I have never been one for value statements and mission statements and the like. I have a cautionary approach to broad statements of intent. Get on with it, I say. Do what you can, inch by inch, take a breather, get round the next corner …
But, in the space between Christmas and a new year, I have been thinking about intention,
I do not call myself a Buddhist. I do not call myself a Christian. Or a Freudian or a Kleinian. I live in a context, I am English, born in 1943 and brought up in post-War Britain. I am influenced by the thinking and example of Christ, of Western philosophers and psychologists, and by the philosophy and psychology of the Buddha among Eastern thinkers I am thinking what does it mean to follow the path that the Buddha taught, in the context of our society now? It seems clear to me that Western capitalism and its accomodation with the monotheistic religious traditions is fatally inadaequate to the task of achieving a good society and we need to look for other ways of experiencing the world. The Buddhist reality of impermanence, of the interdependence of our own being with others, of our pervasive dissatisfaction with experience, offers a different way, certainly. The practice of mindfulness and compassion, living with an ethical principle of non-harm to ourselves and others, and an understanding of the world that does not put ourselves at the centre of all things that matter, offer a different kind of freedom of action. I have come to think that it is both necessary and possible to change our ways of seeing the world. In the end we do have to understand the world better in order to live in it.