Q: Rinpoche, how do we stay positive and undisturbed in a bad situation?
A: Like I have answered this one many times, because people ask me about it “How to overcome my anger?” and “How to overcome my difficulties in my most critical time?”, people tend to ask that kind of a question. And I also ask that question to myself.
But I think you have to understand that as we are, the very projections, the idea that we have, that “that is a disturbance” or “my mind is disturbed” that reflection of our own state of mind, that has to be examined. That has to be examined, I think that is very important.
And we are very fragile, as a human being, that to overcome right away just because we know something, many people knows about the Shamata meditation practice, many people have examined it, but when you don’t have accumulated enough, like such as being a short term retreat, maybe it’s one day or two days, it’s also fine, once in a month, or maybe once in a week.
There is no shortcut solution.
The most important is that you need to have a sense of sharpness in your mind. You need to build up that foundation. Foundation is like when you accumulate more and more Shine practice, more and more Deity practice, and then even there is a sense of disturbance occur, any moment, let’s say, somebody made a bad comment about you, or somebody pointing finger at you, saying many bad things, right?
So at that time, you can and you will examine naturally that “Ah, I pity that person because that person sees nothing but sense of anger, anger itself state of the emotion comes from the illusion from that person’s emotion, that person’s emotions, of the anger, all the root of all the anger and negative emotions, comes from the state of ignorance, ah, what a pity!”.
You will start to see beyond the concept of that person, who dislikes you. You will start to see the emotion of that person. Until now, what we see if we don’t practice, is that “I like”, “I do not like”, “I see this person”, “I hate this person”, “I don’t like this person” but the one thing that we have very much in common is that all of us, we have similar emotion, difficulties, or similarities are there. Every human being has anger, every human being has jealousy, every human being they have ignorance, every human being they have attachment, we have common emotions.
And then when you see such person that has a certain bad comment about you, who say negative things about you, you should examine not the person that you see, but the emotion, the state of the emotion itself. And then you will feel naturally pity for that person. Or you can put it nicely, you feel bad for that person. And then you will generate even more compassionate state of mind. And it happened to me several times.
Kalu Rinpoche
FB Livestream – 2 March 2020 (35′ 35”)
To be continued …
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