Samuel L. Jackson and the path of the righteous man

In this episode we use a passage from the film Pulp fiction to explore the idea that there is a "Right path" for us to become good humans. We explore the Noble Eightfold path put forward by Buddhism as perhaps a guide to the sorts of things we should be concentrating on.

Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

Buy me a coffee 😍

How to be a good hu(man)

Transcript

Hi, and welcome to the podcast, that accompanies the book called How to be a good human. I'm Andrew Wilson, aka IAMSHOKUNIN  And today I want to talk to you about the right path.

I was thinking about this the other day. And the thing that prompted me to think about it was a quote, out of pulp fiction, the movie The Quentin Tarantino movie. And it's a passage which is quoted by Samuel L Jackson throughout the film from the Bible, And it goes like this.

“Ezekiel 25:17. "The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who, in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of the darkness. For he is truly his brother's keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know I am the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon you." 

I absolutely love this quote, out of the film. It has an almost Shakespearean quality to it. It's just so melodic so well written, has so much information in it and it is such a great idea. And, you know, it sets up in in your mind this idea that there is such a thing as a righteous man, a righteous path, and to walk down this righteous path you are going to be surrounded by cruel and unreasonable people. People who are grossly unfair in their behaviour. But you can be good and virtuous and genuine and moral. And you can perform a vital function in the world Looking after people who perhaps are not as strong as you are, who need your help and support. And the idea that you obviously have God's backing of a very powerful Lord on your side or in this case Samuel L Jackson.

I find the whole idea, wonderful. And Samuel Jackson just does such a splendid job of being someone who, at a moment in time in the film has a road to Damascus moment, and suddenly realises that he's just been saved by some miraculous intervention. And it changes his path. And that is fundamentally what the film is about. 

But it got me thinking, because I wrote the book, how to be a good human, for similar reasons - to try and offer a book that allowed people to remain on the right path -  Obviously, Mine isn't, or doesn't come directly from the Bible, and isn't anywhere near as poetic, or as dramatically  delivered as the version in Pulp fiction. 

I just need to add at this stage in case you think I am operating under the misunderstanding that the Pulp fiction version actually is what is written in the Bible - it is not, the only bit that seems to be a quote of sorts is: 

“I will carry out great vengeance on them and punish them in my wrath. Then they will know that I am the Lord, when I take vengeance on them.”

But hey, let’s not stop a little thing like that getting in the way of one of the best film scripts of modern times.

So this got me thinking. Because I thought, well, you know, I know ideas are rarely very original. Most ideas come from somewhere or something that you've read or heard about before. And so I went back in to my library, and I found another very well known pathway, which comes from Buddhism. And it's called the Noble Eightfold Path. 

And it has eight things that you need to do in order to live effectively a righteous life and stay on the right path.

Now, there are many other aspects to it, which are all tied up with how you attain a certain level of transcendence, in your life, but fundamentally, they have reduced a good life and righteous life down to eight steps. which we can follow if we are interested in making the effort. And they are as follows. 

So, the first step is what's called Right Understanding. Now, right understanding is the search for wisdom. It's the ability to really penetrate a subject, and to understand something from multiple points of view. It is what happens when we are mindful of our thoughts and the data we receive. And we research into things further and meditate on them to gain real, all round understanding of something. And that takes patience, and observation, and careful listening. And the desire to understand something as comprehensively as possible.

The second step in the Noble Eightfold Path is Right thought. Now, right thought is the discipline of trying to think correctly about things. So often, in this modern world, we get given a snippet of information or gossip, we don't stop to think about it or where it came from, or whether it's true or not, particularly, for most of us, most of the time, we tend to take things on face value. And as a result of that, we can gain a very skewed view of the world. So learning to only accept the right thoughts in our lives, is the first step in filtering the enormous amount of information and rubbish and misinformation that exists around us. And what it does is it really consolidates good quality information that we are taking on board. And by doing that we are really increasing the quality of our thoughts.  When you have good quality information to work with it is then possible to look at how your thoughts are influenced by the information and whether you are looking at the information with the right glasses on. This all leads to a greater and more balanced view of the world around you.

The third step in the Noble Eightfold Path is called Right Speech. Right Speech basically means not telling lies and not talking badly about Other people, not using bad language or gossiping about others, not saying unkind things. It goes along the lines of if you can't really think of anything useful, helpful or nice to say, it's better just to be quiet. 

The fourth step in the Noble Eightfold eightfold path is called Right action. Right action is all about living an honest, honourable and well-meaning life. It's about trying to do the right things whenever you can. So in the modern day, understanding of this, you could say this is reducing your carbon footprint, recycling plastics or reducing your use of plastics, driving an electric car or using public transport. Recycling whenever possible, wearing clothes, and mending clothes, rather than just throwing them when they're out of fashion. It could mean volunteering, and helping people who are less fortunate in you. It could mean living an ethical life, which means that you live your life honestly. And if that's in business, you only do honest business. There are so many aspects of right action, which we can see all around us on a daily basis. 

The fifth step in the Noble Eightfold Path is called Right livelihood. Now, this is an important thing, because quite often, we don't get a choice. How many of us have applied to the companies we really work want to work for, and can't get a job. So we ended up taking an available job at a company that perhaps wasn't our first choice. And might not be doing the sort of things that we agree with necessarily, but we we take that job because it's a good job, and we need the job. So right livelihood means that you shouldn't make anyone's living by doing anything that harms other life forms. So you shouldn't be involved in building bombs or missiles or anything that makes war. If you are a vegan or a Jain this might extend to You shouldn't be working in slaughterhouses or, you know, even farming, where you're farming animals, where they're going to be killed. Even of you are not vegan or a jain you might want to reflect on what you are doing if you work in an industry that kills billions of sentient beings a year.

What it is basically saying is you must find work that doesn't harm other sentient beings. That is what right livelihood means it's about taking an ethical and moral approach to the work that you do. Because if you think about it, you could sort of say, well, it's a good job. I mean, I'm, I'm an expert in missile guidance systems. So I have to do a job that building missiles, but the reality is, what you're doing is killing people. That's what you're doing. You could argue that you are defending millions of lives, but the truth is you are in the killing game and you have to take responsibility for that in your life. And that's not really a good thing to be doing when you think about it. So that's what right livelihood means. There are many other examples of jobs we do which harm others and I would suggest that you take some time to think about where you work and whether you are contributing to the harming of others by doing your work. 

You will highly say that if I don’t do it someone else will, so I might as well have the job, but this would be an example of incorrect thought and incorrect understanding. This is not about what someone else might or might not do, this is about your understanding of who you are - are you happy harming others in your work, how can you be righteous and on the right path if you do so? How can you be a good human if you work in an industry that harms others?

The sixth step in the Noble Eightfold Path is Right Effort - Right effort refers to the amount of effort you have to make in order to lead a good life. Sometimes this will require herculean amounts of effort, and sometimes not. But you have to be aware of what you're trying to achieve in terms of being on the right path. And you need a lot of effort to maintain that concentration of being on the right path rather than just on any old path. So, what it is basically saying is that the eightfold steps require a lot of continuous effort. And if you want to stay on the path, the righteous path and be a righteous person, you will probably have to put a lot of effort into it. If you think of all the steps we are talking about today, there is a lot to take on board and practice every minute of the day.

The seventh step of the Noble Eightfold Path is Right mindfulness. Right mindfulness is to be acutely aware of Things like what your body is telling you. So when you're tired, or you're not feeling very well. It's listening to that, and paying attention to that and, and caring for your body, when it tells you that -  rather than just reaching for a painkiller, or a cup of coffee, or whatever.  It might instead require you to go and take a sleep, for example,, lie in, take some time off, just do something to relax. It’s about listening and  taking care of those signals that your body's telling you about. Another thing that right mindfulness is asking you do is to be acutely aware of your feelings.  So whether you're feeling angry, whether you're feeling sad, whether you're feeling stressed, and to basically take action to alter and change those feelings. So if you're feeling stressed, identify what's causing you that stress, try and remove that stress from your life. If you're feeling angry, try and understand where that anger is coming from, is it coming from you? Is it came from somewhere else? 

Another aspect of mindfulness that you have to be acutely aware of is what you're, what you're thinking, what your thoughts? Are you being negative, or overly positive? Or, you know, what are your thoughts? And how are they influencing you? And how do this thoughts make you feel ? And what is it that your thoughts doing to you? What are they doing to the people around you. So that kind of awareness and mindfulness of your thoughts is really important. 

The words you use to describe things, are important as they can be angry, cruel, snide, sarcastic or they can be kind, loving, gentle and understanding. Choosing what words you are using is an important indication of how you feel or how you are going to make yourself feel. So babe careful with the words that come out of your mouth, if you catch yourself coming out with snide comments, then you are probably not going to make yourself feel very good as a result and you certainly are not going to make anyone else feel good.

It’s worth being conscious of words as they tell a truth over a longer period of time, words that seem to be used a lot by people are a reflection of their inner self. Not only do you have a responsibility not to engage in negative language for your own mental health, but it is worth noting what other people are saying around you too, because their negativity has an effect on you too. So being aware of words and their power to influence you and others is really important.

Mindfulness has become a thing in recent years, and is to a degree, a relaunch of the practice of yogic meditation, where, we take time to be in tune with ourselves and our thoughts. 

And finally, the eighth step in the Noble Eightfold Path is Right concentration. Right concentration is about applying the right amount of effort to all the other aspects of the path on a continued basis. Once you are focused in delivering on all of these elements of the Eightfold Path, you will start to see the problems and issues of the world around you drop away. You will start to see the manipulation and lies and misrepresentation which exists all around you and you will start slowly to become calm, more understanding and generally happier with life and your place in the world. 

So when you look at this eight fold path, you realise, again, it's just good advice. These are eight steps or eight things that you should do. The Bible had 10 things - the 10 commandments of things that you shouldn't do. We seem to like to reduce things to easy, digestible steps, things that we can do or shouldn’t do.

I think the problem we have in today's society is that, there is just so much information floating around, so many different options and opinions, you know, the three steps to success, the three steps to successful family life, do these two things to be fit and healthy. You know, there are literally 1000s of steps that we can do to be better at something. And I think that's part of the problem. I think the problem is we have too many things being thrust upon us. And we don't really do anything for a continuous and concentrated  period of time. And the only way we get better at doing anything is through practice.

You may have come across Malcolm Gladwell who wrote the the tipping point book well he also wrote a book called outliers which was an investigation into why some people are more successful than others despite being equally intelligent and motivated - he  found out that the people that are truly exceptional at what they do in this world, actually practice and work at what they are focussed on, on average, 10,000 hours. This is an Absolutely enormous amount of time. Thats 10 hours in every waking day 7 days a week for 2.7 years. If you think that 10,000 hours of doing long jump or throwing a javelin is pretty impressive, and just think about how much more complex all the things that we've talked about already today are, and the fact that if you just take the Eightfold Path, that's 80,000 worth of work you've got to do.  Whats even more mind blowing is that you don’t get the opportunity to practice these things all day every day, because you might not  come accross situation requiring you to do so constantly. So if we say that you get maybe an hour a day to think about the eightfold path and practice what you are learning , you have to live for 219 years in order to  get to the magic 10,000 hours per step. So if we look at it another way, lets say we are going to live for 80 years and you start on this path when you are 20 you have 60 years to get to the 10,000 hour level, you need to work on yourself and the path for about 4 hours a day for the rest of your life - that’s why one of the steps is called right effort, now you can see its asking for a minimum of 4 hours of consciousness a day for the rest of your life in order to be on the right path. 

So what we're really saying with this is that we know that we need to practice we know that it takes about 10,000 hours. And if you do the maths is basically telling you that we have if we want to be on the right path, and we want to be righteous men, like Samuel L. Jackson, or perhaps not like Samuel L. Jackson, we have to dedicate our lives to doing so. It's not something that we can do for Easter. It's not something we can do in January, after we've overindulged at Christmas. This is about doing something for the rest of our lives. And practising it and perfecting it, and learning from it, and improving ourselves all the time. In a sense this is exactly the same message that Shokunin give out about their dedication to perfecting something in their lives.

So I want you to imagine, this is my view of what the righteous path is, what the right path might be. So imagine the right path is a nice tarmac road, which stretches out in front of you in a straight line as far as the eye can see. And you can start walking forward on this right path. And like one of those video games, the only thing that's required for you to stay on the road and stay straight, is that you do the right things. So you either follow the Eightfold Path, you either follow the advice in my book, or, you find your own sources of guidance on these matters. But you have to do the right thing all the time. And you're always starting to veer off left or right. But, you know, you can keep yourself on the road fairly accurately, by being mindful and doing the right things having the right attitude. 

Now what tends to happen in life is that we get an opportunity to maybe not quite do the right thing. But it's seems worthwhile because we're really going to get an advantage, we may make a load more money, or we may be able to get hold of an opportunity that we wouldn't otherwise have got by just maybe bending the rules slightly. Now, the problem with this path is that it allows you to take one of these steps. So let's just say you've been a little bit naughty, let's say 10% naughty, Well, you can't actually see your divergence from the road because the road just bends 10% for you, so all you can still see is a nice straight tarmac road leading into the future. So you still think you're on the road. So you say to yourself, well that wasn’t so bad, look at me, I succeeded, Im still on the right path and Im better off, so you persuade yourself that maybe you were being a bit strict with yourself and that there is maybe some leeway in these so called right ways of doing things, so the next time an opportunity comes along, you do the same. But now you're 21% off track, because you already 10% off, you've got another 10% on the 10% you've got this compounding effect. So very quickly, what starts to happen is after you've done 23 of these little misdemeanours, you still think you're on the right road because that's all you can say. But in actual fact, you're now travelling East rather than north, you are 90 degrees off and starting to go in circles. And the road doesn't unfortunately go round on one level. So you can't see the footsteps like you can in those cartoons in the desert, when you meet your footsteps again for the first time having gone round in a loop all you see is a nice straight road in front of you. And you think everything's fine. But the reality is, you're not going anywhere, you're not moving forward. You're stuck in a pattern. And it's a negative spiral. And at some stage hopefully you suddenly wake up one day and you go, how did I get here, things are starting to go wrong. And you start to take a good long hard look at yourself and what you've done, and you realise that you haven't really been truly honest with yourself here, you think - I’ve been quite bad really and consistently bad to boot. And so what you do is you pick up a book, or talk to someone about it and you realise, yeah, you know what I've taken some liberties here. I'm going to get myself back up on the main road the correct path again. And the lovely thing about this road, this right path, is that you can, in one step, step off your spiral, onto the right path.

But you're stepping back to the beginning of that road to the point just slightly behind where you started to diverge from the righteous path all those decision ago.  So in some ways, you undo an awful lot of good work by going off on a tangent in your life. And the reason you go backwards is that you have to rebuild trust with everyone and everything around you. So you know, that takes time. So in a way when you leave the path you start to go backwards slowly. But you can, in one step, one decision, decide to go back onto the right path. And from that moment onwards you can start to go forward again. And if you're on that right path, you know, you can do more or less all the things you want to do in life along the way. 

So the lesson or message I'm trying to get across here is that it's very easy to get off the right path, with just small amounts of naughtiness. The worst part is that we very rarely see ourselves going off the path. 

Now, there are some great examples, and you'll see them on YouTube, of these people who have got involved in gangs and criminality and all the sorts of violence that goes with that. These are stories where young men and women suddenly realise that they're going to die, or it's not what they want, or, you know, they've come to the end of something, they can't go any further. And they make a decision. And they step out of that life, and they step into a new one, they consciously  step back onto the right path. And the reason we know about these stories is because they become very inspirational to us. We love stories of people who have got to the end to the very limits, and almost died been shot, or overdosed, or, you know, had nothing left to live for and make these dramatic transformations in their life. 

It's very powerful metaphor for us, and we get a lot out of them. So this is a bit of what we're talking about. These people were in these very negative spirals. They couldn't see any way forward, other than what they were doing while they were in that life. But at some point, they realised that what they were doing was not right, and not what they wanted to do. And they made a change. And almost in one step, they managed to step out of their old life and back onto the right path to transform themselves. And I find those stories, hugely inspirational. 

Another person who I want to leave you with is a very famous Yogi called Chatra Rinpoche. And he said, the following, he said, No matter where you stay—be it a busy place or a solitary retreat the only things that you need to conquer are mind’s five poisons

And your own true enemies, the eight worldly concerns, nothing else,

Five poisons: 

• Ignorance, 
• attachment, 
• aversion, 
• pride, 
• jealousy

Eight worldly concerns: 

• Hope for happiness and fear of suffering. 
• Hope for fame and fear of insignificance. 
• Hope for praise and fear of blame. 
• Hope for gain and fear of loss.

Really, if you think, think about these things, what Chatra Rinpoche has managed to encapsulate in a very short few words, is the reason why we cause ourselves so much suffering in this world. So if there's anything I can say, that could persuade you to step onto the path of the righteous man and to do away with the inequities of the selfish and tyranny of evil men, and to become a shepherd to help those people around you through the valley of darkness, and to become your brother's keeper, and to become a finder of lost children. It would be the things we have discussed today.

I wish you well my friends because that is what life is about. And life is the path of a righteous man, and as shokunin of life it is a life long journey to becoming a good human.

Thank you for listening and I hope you enjoy these podcasts as much as I enjoy making them, please get the word out to other people that you think might be interested or benefit from them by sharing them on social media.

In the meantime thank you to those of you who have kindly donated to the  podcast. It costs about £25 a month to host the show and I support that myself at the moment. I am hoping that at some stage it will become self funding through the generosity of its listeners. So if you enjoy listening to the podcasts, maybe consider buying me a coffee and I will put your donation towards the show.

Thank you and I look forward to the next time we meet.