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A friend of mine sells belly-dancing related accessories. In the small Wisconsin town where she works, a coffee shop offered to display some of her wares. So she set up a lovely array, including candles, postcards, singing bowls, bracelets, and a couple of statues.

For a time, all was well at the coffee shop. And then the owner’s mother walked in one day, saw the two statues, and pointed at one of them. It was a statue of the Buddha. One of those round-bellied statues where he’s calmly meditating.

“It’s got to go,” the woman insisted. “We can’t have a Buddha statue in here! What are the people in this good Christian town going to think?” (No offense to Christianity here — it was simply the nature of her remark as I heard reported.)

So Buddha (never claiming to be a God anyway, and likely rather amused at people making statues of him) was picked up, put in the backseat of the car, and taken home. He was probably chuckling the whole way.

That left only one statue at the coffee shop, prominently displayed. And who, you might ask, did this statue depict?

Why, Shiva, of course.

Now, for those of you not familiar with Shiva, we’re talking about a Hindu God whose name translates literally as ‘Auspicious One’. He is portrayed in this particular statue with a third eye whose piercing gaze reduces desire to dust, and he is dancing upon the body of the demon of ignorance.

Pretty cool guy. Except that he is also popularly known as ‘The Destroyer’. Although this isn’t really a very good description of his role, around here it’s quite likely that anyone who recognized the statue might wonder what the Destroyer of the Universe was doing perched in a small-town coffee shop. You’d think that if you were going to oust the peaceful Buddha, you’d also oust the more infamous Shiva.

Yes, even the Gods are subject to discrimination. Perhaps an equal-rights program is in order.

This is a good reminder to examine our own discrimination. Not just our more overt acts of discrimination, but the subtle discrimination our minds are constantly engaged in. Just like the case of the two gods, discrimination is always based on unexamined reactions. If we observe our mind’s activity, this is how we move throughout our lives – our minds are constantly replacing the ‘real world’ with a mock-up, crafted out of our beliefs and suppositions.

Allowing our innate awareness to do what it does naturally, it becomes like Shiva’s third eye, piercing clearly into the true nature of things. Only then can we become free of discrimination.

We don’t achieve this by attempting to eradicate discrimination from our minds. All that is required is that we observe – observe our discrimination forming in our minds. You need not do anything with the discrimination — all that is asked is that you observe, and see what happens from there.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 7th, 2008 at 3:28 pm and is filed under Quick Thoughts. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will be queued for moderation and posted as quickly as possible.