Ethan Nichtern
Editor’s Note: We are all weary commuters in search of the road that leads home, restlessly seeking what it turns out we already have. The metaphor is not at all new, but Ethan Nichtern’s approach to exploring the road map of the Buddhist path feels original and alive. Nichtern, a senior teacher or Shastri in the Shambhala tradition, has written a new book brimming with freshness, new angles of perspective, and a provocative and culturally relevant lens through which to see this map of the road home.
Our lives and societies certainly generate a lot of bad news for anyone brave enough to pay attention. It’s a mark of great maturity to realize that we can’t become properly optimistic about life, and can’t take responsibility for the state of the world, until we’re willing to very honestly face the confused side of our situation. This honesty is where the road home has to begin. The historical Buddha first taught about the truth of dissatisfaction that comes from not knowing how to deal with our own mind to a group of intensely depressed spiritual seekers who were literally torturing themselves in the pursuit of happiness.
Given this context, I’ve always thought that the Buddha’s description of our dissatisfaction with the commute through life was simply meant to create a moment of honesty and relief in which his students could admit that they were having a hard time. This is my favorite phrasing of the first noble truth: It’s always okay to admit you are struggling. Why are we struggling so much? To reinterpret the second noble truth in the language of home: people struggle because we don’t know where we belong, and we always assume that home lies somewhere other than here and now, a mistake that sets us on an exhausting commute.
