Right intention and the 10-10-10 rule

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
October 23, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

When making a decision, the 10-10-10 rule is used to think about where you’ll be in 10 minutes, 10 months, and 10 years after the choice. Similarly, the second strand of the Buddhist Eightfold Path is sometimes translated as right intention.

Call to Worship
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

“A person will worship something, have no doubt about that. We may think our tribute is paid in secret in the dark recesses of our hearts, but it will come out. That which dominates our imaginations and our thoughts will determine our lives, and our character. Therefore, it behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping, we are becoming.”

Sermon

The meditation reading was from Emerson, and he said what you believe about life shapes what you think about. What you think about shapes your actions. Your actions shape your work, your relationships, your whole life.

Buddhist teacher Bhikkhu Bodhi says The Buddha talked about two kinds of thoughts: those that lead to happiness and those that lead to pain. The ones leading to pain are thoughts of desire and greed, thoughts of ill will, and thoughts that lead to harmful actions. Those that lead to happiness are thoughts of contentment, thoughts of good will, and kind thoughts that lead to non-harming. Happiness will follow that person like a shadow, always there. For the person who thinks greedy, hateful, vengeful thoughts, pain follows like a cart follows the ox who is pulling it. Does happiness shadow you wherever you go, or do messed up situations lumber behind you like a cart on wobbly wheels? The first strand of the path was “right understanding, “or “right view.” Your right view of existence affects the things you care about, it affects where you put your focus, your habits of attention. The right view, or right understanding we talked about last month is the realization that life is full of suffering. Suffering is caused by desire. If you could let go of desire you lose your suffering. Not your pain, because pain comes with life in a body, but your suffering over your pain, the stories you tell yourself about your pain. The eightfold path of wise thought and action is the way to move yourself toward happiness. The teaching assumes that we want to be happy. It’s not wrong to want happiness, to aim for freedom from suffering.

Buddhism invites you to make three intentions, which I’ll tell you in a few minutes. First let’s try to look at the intentions currently guiding us. Emerson says you already have intentions that permeate your life. Do you want to be loved above all else? Do you want to be beautiful? The smartest? Powerful? Secure? Admired? Helpful? Do you want to leave the world a better place than you found it?

What are the stars you steer by? If you were to make a circle and pretend it was a compass, what one word would be at each compass point?

Martha Beck writes, in her book Steering By Starlight, that to find your real desires, you should ask yourself “what then?” questions about them. Say you want your business to succeed. Why? You would be respected. What then? Your dad will finally give you his blessing. What then? You can stop feeling like a failure. Odds are there is another way to stop feeling like a failure, because that feeling is inside you, not somewhere external. You want your business to succeed so you can have money. What then? You would feel secure. What then? You could stop feeling afraid. Is there another way to stop fear? Say you want a baby. What then? You would feel loved. Is that the way to get there? Maybe yes and maybe no, but it’s a hard job for a kid to be born to fill a hole in an adult. Is joy on your compass anywhere? Contentment? Think all the way out into the future, and imagine the feeling you want to have about your life.

Susy Welch, a business writer with a demanding job, a marriage and school aged children, talks about thinking out into the future in this way. She came up with a way to make decisions in her overwhelmed, information drenched, demand-crunched life. Should I say yes to the Saturday meeting the boss wants me to lead, which will be a huge plus in my column when it comes to promotion time, or should I say no to the meeting and go to my son’s black belt test? She asked herself this question: what would each course of action bring into my life in 10 minutes, 10 months or 10 years? I0 minutes from now her boss would be happy and her son would be crushed. 10 months from now her job would still be full of opportunities and her son would have a tangible memory of her love and support. In 10 years he would be looking for a relationship with someone who was not an out of control work-a-holic, and he would be confident that he was number one with her. That’s the decision she made. OR, and this is my contrariness, in 10 minutes her son would be happy and her boss would be disappointed, in 10 months she could be looking at someone else in the job she had coveted, and her kids would have had plenty of chances to feel her love, and if she had given up the meeting her son wouldn’t have grasped the sacrifice she’d made, and in 10 years he’d be looking for someone whose world revolved around him and he’d have unreasonable expectations.

I think the 10 10 10 works for decisions like “do I really want to go to the gym today?” In 10 minutes you’ll feel virtuous, but maybe whiny about missing a nap. In 10 months you’ll be stronger and maybe grow addicted to the gym. In 10 years it’ll be so much a part of your life that you don’t even look at it as a decision any more.

I think the 10 10 10 is a fun way of considering choices, and that the most useful part of it is the 10 year thinking. In order to think that far out you have to know what you’re aiming for. You need to have hold of your core values, you want to be squinting into your spyglass at the star on the horizon by which to steer.

Remember the three intentions the Buddha recommends? Here they are. First, you understand that greed, craving, and desire cause fear and suffering, so you make an intention to renounce desire. Second, you intend to have good will toward all beings. Third, you make an intention to do no harm. These intentions cure fear and suffering. They move you toward freedom and joy. Intend to have good will towards all beings. Intend to do no harm. You still might get fired, get sick, go broke, lose a child to illness, violence or accident. Life holds both beauties and horrors. Your intention is like a rope you’ve fixed along the way to your goal, and you can grab hold of that rope when conditions get rough. An intention forms your thoughts and gives rise to your actions. It’s not a feeling, or a hope, it’s a plan of action. Scarlett O’Hara set her intention on her knees in a field with the sunset behind her “As God is my witness, I’ll never be hungry again.” That intention shaped her decisions, for good or ill, for the rest of her life – uh – for the rest of the movie. Some of us set intentions very early in life that shape the person we become: “I will find security.” “I will not be around anger.” “I won’t try – it just sets me up for failure.” “I will never be hurt again, so I just won’t get attached to anyone or hope for anything.”

Marilyn Monroe said “I just want to be wonderful.” There is an intention that can shape a life.

To be content, as the Buddha said, and Suzy Welch came up with later, is that you look a couple of steps ahead of your desires. If you want to drink yourself to sleep every night, you think about what comes after that: sick feelings and a sense of having done yourself damage. If you think ahead to the feelings that will come after you act on that desire, the Buddha says, you don’t have to repress the desire. Everyone has always known that repressing desires doesn’t work very well at all. Thinking it through sometimes can. When you think it all the way through, the craving just falls away like autumn leaves from a tree. If you want to have an affair, you think two or three steps ahead to the chaos and insanity that will likely come into your life because of that. If you want to change relationships, you certainly can. Just don’t sit in one thing and hope for another thing. Clarity works to diminish the desire. Be content with where you are, or think what needs to change and change it.

If we have the intention to be content, we practice being content. We are grateful for what we have. We take care of where we are, the things we have, the people we have in our lives.

If we intend to have good will, we practice letting go of resentments. That’s hard, and fortunately there is magic to help you. That magic is called the resentment prayer, where you pray for a person to have everything in their life that you want in yours. So you would pray for your mother in law to have peace of mind, financial security, good health, etc. In Buddhism it’s called the metta, or loving kindness prayer, and you don’t have to believe in it or even mean it at first, you just try it.

If we intend harmlessness, for some of us that means we give up doing wrong to people. For others, it might mean giving up violent thoughts, for others it might lead them to eat in a vegan way, the way of most compassion and the least harm. What does it mean for you? Take the steps that feel natural, that feel like a call, that feel like a move toward freedom and joy. So it’s little by little. Contentment and peace rather than agitation and anger. It takes practice, practice, practice.

Notice what intention has been guiding your life. It works like a mission statement. Wonder to yourself how it has shaped your experiences and wonder ( so much better than making a resolution) what your life would be like if you intended to be content, do no harm, to have good will toward all beings.

“Be a lamp, a lifeboat, a ladder. Help someone’s soul heal. Walk out of your house like a shepherd.” –Rumi

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