A Prayer of Faith

My freshman year of college I took a world religions class. The professor who taught the section on Eastern Religions was a very funny man, and I really enjoyed his teaching, so much that I took his class on Buddhism a few years later. He has an analogy that he used in both classes that he called “The five martini effect.” It goes like this: The first martini is pretty good. The second martini is great. The third martini is fantastic! The fourth is okay. The fifth…. LIVING DEATH!!!! He used this analogy to teach what many Buddhists call the “Middle of the Road” mentality that was the real beginning of the Buddha’s enlightenment. He said that if he could just get himself to stop on the third martini he would be a much happier man. Because human nature insists on having more he won’t naturally stop when he should, but instead must cultivate control over himself and learn when his needs are met. He must learn to walk down the middle of the road.

I had a roommate who was becoming dissatisfied with her weight. She tried to lose weight by not eating anything sweet, and exercising a lot. It didn’t work. She would often get frustrated and eat a cookie then a few minutes later find she had eaten the whole pack. I told her the five martini story and tried to convince her that she didn’t need to deny herself of everything. She liked the idea and was able (by shouting “MIDDLE OF THE ROAD” outloud to herself) eat only two or three cookies every day instead of a pack of cookies twice a week.

The story of the Buddha’s realisation of this teaching is very interesting, (and I’m going to tell it from memory so parts may be a bit off). The Buddha was born to a king, and was named Siddartha. Shortly after birth he was taken to an oracle who prophecied that he would either be a great king or a great holy man who would allieviate the sufferings of many. His father wanted his son to be a great king, so he attempted to control his son’s reality and not let him be exposed to suffering by keeping him in the palace. Eventually Siddartha got out and saw three things, an old person, a sick person and a dead person. This shook him up pretty good and he thought that his whole life was a lie. Then he saw an renunciate, a man who lived in the woods, not eating and meditating all the time. He went and joined them and became the most hard-core renunciate they had ever seen. He had a little group of followers, and would sit under a tree meditating for days. He could grab his spine through the front of his stomach because he had eaten so little. One day a lady went to give an offering of rice to a tree god that she thought lived in the tree near her house. She found Siddartha sitting under the tree, assumed he was the tree-god and gave him the offering. Siddartha came out of his trance, saw the rice and ate some. All the sudden life the universe and everything became clear to him. At this point he became the Buddha and he taught that enlightenment isn’t found in extremes, it’s found in moderation.

As mormons we tend to shy away from the idea of moderation. To us moderation means you can have a few drinks. You shouldn’t give all that we have to the church. We shouldn’t expect to perfect. We make the mistake of thinking that moderation as a life principle applies to situations that are either too specific, or too broad. We tend to view it as an excuse to get out of things that we think are too hard. In fact ‘moderation’ can be a very very harsh task master. Consider the idea of food in a moderate lifestyle. If I eat and drink only what I need, then I will never drink alcohol because I do not need it. Spices and flavorings are wasteful and distracting. Furthermore I will never eat more than I need to function, which happens to be less than I eat to feel full, probably just one bowl of rice every day. If I need to eat more than that, then perhaps I am not being moderate enough in my activities.

Perhaps the idea that ‘moderation’ is really trying to convey is a deep sense of balance. We take energy in, and we spend energy, physically, mentally and spiritually. We take in food, then we burn calories. We sleep, relax and play, then we work, think and cope. We pray, study the scriptures and meditate, then are tempted, suffer and struggle. The tricky thing is, all of this is interconnected in a sticky web of incoming and outgoing traffic. The cookies I eat give me energy and help me relax. If I eat too many then I have too much energy, and that causes stress by weight gain, and guilt, and pent up sugar highs.

I believe that we try to compartmentalize our lives too much. We are complete beings, and our eternal salvation isn’t based only on how well we know the scriptures, but by how well we live with our bodies, our families, our neighbors and coworkers. Ignoring my family so I can pray all day will not lead me to the Celestial Kingdom. My ’spiritual’ progression isn’t just my spirit it is all of me. If one part genuinely improves all parts improve with it. If I focus on one part of me at the expense of the others then my efforts are wasted because the part that is lagging drags all of me down with it. It’s a complex balancing act, where excess or lack in any area can set the whole thing askew. It is also highly individualized, and we cannot compare our needs to the needs of others. Maybe I need to meditate for an hour everyday, while my neighbor just needs a few minutes in the shower.

With guidance from the spirit we can achieve perfect balance and eventually become perfect beings.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 12th, 2006 at 11:12 am and is filed under Whisperings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.