All truly wise thoughts have been
thought already thousands of times;
but to make them truly ours, we must
think them over again honestly,
till they take root in our
personal experience.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Lloyd Shearer

Good people are good because they've come to wisdom through failure.  We get very little wisdom from success, you know.

William Saroyan

Many persons have a wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness.  It is not attained through self-gratification but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.

Helen Keller

Eyes Wide Open
tom walsh

Compassion's Not so Hard

True friend that he is, do you think that Linus encourages Charlie Brown?  Do you think that he tries to show some compassion?  No.  Linus mocks him by saying that Charlie Brown is the only person he knows who can take a wonderful holiday like Christmas and turn it into something negative.  Then he says that his sister was right when she said that "Of all the Charlie Browns in the world, you're the Charlie Brownest."

How would you feel if you went to your best friend and tried to share some of your feelings and got insulted in reply?  Is that really any way to treat a friend, when all is said and done?  Is such a reply ever going to help?

I know full well the argument about someone who complains too much, someone who's always bringing other people down by always looking at the dark side of things.  Sometimes "tough love" is more appropriate than sympathizing with such people.  But when a friend comes to me and tells me that he or she is feeling depressed, I want to try to do my best to help that friend to change those feelings, for they can be dangerous.  I'm certainly not going to ridicule that person and make him or her feel even worse.

Our media are full of such examples of ways of treating people.  Somehow, the insult and the cut-down are funny, and we like to see humorous examples of people insulting other people.  But it's a cheap and easy way to get a laugh, and it certainly isn't an effective way of dealing with a friend who's hurting in real life.

It's easy to get overwhelmed when a friend is hurting, and to try to make light of the situation in order not to get pulled into it ourselves.  But just because we try to be compassionate doesn't mean that we have to get pulled into other people's problems--very often, the very best thing that we can do is simply to listen.  Most people are able to find solutions themselves, even to pull themselves out of bad times, simply by having the opportunity to talk to someone, a person who is willing to be there just to listen, not to try to fix anything.  But we certainly aren't shown too many good examples of good listeners, so whom do we think of when we're trying to decide how to respond to a friend's problems?  I usually see other people try to do one of two things:  fix their friend's problems through advice, or make light of the problems in order not to have to deal with them.

I do know that sometimes when someone's been focusing on the negative for too long, a bit of hard love can be appropriate, and it may be best to tell someone to knock it off and get on with their lives.  But even that isn't mocking them or making fun of them.

We all have decisions to make when friends trust us enough to discuss their problems.  It's a shame that the decision is so often not to be a compassionate listener, but instead to be a smart-aleck with something witty and possibly insulting to say.  I hope that as time goes on, I grow better at sharing myself by saying nothing, by allowing others to use me as a sounding board that can help them to see things much more clearly.

What does that mean?  Here is an example.  In a car the accelerator pedal
is on the right and the brake is to the left.  That is not a big deal.  I don't see
impassioned pleas to rearrange the pedals.  People know this and accept it
without judgment.  Now let's imagine that you think having this arrangement
is bad.  Furthermore, since you don't like it, you are going to act as if the
pedals are reversed.  It won't take you long to come to grief.

But failure to accept people is like the example above.  How many of us see,
not the person in front of us, but the person we expect to see.  Then we act
as if they are how we expect to see them.  And, sure enough, we come to grief.

Come to know them through their actions, accept without judgment and act
accordingly.  If the other is a controlling person, then I know I will either need
to let go my need for control or be prepared for a battle of wills.  If the other is
chronically late, then need to invite them early to events, be prepared to start
without them or wait.  In any case, to get upset is to pretend they are someone
different - and that's like pretending the accelerator and brake are reversed,
a quick road to grief.

Christopher Oliphant

from Everyday Zen
Charlotte Joko Beck

My dog doesn't worry about the meaning of life.  She may worry if she doesn't get her breakfast, but she doesn't sit around worrying about whether she will get fulfilled or liberated or enlightened.  As long as she gets some food and a little affection, her life is fine.  But we human beings are not like dogs.  We have self-centered minds which get us into plenty of trouble.  If we do not come to understand the error in the way we think, our self-awareness, which is our greatest blessing, is also our downfall.

To some degree we all find life difficult, perplexing, and oppressive.  Even when it goes well, as it may for a time, we worry that it probably won't keep on that way.  Depending on our personal history, we arrive at adulthood with very mixed feelings about this life.  If I were to tell you that your life is already perfect, whole, and complete just as it is, you would think I was crazy.  Nobody believes his or her life is perfect.  And yet there is something within each of us that basically knows we are boundless, limitless.  We are caught in the contradiction of finding life a rather perplexing puzzle which causes us a lot of misery, and at the same time being dimly aware of the boundless, limitless nature of life.  So we begin looking for an answer to the puzzle.

The first way of looking is to seek a solution outside ourselves.  At first this may be on a very ordinary level.  There are many people in the world who feel that if only they had a bigger car, a nicer house, better vacations, a more understanding boss, or a more interesting partner, then their life would work.  We all go through that one.  Slowly we wear out most of our "if onlies."  "If only I had this, or that, then my life would work."  Not one of us isn't, to some degree, still wearing out our "if onlies."  First of all we wear out those on the gross levels.  Then we shift our search to more subtle levels.  Finally, in looking for the thing outside of ourselves that we hope is going to complete us, we turn to a spiritual discipline.  Unfortunately we tend to bring into this new search the same orientation as before.

Most people who come to the Zen Center don't think a Cadillac will do it, but they think that enlightenment will.  Now they've got a new cookie, a new "if only."  "If only I could understand what realization is all about, I would be happy."  "If only I could have at least a little enlightenment experience, I would be happy."  Coming into a practice like Zen, we bring our usual notions that we are going to get somewhere--become enlightened--and get all the cookies that have eluded us in the past.

Our whole life consists of this little subject looking outside itself for an object.  But if you take something that is limited, like body and mind, and look for something outside it, that something becomes an object and must be limited too.  So you have something limited looking for something limited and you just end up with more of the same folly that has made you miserable.

We have all spent many years building up a conditioned view of life.  There is "me" and there is this "thing" out there that is either hurting me or pleasing me.  We tend to run our whole life trying to avoid all that hurts or displeases us, noticing the objects, people, or situations that we think will give us pain or pleasure, avoiding one and pursuing the other.  Without exception, we all do this.  We remain separate from our life, looking at it, analyzing it, judging it, seeking to answer the questions, "What am I going to get out of it?  Is it going to give me pleasure or comfort or should I run away from it?"  We do this from morning until night.

Underneath our nice, friendly facades there is great unease.  If I were to scratch below the surface of anyone I would find fear, pain, and anxiety running amok.  We all have ways to cover them up. We overeat, over-drink, overwork; we watch too much television.  We are always doing something to cover up our basic existential anxiety.  Some people live that way until the day they die.

As the years go by, it gets worse and worse.  What might not look so bad when you are twenty-five looks awful by the time you are fifty.  We all know people who might as well be dead; they have so contracted into their limited viewpoints that it is as painful for those around them as it is for themselves.  The flexibility and joy and flow of life are gone.  And that rather grim possibility faces all of us, unless we wake up to the fact that we need to work with our life, we need to practice.

We have to see through the mirage that there is an "I" separate from "that."  Our practice is to close the gap.  Only in that instant when we and the object become one can we see what our life is.

Enlightenment is not something you achieve.  It is the absence of something.  All your life you have been going forward after something, pursuing some goal.  Enlightenment is dropping all that.  But to talk about it is of little use.

The practice has to be done by each individual.  There is no substitute.  We can read about it until we are a thousand years old and it won't do a thing for us.  We all have to practice, and we have to practice with all of our might for the rest of our lives.
   

Evan Esar