At the First U auction last year, our Treasurer Mitch Major was the lucky winner of the opportunity to tell me what to preach about. Mitch is a Buddhist Unitarian Universalist and he wanted me to preach about something related to Buddhism, possibly using this book by Sharon Salzberg: Lovingkindness. At the same time as he gave me that book, he also gave me this other book, ostensibly unrelated to the sermon topic: The Bogleheads’ Guide to Investing. This book is about investing and managing money, which is something I had told him I want to understand better. But he had given me these two books at the same time and I started reading them at the same time, little bits and pieces of each. And after a while, it struck me that these were basically two different versions of the same book.
Sharon Salzberg’s book is subtitled “The Revolutionary Art of Happiness” and it describes, in very beautiful and concise language, a Buddhist technology for connecting with the source of happiness in each of us. The secret – here I’m going to give it away in the first minute of my sermon, in case anyone needs to leave early, here it is – the secret is cultivating “lovingkindness” (all one word). Lovingkindness. It’s an orientation of boundless goodwill toward yourself and all the creatures of the earth. It’s an orientation of compassion and forgiveness – that when someone does something hurtful to you, instead of thinking to yourself, “That bastard! I’m gonna get back at him!” you think to yourself, “Oh, he must be really hurting inside to do something like that.” Lovingkindness is letting go of your resistances and rejections of the difficult people and challenges in your life. To paraphrase our reading from a Buddhist text from earlier — it’s an attitude of cherishing all living beings as if they are your own children, radiating friendliness over the whole world without limit. Doesn’t that sound nice?
Getting there is the hard part. Getting there requires what I’m calling a technology in the sense that all religious and spiritual practices are technologies — they are means of connecting and transforming our lives in the spiritual realms the way that cell phones and artificial heart valves connect us and transform our lives in the physical world. You can’t just leap to a state of bliss without a mechanism for getting there, any more than you can talk to your cousin in Nepal without a working cell phone tower. The Buddhist technologies are intricate and specific — they require training and practice. They’ve been developed over the last 2500 years, since the Buddha is said to have become enlightened and given his open source lovingkindness code to the world.
Buddhist technologies for happiness include practicing generosity, keeping five moral precepts (which are reminiscent of some of the Ten Commandments – no killing, lying, stealing, etc.) and, of course, meditation. In that order. The generosity and the keeping of the moral precepts are primary. Salzberg tells a story about this in which a meditation master from Thailand came to the U.S. for a visit. She writes, “After just a short time here, he said rather bemusedly, ‘In Asia the classical sequence of the teachings and practice is first generosity, then morality, and then meditation or insight. But here in the United States, the sequence seems to be meditation first, then morality, and after some time, as a kind of appendix, there is some teaching about generosity. What’s going on here?’”
What’s going on is that in our individualistic culture and also in Christian tradition, there’s a sense that you need to change yourself internally first – become spiritually pure somehow through prayer and faith – and that, if you do that, good actions will be a natural outgrowth from that. The theory goes that our outward actions are a reflection of our internal state. But in the Buddhist approach (and in Jewish and Muslim teachings too), it’s kind of the other way around. Our internal state is shaped by our outward actions.
Why cultivate generosity and moral integrity first? Because your daily behaviors create what Salzberg calls a “field” into which you plant the seeds of your spiritual practice. If you are cultivating lovingkindness in your actions, that field that you’re preparing becomes the ideal space, fertilized and watered with lots of sunlight, for the flowers of your practice to grow. On the other hand, if you’re cheating on your spouse and yelling at your employees, even if you then go and meditate for five hours, that meditation is not going to bloom for you the way you want it to because it’s not being planted in a field of goodness. Nothing exists in isolation. If you want to become a well-loved, peaceful, joyful person, you need to be cultivating love, peace, and joy in all aspects of your life. Everything is connected to everything else. Makes sense, right?
So does this mean you can’t ever make a mistake? You can’t ever do anything thoughtless or mean or tell a lie or kill a mosquito or it will eviscerate your entire spiritual practice? No, it doesn’t mean that. If you are consistently investing in your field of lovingkindness and being generous and kind and honest overall in your life, the field itself will be able to absorb the occasional (as they call it) “unskillful” act. You’ll be creating a kind of equanimity and balance in your world over time, where the normal vicissitudes of life won’t be able to harm you. Salzberg describes the field of lovingkindness as offering protection from the harm that could otherwise come from your occasional unskillful actions.
There is an obvious parallel here to the world of financial investing. If you invest consistently, bit by bit, with equanimity, in a balanced, diversified portfolio individual stocks may go up and down – even dramatically – and in the short run you may lose money, but over time you will be protected from disaster and you will realize your goals. In the financial world, the goal may be to make money, in the spiritual world the goal may be peace and happiness, but the principle is the same. You plant your seeds in a field of goodness which you tend and maintain with healthy practices and the seeds will eventually flower.
In thinking about the spiritual path, this approach may sound overly opportunistic – as if creating this field of lovingkindness and being generous is merely a strategy for you yourself becoming happy. And, indeed, there is some discussion in Salzberg’s book of the importance of cultivating the right intention in your giving. You are supposed to examine your own motives for everything you do and try to only act out of the purest of other-oriented intentions. But I think an important part of the point here is also to break down the illusion of self and other. The fact that being generous to the other is really being generous to yourself is exactly the lesson.
Here is where Buddhism and Unitarianism converge: a fundamental oneness undergirds all of reality. In a very literal sense, the suffering of one is the suffering of all and the health of one is the health of all. Any temporary deviation from this, in which one person seems to profit at the expense of others or suffer while others thrive is temporary and illusory. There is no “getting ahead” because, just like in dream interpretation, all the different characters in the world are really just you in different forms. In classical Buddhist thinking, it is the law of karma that our actions automatically boomerang back to us either in this lifetime or another. You can’t steal and ultimately get away with it because, at the very least, even if you don’t believe in future lives, you will have made your own field barren and inhospitable for life. You literally can’t beat the system.
I never thought I would be moved by a financial guidebook, but in The Bogleheads’ Guide to Investing there was a passage on this that took my breath away. It was describing what is called “Efficient Market Theory” (EMT) which was developed in 1900 when a young French mathematician named Louis Bachelier wrote his PhD thesis. “EMT can be described as ‘an investment theory that states that it’s impossible to “beat the market” because existing share prices already incorporate and reflect all relevant information.’” In other words, if I decide to buy Apple stock, I am bringing to bear on that decision not only anything I may know about the company but also all my feeling-level knowledge of our culture and society and Apple’s place in it and my own needs and desires as a consumer. And hundreds of thousands of other people are doing the same thing at the same time, coming to conclusions based on their own unique life vantage points, some deciding to buy more Apple stock and some deciding to sell. And so the resulting stock price is the congealed expression of all that collective knowledge.
An individual investor can’t possibly know more than that. And so the book goes on to explain that in study after study, economists have found that market forecasters are actually unable to forecast the market. They are unable to know anything that the aggregate mind of all the other investors does not already know. Apparently Efficient Market Theory is an “obscenity” on Wall Street “where investors are constantly told that Wall Street’s superior knowledge can make it easy to beat the market (for a fee).” But it’s not true. Whatever wild success you may have in the short run, in the long run, you actually can’t beat the market.
You can’t beat the market because the law of the market is karma. We can’t stand outside of it. Every part of it, each of us, each action, each thought, however subtly contributes to creating the whole. Just as the purchase or sale of every single stock gets assimilated into the movement of the stock price, every action any of us takes ripples outward and gets assimilated into the movement of the universe. None of us can escape both impacting and being impacted by everything else. Stock prices are an expression of our collective consciousness, as is everything – food availability in the third world, same sex marriage legislation, sports arena attendance, sales of Gap clothing, traffic patterns, and even the temperature and climate of the earth itself. We are creating our world in real time together. The killing of a black man in Baltimore provokes rage in New York; an earthquake in Nepal rattles our walls. And our responses to these events and to every moment of our lives create the field in which we then plant our seeds. Will it be a field of lovingkindness? Will our investments help grow flowers of happiness and peace?
Sharon Salzberg’s book includes a classic Buddhist lovingkindness meditation. In this practice you intentionally direct lovingkindness toward all the world, usually beginning with yourself. You simply wish yourself well, saying something like, “May I be well. May I be peaceful and at ease. May I be whole.” After you’ve meditated like this for a few weeks or months, you start offering lovingkindness to someone you love: “May she be well. May she be peaceful and at ease. May she be whole.” Then you move on to someone you feel “neutral” about – someone you have neither positive nor negative feelings about. And lastly, you offer lovingkindness to your “enemy –” someone you feel you have no connection to at all. The goal is to ultimately feel our interconnectedness so deeply that we make no distinction between these categories – no distinction between self and other, loved one, friend, or enemy. The goal is to love them all.
The Bogleheads book describes what it calls the “sleep test” for investments. The sleep test is simply, when trying to decide what investments to make, ask yourself, “Can I sleep soundly without worrying about my investments in this particular asset allocation?” The idea is that we have a gut-level understanding of what’s a good or bad investment for us. If we wouldn’t sleep soundly having bought that Apple stock, that’s a sign that we shouldn’t buy it. Sharon Salzberg doesn’t write about the sleep test, but she might as well have. If we wouldn’t sleep well knowing that we had taken a particular action, that’s a sign that we shouldn’t do it. And if we would sleep well, we can know that we are helping to grow our flowers of happiness and peace. If we take time contemplate our own goodness and the goodness of others, if we get in touch with the interconnectedness of all the creatures of the earth, we will know in our hearts that helping another is helping ourselves, and it will simply feel good to do it. We will want to make use of the spiritual technologies available to us. We will invest in our own fields with acts of generosity, honesty, and lovingkindness. And those are investments that are guaranteed to pay off.