What’s the best way to think about the cockroaches in the kitchen?
First of all, you’ve got to not want to kill them. Why? First – forget compassion –it’s for your sake. This is the thinking to do; this is the thinking that has to be underneath the wish not to kill.
This means you have to know that, according to the natural law of cause and effect, everything you think and do and say puts seeds in your mind that will bring any of the four results: rebirth, tendency, experience similar to the cause, or environmental.
You have to ask yourself the question: Do I want to be killed? Do I want to have a tendency to kill? Do I want to be harmed? Do I want to have a lousy environment? And the answer has to be no.
We don’t think like this. We think of this as punishment. We think, well of course I must kill them, it’s not my fault. It’s a bit like you’re addicted to sugar, and you know it will cause diabetes, so you go to your doctor: “Oh doctor, I can’t stop eating sugar. Can I please not get diabetes?”
It’s got nothing to do with punishment and reward. It doesn’t work like that. “Karma takes care,” as Lama Yeshe puts it. You understand?
The idea is to have the courage to not want to kill, to have the practice every day, to do your purification every day – because that puts atomic bombs under the tendency to kill, it purifies the likelihood that you will have to kill, and it prevents you from meeting creatures that you might need to kill. The whole dynamic changes if you can have confidence in that.
But not killing doesn’t mean we have to be nihilistic and let the cockroaches take over. Don’t be silly. You’ve got to make some decisions. You have to look at methods of how to get rid of cockroaches and then methods of how to prevent them.
You do your research: you’ve got to be realistic and look into what attracts them, where do they come from, how do you prevent them.
And what do you do when you get them? You need a bit of patience. Perhaps you could catch them and send them off somewhere. And you try to have compassion: say a few mantras, which blesses your breath, and blow on them for their benefit. Do what you can to get rid of them without harming them.
I’ve always told this story of our friend, Ven. Thubten Pemo, this nun who died recently – she was a meditator, a yogini, an amazing human being. She was in retreat for years, and she had these big sacks of flour up in the mountains somewhere. And then she was overrun by moths. What were moths initially? Were moths little worms or bugs or something? (Student: Caterpillars.) Okay, so she had a plague of moths in her retreat house.
She was telling Lama Zopa how for weeks, if not months – for weeks if not months – she’d go around her retreat house with a cup and a lid. She’d catch amoth, say mantras – om mani padmehum, om mani padme hum, om mani padme hum – and then blow on the moth and release it. She did this for weeks – how kind!
Dealing with your cockroaches is a practice for you to understand karma, it’s a practice for you to have compassion, and to calm down and not have a panic attack. They’re just sentient beings, you know: they’re little mothers who want to be happy, don’t want to suffer.
Say mantra, blow on them, and meanwhile do what you can, be reasonable. But for your own sake as well as for their sake, try not to kill. All we can do is what we can do – there’s no miracle answer to it.
What’s interesting is that if you really have confidence in the karmic view – and you can’t be forced to have it – and you really do the purification, you really have compassion, you really regret, and you really keep your vows if you have them, and you really purify, don’t be surprised if the cockroaches stop coming. Because whatever you do in your mind changes the situation.
The hardest thing in the Western world when we hear about karma is to realize this first step: I don’t want to kill for my sake because I don’t want to put the tendency in my mind, I don’t want the future results. This is really like compassion for yourself. Forget compassion for the cockroach. It’s got to first be compassion for ourself: to realize that everything I think and do and say programs my mind and brings results to me.
It’s like the diabetes one: you’d be so cautious about eating sugar because you know you don’t want diabetes. That’s the attitude to have towards not killing and stealing and lying: Why on earth would I want to become that kind of person?