We’ve been talking for a few weeks now at Satsang about right livelihood, the fifth limb in the Buddha’s Noble Eightfold Path. We were just getting into the implications of this limb of practice, expanding our lens outward from the basic ethics of how we earn our living and then how we spend that living. 

We’re talking about the flow of resources, about their origin, their movement around the world, and how humans make choices (saṅkhāra) at every moment in that process. Choices are always either skillful or unskillful (or a mix of the two, of course), and so the entire web of interconnectedness can be seen as bonded by ethical responsibility. We are all accountable to each other, all the time. We might call the realization of this accountability, and the dedication to liberation that comes with it, bodhicitta — the awakening mind.

This moment’s manifestation of interconnection — a global pandemic —is shot through with unskillful human choices, born of greed, hatred, and delusion. The foundations of the global economy are implicated, and so in a strange way, our topic was right on time. The virus is a manifestation of wrong livelihood, globally! And of course in more individual ways, this moment is a livelihood problem, as many of us find our livelihoods threatened or diminished by the crisis. We’ll keep talking about all of this as we meet virtually, as we have been doing.

Satsang is now online for the immediate future, on the Zoom platform so that we can interact. The most up-to-date info on events, and all links, can be found in the Facebook Group: In It To End It. Join us in this “virtual saṅgha” for study, discussion, and spiritual community.