Of all the steps along The Eightfold Path (eight precepts that Siddhartha Gautama Buddha specified as disciplines conducive to enlightenment), Right Livelihood (precept #5) has posed conundrums that have consistently confounded me. Right Livelihood involves choosing a source of work-based income that helps one in the pursuit of spiritual development. Every problem I have created for myself in my adult life stems from poisonous roots tangled deep in my world of work — which means essentially that they are rooted in my core beliefs that extend into that netherworld.
Those who know that I worked for thirty years in advertising/marketing communications (and regard such work with smug disdain) might immediately quip “Well, fool, wouldn’t you kind expect to feel dissatisfied with that?” In my experience, remarks like that come from li’l kiddies splashing and calling names at one another in the shallow end of life. They’re going to have to take off their water wings and accompany me in a dive to the drain of human existence in order to understand where my disappointments originate. Experience has also taught me that few, if any, will accompany me in the not-entirely-uplifting adventure. There are just too many precious notions to be found on the murky bottom disarrayed in wreckage, in shards — at best overturned.
The practical, real-world truth is, for any promise of success I may have shown, for any smarts I may otherwise possess, I have unwittingly played the role of Village Idiot in every professional situation I tried to settle into. I willfully and tenaciously denied the One Undeniable Fact Of Life In Business: no matter what one does for a living, the part of it that actually ensures PAYMENT for services rendered or goods delivered requires, above all, cunning participation in “THE GAME” of manipulating other people's perceptions to serve one's personal interests.
In hindsight it seems a matter of common sense to wonder what I was thinking and why I was thinking it — to wonder how I could ever have thought that I might be special enough to defy the Immutable Laws of the Commercial Universe. Those laws are, like the natural laws by which the Biological Universe operates, essentially Darwinian*. With world-weary eyes of understanding I now recognize that my denial owed to childish, stubborn belief in a groundless idealism regarding human nature. I assumed that everyone cherished and aspired to uphold the same notions of good and wisdom that I did. Even as this virtuous notion has been cuckolded by the reality of pretty much my experience with other human beings, I have clung to it with colossal stupidity**.
A psychologist I once knew, liked and enjoyed very much once remarked, “Chazz, you give people WAY too much credit!”
The pursuit of transcendent wisdom is not on the average person's priority list. For most of my adult life, it has been at the top of mine. But in pursuing it, I rendered myself virtually incapable of playing the games necessary to thrive (perhaps even to survive long-term) in any work place. Only people of independent wealth — or people who genuinely don’t care what happens to them, materially — can afford my chosen philosophical and spiritual disposition. In real-world terms, I literally cannot afford to be the way I am; the way I have created myself to be.
As best I can tell, there is no market to support a Right Livelihood I could fully embrace — encouraging people to evolve toward ever-deeper understanding of themselves and the nature of the worlds they create for themselves; and that we all ultimately create together in terms of shared experience. Whatever I do for a living (to earn money) is highly unlikely to be something fully aligned with "who I am" or to provide me with a sense of ultimate purpose and fulfillment.
Right Livelihood: apparently it's not for everyone. This particular aspect of my personal reality has been a bitter pill to swallow. But now that I've finally ingested it, I find the medicine is very good for me.
*Don’t read too much into my use of the term “Darwinian.” Like everything else in life, the actual principles of Darwinism are much more subtle than the popularized concepts.
**This is not self-condemnation. It’s just recognizing the fact that my clinging to the notion was unreasonable and suboptimal in terms of my material well-being.
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