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only I were younger, or  If only I were older, or whatever. It s always
the same state. I watched it when I was a monk and all I had were a few
books and a robe and bowl. Possessions were really minimal. Even so, I
found myself thinking,  If only I had a little nicer robe. It has nothing
to do with what s around us. It s this movement inside of feeling like
what s here is not enough. Do you know what I m talking about?
Nasrudin says:
Never give people anything they ask for
until at least a day has passed.
Someone said,  Why not?
 Experience shows they only appreciate something
when they have the opportunity of doubting
whether they will get it or not.
One of the interesting things when you start to look at and work
with the hindrance of desire is to see that what relieves it,what makes one
finally happy about it, is not so much the thing that you get, or the person,
or the experience that you get at the end - this is important, so listen to
this - it s actually the fact that the state of desiring has ended. I ll give you
a simple example. Suppose you have a craving for some food that you
really want to have. It can be pizza or ice cream or cannelloni, you name
it, whatever it happens to be. You go and you get it. You do all the things.
You get in your car, you go, you finally get it, you have it in your hand,
and you take the first bite of whatever it is. And usually the moment that
you taste it, there s this great sense of delight and release, and so forth,
and part of it may be because it tastes good and it s pleasurable, if it s
part of your fantasy  but the main piece is, in that moment, finally the
wanting stops. Do you understand that? And that a good deal of the joy
of fulfilling desires is not so much of the getting of the thing, because you
have it for a little while and then you want the next thing  it s endless
112 Chapter 9. Hinderances of the Householder
 but rather that there s a moment where the wanting itself stops. If you
look closely in yourself, if you let yourself look, you find that the very
process of wanting is painful; that the very state of not being complete
or content or present with what s here is what the pain is about.
That s a familiar hindrance. Let s talk about some of the others,
and then talk about ways one could work with them in one s life. Of
course, the first piece is just beginning to understand how these operate
in ourselves.
The next four are quite interesting. Anger, sleep, restlessness and
doubt  even desire to a certain extent is included  I tend to see them
all as states of avoidance. They re really states which arise so that we can
avoid something, some aspect of what s true in our experience. Maybe
I can explain that as we go along.
Anger, which includes irritation and judgment and boredom, not
liking what s present, fear  all of those are the movement of anger. It s
a very painful state, for the most part, if you look at it. The body has a
lot of tension, there s heat, there s burning if you re angry.Even irritation
has a lot of tension in it. Yet in some way we do it again partly out of
habit. Another reason that we do it is because it makes us feel right in
some way. You know what I mean about being right. That s the favorite
feeling of many people because it s the feeling that most authenticates
the sense of yourself.
Two weeks ago when we talked about Forgiveness somebody stood
up or raised their hand and said something that was really powerful.
They said,  Here we are, stewing and raging and angry about something
that someone has done, and very often they re off going about their own
business enjoying themselves. And who s suffering? It s us because it
wasn t that way,and we re so angry, and it should have been,and so forth.
And who is doing the holding on at that point? I m not saying that you
shouldn t be angry  you can be angry or hold grudges; you re welcome
to do anything.  We re just looking at the laws of how it operates.
I remember I was sitting at this one monastery for a long time medi-
tating, and I had a bout of anger about something, which I have regularly,
and I went to the teacher and told him how angry I was about something.
It was in the hot season and he was wearing those little flip-flop sandals.
He got up and went over to the table where we were sitting and he kicked
the table leg. It looked like it hurt him. Then he held his foot and he
hopped around for awhile. Then he sat back down and kind of massaged
his foot. Then he looked at me and he shook his head. That was his re-
sponse to my being angry. He just kind of acted out what we do. Just
like desire, where we can desire anything, and it doesn t matter what it
113
is, the force is there, and we get our food, or our relationship, or our car,
or our vacation, or our time off, whatever it is, and then we look for the
next thing because it s so powerful. The same with anger. We can get
angry at anything, including things that are already past and nothing can
be done about them. And even more, we can imagine something which
somebody is going to do, and sit there and get really angry at what they
might do. Have you ever seen yourself do that?
We project our righteousness on other people in some way. We
project our pain, is really what it s about; that we re in some kind of pain,
and we make it somebody else s fault. Also there s as much suffering in
the world as we experience at certain times, and we don t want to take it
in because it s so hard for our hearts, and our culture is one that doesn t
train the human heart very well to deal with the measure of pain that s
part of life.
I got quite angry today. In fact, I was really yelling at somebody. I
won t talk about the specifics so much. I felt so indignant and I felt so
right that it was very hard not to do it. It s interesting to observe. It s not
like anger is some terrible thing, or that it won t arise, or that all these
other stateswon t arise,or that there might not even be an occasion where
it was appropriate. There are some occasionsfor that,especially if you re
able to let it move through you instead of storing it as resentment and all
kinds of other things, or if you use it in a way that isn t really intended
to hurt other people. That s a whole other talk about anger.
But here we are, living in a pretty busy and complicated world, and
we see this state of being angry, or being irritated, or judgmental, arise [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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