Welcome to Wisdom NOTES, a short reflection capturing insights from my conversations on In Search of Wisdom. This edition comes from my interview with Stephen Cope (a few months ago), the author of The Dharma in Difficult Times: Finding Your Calling in Times of Loss, Change, Struggle, and Doubt. Stephen is a best-selling author and scholar specializing in the relationship between the Eastern contemplative traditions and Western depth psychology.
Many wisdom traditions view hardship as an opportunity to cultivate our character. Figures like Seneca, Dostoevsky, John of the Cross, and others agree. Seneca said, “Difficulties strengthen the mind, as labor does the body.” John of the Cross put it this way, “The endurance of darkness is the preparation for great light.”
Navigating Life’s Challenges
How can life’s challenges help us find our calling (or path in life)? My conversation with Stephen Cope (author of Dharma in Difficult Times) discussed the meaning and importance of dharma,
Dharma is one of those very complex Sanskrit words that often means truth or path or law. In the two books that you and I are going to be talking about, including the recent one, the word dharma is a Sanskrit word that means sacred calling, true calling, our true vocation.
Similarly, in the classic Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl stressed, “We need to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life — daily and hourly.”
Are you facing any challenges or obstacles in your life? If so, what might these challenges be urging you to contemplate?
The Bhagavad Gita, and Eastern contemplative traditions, agree that we all suffer from the same roots of evil and suffering. All meditative practices found that what Buddhism calls the three poisons or yoga calls the three evils are our grasping, aversion, delusion, or greed, hatred, and delusion in the Buddhist lexicon.
Letting go of the three poisons allows space for goodwill. According to Cope, there are three so-called proximate causes of the arising of goodwill:
The first is to look for the good in the other person. However, this doesn’t mean that we go delusional and do not see the bad but look for the good because there will be some good, except in very few cases.
The second one that I think is pertinent to our conversation is identifying with the suffering because we all suffer from the same thing. We all experience suffering from grasping from greed, craving, clinging, and holding on; we all experience suffering from hatred, aversion, and the experience of suffering from delusion.
And the third one is acknowledging that all beings want to be happy. And to the extent that they’re behaving in ways that don’t make them happy. It’s because they’re deluded, they’re ignorant, and they’re not seeing.
Final Thoughts
To avoid or see through the delusion, we must know how to find our way and navigate life’s challenges. Finding our calling — is the calling. The poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe suggested:
Like a sculptor, everyone holds his fortune in their own hands, the raw material he will fashion into a figure. But it’s the same with artistic activity: We are merely born with the capability to do it. The skill to mold the material into what we want must be learned and attentively cultivated.
Difficult times not only help us discover our path it allows us to find out who we are. In The Great Work of Your Life, Cope writes that everyone has a vocation to be someone: but they must understand clearly that in order to fulfill this vocation, they can only be one person: themselves.
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Thank you for reading/listening; I hope you found something useful.
Until next time, be wise and be well,
JW
The "night sea voyage", the "dark night of the soul" - we all are to visit our own darknesses that we may learn. This is the way of the "boots on the ground" experiences of this world. It is suffering for good reason.