We Are All Stars

“We are all playing a leading role, having taken our place in this trouble-filled saha world to act out the drama of kosen-rufu.” 

• President Ikeda, The Wisdom of the Lotus Sutra, Volume 1, p. 129.

After reading this passage,  I asked myself, “how do humans choose their characters?” I saw how each of us is playing the part of our own drama, our play.  In Buddhism it is believed that we have chosen our current existence with all of its obstacles and mishaps.  We have chosen to live in this world in order to transform and help others to transform.  Evolution and transformation is our ultimate purpose.  

Florescent Universe by CMS 2011

Still, I have heard several friends tell me that they cannot control their thoughts.  The idea that we are not our thoughts seemed very foreign to them.  I began to wonder if symptoms of mental illness are the cause of the random, negative thoughts or if years of the perpetuation of negative, self-defeating thoughts are actually the cause of mental illness.  Is it possible that the brain’s wiring and ability to produce the appropriate chemicals could be affected by repeated and perpetual negative thinking?  I ask this because we are living in an age where mental illness seems an epidemic.  More and more children are put on drugs to control their outbursts and behaviors.  More and more adults are succumbing to depression and other related illnesses like bi-polar disorder, which appears to need life-long medical treatment.

And there are other forms of epidemic mental illness, for instance, the ability to choose to murder hundreds of thousands of people rather than to come from a place of peace to have rational conversations.  The strike first, talk second, murder doesn’t matter if it’s called war mentality is also epidemic.  Unfortunately, this epidemic or drama has been going on since biblical days.  People have suffered from the insane illusion that killing is okay as long as it is a means to an end.  Unfortunately so many returning soldiers are also diagnosed with PTS disorders and are prescribed medications to deal with the stress of returning home to an environment where every noise in the night is likely not a bomb going off.  What is the drama or play that we as a collective are creating that puts young women and men in harms-way in order to prove a point or to make more money for the very wealthy or to secure “our” interests in regions we do not belong in anyway?  How can we as a collective change this fear based drama that dooms us to repeated misery?

Tree Reaching by CMS 2011

I think starting with the dramas we create in our own homes and heads might be a very good place to start. I am not a psychiatrist nor a doctor of any kind.  I am merely a person who questions and observes.  I question whether drugs, which have so many side-effects, can actually solve people’s problems.  I wonder if taking spoonfuls of happy thoughts, through chanting, meditation and exercise, is a better way to cure the blues.  I have known people who seemed completely unable to perceive anything positive. One friend, told another friend, Amy, that she would never get married and that no one would ever love her.  Amy told this friend that she would never find a husband with that attitude.  Consequently, that friend never found a husband or had the child she said she could never have. How are we manifesting exactly what we think will happen?  How do we change from manifesting our worst fears to living our most beautiful dreams?

Lotus Flower by CMS 2011

I may not be a doctor, but I am an actor and have transformed inside and out on stage and on camera to manifest the emotions and the moments the scenes needed to tell the story the directors envisioned.  Perhaps we are all the directors, the actors and the writers for the scenes of our lives.  I am also a screenwriter and have used the skill of visualizing how I’d like a scene to go, not only on the page but in my “real” life.  Once, I was afraid of the potential anger my friend might have when I asked her to move out of my apartment.  I saw the anger very clearly.  I chanted, “Nam Myoho Renge Kyo” to clear my mind of negative, fearful thoughts.  While chanting, I began to feel better.  I then began visualizing the outcome I desired, a calm, rational, sincere conversation.  I began to feel more and more certain that there would be a positive outcome to our discussion. I was relieved and filled with gratitude when this vision of peace is what I manifested that day.  

If I had entered that conversation with the fear and resentment that I previously felt, my fears would have manifested.  I knew I had to speak from a place of love and respect, and that this place had to be created by me.  The friend I had to have this conversation with also suffers from a mental illness, so I had that fear to deal with as well.  But I was able to overcome not only my own fundamental darkness that day, but possibly her fundamental darkness as well.  And that is the tip of the ice-berg of the power of chanting.

Blurry Road by CMS 2011

How can we as a society, as individual cities, states, countries and continents come together with our collective dysfunctional characters to instead choose peaceful roles, leaving the fundamental darkness at the door?  If the political figures we choose to elect could come to the table of dialogue from a place of truth and compassion and ultimately true power rather than fear, we may begin to see the end of one form of collective mental illness, war.  And aren’t the atrocities that plague the world in the form of genocide, human female mutilation, mass killings and beheadings, all the horrible things that happen in the world, even treating animals like machines and torturing and killing eight billion of these innocent creatures in the United States alone, aren’t these all symptoms of mass mental illness?  To quote a dear friend, “The inmates are running the asylum.”  The people of the world have allowed people suffering with severe mental illnesses to be the leaders of society for far too long. Isn’t it time we put stock in commodities that actually have a chance to yield the positive, empowered, abundant results we desire?

I realized when dealing with my own drama about asking my friend to move, I had to change the character, I was choosing to play, from one of stress and fear and resignation to one empowered with truth and emblazoned with the light of compassion.  During rehearsals, actors are constantly refining their characters, questioning their motives and the inner obstacles to that character’s success.  Perhaps these same skills can be used to refine and fine-tune our own characters in the world as well.  If the world is all a stage, then let us play our best characters in this amazing production.  Let us overcome every obstacle to our enlightenment with courage and compassion.  Let us lift our hearts and our hands to help others and thereby help ourselves, for as the energy of each individual transforms and is raised to a higher consciousness, so to is the consciousness of all of creation.