There is much wisdom in this teaching. ― Molly
Like
the mother of the world who carries the pain of the world in her heart, you are
sharing in the totality of this pain and are called upon to meet it in
compassion and joy instead of self-pity.—Sufi master Pir Vilayat Khan
Alan Wallace, a leading Western teacher of Tibetan Buddhism,
puts it like this: “Imagine walking along a sidewalk with your arms full of
groceries, and someone roughly bumps into you so that you fall and your
groceries are strewn over the ground. As you rise up from the puddle of broken
eggs and tomato juice, you are ready to shout out, ‘You idiot! What’s wrong
with you? Are you blind?’ But just before you can catch your breath to speak,
you see that the person who bumped into you is actually blind. He, too, is
sprawled in the spilled groceries, and your anger vanishes in an instant, to be
replaced by sympathetic concern: ‘Are you hurt? Can I help you up?’ Our
situation is like that. When we clearly realize that the source of disharmony
and misery in the world is ignorance, we can open the door of wisdom and
compassion.”
Each person who comes for spiritual teachings or psychotherapy
carries his or her measure of confusion and sorrow. Buddhism teaches that we
suffer not because we have sinned but because we are blind. Compassion is the
natural response to this blindness; it arises whenever we see our human
situation clearly. Buddhist texts describe compassion as the quivering of the
heart in the face of pain, as the capacity to see our struggles with “kindly eyes.”
We need compassion, not anger, to help us be tender with our difficulties and
not close off to them in fear. This is how healing takes place.
Beneath the sophistication of Buddhist psychology lies the
simplicity of compassion. We can touch into this compassion whenever the mind
is quiet, whenever we allow the heart to open. Unfortunately, like the clay
covering the golden Buddha, thick layers of ignorance and trauma can obscure
our compassion. On the global scale, ignorance manifests as injustice, racism,
exploitation, and violence. On a personal scale, we see our own states of envy,
anxiety, addiction, self-judgment, and aggression. When we take this blindness
to be the end of the story, we limit the possibility of human development.
Consider Freud, whose revolutionary work brought so much understanding of the
psyche. But in Civilization
and Its Discontents, he comes to a deeply pessimistic conclusion
about the human heart. He states, “Civilization has to use its utmost efforts
in order to set limits to man’s aggressive instincts . . . the ideal’s
commandment to love one’s neighbour as yourself . . . is really justified by
the fact that nothing else runs so strongly counter to original human nature as
this.” Yes, we must recognize this aggressive aspect of our human nature. But
in this essay, Freud stops there, completely missing the opposite and more
powerful fact that our individual lives and our whole society are built upon
innumerable acts of kindness.
― Jack Kornfield
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