What follows is part of a talk given by Cheri Huber, a Buddhist practitioner and teacher. This talk is transcribed in Sweet Zen: Dharma Talks from Cheri Huber. Her words are so straightforward and simple, they are really pressing me to embrace Buddhism again. It's much less threatening than before; I had been sitting faithfully for a while and had to give it up. Too much pain, too many voices in my head.
If I walk into the kitchen and smell gas, I know
what that smell means,
and I know what can happen if that smell is not
attended to. Before I knew
what that smell was, I could have gone to bed one night
and not gotten up in
the morning. In the same way, it is important to know
the signs and
potentials and movements of egocentricity, to recognize
them for what they
are, and to take steps to deal with them. If I smell
gas in the kitchen, I
open the doors and windows, find the leak, get it
fixed. Within ourselves,
similarly, there are steps we can take to protect
ourselves from the
suffering caused by egocentric conditioning.
Let¹s examine one conditioned process, guilt. Guilt
is a process that
does not require specific content. As long as you
maintain the internal
process of feeling guilty, guilt will always be there
about something. But
awareness of that process of that process can stop it.
You can be just going along, and a voice in you
says, "You're lazy." When you hear that message, you feel guilty, just like
Pavlov's dogs
salivating when a bell rings. That is conditioning. The
two events have
nothing to do with each other, but, quite predictably
and automatically,
hearing "You're lazy" produces a feeling of guilt.
How could you break that pattern? You might notice
exactly what happened
and write it down on a little note and stick the note
on the wall. "The
voice says "You're lazy," and then I feel guilty." It
could be a cartoon:
"You're lazy" is in a balloon above the head of the
person. Next panel:
person feels guilty. There you have the conditioned
pattern of response.
From now on, when you hear that message inside your
head, you know what the
result will be. It is like knowing what it means when
you smell gas.
"When that happens, this is how I feel" applies to
all sorts of
conditioned reactions. It takes so long to work through
even one of those
patterns because ego is very resistant. We try to deny
what our conditioning
does to us; we hide out, hoping it will forget about
us. But go right on in
there. "A voice says I'm lazy, then I feel guilty."
There it is. You diagram
it and put it on the wall, and you check in with it
every day. You actively
listen for that voice.
Pretty soon you will hear another voice, presenting
the other side of
the issue. "But you are too tired to work hard." Then
watch what happens:
you believe you are too tired, and you feel inadequate,
overwhelmed,
depressed. Lay all that out. "The voice says this, I
feel that." What
happens to you emotionally? What happens to you
physically? What happens to
you mentally? Chart the whole thing. Pretty soon you
will have seen
everything there is to see about that particular piece
of your conditioning.
An essential ingredient in this is a sense of
adventure and fun. If it
is as grim as life and death, you have lost before you
started. It has to
have that light tone to it. On the one hand, it is
serious business, because
what motivates us is being sick of having our
experience controlled by
forces we do not understand. But our approach to that
is more in the spirit
of play: we are going to put on our boots and our
six-shooters and head down
Main Street, and we are going to confront those
culprits. And from now on,
we are going to have a different relationship.
Once you have seen everything there is to see about
guilt, you can
tackle another conditioned pattern. Next! You take on
the next piece, and
then the next. There is a tremendous sense of
well-being that comes with
that. You are no longer ducking and hiding through your
life. Everything is
right out there, and you are actively dealing with it
head-on.
It can sound laborious to have to do this with
every one of those
patterns in our lives. I assure you, though, it is no
more laborious than
living with them.
As with the Buddha's image of the knots in the
scarf, you untie each
knot of conditioning, one at a time, until they are all
gone. Nothing is
left unfinished, nothing is left undone. Then you can
lay the scarf out on
the ironing board and press it out so smoothly that
there is not a wrinkle
left.