There’s a big difference between having angry thoughts and being angry. Let’s say I’m convinced that Fred is cheating on me, so I go to see you, my friend, and rant and rave about terrible is Fred is, and you kind of encourage me. The anger comes, and I feed into it, believe it, increase it. That’s being angry.
But if I go to you and talk about my anger because I want to work with it, understand it, go beyond it: that’s different.
We know that thoughts come uncontrollably. A thousand thoughts a second! In this job of being our own therapist, as Lama Yeshe puts it, our job is to become intimately familiar with our thoughts and to gradually learn to identify them and, crucially, learn to distinguish between the I-based, fearful, neurotic ones such as attachment and anger and jealousy and the positive, useful ones such as love and patience and compassion.
Part of our problem is that we’re scared of our thoughts. We’re doing our best to work with them but we get a bit fundamentalist and think, oh, I shouldn’t be angry and then try to suppress them.
That doesn’t work! One approach is to learn to step back and just see them flying by. Then we can learn to identify them. But the trouble is we grasp onto them and, if we’re not suppressing them we’re identifying with them: this is me, I’m bad. That’s a disaster too.
Another approach is to see, as Lama Zopa Rinpoche puts it, that that dirt is coming out. A friend of mind has been doing intensive meditation retreats, three-year retreats, four-year retreats, and at some point, he said, he was out of his brain with extra levels of rage and anger and arrogance. He was really distressed, and he went to Rinpoche and Rinpoche laughed and laughed and said, “Fantastic. The dirt has to come out. The dirt has to come out. The dirt has to come out.”
I can’t stress this one enough. If you are practicing, and every one of you is seriously practicing – I know that – then don’t be surprised when the rubbish comes to the surface. It’s like putting your clothes in a washing machine. Don’t get upset when you see the dirt in the water. Be happy.
There’s a huge difference between the crazy thoughts coming and buying into the crazy thoughts, so we need to distinguish between being angry and buying into the story, and allowing all the crazy, angry thoughts to come but not buying into them. This is a miracle of a difference if we’re brave enough.
If we can do this, then you will have a good sleep, and they’ll be gone by the next day, I promise. Suddenly, you’ll see reality again. The storm will have passed.
So, be courageous. Doing this job of working on our mind is an intense job, it’s a miracle of a job. I mean, to even attempt to be a better human being on this planet, that’s a pretty incredible job to do. I can’t see that too many human beings are trying to do that. Some are. It’s amazing. So then be happy about it. Be glad.
Be glad when the dirt comes out and remember that it’s not at the core of your being, it doesn’t define you, and you can change. That’s the courage we have to have, I tell you. And that’s why doing the four opponent powers at the end of every day is a miraculous practice, fantastic practice.
We’re a work in progress. I love that saying. You’re a work in progress, okay? So important to remember that.