The state of nonduality is a state
of intense peace and perfect balance. It is so peaceful because
everything is seen as it belongs--to the eternal order of cosmic
evolution; hence, all is accepted, all reconciled.
— Notebooks, Paul Brunton
posted to Wisdom-l by Mark Scorelle
Keep the Three Inseparable
Your actions, your speech, and your
thoughts should be inseparable from this yearning to communicate
from the heart. Everything you say can further polarize the
situation and convince you of how separate you are. On the other
hand, everything you say and do and think can support your desire
to communicate, to move closer and step out of this myth of
isolation and separateness that you're caught in.
Don't impose the wrong notion of
what harmony is, what compassion is, what patience is, what
generosity is. Don't misinterpret what these things really are.
There is compassion and there is idiot compassion; there is
patience and there is idiot patience; there is generosity and
there is idiot generosity. For example, trying to smooth
everything out to avoid confrontation, not to rock the boat, is
not what's meant by compassion or patience. It's what is meant by
control. Then you are not trying to step into unknown territory,
to find yourself more naked with less protection and therefore
more in contact with reality. Instead, you use the idiot forms of
compassion and so forth just to get ground. When you open the
door and invite in all sentient beings as your guests, you have
to drop your agenda. Many different people come in. Just when you
think you have a little scheme that is going to work, it doesn't
work. It was very beneficial to Juan, but when you tried it on
Mortimer, he looked at you as if you were crazy, and when you try
it on Juanita, she gets insulted.
Coming up with a formula won't
work. If you invite all sentient beings as your guests while just
wanting harmony, sooner or later you'll find that one of your
guests is behaving badly and that just sitting there cheerfully
doing your tonglen and trying to cultivate harmony doesn't
work.
So you sit there and you say,
"Okay, now I'm going to make friends with the fact that I am
hurting and afraid, and this is really awful." But you are
just trying to avoid conflict here; you just don't want to make
things worse. Then all the guests are misbehaving; you work hard
all day and they just sit around, smoking cigarettes, drinking
beer, eating your food, and then beating you up. You think you're
being a warrior and a Bodhisattva by doing nothing and saying nothing, but
what you're being is a coward. You're just afraid of making the
situation worse. Finally they kick you out of your house and
you're sitting on the sidewalk. Somebody walks by and says,
"What are you doing sitting out here?" You answer,
"I am practicing patience and compassion." That's
missing the point.
Even though you've dropped your
agenda, even though you are trying to work WITH situations
instead of struggling AGAINST them, nevertheless you may have to
say, "You can stay here tonight, but tomorrow you're going,
and if you don't get out of here, I am calling the police."
You don't really know what's going to benefit somebody, but it
doesn't benefit anybody to allow someone to beat you up, eat all
your food, and put you out on the street.
So "Don't misinterpret"
really gets at the notion of the big squeeze. It's saying that
you don't know what's going to help, but you need to speak and
act with clarity and decisiveness. Clarity and decisiveness come
from the willingness to slow down, to listen to and look at
what's happening. They come from opening your heart and not
running away. Then the action and the speech are in accord with
what needs to be done, for you and for the other person.
We make a lot of mistakes. If you
ask people whom you consider to be wise and courageous about
their lives, you may find that they have hurt a lot of people and
made a lot of mistakes, but that they used those occasions as
opportunities to humble themselves and open their hearts. We
don't get wise by staying in a room with all the doors and
windows closed.
See if you can catch yourself
complaining,
in either speech or thought, about a situation
you find yourself in, what other people do or
say, your surroundings, your life situation,
even the weather. To complain is always
nonacceptance of what is.
LISTEN