It isn’t always easy to tell if we are on the path we’ve chosen. It also isn’t easy to know when we’ve wandered away. Small airplanes have an instrument called the Attitude Indicator. It lets the pilot know if they’ve pitched up or down from their intended level, or if they are turned left/right from their intended path. And, it does it instantly.
In the image above, the white horizontal line, separating the blue sky from the brown field of the earth is the horizon line. The orange split lines are the wings of your plane. If the two lines match up, you are flying level with the horizon. If the orange line is angled relative to the horizon, it indicates how much the plane is turning and in which direction. In cruising flight, pilots like to maintain a straight and level path – the most comfortable and efficient for normal flying.
Humans don’t come equipped with an attitude indicator that objectively identifies our position relative to our path. But just like flying a Cessna or Piper airplane, we want to navigate our lives with a straight and level path, comfortably, day in, day out.
Just as a pilot can’t always avoid small or dramatic changes in weather or equipment that affects its flight path, humans can’t either. But in order to make our own corrections, we first need to understand we deviated from the path we aspire to.
How do we do that? It’s hard to miss the big ones in our lives, but it is the thousands of little ones that cause that unsettling low level of dissatisfaction we feel. Attitude, in this case, is not only how we respond to what happens to us, but is a metaphor for how we position ourselves in this life in this cosmos.
We have choices given the causes and conditions we are born into. Our innate attitude indicator lets us know when we are not straight and level. We do know it but learned to ignore or disregard it because we had not be given the “how to” manual to deal with it in a rational manner to remove it from our lives. Buddhist teachings give us the ‘how to” manual, but do we really want to put it into action? Do we really want to do the work to reduce dukkha in our lives or is it easier to just live with dukkha?
We are told it is rare to be born human, now we are human. We are told there is an estimate of 8,700,000 million life forms on earth, we are just one of them, the human one. This is our opportunity to begin to listen to our innate attitude indicator and decide if we are willing to do the work to stay on the path we aspire to.
May we all learn to accept ourselves as we walk on the Shin Path as Amida Buddha accepts us, just as we are. And in so doing, learn to live with more compassion for ourselves and others, and greater wisdom bringing greater peace. May we begin to listen to our attitude indicator with greater frequency as we begin to navigate 2024 with our Buddhist teachings.
Namo Amida Butsu
Namo Amida Butsu
Namo Amida Butsu
Rev. Anita
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