You’ve got your three categories of states of mind – there’s no fourth. First, you’ve got your neurotic, deluded, negative, ridiculous, disturbing, I-based, fear-based ones that make us insane, that make us crazy – and make us harm other people because of past karma: habits. My poor friend, my torturer friend on death row, came into this life with these tendencies: he doesn’t know why he wants to torture, his mother didn’t teach him. He came into this life with the tendency, the habit to torture, driven by deluded states of mind.
Second, you’ve got the positive, reasonable states of mind: love, compassion, empathy, wisdom, kindness, generosity, forgiveness.
The crucial thing that distinguishes the first lot from the second lot is that the first lot are driven by the root delusion, the mistaken view of a separate, bereft sense of a concrete self – it’s so abstract for us. They are all branch voices of that one.
And all these delusions – and this is the part we have to understand – are misconceptions. We talk about the emotions, but that’s just habitual experience that the body also experiences from the habit of having these thoughts in our minds from countless lifetimes. These delusions are finally misconceptions in the bones of our being. That’s why we’ve got to develop concentration in meditation to get down to the level where we unpack and unravel these misconceptions to prove that they have no basis in reality.
The second lot, the virtues, have a basis in reality: they’re based in interdependence – although they’re not totally accurate yet, not until we’ve realized emptiness. Love, compassion and the rest: they are valid – not because God says or Buddha says, or our mother or the government, for that matter. No! They’re valid, very simply, because they are rooted in interdependence.
Even more simply, actions done on the basis of delusions are negative because they harm others and actions done on the basis of virtues are positive because they’re beneficial to others.
The third lot I like to call the mechanical parts of our mind. They enable us to do whatever we do, whether negative or positive.
Of the thousands of states of mind that you have in your head, they’re all going to fit into these three categories. Already that should calm us down; already it should be helping our mind: “Phew, just three categories, I can manage that!” Your job as a Buddhist is to put these states of mind in the right categories: “Oh, there’s love: that’s the positive category. Oh, there’s attachment, that’s in the deluded one, that’s rubbish, get rid of it. Third one, I need that: attention, intention, discrimination, concentration: better grow those so I can use them to help me do the job of distinguishing between the negative ones and the positive ones.” This is not a complicated concept.
It’s like your garden: the flowers, which are the ones that you want to grow, and the weeds, the ones to get out; then there’s the stuff that enables both the weeds and the flowers to grow. It’s an analogy here. The job is to distinguish between the weeds and the flowers and to know what to do with them – that’s it, that’s it, that’s it! – all the way from here to buddhahood!
There are so many of these states of mind – it’s too many to identify them all immediately, but we can start articulating some of them. If we can write them down, it’s quite helpful. You can do an analysis, and you look at the sentences: Well, is that a valid thought? Is that an exaggerating thought?
The key function of deluded thoughts is that they exaggerate. “My boyfriend is so divine, I will die without him.” You start to analyze that thought and you realize that thought, that sentence, an expression of attachment, is an absurd exaggeration!
Then you look at another thought: you might think you’re a saint or something – “Wow, I am so holy!” Well, now, analyze: “Am I really a saint yet? No, I haven’t got bodhichitta and I haven’t realized emptiness, so I’m not a saint.” So that’s an invalid sentence, that’s an invalid thought: the thought of pride, which exaggerates your good qualities.
You’ve still got the thought – it’s still crazy inside you – but you analyze it and you decide which category it fits into: the first or the second. Is it valid or not? It’s kind of hard work because we just wish it would all go away.
The key point is this: as Lama Zopa says, bad enough I see my boyfriend in a way that he doesn’t exist – through the lenses of my attachment – but the worst thing, the thing that keeps us locked in samsara, is that I believe it is true.
So what we have to do – and this is the one that’s really intense – is we have to check if the thought is valid. You have the crazy thought: you think you’re a saint. You have the crazy thought: you think your boyfriend’s the cause of all your happiness. You have the crazy thought: torturing is good. All these appear real to us because of our past tendencies.
What do you do with them? You use your wisdom and check: “No, that’s not a valid thought, Robina” – even though everything in you wants to torture, even though everything in you believes your boyfriend’s divine, even though everything in you believes you’re a special person. A little wisdom voice pops up: “No, no, no, Robina, listen, listen, honey, that’s not a valid thought.” Then, “Phew, I won’t believe it.” The thought is still there, raging, shouting – but you practice not believing it. This is what keeps us sane.
You can’t stop the crazy thoughts from being there – you can’t stop the weeds overnight – but you can start to realize that they’re not at the core of the garden, that they can be removed. And then you learn the methods to slowly, slowly weaken the weeds and grow the flowers.
This is an enormously difficult job. You might have been doing this job of being a Buddhist for fifty years, but still you can be overrun one day by depression. When it arises it hits you like a ton of bricks, the thoughts arise from the junkie past, and they seem so true: it really does feel like life is worthless, that you’re useless. But your wisdom says, “No, Robina, this is not true! They are invalid thoughts, so don’t believe them.”
Of course it’s not easy, but it’s possible!