Okay, sweethearts, what’s on my mind lately? Well, one thing is patience. It’s an interesting word: patience. We don’t like patience. My feeling is that when we think of patience we think it’s gritting our teeth and waiting for that horrible thing to go away. Well, that’s passive aggression, suppressing – and that’s internalized anger, not patience. It’ll make you insane, it’s a nightmare: something will explode one day.
I think in our culture we only have two modes: either repress or vomit it all out. That was my style: I vomited everything out, I didn’t hold anything back. It’s terrible because I harmed others as well as myself.
If you’re kind of a quiet person, a nice person, one who suppresses their angry feelings, and you don’t say the ugly words, at least you’re not harming others, so you should be happy about that. But you’re harming yourself. And, whether we’re vomiting or suppressing, neither of us is taking responsibility. And these seem to be the only choices we feel that we’ve got, you know?
What is patience then? Essentially it means to greet a problem, not to avert it. Patience is quite an advanced practice, actually – it’s taught in more depth as one of the perfections of the bodhisattva. The only way we’re going to understand patience is by understanding what aversion is, which is anger, and the only way we can understand aversion and anger is by understanding attachment: they have such an intimate relationship.
Right at the beginning of the path Buddha talks about “the three poisons,” “the three toxic emotions”: ignorance, attachment and aversion. On the face of it, it seems simplistic almost, you know? But the analysis of these is profound.
First of all, the root one, ignorance, marigpa, unawareness, is this deepest misconception, deep in the bones of our being, an assumption virtually of a concrete, solid, separate, bereft, lonely, fear-based me.
Then, just naturally, there’s the attachment to get what that bereft fantasy-I wants. And this drives most of what we do. Effectively, according to the four noble truths, this is the main cause of our suffering.
Attachment is multi-faceted. The most primordial level of it is the terrible ache of never having enough, never being enough. This leads to the emotional hunger to find what’s missing – out there, among the objects of our five senses. It then exaggerates the deliciousness of the object, manipulates to get it, then grasps at it as mine, convinced that it’ll fill up the gaping whole inside.
Attachment is a junkie that only wants the nice things – all it wants is the nice things, all it wants is the nice things. And, of course, that means all it wants is what I want: it’s totally self-centered.
This drives us, it’s primordial. Lama Yeshe said, “I can tell you about attachment for one whole year, you’ll never begin to understand it until we start going deep inside.” It’s utterly spontaneous: we came programmed with it from the first second of conception in our mother’s womb because of having practiced it in countless past lives, Buddha says.
What happens the second attachment doesn’t get what it wants, which is a thousand times a day? The panic attack of aversion arises. This can be the tiniest thing: you don’t want the red light, you want the green light; you don’t want the carrot cake, you want chocolate cake; you want the cups to stay nicely on the sink and not to fall on the floor – tiny, baby events that we don’t even pay attention to.
I’ve never yet met a person who when they break a cup while they’re washing the dishes doesn’t get upset: attachment not getting what it wants. I’ve never met a person who says to themselves, “Oh, that’s okay, break another cup, Robina, it’s cool, darling, you can buy another one.” Nobody says that! We get upset: “I shouldn’t break a cup!”
And that’s anger, although we don’t think of it as anger because it feels small. We say we’re irritated, annoyed, upset, frustrated – they’re just polite words for mild anger.
And because we’ve internalized our mother since we were a little girl, it also becomes guilt: “You shouldn’t break cups! You’re not allowed to!”
We have a thousand of these events a day but we don’t pay attention because we think they don’t matter. And because nothing goes astray – everything gets stored in the mind – these moments of aversion build up, and by the end of the day there’s the straw that breaks the camel’s back. Because we don’t pay attention, we make it ten times harder for ourselves – at that point our mind is completely berserk.
So what we have to do is learn to pay attention to the small things; to realize that those baby events are the time to practice.
Practice what? Patience: the exact opposite of aversion. Aversion – anger, irritation, frustration and the rest – arises the millisecond the attachment doesn’t get what it wants. The millisecond the thing you don’t want arises in front of you – the wrong smell, the wrong taste, the wrong words, the wrong sound, the wrong this, the wrong that –aversion is there, which is the bare-bones thought that drives the more volatile anger.
We have to grab that moment. So why not start with the small things? It sounds so silly talking about breaking a cup – “Don’t be so pathetic, Robina!” – but they’re the baby events that are what attachment doesn’t want, which means the baby events of aversion.
Patience is grabbing that moment and greeting the wrong thing: “That’s cool, I can handle the red light. That’s cool, it’s okay to break a cup.” Right that second, you counteract the aversion. Theoretically so simple, but so hard because we haven’t practiced it. It takes courage to look the red light in the eye and welcome it!
In our culture we wait till we want to murder our husband before we realize we’re angry, before we go to the therapist. Way too late!
Forget about getting single-pointed concentration, forget about realizing emptiness, forget about bodhichitta. Every day, learning to be conscious of the response in our mind to whatever goes on outside: this is the job: all the rest are based on this. There’s always a response triggered by the outside events: the red light triggers a response, the green light triggers a response, breaking the cup triggers a response, getting the nice cake triggers a response.
Our responsibility is the response: our responsibility is what goes on in the mind: to label it accurately and, if it’s a delusion, to counteract it with virtue, with wisdom.