When someone comes to you in despair, how to help?
When bad things happen – join the universe, things go wrong – one of the worst things is we think there’s no light at the end of the tunnel. This is what happens, isn’t it? You feel you cannot see any benefit in anything, you cannot see any purpose, you cannot see any value – especially in yourself.
Now, is there something here we can do?
First of all, it depends on how close they are to you. That’s my first question to you: what are they to you, you know?
But whether they’re close or not, it seems to me, we can’t just give them a lecture: “Well, do this and do that and don’t do this and you shouldn’t think this and this is ridiculous.”
When someone’s despairing and sees no light at the end of the tunnel and they’re in front of you, the thing you need to do is make them feel there is some worth. How do you do that?
All you can do – all you can do – is just be loving and be kind and be optimistic, you know?
The way that Buddhism talks about ego – which is when we’re overwhelmed by attachment, overwhelmed by anger, overwhelmed by despair, overwhelmed by jealousy, overwhelmed by depression, by hopelessness, you name it, all these words we know so well – one of the key functions of that is you feel utterly isolated: the more we suffer, the more we are separate from others. You can’t see anything or anyone else. So there’s a sense of utter disconnect, isn’t there?
So if you’re with a person who’s despairing, the idea is not to give lectures, but to be loving and to show there’s some sense of connectedness – show them that you see them, that you hear them.
Often I think of people in old people’s homes, drugged out of their brains like old vegetables, and there’s nothing and nobody for them. Even the cleaning lady being kind to them can be transformative. The thing we need most – we need most – is to have the person in front of us reflecting back to us something good.
We almost have to be like a mirror for the other person –not mirror their despair and their anger, but mirror their own goodness. When you’re despairing or when you’re really angry or when you’re really depressed or when you’re really jealous – this is the Buddhist analysis – these states of mind are the function of ego, and they make us totally separate. This is the tragedy, the irony of ego: there’s a feeling of utter separateness, you know?
And the other tragic thing, the utterly tragic thing is that we somehow believe that what we feel is the absolute truth. This is something that’s so primordial it almost seems weird to say it.
For example, if you’re angry with somebody, basically you’re interpreting the person and their actions in a certain way – and you believe it’s the absolute truth. When we are feeling this way, when the unhappy state of mind is there, things appear set in stone: “He is bad.” In the Buddhist analysis, the very character of unhappy states of mind is such that there’s not a millimeter of space, not even the possibility that you could see it from another point of view.
So, the miracle here is that if we can see something from another point of view, then we can see there’s light at the end of the tunnel, we can see there’s some possibility.
But it’s the tragedy of the deluded states of mind – anger, attachment, jealousy, low self-esteem, you name it – when they are rampaging in your mind, everything seems set in stone and there’s no part of your mind thinking, “Well, I wonder if this is really true? I wonder if I can see it from another point of view?”
The millisecond you know it’s possible to see things from another point of view, then you’re okay.
If you can’t see there’s another possibility, that’s the tragedy. This is the Buddhist analysis of the unhappy states of mind.
The happy states of mind, the positive states of mind, the reasonable ones, like kindness and love and compassion and self-respect and self-worth, they’re spacious, they’re not rigid. They’re spacious, and there’s a feeling of connectedness with others, and that’s the saving grace.