Turning Toward Pain

Continued from page 3

I advise people to stay with the immediacy of their experience when

arises. One way is just to start breathing in and out. It doesn't have to be a big spiritual act, just something to replace your usual reaction. Eventually, if you don't have the habitual response, then the urge passes. You're on to something else. When you don't have the habitual reaction, you're actually burning up those seeds in the

. Then there are two possible outcomes. One is that the urge disappears; you don't have that particular desire to eat chocolate cake anymore, or to make a mean remark. The other outcome is that the urge still arises, but you don't invest it with much meaning.

Yes, meditation practice is the key. But some people can meditate for years and years and years and still burn no seeds. They are stuck on an image of themselves as good meditators, or good Buddhists. To burn up the seeds of shenpa, one must sit in the middle of the fire.

Zen teacher Ezra Bayda does a practice one day a week in which he does not speak or act out of negativity, no matter what happens. You might think that's repressive, but it heightens the awareness of how you otherwise speak and act in ways that strengthen the negativity. If you've taken this vow, you can say: "It's Wednesday. I can't do that." As a result, you discover what it feels like to burn the karmic seeds of negative mind and negative speech and negative action.

We need to break these habits that keep us locked in a cycle of suffering. We have this sense of the self as solidly right and righteous, which would not be such a problem except that it adds up to enormous suffering at the personal level, and at the global level.

I had just entered a hundred-day retreat. I had been there only four days. My first reaction was shock and enormous sorrow, like what I'd felt when my husband left me. I knew that countless people-particularly in New York-were going to find it impossible to get the ground back under their feet. Yet it was an enormous opportunity for people to wake up out of a trance, and many, many people did just that. I also knew that there probably would be a strong conservative backlash, and I felt great sorrow about that too. I didn't have any feeling of there being an enemy, of us-versus-them. Sometimes the seeds of

also ripen for nations, and to me that's what happened. I felt sorrow for everybody on all sides.

You have to want to lose your appetite for violence or aggression. And to do that, you have to lose your self-righteousness. You have to realize that you cannot continue to have your habitual reaction to something, especially if your reaction ends with violence-physical or verbal-against yourself or somebody else, or even against the government of your country or the terrorists or whomever. You have to accept in your gut that the habitual reaction is poisonous not only to you but to the rest of the world.

Some people are waking up to this because they see the repercussions of violence in the world today. But I also see more and more people looking for ways to justify their aggression. I hear them say, "Yes, but this time I'm right." That's our self-righteousness talking. It is the voice of the fundamentalist within us. People need a lot of encouragement before they can silence that voice. Most of them can't get rid of it right away. They keep getting stuck in the story line. But we're not working with right and wrong. We're working with a change at the core of our being. When you make this change, the habitual pattern that causes you to think that something is right or wrong no longer has power over you. You're no longer a slave to it.

Some people find this message powerful, but the next time someone angers them, they start to get self-righteous again. I say to them, "You're sowing those seeds that are going to cause you and others great unhappiness, and you're cutting yourself off from your basic goodness." And they'll pause and say, "You're right." But many of them are still unwilling to give up their story line. They say, "Sometimes you have to be practical. Sometimes there are things that have to be done." The urge to follow that deep groove is very strong.

That's what's happening now on an international scale, particularly with the United States and the Middle East. It's a mirror of what's happening at the individual level. What we call "ego," or the sense of a solid self, we could just as well call "self-preservation." It's the same thing at the international level. Self-preservation leads you to think you must have homeland security, which is synonymous with all of those habitual patterns I've been talking about. And you become more and more cut off from your basic heart, your basic wisdom, your basic interconnectedness with other people.

We follow habitual reactions because we don't want to feel the groundlessness of a given situation. But Buddhism teaches us that everything is always groundless. If we can know that, and befriend that, then happiness is possible. Trying to avoid groundlessness only leads to violence.

I would like to have seen a large number of people realize that the groundlessness they were experiencing was the truth; that it didn't have to be a nightmare; that they could relax into it. In the early days after the attacks, I heard people say that the only thing that made sense was to be kind to each other. That's what happens when we relax into groundlessness: Suddenly the only thing that makes sense is to be kind to each other.

It's beyond my ability to say exactly what we should have done. But the Dalai Lama urged President Bush not to go to war because aggression only breeds aggression. Each of us needs to realize what seeds caused such a tragedy to happen in the first place. And then we can start burning up the seeds of aggression rather than escalating the violence, which will only put us in a worse place in the future.

I would like to have seen an awareness of cause and effect at the global level. September 11 could have been a moment of truth, of ultimate groundlessness. We could have begun to burn up the seeds of aggression rather than sow more; we could have created greater peace and harmony between people instead of more hatred and polarization. We all have to beware of fundamentalism, this self-righteousness that tells us everything is somebody else's fault.