Why do we offer our most generous hospitality to the most harmful guests?
Why do we offer our most generous hospitality to the most harmful guests?
Dear Readers,
I have been wanting to share a post on this subject for a while, because it applies to every one of us, whoever we are and whatever we do.
For those of you engaged in the ‘Six week meditation challenge,’ I hope the link I provide to an additional type of meditation, offers something you may like to explore as part of your new habit.
I will be back in touch with new inspiration for meditators in the next couple of weeks.
In the meantime, I hope this week’s post offers fresh stimulation and encouragement!
Warmest wishes,
David
Every day we receive hundreds, possibly thousands of visitors. We’re pretty off-hand with some. Many we ignore almost completely. As a rule, the more unruly, destructive, and harmful the guest, the more likely it is that we’ll give them the red-carpet treatment.
We focus lavish attention on the troublesome ones, going to great efforts to encourage them to stay. If we are distracted by another visitor, even a quite charming one, we will reassure any malevolent thug who showed up that we’ll get back to them in just a moment. “Stay for a drink, why don’t you?” we implore. “Can I get you something to eat? Do you have friends who can join us? Preferably some violent, hell-raising types to really trash the joint. Let’s get this party happening!”
Are we insane?!
No, only human., And we’re all up to the same thing. The visitors I’m talking about are, of course, thoughts. Our rule of thumb is to disregard, minimise or overlook those thoughts that lead to upliftment and joy, while showering a hugely disproportionate amount of our only finite resource – time - on the ones that cause misery in its myriad forms.
When this was once pointed out to our Dharma class by our teacher, he asked us to think of a situation when we had been offered a compliment and a disparagement of roughly equal weight. Which had we spent more time thinking about?
It was an easy exercise for me. Only the week before I’d had a haircut, after which I went to my favourite coffee shop. I am fortunate to live in a suburb where we can walk to most places and, as a result, people get to know each other.
“Like your hair!” said Shelley as she saw me in the line ready to order. She was breezing out of the shop with a coffee to go.
“Thanks,” I replied, my thoughts quickly returning to the contents of the display cabinet filled with mouth-watering pastries.
“What happened to your hair?” asked Bill, moments later, as he too stepped out with his coffee order.
“Just had a haircut,” I explained. Before bending to check myself in the chrome corner of the display case. It looked the same as when the hairdresser had finished her work. What was Bill implying? By now he was already out of the shop on his way to wherever with that wry smile of his.
He could be sarcastic, Bill. There was sometimes an edge to his humor, and he’d crack jokes at other people’s expense. In any case, he was hardly the great arbiter when it came to men’s hairstyling. He was thinning on top and had a comb-over. A comb-over! Just like my Dad. And he was making cracks about my hair! When it came down to it, he not only couldn’t bring himself to get with the program in the hair department. He was forever walking around in those thin, nylon windcheaters that look cheap and nasty. I wondered why. Was he stingy, maybe? What was wrong with my hair anyway?
“Flat white?” called Katie from behind the counter. I had got to the front of the line and being a regular here, some of the staff knew my order. Which was when it struck me how long I had been thinking about Bill’s comment. How much further might I have ventured down that particular rabbit hole if I hadn’t been brought back to the present moment by Katie?
We are all thought-huggers. Along comes a thought, any thought at all, and we embrace it. The problems with this are two-fold. The first is that the only way a thought can remain in our consciousness is if we engage with it. Shelley’s compliment remained in my mind only an instant because I gave it no attention. But I gave Bill’s barbed remark a lot of attention. Not only that, as is the habit with thinking, one negative idea – there was something wrong with my haircut – quickly gave rise to others. There was something wrong with Bill’s hair. And with the clothes he wore. And his attitude to money. An entire network of negativity catalysed in just moments. Negative thoughts lead to negative feelings, and it’s easy to see how in no time at all the emotional weight of all that negative cognition starts taking its toll.
The second problem is that the more we reinforce thoughts with our attention, the more likely they are to recur. We get into the habit of entertaining them, and thoughts like them, and it becomes a habit that’s hard to break because we are so damned good at it. If we have a tendency for depression, as I have, we can be put in any situation and quickly see a way that it reflects on how hopeless we are. Other people are similarly high achievers at getting anxious, stressed, or whatever their particular form of negativity happens to be. The thoughts we continually empower are those that remain and return.
How to break the circuit?
“I can’t help the thoughts that come into my head!” is a lament we sometimes hear. One we may have expressed ourselves. While this is true in an immediate sense – who knows, at any moment, what our next thought may be? Did you say something about pink porpoises? – more generally, our patterns of thought are the ones we reinforce through habit.
Breaking the habit requires us to take conscious charge of our thoughts. In particular, to stop engaging so generously with the destructive ones. This is best practiced in meditation sessions with a view to extending its application between sessions. Little by little we shift the way we deal with thoughts from compulsive engagement with every last one of them, to becoming aware that we do actually have a choice. If we wish, we can simply acknowledge the thought as mere mental activity, accept that we had it and let go.
I explain this process a lot more in a short recording about ‘mind watching mind,’ and in a ten minute guided meditation where we do exactly this (scroll down to ‘Free Guided Meditations’).
Becoming more aware of our own mind is, for me, the most powerful use to which meditation can be put. By becoming more effective thought managers, we take control of our own mental and emotional wellbeing. While my haircut example is a trivial one, the same dynamic plays out in the case of much more complex and suffering-inducing dramas: the loss of love, devastating diagnoses, turmoil sparked by financial, legal or relationship problems.
People who cultivate strong levels of mental awareness tend to be more resilient in the face of such adversities. They still feel pain but they are better at not being so tortured or carrying it with them for so long, because they’re better at putting away the tea trolley and closing the bar when negativity comes visiting. As a result, they experience life with greater equanimity.
That’s only the start. Because a profoundly powerful benefit of becoming better thought managers is that as we practice freeing our minds of agitation, we start to experience their true nature free of mental chatter. This is not something that happens quickly. Sitting in meditation focusing on mind itself, we may enjoy some serene sessions, but it’s also inevitable that our malevolent friends will come visiting. Just as its likely that we will slip into hospitality mode and engage with them as we are in the habit of doing.
But we catch ourselves out. It may take the whole session. Or half of it. As we improve our ability to recollect the object of meditation – our mind – over time we get distracted for shorter and shorter periods. And once we stop feeding negative cognition, in the words of my teacher, ‘it wears itself out.’ Even the most engrained, darkest, multi-layered web of thoughts can’t survive our dispassionate focus when we refuse to engage with them. They have nowhere to go. Eventually they stop showing up. It’s the most gentle but transformative therapy.
What we discover for ourselves is that the conventional nature of our mind is clear, boundless and peaceful. These are conceptual terms somewhat clumsily pointing to qualities that are beyond concept. ‘Clarity’ is that aspect of consciousness that enables any thought, feeling or sensation to arise. ‘Boundless’ because there is no definable limit to our consciousness, and certainly no beginning or end to it. And ‘peaceful’ because, free of agitation or dullness, far from mind being a great big zero, it has a quality of tranquillity. And the more we become acquainted with that tranquillity, the further it deepens to states of increasingly subtle and refined bliss.
It turns out that the constant stimulation that we crave for mental amusement can only ever be temporary and surface-level. If it’s abiding and profound wellbeing we’re after, we’re looking in the wrong place. We already possess the source of our most precious and invaluable treasure. A metaphor is sometimes offered of telling a really poor person that, sewn into the lining of her pocket is a rare diamond of incredible worth. She only needs to access it and she can enjoy all she wants.
Us too. In learning how to access our minds, and abide in their true nature, we are no longer at the mercy of whatever passing cognition comes our way. We politely but firmly give toxic gangsters short shrift. And we find our conviction deepening that, just as our teachers tell us, we are the possessors of Buddha nature, and what more worthwhile goal could there be than to fully realize it, for our own sake, as well as for others’.
Photo: Among the many unlikely friendships right now at Twala Trust, the animal sanctuary that you support as a subscriber, are those between baby vervet monkeys and kittens. May all beings have happiness and its causes!
About half the money readers help me raise through subscriptions goes to the following four charities. Feel free to click on the underlined links to read more about them:
Wild is Life - home to endangered wildlife and the Zimbabwe Elephant Nursery; Twala Trust Animal Sanctuary - supporting indigenous animals as well as pets in extremely disadvantaged communities; Dongyu Gyatsal Ling Nunnery - supporting Buddhist nuns from the Himalaya regions; Gaden Relief - supporting Buddhist communities in Mongolia, Tibet, Nepal and India.
Brilliant David! When I start ruminating about a possible slight hitting me like an imagined (and yes a rather dramatic , I know) dagger , I remember what my Goddess Grandmother taught me…From my youth to the present I say her sweet rhyme…” Bad thoughts go away, Good thoughts are here to stay” …Sometimes I wonder if the negative thoughts have something to teach us until at some point we are able to let them rest…? And when we can do that they seem to come less often.❤️🙏P.S the little monkey touched my soul, so very precious…thinking of her is such a positive…thank you for sharing her sweetness with all of us! 🌹
Great post David - look for the positives- the negatives will find you without you looking.
I have just finished David’s latest novel- The Secret Mantra and it’s a fantastic read. As well as being a great adventure it is has great insights into Buddhism. Strongly recommended