I get up in the middle of the night for a glass of water, pad into the kitchen, switch on the light, and there it is, perched on a cold burner of the stove. My heart jolts. The cockroach freezes like a fugitive caught under a police helicopter's search beam-and then hurls itself into action, its six tiny legs pumping furiously as it scurries for cover. Unfortunately, this is not a rare happening; soon after I moved into this apartment, I discovered that it came with an all-too-lively problem.
Something primal overwhelms me and I want to kill it, this nasty little invader of my space. Instead, I pause and think. Buddhism is all about becoming more aware. If William Blake could see a world in a grain of sand, why can't I find an object for contemplation in this humble bug?
If there's one thing I've learned from years of practice, it's that the challenge is not about figuring out how to reach some distant exotic nirvana. It's about getting better at dealing with moral quandaries, great and small. And this-believe it or not-is one of those times. Should I kill the bug or let it live? I'm the emperor of my kitchen: thumb up or down?
My tingling Buddhist “spidey sense” tells me that something about this situation deserves a deeper inquiry. When I regard this roach, I'm not calmly thinking, Hmm, here's a minor household situation that might need to be dealt with. No-I'm flooded with an intense jolt of anger and revulsion. I'm thinking, How dare you invade my safe kitchen, you malicious little bastard!
When anger arises, it's always a good idea to question what's going on inside, rather than out. First of all, because I have chosen to occupy this apartment, is it inherently mine? Why is it my space, as opposed to the roach's? And why do I believe this little creature is threatening me? I even impute a malicious streak to it, as if it were inherently both vermin-noxious and objectionable-and villain.
When I look at things from the roach's side, I see the wrongness of my view. This bug doesn't wish me harm. It came out of the darkness into an open space, just seeking a bit of food, the satisfaction of its most basic needs. Then the light came on and a huge monster was standing there! From the roach's point of view, I'm the menace; I'm the potential cause of suffering.
I think about sharks. I fervently with I never seen the movie Jaws. I can never swim in the ocean without imagining (dun-dun, dun-dun) some deadly beast rising toward me from the depths. However, while writing an article about a controversy over shark fishing tournaments, I learned something that surprised me. Guess how many people are killed, on average, by sharks each year worldwide? Fewer than six. How many sharks are killed by humans? Somewhere between 40,000,000 – 100,000,000! Yet, as we plunge into these creatures' native habitats, we're the ones who are afraid.
And when I probe my wrath toward the roach, I find-as I do with most anger-that it's rooted in fear. Pretty odd. Though my chances of getting bitten by a shark are miniscule, at least it's possible. But no cockroach has ever bitten off a human's leg. So what am I afraid of?
I see myself as the center of the universe. I believe other beings are out to harm me. I impute all sorts of meaning where it doesn't exist. For me and for the rest of the human race, such distorted perceptions cause a huge amount of damage.
For example, they lead to a twisted view of humanity's place in the world's ecology. They enable a callous attitude toward animals, which results in horrors like factory farming, in which we convince ourselves that animals can be treated as if they were just inanimate industrial products.
Written By: Gabriel Cohen for the Global Conservation Group
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