Everyday Mindfulness

Seeing our meanness, our unkindness, we decide to pursue a new desire: to be kind, to be good, to be patient. Guilt goes with this desire, like a sort of baby brother: when we don’t fulfill our picture of how we should be, we feel guilty. We’re still trying to be something we’re not. We’re trying to figure out how to be different than we are. When we can’t fulfill our ideals, we build guilt and depression. In our practice we swing through both of these stages. We see that we are mean, greedy, violent, selfish, ambitious. And so we form a new ambition, to be unselfish. “I shouldn’t have those thoughts. I’ve been sitting for such a long time; why am I still greedy and mean? I should be better than that by now.” We’re all doing that. A lot of religious practice mistakenly aims at trying to produce a good person who doesn’t do or think bad things. [...] See, all wanting—especially wanting to be a certain way—is centered on ego and fear. “If I can be perfect, if I can be realized or enlightened, I will take care of the fear.” Do you see the desire there? There’s a tremendous desire to move away from what I am, into an ideal. Some people don’t care about enlightenment; but they may feel, “I shouldn’t yell at my spouse.” Of course you shouldn’t yell at your spouse; but the effort to be a person who doesn’t yell at your spouse just increases the tension.

So our practice is about making fear conscious, instead of running around inside our cell of fear, trying to make it look better and feel better. All of our efforts in life are these escaping endeavors: we try to escape the suffering, escape the pain of what we are. Even feeling guilty is an escape. The truth of any moment is always being just as we are. And that means to experience our unkindness when we are unkind. We don’t like to do that. We like to think of ourselves as kind people. But often we’re not. When we experience ourselves as we are, then out of that death of the ego, out of that withering, the flower blooms.