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Nonduality Highlights: Issue #3743, Saturday, December 12, 2009, Editor: Mark
"Rahula, practice loving kindness to overcome anger. Loving
kindness has the capacity to bring happiness to others without
demanding anything in return.
Practice compassion to overcome cruelty. Compassion has the
capacity to remove the suffering of others without expecting
anything in return.
Practice sympathetic joy to overcome hatred. Sympathetic joy
arises when one rejoices over the happiness of others and wishes
others well-being and success.
Practice non-attachment to overcome prejudice. Non-attachment is
the way of looking at all things openly and equally. This is
because that is. Myself and others are not separate. Do not
reject one thing only to chase after another.
I call these the four immeasurables. Practice them and you will
become a refreshing source of vitality and happiness for
others."
- The Buddha, posted to DailyDharma
The psychological condition of fear is divorced from any concrete
and true immediate danger. It comes in many forms: unease, worry,
anxiety, nervousness, tension, dread, phobia, and so on. This
kind of psychological fear is always of something that might
happen, not of something that is happening now. You are in the
here and now, while your mind is in the future. This creates an
anxiety gap. And if you are identified with your mind and have
lost touch with the power and simplicity of the Now, that anxiety
gap will be your constant companion. You can always cope with the
present moment, but you cannot cope with something that is only a
mind projection - you cannot cope with the future. Moreover, as
long as you are identified with your mind, the ego runs your
life. Because of its phantom nature, and despite elaborate
defense mechanisms, the ego is very vulnerable and insecure, and
it sees itself as constantly under threat. This, by the way, is
the case even if the ego is outwardly very confident. Now
remember that an emotion is the body's reaction to your mind.
What message is the body receiving continuously from the ego, the
false, mind-made self? Danger, I am under threat. And what is the
emotion generated by this continuous message? Fear, of course.
Fear seems to have many causes. Fear of loss, fear of failure,
fear of being hurt, and so on, but ultimately all fear is the
ego's fear of death, of annihilation. To the ego, death is always
just around the corner. In this mind-identified state, fear of
death affects every aspect of your life.
For example, even such a seemingly trivial and "normal"
thing as the compulsive need to be right in an argument and make
the other person wrong - defending the mental position with which
you have identified - is due to the fear of death. If you
identify with a mental position, then if you are wrong, your
mind-based sense of self is seriously threatened with
annihilation. So you as the ego cannot afford to be wrong. To be
wrong is to die. Wars have been fought over this, and countless
relationships have broken down.
Once you have disidentified from your mind, whether you are right
or wrong makes no difference to your sense of self at all, so the
forcefully compulsive and deeply unconscious need to be right,
which is a form of violence, will no longer be there. You can
state clearly and firmly how you feel or what you think, but
there will be no aggressiveness or defensiveness about it. Your
sense of self is then derived from a deeper and truer place
within yourself, not from the mind.
Watch out for any kind of defensiveness within yourself. What are
you defending? An illusory identity, an image in your mind, a
fictitious entity.
By making this pattern conscious, by witnessing it, you
disidentify from it. In the light of your consciousness, the
unconscious pattern will then quickly dissolve.
This is the end of all arguments and power games, which are so
corrosive to relationships. Power over others is weakness
disguised as strength. True power is within, and it is available
to you now.
The mind always seeks to deny the Now and to escape from it. In
other words, the more you are identified with your mind, the more
you suffer. Or you may put it like this: The more you are able to
honor and accept the Now, the more you are free of pain, of
suffering - and free of the egoic mind.
If you no longer want to create pain for yourself and others, if
you no longer want to add to the residue of past pain that still
lives on in you, then don't create any more time, or at least no
more than is necessary to deal with the practical aspects of your
life. How to stop creating time?
Realize deeply that the present moment is all you ever have. Make
the Now the primary focus of your life.
Whereas before you dwelt in time and paid brief visits to the
Now, have your dwelling place in the Now and pay brief visits to
past and future when required to deal with the practical aspects
of your life situation.
Always say "yes" to the present moment.
- Eckhart Tolle, posted to The_Now2
The first step, then, in connecting our hearts with our
experience is to reduce the domination of our fixed agendas, our
ready abstractions which we project onto situations and people.
We can be inquisitive about the world without trying constantly
to make that curiosity serve a purpose. Then we open ourselves to
the world with all of our rawness and tenderness. This means
especially opening up to perception, to our ongoing connection
with the world of our direct experience. An important part of
that connection is our relation to other people, not only those
close, but all humans everywhere. It is a natural kind of human
knowledge that our materialistic culture has seriously damaged.
To economic man, according to economic doctrine, helping others
is simply another kind of "utility," a gain in pleasure
for the self.
Without this inner understanding, we find in everything we see
our projections. Our ideas of cars, food, houses, dolphins, acid
rain, liberals and conservatives are about "me" not
about "them." There is nothing wrong with
interpretation in itself, but we must be able to go back to the
raw experience. Direct perception is the basis for Awakened
Heart, which also includes our sense of connection with the
universe and each other.
Awakened heart, in this sense, can also be called "non-goal
oriented questioning." Instead of constantly demanding
specific answers in situations, we can just be open to all of the
possibilities. As we are active in the everyday world around us,
we see that interpretations arise quite naturally, that is how
mind works, but by staying in touch with awareness, we can come
back over and over to simple perceptions. From basic perceptions,
we see how things in the world work, how situations and people
are connected. This is wisdom. Seeing connections, we discover
compassion or sad and tender heart. From wisdom and compassion
arise skillful means, knowing what to do and how to do it.
- William A. Gordon
There was a story that was widely circulated a few days after the
attacks of September 11, 2001, that illustrates our dilemma. A
Native American grandfather was speaking to his grandson about
violence and cruelty in the world and how it comes about. He said
it was as if two wolves were fighting in his heart. One wolf was
vengeful and angry, and the other wolf was understanding and
kind. The young man asked his grandfather which wolf would win
the fight in his heart. And the grandfather answered, "The
one that wins will be the one I choose to feed."
So this is our challenge, the challenge for our spiritual
practice and the challenge for the world - how can we train right
now, not later, in feeding the right wolf? How can we call on our
innate intelligence to see what helps and what hurts, what
escalates aggression and what uncovers our good-heartedness? With
the global economy in chaos and the environment of the planet at
risk, with war raging and suffering escalating, it is time for
each of us in our own lives to take the leap and do whatever we
can to help turn things around. Even the slightest gesture toward
feeding the right wolf will help. Now more than ever, we are all
in this together.
Taking the leap involves making a commitment to ourselves and to
the earth itself - making a commitment to let go of old grudges,
to not avoid people and situations and emotions that make us feel
uneasy, to not cling to our fears, our closedmindedness, our
hardheartedness, our hesitation. Now is the time to develop trust
in our basic goodness and the basic goodness of our sisters and
brothers on this earth; a time to develop confidence in our
ability to drop our old ways of staying stuck and to choose
wisely. We could do that right here and right now.
In our everyday encounters, we can live in a way that will help
us learn to do this. When we talk to someone we don't like and
don't agree with - maybe a family member or a person at work - we
tend to spend a great amount of energy sending anger their way.
Yet our resentments and self-centeredness, as familiar as they
are, are not our basic nature. We all have the natural ability to
interrupt old habits. All of us know how healing it is to be
kind, how transformative it is to love, what a relief it is to
have old grudges drop away. With just a slight shift in
perspective, we can realize that people strike out and say mean
things for the same reasons we do. With a sense of humor we can
see that our sisters and brothers, our partners, our children,
our coworkers are driving us crazy the same way we drive other
people crazy.
The first step in this learning process is to be honest with
ourselves. Most of us have gotten so good at empowering our
negativity and insisting on our rightness that the angry wolf
gets shinier and shinier, and the other wolf is just there with
its pleading eyes. But we're not stuck with this way of being.
When we're feeling resentment or any strong emotion, we can
recognize that we are getting worked up, and realize that right
now we can consciously make the choice to be aggressive or to
cool off. It comes down to choosing which wolf we want to feed.
Of course, if we intend to test out this approach, we need some
pointers. We need ways to train in this path of choosing wisely.
This path entails uncovering three qualities of being human,
three basic qualities that have always been with us but perhaps
have gotten buried and been almost forgotten. These qualities are
natural intelligence, natural warmth, and natural openness. When
I say that the potential for goodness exists in all beings, that
is acknowledging that everyone, everywhere, all over the globe,
has these qualities and can call on them to help themselves and
others.
Natural intelligence is always accessible to us. When we're not
caught in the trap of hope and fear, we intuitively know what's
the right thing to do. If we're not obscuring our intelligence
with anger, self-pity, or craving, we know what will help and
what will make things worse. Our well-perfected emotional
reactions cause us to do and say a lot of crazy things. We desire
to be happy and at peace, but when our emotions are aroused,
somehow the methods we use to achieve this happiness only make us
more miserable. Our wishes and our actions are, all too
frequently, not in synch. Nevertheless, we all have access to a
fundamental intelligence that can help to solve our problems
rather than making them worse.
Natural warmth is our shared capacity to love, to have empathy,
to have a sense of humor. It is also our capacity to feel
gratitude and appreciation and tenderness. It's the whole gamut
of what often are called the heart qualities, qualities that are
a natural part of being human. Natural warmth has the power to
heal all relationships - the relationship with ourselves as well
as with people, animals, and all that we encounter everyday of
our lives.
The third quality of basic goodness is natural openness, the
spaciousness of our skylike minds. Fundamentally, our minds are
expansive, flexible, and curious; they are pre-prejudice, so to
speak. This is the condition of mind before we narrow down into a
fear-based view where everyone is either an enemy or a friend, a
threat or an ally, someone to like, dislike, or ignore.
Fundamentally, this mind that we have, that you and I each have,
is open.
- Pema Chodron, from Taking the Leap - Freeing Ourselves from
Old Habits and Fears