If you ask someone, anyone, what is the most important thing to them, the usual answer is health. With health, one may accomplish anything within one’s capability. Without health, the only thing one works on and strives for is getting it back. Of course there are desperate situations, where you have lost your health, and are for example, terminal, and then you ask yourself what you want to do with your final days. But, whenever there is a chance of recovery, we go for it.
Some people do not answer health as their first priority. These are people who have never lost it or had it in jeopardy. There is a saying, “You don’t know what you had until you lose it”, referring to a lost love or something romantic. It is much more true about health. People born with perfect health who have never been seriously threatened by injury or illness may not have any conception of how valuable it is. This is especially true for young people who may not have even seen their parents suffer ill health. They simply have no experience with it.
The other end of the spectrum are those who are chronically ill and have always been that way. They have never experienced the exhilaration of good health, and don’t have the same longing for it that those who have had it and lost it have. If you’ve never been to
After people have come to the conclusion that health is the most important thing, the obvious question is “What is second?” Many answers come up, depending on the person, and what they have had and lost and possibly regained. “Prosperity” might be one, and “A good family” or “A good spouse” might be another. A few people give religious answers. Some have a very specific goal that has eluded them, such as the return of a prodigal child or relationship, or a variant on health, such as “Lack of depression”.
Why is health an undisputed number one, and number two up for grabs? Health is number one because it is the chief enabler, as well as a provider of good feelings, in and of itself. When you are healthy, your endorphins, serotonin, and dopamine are up, which are the pleasure and reward chemicals that are the mechanism we use for making decisions, the neurotransmitters that condition our brain to seek activities that produce more of the same. They are the basis for our motivation. But besides a direct squirt of pleasure in the brain, health makes the accomplishment of everything else not impossible. A complete lack of health makes it impossible to get anything else done, and, returning to the neurochemical side, saps our motivation to do much of anything. Lack of health is a depressant, unless of course it serves to strongly motivate you to get it back.
This second side of health is a clue as to what should be the second on our list of things to wish for. What else makes it possible for us to accomplish things? Don’t say, “Money”, because money only allows us to buy things and services. It does not allow us to accomplish things ourselves, except perhaps by providing more time. Often money comes with a catch, having to work for it, or at least preserve it, that uses up much time. At this point I want to throw in the topic of this writing: order.
Order means that you have things in your life put in some efficient organization. Order means your mind is focused. Order means your possessions are in expedient places. Order means your schedule is under control. Order means everything is orderly. And what is the real utility of order – it is again a huge enabler. It makes it possible to get things accomplished.
Order doesn’t run pleasure neurotransmitters into your brain’s cortex, like health does, unless you have been trained to enjoy it. That’s the same mechanism we have to provide reinforcement for anything else in life. You don’t like school unless you have been trained, or specifically, your neural nets have been trained to produce “happy chemicals” in your brain when you go to school, think of school, or are reminded of school. How that happens is pretty obvious to everybody, so there is no need to repeat it here. Order is the same. It is not an intrinsic pleasure source, like food, sex and affection. It is simply a trained source of pleasure, if indeed it is one. However, this has little to do with whether or not it is an enabler of other capabilities in life.
For those who are already orderly, and who have as well experienced disorder for significant periods in their life, these statements about order enabling other accomplishments do not need clarification. But many people probably are in the extreme situations – they have always, since childhood training, been orderly and don’t know disorder, or, they have always, because of lack of childhood training, never been orderly. So here I will discuss it.
Accomplishments often mean “putting something somewhere”. Like putting facts into your brain and then putting them down on a series of examination papers – which is the accomplishment of education. Like putting money into a bank account – which is the accomplishment of wealth. Like putting glycogen into your muscles and putting yourself across a finish line – which is athletics. Life is all about moving material and intangible objects into some place. Eating is simply putting edibles into your mouth. And so on.
If you want to put something somewhere, you have to have access to it. If you have order in your life, in your mind, in your thoughts, in your actions, you can more quickly and more effectively get something and put it somewhere. People who have trouble getting anything done typically have little order in some or all of the aspects of their lives.
If you don’t have order in your activities or your schedule, it’s hard to hold a job or to complete your education. If you don’t have order in your finances, it’s hard to make investments or save money or pay off debts. If you don’t have order in your paperwork at home, it’s hard to file taxes or get government approval for something. If you don’t have order in your food supplies, you lose things through spoiling. If you don’t have order in your home, you can’t find things easily, and you have a hard time maintaining cleanliness. Cleanliness is a type of order, meaning that dirt and other debris is in their places, i.e., the trash pile. Order in eating means getting the nutrition you need. Order, or in other terms good organization, is the key to doing almost anything at all.
How does that connect to SGI and Nichiren Buddhism? The mind is a place that needs ordering, perhaps more than many other ones. But you can’t just go through your cortex, medulla, amygdala, hypothalamus, and just straighten them out. Something can be done with education, but the activity in the brain is often simply incoherent. Lots of stuff is going on at any one time. Chanting quiets down a lot of this, and allows orderly thought to occur.
People who are not familiar with chanting and other forms of meditation often laugh at the claims that SGIers make about having victory in some aspect of life, resulting from chanting. That is because they simply do not understand that mental order, keeping your thoughts in line and in focus on what it is you need to do, is a tremendous advantage in accomplishing everything.
There is other training that works on focusing your attention and thereby your activity. Certainly, military training stresses getting important things done briskly and properly, and repetitive exercises in doing various activities reinforces the mind’s order here. Repetition is a great teacher. But for more amorphous tasks, where you have to think about solving a problem, quieting the parts of the mind that are not concerned with this task is a great advantage. That is why chanting works, because it produces order, and order is second only to health, in my humble opinion, in getting things done.
Test it yourself. Try and work with a totally messy desktop, with hundreds of miscellaneous papers, notes, books, magazines and other information objects strewn about. See how that goes for a week. Then take some time off and clean it off. Organize everything into orderly files. Then try to accomplish something in that environment. After the two weeks you should have no doubt as to the advantages of order. Then, if you make the leap from desk to mind, you should appreciate chanting.
