Revd Chris McDermott, Lead Chaplain for the University of Sussex

We continue the series of wellbeing blogs taking our departure from a series of precepts taken from the Buddhist tradition which we read universally as descriptions of what we are at our best as human beings.

The fifth precept reads: ‘Proceed clearly. Do not cloud the mind.’

This precept is taken by some (not all) as a prohibition against drinking alcohol or using drugs. But its essence is about the value of approaching life with clarity of mind. This clarity may not be impaired by excessive drinking or drug use only but by other ‘intoxicants’ that cloud judgement and perception as well.  

A recent article in the New York Times highlights the inordinate over-identifying with a group to the extent that belonging overwhelms our capacity to see clearly through misinformation. Max Fisher stresses the importance of negotiating the "era of endemic misinformation" and cites a growing body of evidence that “directional motivations to defend or support some group identity or existing belief, and messages from other people and political elites” – facilitated by social media – impairs cognitive abilities and judgement.

To what extent, regardless of our best intentions, do we surrender critical awareness and judgment to support the view of ‘our tribe’? That does not mean that if we are alert to the influences of ‘group think’ that we will all arrive at some kind of consensus around facts. We won’t. But the ensuing dialogue and discourse will have a different quality.

Sometimes it may be our tendency to avoid difficult subjects will cloud the judgement. Rather than face the reality of a conflict, we resist direct engagement or we take refuge in the tale of our own victimisation and the essential badness of the other person(s).

Or there is the subject of death and dying and our own impermanence. Nothing like this subject to raise the spectre of our own vulnerability and mortality. The charity Dying Matters sponsored this week as Dying Matters Awareness Week. I was not surprised that an online space marking the week, offering some space for reflection on and acknowledging losses over the past year – whether or not related to Covid – drew no takers. Perhaps it was not relevant to many people or it did not scratch where people were really feeling an existential itch. But discomfort with the subject may also be a factor.

Death and dying are often themes we shove to the periphery of our awareness or marginalise to places that are no-go areas for conversation. But charities like Dying Matters and groups hosting ‘death cafes’ that encourage open discussions around the theme seek to normalise such conversations. The capacity for negotiating our way through the cloud of grief and loss, whether our own or in our attempt to support others, is enhanced when we are willing to confront the reality of our own and others’ mortality. Perhaps here, it will be a matter of proceeding more constructively than with some pristine clarity. But it may also be claimed that facing the uncomfortable realities of death – our own and others' – offers more clarity and a positive sense of vitality and joy of living.

The poet Mary Oliver expresses this note of joie de vivre in her poem, ‘When Death Comes’:

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox;

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

Whatever intoxicant gets in the way of our ‘proceeding with clarity’ – literal excesses, addictions to the habit of ‘group think’ that clouds our judgement and obscures the world of facts, or the avoidance of difficult but important life challenges – ditch it if you can. And embrace your life ‘like a bride married to amazement’ or a ‘bridegroom taking the world in [their] arms’.

And proceed with an unclouded mind – or at least with a bit more clarity.