Photo courtesy of maloja

According to Buddhist and other spiritual teachings, basic human nature is fundamentally good. In Buddhism this is known as “basic goodness.” The idea is that at our most absolute core, rock bottom level, there is really no problem, and in fact we are brilliant, awake, and sane people.

Basic goodness isn’t some kind of utopian fantasy where everything is nicy nice, and we don’t have pain, confusion, and ugly parts. It’s not that everything is sugar coated and we should pretend we don’t have suffering, or we should ignore all our various problems. Rather, basic goodness is that regardless of how difficult or confused our situation in life – or the situation of anyone else for that matter – we can never give up and say it’s a bad deal.

Basic goodness means that nothing is fundamentally screwed up and flawed: there is some workability and sanity buried in even the most confused and degraded situations. We can always wake up, see our confusion, and we can move forward.

In other words, there is no garbage bin where we throw all the trash, because there is no trash. All people are fundamentally awake, and when we act otherwise it is simply because we have lost touch with our basic nature.

Now of course, often times we stray very far from our nature. Indeed we human beings get lost in dark and deeply destructive states of mind, often for whole lifetimes, and sometimes in systematic grand scale ways such as we see in imperial conquests and genocidal movements of all kinds.

But according to the teachings of basic goodness, even then, even when we are that far gone, given the right circumstances, we can wake up from our destructive and violent patterns, discover our nature of goodness, and it’s always possible for us to walk a path back home.

This is because deep inside nobody wants to suffer, and nobody wants to see others suffer. Deep inside we all want to be happy, and even though our disconnection often causes us to think otherwise, naturally we we also want others to be happy as well.

This nature of basic goodness teaches that for any of us, no matter how angry or screwed up we might think ourselves to be, for each and every one of us, we are fundamentally worthy and good people. For each of us, it’s possible to find our way back to the heart of the matter, it’s possible for us to make our way back to our awake and sane nature of goodness.

By Craig Mollins