An Example of the Why and How of Reasoning

2015-01-07

One of the participants in the online group gave an excellent observation yesterday about dealing with deeply felt negativity, anger and rage. The negativity was caused by noticing a connection between a newspaper story and the unexpected death of his daughter’s 5 year old bulldog.  The connection was about dog treats from China being sold in the US, dog treats that were and are known to cause kidney failure and death in dogs.

The clarity of this participants report allowed me to make the following response which gives an example of how and why we need to develop the skill of reasoning:

“T” has put a lot of very rich and useful material into his post. It's especially meaningful for me, as I had the opportunity to meet Rosie the bulldog via Skype. I also used to help raise bulldogs for sale while living with a girlfriend in Missouri, and I know how attached owners can become to their pets. In a very real way the term "pet" ceases to apply as the animals become part of the family. So strong feelings about people profiting from mislabeled and poisonous dog treats is understandable... and then some.

That said, this is a perfect opportunity to employ reason. Why? Because anger, resentment and rage will harm us, our children, and those around us; without serving any positive purpose. One might think that a positive outcome could come from this rage by directing it toward activity to stop the sale of such products. But efforts to stop such sales can be motivated more effectively by compassion for dogs, without the need to poison our systems with negativity.

Part of the process of reasoning is to clearly see that poisoning our own mind and body, and by setting an example, poisoning the bodies and minds of our children with negativity and rage, is actually worse than selling tainted dog treats… for a number of reasons.

• First, as mentioned above, it only hurts us, not the "sellers".
• Second, we don't know the whole story of the "sellers". Are they the unscrupulous people we assume them to be. Or are they simply trying to feed their families as best they can. Do they know the harm that they are causing? Are they conscious... or simply acting in a mechanical and unconscious way?
• Third, do we take this event at face value, as something that is only happening in world 48? Or is it possible that this is our accumulated karma from a past life; that this is a karmic balancing event coming from world 24? Do we have the ‘right’ to get mad? Or should we be grateful that we are finally experiencing a type of pain and harm that we may have caused others sometime in the past.
• Fourth, do we detect any egoic element in ourselves while buying dog treats? …as opposed to only buying what we know to be healthy food for our dogs.
• Fifth, did we ignore some kind of indication from conscience when buying these treats? If so, why?
• Sixth, is it possible that our anger and rage isn’t really about the sellers, or our dog, or even our children, but about us. Is it possible that we are just conveniently using this situation to feel good, righteous, judgmental, and superior to ‘lesser beings’?

These six lines of reasoning hardly scratch the surface of what’s possible. But already we begin to see a linking pattern as one line of reasoning leads to another, deeper line. And generally the deeper we go, the more uncomfortable it gets. To see that our negativity hurts us is not really all that hard to understand. To be compassionate toward the sellers is harder. To see that this might be our karma is harder still, but at least that was caused by another lifetime and we can maintain that we aren’t like that now. But to honestly confront our own present time egoic culpability, ignoring of conscience, or even worse, exploiting the situation for our own egoic pleasure is not so easy.

But it’s this kind of reasoning that allows us to process the anger, rage and negativity without expression or repression. It allows us to use the situation for real transformation.