..续本文上一页 Violence is very exciting, too, so often sex and violence are put together, as in rape and things of that nature. People like to look at those things at the cinema. If they made a film about a celibate monk keeping the discipline, very few people would appreciate that! It would be a very boring film. But if they made a film about a monk who breaks all the precepts, they”d make a fortune!
The fourth precept is on speech. On the coarsest level, if you”re a big liar, say, just keep this precept by refraining from telling big lies. If you take that precept, then at least every time you tell a big lie you”d know it, wouldn”t you
But if you don”t take any precept, sometimes you can tell big lies and not even know you”re doing it. It becomes a habit.
If you refine this from the coarse position, you learn to speak and use communication in a very careful and responsible way. You”re not just chattering, babbling, gossiping, exaggerating; you”re not being terribly clever or using speech to hurt or insult or disparage other people in any intentional way. You begin to recognise how very deeply we do affect one another with the things we say. We can ruin whole days for each other by saying unkind things.
The fifth precept is refraining from alcoholic drinks and drugs which change consciousness. Now that can be on the level of just refraining from drunkenness – that”s what everybody likes to think it means! But then the sober side of you says maybe you shouldn”t have a drink of any kind; not even a glass of wine with your dinner. It”s a standard to reflect upon and use.
If you”ve committed yourself to these precepts, then you know when you”ve broken them. So they”re guidelines to being a little more alert, a little more awake and also more responsible about how you live. If we don”t have standards, then we just tend to do what we feel like doing, or what someone else feels like doing.
I have a very natural kind of moral nature. I”ve never really liked being immoral. But when I lived in Berkeley, California, because the more clever, intelligent and experienced beings around me that I greatly admired seemed to fully commend immoralities, I thought: ”Well, maybe I should do that too!” Certainly, when you”re looking up to somebody, you want to be like them. I got myself into a terrible mess, because people can be very convincing. They can make murder sound like a sacred act!
So sila is a guide, a way of anchoring yourself in refraining from unskillful actions with your body and speech, both in regard to yourself and to the other beings around you. It”s not a kind of absolute standard. I”m not telling you that if you kill a worm in your garden you”ll be reborn in the next 10,000 lifetimes as a worm in order to frighten you into not killing. There”s no wisdom in that. If you”re just conditioned, then you”re just doing it because you”re afraid you”ll go to hell. You wouldn”t really understand; you”ve not reflected and watched and really used your wisdom to observe how things are.
If you”re frightened of action and speech then you”ll just become neurotic; but, on the other hand, if you”re not frightened enough and think you can do anything, then you”ll also become confused and neurotic!
Sigmund Freud had all kinds of people coming to him with terrible hang-ups and, as sexual repression was the ordinary thing in Europe and America at the time, he thought: ”Well, if we just stop repressing, then we won”t have these problems any more. We”ll become free, happy, well-integrated personalities.” But nowadays there”s no restriction – and you still get hysterical, miserable, neurotic people! So it”s obvious that these are two extremes springing from a lack of mindfulness in regard to the natural condition of sexu, ality.
We have to recognise both what…
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