the game of office politics. It is worth learning to play the game so that we can be happy, as well as work reasonably efficiently.
Another pitfall many people face is to become trapped in a job because of high levels of expenditure and debt.
We may have a lot of direct debits set up that we have to meet. Not to mention a possible partner or kids with expensive tastes.
If we have to cover this monthly stream of outgoings, we can become trapped. We see no way to reduce our outgoings, so have no alternative but to stay in the job, and do anything to avoid redundancy.
We end up saying “Yes sir, no sir, 3 bags full sir” to our boss as he steadily increases our workload.
This is a very real problem faced by many millions of people in this country.
A good friend of mine was a doctor in Germany. He was trapped with certain financial commitments in his new large expensive house.
He thought he was going to be sacked.
He drank two bottles of red wine, told his wife he was going out, and then committed suicide. In his suicide not were the words “I cannot take it any more”.
This is an extreme example of the opposite of right livelihood. However many people face similar issues from time to time. The solution is to be able to exist at very little cost if needed.
I have found for myself that my level of stress has reduced considerably now that I run my own business. I do not have any bosses I have to cow tow to. Instead I have many clients, and if I lose a client it is no big deal, as another one will come along soon enough.
One of my clients was an over exciteable Northern lady who got a bit angry with me over the phone. My solution was to let her know that I did not have time to take her calls, and would just answer one email at the end of each month.
So I reduced my stress and asserted my boundaries.
She cancelled her contract with me at the end of the month, but that was fine with me.
It just feels so great not to have any bosses any more. If I was more enlightened, I could cope with bosses, but old unconscious patterns of behaviour start to kick in and I try and please them.
Another advantage of being self employed is that I have a lot less resistance to working. Working is a way not only of helping my clients, but also of making money.
So working has become something I enjoy doing rather than something I avoid.
Another important issue is ethics.
Does one’s job or livelihood improve things overall, or make things worse. Or to put it another way, does it increase the amount of happiness, awareness and metta in the world.
We may have a very cosy happy job working for a company that does bad things.
This is bad in two ways.
Firstly it is bad for society, as we are helping the company carry out its agenda. However, it is probably true that they could always get someone else to do it. So this reason is not so important unless the vast majority of people would turn the job down.
Secondly, and more importantly it is bad for us. As we become more aware of what is really going on, we are becoming out of alignment with our core beliefs and principles.
This either leads to us having a big internal split as we have to deal with this cognitive dissonance, or it leads to us moving away from our ideals.
I can give an example of a this.
I was called up by a very pleasant Zimbabwean lady who worked for a PR firm. She wanted me to help with her client who was a businessman in Zimbabwe. She said a lot of lies were being spread about him by his business rivals. I said I would help.
Later, I investigated further. I found out that he was helping to bankroll the Robert Mugabe regime. In addition, MDC, the opposition party had accused this prospective client of ordering his henchman to intimidate villagers with physical violence.
In addition to this, there was a Channel 4 documentary exposing him, so the volume of evidence clearly showed he would be a bad person to help. I turned down the contract, which could have been many thousands of pounds.
I have the freedom to turn down bad clients, but if you work for a company, you have a share in responsibility for their actions, even though you may have little freedom to influence things.
Our employers may not always act perfectly, but we do have to look at the bigger picture, and ask whether we feel happy using our energy to achieve our employer’s goals.
Everytime we buy something, we also have a share of responsibility for all the events that are involved in providing that product or service. It can very complex, but we have a moral duty to at least avoid supporting the worst offenders.
So, I have talked a lot about examples of situations that are clearly not right livelihood. How about some that are?
There seem to be 2 issues.
Is it a nice cosy job which is conducive to a meditative lifestyle, and does the employer’s activities improve society.
One positive job that springs to mind is working at a retreat centre. It seems to tick all the boxes. It is a very pleasant environment, with not too much stress. The workers have a lot of time off to meditate and go on retreat. Plus the goal they are working towards is to provide more opportunities for retreat, which is very much needed.
There are many other examples of jobs that are a force for good in this world, like teachers, social workers, health workers etc. However, if they are high stress, that would make them less good examples of right livelihood.
Hopefully I have given you some food for thought to examine your own livelihood, and to see whether there is anything you can do to improve it.
In my case, I do think there are areas where I could make my livelihood more ethical.
This is very nebulous, but I can think of a few ways.
Firstly: Sometimes I am tempted to exaggerate the effectiveness of my service a little to gain the contract. It is a very fine line, and a slightly different form of words could give a different shade of meaning. But I will endeavour to be more vigilent in being honest, even if it means losing contracts because of it.
Secondly: I could have a stricter policy of rejecting borderline clients who act with dubious ethics. Capitalism is a grey area, with the primary motive being to make money at the expense of others. I should refuse to help any client that I think is causing more suffering than happiness to the world.
Thirdly: I should remember that my client is a person, and relate to them as a friend, with their best interests at heart, rather than just a pawn in my game to accumulate money.
The end