One time His Holiness was asked, “How do you apply emptiness in daily life?” He said, “See things from a different point of view.” That’s pretty tasty. Because when we’re so fixated, when attachment or anger are running the show, the mind is so narrow, limited; we have tunnel vision. It’s applying dependent arising, in particular the view that how things appear to us, how we experience them, is mainly dependent on how we label them.
We know this is true. We’re trying to get a friend, say, to see things from a different point of view, trying to get them to be more optimistic about themselves, a bit less self-hating. You know this person, you love this person; you can see their good qualities. You know you’re being realistic, but they just can’t see it. “No, no, Robina, I am a creep. No, Robina, you are wrong. I am ugly.”
We’re all like this. Twenty-seven people can tell me my good qualities, but when we’re overwhelmed by self-loathing – this is just one example of a delusion – we only believe what we see. We don’t even begin to believe what our friend says, even though you trust them as your friends. We firmly believe our own, negative view.
Delusions are fundamentalist. When attachment is strongly there, we’re convinced that the cake is definitely delicious, definitely the cause of my happiness. Look at what we do when we’re fixated on something – fixated with attachment on something or somebody. We will do anything to get that object. So obsessed. That’s attachment. Talk about obsessive-compulsive! And we believe only that is true, and there’s no way in the world we can see it from another point of view.
That’s why His Holiness’s answer was so profound but so simple: “Try to see it from another point of view.” Right now it’s, “Well, everything’s a disaster. Things have gone wrong. My husband left me. Nothing is good. Everything is hopeless. I might as well kill myself!”
We need to have the courage to say to ourself: “This does feel overwhelming, it feels the absolute truth to me,” but a tiny part of your wisdom is saying, “Robina, maybe there’s another way of seeing things. I’ll give myself a bit of space here.”
Just to even say that is like putting atomic bombs under the delusions because delusions in their nature are fixed, stuck, narrow, fearful. “This is how it is.” We know this state of mind. That’s when we despair: because we can’t see any other way of seeing it.
That’s why I always use my example of my friend, Sunny, in prison. She’s out of prison now. She was there for seventeen years, many of them on death row, accused of killing two policemen with her husband. She lost her children. Her parents got killed in a car accident. Her husband got executed – his head burst into flames! And she was there to witness it! But they were totally innocent.
I mean, that’s enough to make people go completely out of their brain with insanity. And many people in prison, wrongly accused, do go mad. But she had this astonishing ability to see things from another point of view. She said, “I knew I had the choice.” To change her mind: to learn to not be angry, to not go crazy; to stay in control of her own mind, her own life in the confines of that small cell. That’s pretty amazing!
So, she was imprisoned. She was wrongly accused. They’re facts. They’re facts. She was on death row. She was innocent. She said, “At some point, I knew I couldn’t change anything, but they couldn’t take my mind from me.” She knew she could see it differently. She knew she could find a way to interpret this nightmare that kept her sane and reasonable. So she said, “I’m not a prisoner, I’m a monk. I’m not in a cell, I’m in a cave.”
This is the teaching about transforming problems into happiness – to see a thing called a problem as good: literally, labeling it differently.
And what’s the logic for doing this? What is the advantage to us? So simple, so clear. We don’t go crazy, we don’t get overrun by anger and despair and attachment.
But look at difficult it is! These delusions are so absolute in our mind, especially when they’re rampant: it’s not possible to see anything differently. When you’re overwhelmed by jealousy, and the husband just left you, that pain is so unbearable you can’t even imagine seeing it differently.
We can’t be brutal with ourselves and just force the pain to go away. No, it’s not like that. It’s a gradual process. Slowly, slowly a bit of wisdom comes. When you’re overwhelmed by your panic attacks or your jealousy or your anger, take care of yourself, tread carefully. Have some tiny part of your mind think, “I can learn to see this differently. I can learn to change my mind.”
And implicit in this approach is view of emptiness and dependent arising: nothing has an intrinsic nature. Nothing is set in stone. Nothing exists from its own side.
This is how to become clear and wise and fulfilled.