Power & Responsibility

One of the reasons why we bow down to the Buddha and his Dhamma is because he treats us like adults. He assumes that we want to have the power to change our lives and we’re willing to take on the responsibilities that come with power.

There are so many people out there who like to hear that what they do doesn’t have any consequences. In fact, it’s not really them doing it—it’s some outside force acting through them. They’re not responsible. A lot of people are afraid of responsibility to the extent that they are willing to abdicate power.

But when you can be responsible in a way that leads to true happiness, that’s a power that’s good to take on. If we didn’t have the power to change our lives, didn’t have the power to change our minds, then we’d be the victims of whatever came up, and there’d be nothing we could do about it.

But as the Buddha pointed out, what you experience right now is a combination of influences coming in from past actions plus your current actions and the influence of those current actions. All those together create your current experience. So you have to look into what you’re doing right now, because that can make a difference—the difference between suffering and not suffering.

It’s like having a lot of skill. Say you’re a carpenter. You want to make a piece of furniture, but you have bad pieces of wood. If you’re really skillful, you can figure out some way to take that bad wood and make something good out of it. If you’re not skilled, you can have the finest wood in the world and you can still make a mess out of it.

Fortunately, skill is not something we’re born with. We may have some skills coming over from past lifetimes, but skill is something we can develop. Our level of skill doesn’t depend on what we had in the past. We can change our minds. We can develop them. In that way, the Buddha says, we’re not left bewildered or unprotected. We know what to do in the present moment, and we can protect ourselves from the bad things coming in from the past. This is all to the good.

So you want to be willing to take on the responsibilities that come with power because the power can be used in lots of good ways. And as the Buddha said, it can get so good that it’s beyond your imagination.

So look at what you’re doing right now as you’re meditating. When the mind wanders off, take responsibility for the fact that you have to bring it back. It could wander back on its own, but what are you going to develop that way? You want to develop the power of mindfulness, the powers of your ardency and your alertness, so that you can see what you’re doing, get a sense of where it could be improved, and you improve it.

And bit by bit by bit, things are going to get better. You get more and more skillful so that whatever wood comes your way, you can make something good out of it. This is an adult attitude, which is why I say the Buddha treats us like adults, assumes that we want to assume exercise our powers to make a change. We’ll accept the responsibility that comes with those powers. We’ll try to use them well.