Friendship is the key to changing the world

Each week at MAPLE, one resident or apprentice presents their perspective on what MAPLE’s mission is, and how it relates to what’s truly important. This week I felt inspired to write my own version, which goes as follows.

The world is brought into existence by cooperation. All the ways that humans have shaped this world — both positively and negatively — are based on cooperation.

Therefore mastering cooperation is the key to positively affecting the world.

At MAPLE, we teach cooperation by teaching the following skills:

• Compassion: the ability to cooperate with all beings
• Power: the ability get all beings to cooperate with you
• Wisdom: the ability to cooperate beyond ideologies

In service of developing these skills, we divide our time and space into two activities:

• Awakening (sutra study, chanting, formal meditation practice, interviews with the teacher) is about subtracting from what’s already there. We cut through our personal ideologies, our sense of separateness, and our attachments, all of which are hindrances to cooperation.
• Responsibility (cooking, cleaning, gardening, accounting, etc) is about adding to what’s already there. By practicing getting simple things done as a team, we create beneficial new patterns that are compatible with cooperation.

Underneath all of this is the following: the real basis for all cooperation is friendship. Underneath the wisdom/love/power triad and the awakening/responsibility duo is just this: simple, ordinary, personal friendship.

On what basis can we make friends with those with whom we seem to have nothing in common? It is said that enlightenment is that which is common to all beings, and so is the ultimate basis for true friendship.