Jack Kornfield on Meta, Compassion and self-Hatred


Meta, Compassion and Self Hatred

 

“Ultimately that sense of poverty leads to aggression. You not only do not want to give anything away, but you would like to destroy that which reminds you of giving. That is the ultimate world of hell, or naraka, an instant and extremely powerful state of aggression or hatred.

Chogyam Trungpa on “the hungry ghost realm

 

“If you had a person in your life treating you the way you treat yourself, you would have gotten rid of them a long time ago…”

Cheri Huber, There Is Nothing Wrong with You: Going Beyond Self-Hate

“When you are afraid of something, it might be a fear of darkness, a fear of knives, a fear of guns, or of anything. You can’t just have fear without fear of something. So what is that other? Who is the other? That’s yourself. There is a story about a man who is locked in a room. He’s sitting in that room, a big room with lots of space and lots of possibilities of noise bouncing back. Things are getting cold and dark and darker. He hears something. So he says ‘Who dat?’?”? When there is no response, he says, “Who dat who said, ‘Who dat?’?” And then he says, “Who dat who said, ‘Who dat?’ when I said ‘Who dat?’?”

The antidote to that echo chamber is to make friends with yourself.
Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche

“If a person can really relate to the simplicity of the practice of meditation, then automatically there is an absence of aggression. Because there is no rush to achieve, you can afford to relax. Because you can afford to relax, you can afford to keep company with yourself, be friends with yourself. Then thoughts, emotions, whatever occurs in the mind, constantly accentuate the act of making friends with yourself.”

Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche

Meta, Compassion and Self Hatred

Jack Kornfield

 


“We find that we are being a nuisance to ourselves, let alone being a nuisance to others. We get angry with ourselves, saying: “I could do better than this. What’s wrong with me? I seem to be getting worse. I’m going backwards.” We’re angry at the whole world, including ourselves. Everything we see is an insult. The universe becomes the expression of total insult. One has to relate with that. If you are going to exert your power and energy to walk on the path, you have to work with yourself.

The first step is to make friends with yourself. That is almost the motto of shamatha experience. Making friends with yourself means accepting and acknowledging yourself. You work with your subconscious gossip, fantasies, dreams—everything. And everything that you learn about yourself you bring back to the technique, to the awareness of the breathing, which was taught by the Buddha.

Having made friends with yourself, you feel a sense of relief and excitement. At the same time, you should be careful not to get overly excited about your accomplishment. You are still a schoolboy or a schoolgirl. If last night’s homework was good, that doesn’t mean that you are done with school altogether. You have to come back to class, you have to work with your teacher, you have to do more homework, precisely because you were successful. You have more work to do”.

Beyond Present, Past, and Future Is The Fourth Moment

By Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche

 

Adi Da Samraj: Accept It (life and all is pains). Accept that is life, that is the reason for existence, that is the law of existence, that is the Perfect State you are Given, and allow It completely, more and more, with all your stress, with murders in your heart, in your gut, just done.

All your “oinking” refusal, hatred, anger, upset, pursuit, seeking. So what? You have to make a life out of this acceptance, this embrace. Eat It. Eat the Living God.

You must let your fear of death go. You must accept the imposition of What Is here that you have been refusing all your life, and take (it) on…all over your heart, opened, relaxed…give it up, relax down, surrender.

You are all in the same boat here in these independent bodies. Death is coming. Do it, then. Do it now. Embrace What is Imposing Itself on you. Do not wait until the end of life. Do it now. There I am—swallow Me down. Take a deep breath. Be done with it. It has to happen. Do not wait for the end of life.

 

Pleasure and Pain

~ Pleasure ~ Here may investigate more thoroughly the nature of this feeling of satisfaction and its opposite: pleasure and pain. The Sanskrit words for these two mental states are respectively sukha and dukkha. Both come from the root khan, “to dig”; the prefixes su and dus make the difference. The former prefix conveys the idea of “ease” and it derives this idea from the unrestrained easy flow of breath. The radical idea of sukha is, therefore, unrestrained digging ­ digging where the soil offers but little resistance. Transferred to the mind, that act becomes sukha, which makes an easy impression upon it. The act must, in the nature of its vibrations, coincide with the then prevailing conditions of the mental vibrations. Before any percepts or concepts had taken root in the mind, there was no desire, no pleasure. The genesis of desire and what is called pleasure ­ that is, the sense of satisfaction caused by the impressions produced by external objects ­ begins with certain percepts and concepts taking root in the mind. This taking root really is only an overclouding of the original set of impressions arising out of evolutionary mental progress. When contact with the external object momentarily removes that cloud from the clear horizon of the mind, the soul is conscious of a feeling of satisfaction that avidya connects with the external object. This, as shown above, gives birth to desire. ~ Pain & Dwesha ~ The genesis of pain and the desire to repel (dwesha) is similar. The radical idea of dukkha (pain) is the act of digging where a good deal of resistance is experienced. Transferred to the mind, it signifies an act that encounters resistance from the mind. The mind does not easily give place to these vibrations; it tries to repel them with all its might. There arises a feeling of privation. It is as if something of its nature was being taken away, and an alien phenomenon introduced. The consciousness of privation, or want, is pain, and the repulsive power that these alien vibrations excite in the mind is known by the name of dwesha (desire to repel). The word dwesha comes from the root dwesh, which is a compound of du and ish. Ish itself appears to be a compound root, i and s. The final s is connected to the root su, “to breath”, “to be in one’s natural state”. The root i means “to go”, and the root ish, therefore, means to go toward one’s natural state. Transferred to the mind, the word becomes a synonym of raga. The word du in dwesh performs the same function as dus in dukkh. Hence dwesh comes to mean “a hankering after repulsion”. Anger, jealousy, hatred, etc., are all modifications of this, as love, affection and friendship are those of raga. By what has been said above, it is easy to follow up the genesis of the principle of “tenacity of life”. I must now try to assign these actions to their prevailing tatwas. The general color of avidya is, as already said, that of akasa, darkness. Otherwise, the agni tatwa prevails in anger. If this is accompanied by vayu, there will be a good deal of motion in the body, prithivi will make it stubborn, and apas easily manageable. Akasa will give a tinge of fear. The same tatwa prevails in love. Prithivi makes it abiding, vayu changeable, agni fretting, apas lukewarm, and akasa blind. Akasa prevails in fear; it tends to produce a hollow in the veins themselves. In prithivi the timid man is rooted to the spot, with vayu he runs away, with apas he succumbs to flattery, and agni tends to make one vengeful.

THE SCIENCE OF BREATH AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE TATTVAS TRANSLATED PROM THE SANSKRIT, WITH INTRODUCTORY AND EXPLANATORY ESSAYS ON AND ADDITIONS. ­ BY RAMA PRASAD, M.A., F.T.S.

“In the Mahayana tradition we experience a sense of gentleness toward ourselves, and a sense of friendliness to others begins to arise. That friendliness or compassion is known in Tibetan as nyingje, which literally means “noble heart.” We are willing to commit ourselves to working with all sentient beings. But before we actually launch into that project, we first need a lot of training”.

“Relative Bodhichitta and the Paramita of Discipline…….That brings us to the next stage. Again, instead of remaining at a theoretical, conceptual level alone, we return to the most practical level. In the mahayana our main concern is how to awaken ourselves. We begin to realize that we are not as dangerous as we had thought. We develop some notion of kindness, or Maitri, and having developed Maitri we begin to switch into karuna, or compassion.

Introduction – TRAINING THE MIND AND CULTIVATING LOVING-KINDNESS – by Chogyam Trungpa – Edited by Judith L. Lief.