How to be a Peacock in the Social Media Jungle

Taking poison as medicine.

Photo by Ricardo Porto on Unsplash

The Tibetan Buddhist tradition holds that the cause of a peacock’s brilliant plumage is feeding on poisonous plants found in the jungle. The famous mind training text by Dharmarakṣita, entitled The Discus (Mtshons cha ‘khor lo) begins:

When peafowl roam the jungle strong poison,

even though there may be beautiful medicinal gardens,

those are not enjoyed by the flock of peafowl,

instead the peafowl are nourished by the essence of strong poison.

In the same way, when the heroic enter the jungle of saṃsāra,

even though there may be beautiful gardens of happiness and wellbeing,

the heroic are not attached,

heroic beings are nourished in the jungle of saṃsara.

Social media is a jungle of three poisons. The question before us today is how does the practitioner of the bodhisattva path deal with the toxicity rampant in social media and in modern society in general? Here on Substack, erstwhile Dharma “experts” and “Awakening” coaches mainly seem to focus on making samsara a more comfortable place, less toxic, less miserable, to make one a better samsarin. For the practitioner of the bodhisattva path, the three poisons are transformed into medicine—compassion, patience, and wisdom—medicine which removes the jaundice of our afflicted vision and allows us to see samsara as it truly is.

The Dharma taught by the Buddha was not taught to make one more comfortable in samsara. The Dharma was taught by the Buddha to expose the flaws of samsara in order to cause us to have an experience of revulsion for continued samsaric existence, to show us that samsara is uncomfortable and that we are suffering, whether we know it or not. But this revulsion is not a means to address the question of “How can I cope with my bullshit job that I am going to lose to AI in six months.” The Buddha did not teach the Dharma to reduce our stress, make us more productive and efficient cogs in corporate machinery of neoliberalism. Finally, the Buddha also taught us that we cannot escape samsara and reject it for nirvana, engage in sensory withdrawal (pratyahara) to cause the cessation of the fluctuation of the citta as advocated by the Yoga Sūtras,¹ nor find a state of ataraxia, as lauded by the Stoics.

So what does it mean to be nourished in the jungles of samsara, if we are not trying optimize our samsara or flee from it? It means facing the discomfort of samsara’s three poisons, recognizing the three poisons as they are, recognizing them as opportunities. The great Indian adept Virupa said:

One must take faults as qualities and take obstacles as siddhis.²

To take faults as qualities means to recognize faults as faults, not deceiving ourselves that our participation in social media is noble when it is merely an exercise in afflictive overreaction and confirmation bias. Taking obstacles as siddhis, or attainments, means recognizing that when we find ourselves in trenchant disagreements with others that perhaps we are too fixed and inflexible in our point of view, leading to lack of empathy and emotional rigidity.

To enter the conduct of awakening (bodhicaryāvatāra) one must look directly at the suffering of ourselves and others and choose to remain in samsara for as long as we and all sentient beings are suffering—it means embracing all the discomfort of samsara for as along as it takes to attain full awakening, and then continuing on. Full awakening however is not the same thing as optimizing samsara.

The hardest part of wandering the jungle of samsara is avoiding preferences, choosing this poison over that. It is easy to prefer the obvious suffering of the oppressed based on our sympathies. The karmic results of being an oppressor are much more severe. And we generally have sympathy for those whom we regard as oppressed. For example, my sympathies lie with the people in Gaza—the horrible suffering of the Palestinians at the hands of Israel and West, as well as at the hands of the Arab nations, being used as pawns for decades in a game in which they have little voice is terrible, an indictment of the international order. But the ripening of this terrible karma will fall upon those who support this war against Palestinian civilians, as well as those who support Hamas’s constant attacks on Israel over decades. This is a tough pill for non-Buddhists or those Buddhists who have not wrapped their minds around the infallibility of karma and its ripening. I am certain that those who are waging this war, on both sides, are all going to lower realms as a result of their terrible actions. And that causes me to have compassion for all involved. Samsara is suffering for all migrating beings no matter where they are in the three realms.

In closing, the Dharma is not a course in miracles, nor a stress-reduction program, nor a notch on the belt of our spiritual acquisitions. It’s a confrontation with our own three poisons, an epic war where we generally seem to constantly lose, birth after birth, lifetime after lifetime. Since sentient beings are numberless, there is no way we can save them all at once, but save them all we must, dying over and over again to help each and every one of them, each and everyone one of them our mother in some lifetime or another. Thus, we must have impartial compassion toward them all. This is the only way we can be a peacock wandering in the jungle of social media. The Dharma eye of compassion is impartial and plays no favorites, just as peacocks wander the jungle eating poisonous plants without preferences.

1. Yogascittavrttinirodhah.

2. Kong-sprul Blo-gros-mthaʼ-yas and Malcolm Smith, Sakya: The Path with Its Result. Part 1, vol. 5 of The Treasury of Precious Instructions (Boulder, CO: Snow Lion, an imprint of Shambhala Publications, Inc, 2022). Pg. 24.