Career Success

Rama emphasized two essential points of spiritual practice, meditation and career. He felt that it's critical for us to meditate each day to clear our minds. Career is what we do with the rest of our time. Most people view career as what they have to do to get money. Or if they are a student, they view school as what they have to do to graduate. From a Buddhist perspective, this means that our careers are just another form of suffering.

Rama preferred to view career success as a means to spiritual growth. This is very important because those of us who live in the west spend so much of our time working on our career. Each day we spend time at work, time commuting, time getting ready for work. If we can use this time to advance our spiritual practice then we will progress much more quickly than if we think of this as downtime.

We can be sweeping a floor in a factory. Think of the best way to sweep the floor. What is the best pattern to use to sweep the area most efficiently? When we are sweeping we should be focused on what we are doing and how our body is moving. Can we move more efficiently? Can we sweep in a way that avoids injury?

This is called mindfulness. But there are lots of things that we can do with any task to enhance our practice. When we are meeting with people are we listening to what they are saying? And can we set aside our preconceived notions, our fears and our attachments to deal with each person in a professional manner.

Rama taught Tantric Buddhism. The vehicle for tantra is the world around us. Working in the world forces us to deal with difficult parts of ourselves that we would otherwise like to ignore. He felt that tantric practice is best suited for Americans and westerners.

In Asia, Buddhism was normally practiced in a monastery. He felt that the cultural conditioning in America made it more comfortable for people to have their own place to live, their own space. And in order to pay the bills we need to have an income. So in addition to supporting our practice, our career should provide us with enough income to pay the bills, give us the ability to help others and allow us to have some fun.

While we can use any career to advance our practice, Rama generally recommended computer science as a practical option for most people. He recommended computer science primarily because he felt that programming and other computer occupations required us to use our minds in ways that were very similar to traditional Buddhist practices. So for example, the monks in a monastery might spend many hours focusing on an image of a deity in order to create a sand mandala or thangka. Likewise, a programmer needs to hold program routines and data structures in their mind as they code. So developing software can be a form of meditation very similar to traditional Buddhist practices.

Rama also pointed out that traditional Buddhist practice should prepare a person well for working in the computer field. Because meditation is very structured, a person who has spent many lives practicing spirituality should be able to understand programming. There may be a struggle initially because an individual may have been conditioned when they were young that they aren't good at math, that computer stuff is boring or even that computer programming is somehow not spiritual. And so it can be challenging to overcome these obstacles to learn a computer skill. However, the act of overcoming the conditioning that we have been taught in order to improve our lives, is itself a part of spiritual practice. And when we learn about computer structures we are actually awakening in our minds the skills of meditation that we have developed in prior lives.

And finally, computer jobs tend to pay well and generally have a good working environment. So Rama encouraged his students to foster a career in the computer field and to use that career to improve their lives. He felt that career success meant that our career should advance our mental state and provide us the money that we need to live. Once again, the money is not the primary goal but it is an essential component because we don't want to be stressed about money all of the time. Buddhists do not work to get paid, they work to improve themselves.