Saturday 10 July 2010

How do we appear to cafe customers & hoteliers?

World peace cafes are supposed to be helping, but if their is disharmony in a centre then non Buddhists will come to know of it & it will be embarrassing for Buddhism & the tradition. When people who worked at cafes suddenly vanish (given a months notice to leave the centre for a small transgression - small in the eyes of worldly people certainly) the regulars will ask why, where have they gone? At this point the cafe staff will have to tell a lie or divert the conversation. If someone is a regular at the cafe and this keeps happening they will see through it. Worldly people call a spade a spade. Therefore its important to make the centres harmonious & happy. This disharmony has to stop now because once the general public latch on they wont keep a dignified silence in order to protect the reputation of the tradition like we do.

The answer isn't to tell residents to be quiet & hide these things but to actually remove this disharmony from the centres. You cannot remove disharmony by kicking people out either because new people then come & develop the same grievances because they are treated the same way as the previous ones & generate the same reaction.

Having a think tank to tackle issues such as this needs to be a priority within the organisation. Admin needs to look at cases of disgruntled former residents & find out what is at the heart of these repeating patterns & if anything can be done to reduce the amount this is happening. I believe any group of people living together need a way to communicate & facilitate fizzling out these feuds by negotiation & communication rather than being left to fester in their rooms not being able to talk to anyone. Communication is so important in families, friendships & people living together. The fact that I cannot share an idea such as this for example shows the fear of communication that exists in community residents and long term visitors. Yet an idea such this could be the start of things becoming so happy & harmonious.

Having been an administrative team member myself & attended various meetings I noticed a significant avoidance at admin meetings to talk about anything 'negative' and that being surrounded by senior Buddhists it would be easy to just spend whole meetings focusing on the things that are going well. Ie if you made a comment about how well the Dharma is spreading you would induce bliss and you just didn't want to say about any obstacles or anything that is going wrong as you feel like you are going to deflate everyone & the atmosphere. But removing obstacles is what we will do when we are a Buddha. We will become just like Dorje Shugden. It is a positive activity & very important. It means that our centres are like a well functioning vehicle rather than a car that has breakages that we choose not to fix. Why endure the hardships of a gearbox that is being difficult & never fixing it when one can simply with a few tweaks make a great future for your driving.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Anonymous comments are avaliable but if reference is made to New Kadampa Tradition only positive, constructive posts will be approved by the moderator. This is a website to discuss ideas for the removal of obstacles not for negative venting, personal attacks or talk of giving up. Constructive comment for example can be saying what would work and how things could be done.