Save A Life

In Today's Karma Builder: We Are Going To Explore What It Is To Save A Real Life And Increase Our Awareness For Living Things.

• Karmic Muscle Group: Compassion, Awareness, Loving Kindness
• Materials: a living creature that is marked for death like worms used for bait
• Time Requirements: One hour or more

Training Note:  This exercise must done with care.  Releasing certain fish into streams can cause ecological disaster.  This is particularly true with carp and other fish sold live at Asian food stores.   WARNING: It is very important that you DO NOT release creatures into the natural environment that do not belong in the local ecosystem.  Furthermore, releasing an animal like a worm in an environment that is inhospitable (like dry sand) or soil made toxic by oil or other poisons will kill the creature and create the exact opposite karmic consequence that you are trying to produce.   The point here is to take responsibility for saving a very real life.  To think about that life and to act with the clear intention of saving life.  This is not a hypothetical exercise.   Insects found in houses like flies that you might ordinarily kill as pests are perfect for this exercise and precisely the type of being that should be rescued from certain death and released outside - in the spring and summer, but not in the winter in a cold climate.
     If you have doubts about the creature(s) being released, DO NOT DO THIS EXERCISE.
The Exercise: Save A Life

1. Go to a store that sells bait such as worms or crickets.  The point is to buy creatures that are marked for death.
2. Buy some of these creatures and take them to a suitable natural environment for them and release them.  Worms can be released in a garden provided that the soil is suitable for worms.  Crickets can be released outside nearly anywhere, but should be only released outdoors if the temperature supports their lives.  Putting crickets out side in snow will kill them.
3. An alternative practice would be take insects out of your home that would otherwise be killed during cleaning.  Spiders are particularly vulnerable to death by cleaning.
4. Let the creatures go hopefully in a place that will be healthy and beneficial for them.
5. Spend 3 full minutes meditating on the very real lives that you have just saved.  These are beings that move and have families just like you.  Why do you consider them inconsequential when their lives are the same as yours?   Notice the temptation to consider humans more important than other life.  What is the karma of that, do you suppose?

Karmic Benefits:

1. Wake Up To The World Of Living Things: life is everywhere and we are quite careless around it.  It is bad enough that we maliciously end life, but way more living beings are killed by human activity than are even noticed by the average human being.  Waking up to the living world feels inconvenient even though the opposite is true.  Not taking our place as a source of nurture in the world is not just killing most living things - it is killing us.  Like a virus, we are destroying our own host.  The only way to stop this is to wake up.  To do this requires individual awareness and action.
2. Who Is Responsible For Life - You Are:  humans are incredible dealers of death.  We wipe out whole species and even kill each other by the thousands.  Why?  The answer is ignorance.  We simply refuse to wake up to life and the systems of the natural world.  When you stop to think about it, which is precisely what this exercise is about, you suddenly see the human race as an incredibly blind and dangerous thing - especially if you are an animal.  We are the poisonous snakes that all animals fear.
3. Notice The Killing That You Do Out Of Ignorance:  human beings kill without even knowing that they are doing it.  It is inevitable.  It impossible to drive a car a mile in the summer without killing thousands of creatures.  We actually deliberately blind ourselves to this so that we do not have to be responsible for the killing we do.   Life is life until it is taken or expires.
4. Notice How You Are Barely Aware Of The Life Around You:  your lack of awareness of living things makes you a threat to and a burden on the biosphere. Living beings lose their lives simply because you are unconscious.  Is that how you really want to live?  Is a non-human  living thing simply an inconvenience?  History shows us horrific examples of what happens when human beings are the creatures whose lives are considered inconsequential.  We consider this genocide.  Why are we so removed from the lives of other beings?  Is it a fact of life or blindness that has us be so obtuse?

About The Author

David Kenyon is a long-time practicing Tibetan Buddhist practitioner of the Kagyu lineage and formerly, a martial arts instructor in Aikido tradition.  He is president of a holistic healing school in St. Louis, Missouri.