Q: What if you feel the necessity for a violent act in order ultimately to do good for a person?
A: You just do it.
Q: But if you are not at that point of true compassion and wisdom?
A: You do not question or worry about your wisdom. You just do whatever is required. The situation you are facing is itself profound enough to be regarded as knowledge. You do not need secondary resources of information. You do not need reinforcement or guidelines for action. Reinforcement is provided by the situation automatically. When things must be conducted in a tough manner, you just do it because the situation demands your response. You do not impose toughness; you are an instrument of the situation.
Q: What do you do for a bridge when you don’t feel compassionate?
A: You do not have to feel compassion. That is the distinction between emotional compassion and compassion compassion: you do not necessarily feel it; you are it. Usually, if you are open, compassion happens because you are not preoccupied with some kind of self-indulgence.
Q: Does the bridge of compassion require continual maintenance?
A: I do not think so. It requires acknowledgement rather than maintenance. That is the mentality of wealth; that you acknowledge that the bridge is there.
Q: What do you do when you are afraid of someone, perhaps with reason? For me, this destroys compassion.
A: Compassion is not looking down upon somebody who needs help, who needs care, but it is general, basic, organic, positive thinking. The fear of someone else seems to generate uncertainty as to who you are. That is why you are afraid of that particular situation or person. Fear comes from uncertainty. If you know exactly how you are going to handle this frightful situation, then you have no fear. Fear comes from panic, the bewilderment of uncertainty. Uncertainty is related to distrust in yourself, feeling that you are inadequate to deal with that mysterious problem which is threatening you. There is no fear if you really have a compassionate relationship with yourself, because then you know what you are doing. If you know what you are doing, then your projections also become methodical or predictable, in some sense. Then one develops prajna, knowledge of how to relate to any given situation.
Q: What do you mean by projections in this context?
A: Projection is the mirror reflection of yourself. Because you are uncertain about yourself, the world reflects that uncertainty back to you and the reflection begins to haunt you. Your uncertainty is haunting you, but it is merely your reflection in the mirror.
Q: What do you mean by saying that, if you are compassionate towards yourself, then you know what you are doing?
A: These two aspects of meditation always appear simultaneously. If you are opening to yourself and have a positive attitude towards yourself, then automatically you know what you are doing because you are not a mystery to yourself. This is jnana, “wisdom,” “spontaneously-existing-awareness-wisdom.” You know that you are spontaneously existing, you know what you are, therefore you can afford to trust yourself at the same time.
Q: If I really were to make friends with myself, then I wouldn’t be afraid of making mistakes all the time?
A: That’s it. The Tibetan word for wisdom is yeshe, which means “primordial intelligence.” You are yourself at the beginning of any beginning. You could almost call it “unoriginated trust in yourself.” You do not have to find the beginning at all. It is a primordial situation, so there is no point in trying to logically find the beginning. It is already. It is beginningless.
Sense of Humor
It would be interesting to examine this subject in terms of what is not a sense of humor. Lack of humor seems to come from the attitude of the “hard fact.” Things are very hard and deadly honest, deadly serious, like, to use an analogy, a living corpse. He lives in pain, has a continual expression of pain on his face. He has experienced some kind of hard fact—“reality”—he is deadly serious and has gone so far as to become a living corpse. The rigidity of this living corpse expresses the opposite of a sense of humor. It is as though somebody is standing behind you with a sharp sword. If you are not meditating properly, sitting still and upright, there will be someone behind you just about to strike. Or if you are not dealing with life properly, honestly, directly, someone is just about to hit you. This is the self-consciousness of watching yourself, observing yourself unnecessarily. Whatever we do is constantly being watched and censored. Actually it is not Big Brother who is watching; it is Big Me! Another aspect of me is watching me, behind me, just about to strike, just about to pinpoint my failure. There is no joy in this approach, no sense of humor at all.
This kind of seriousness relates to the problem of spiritual materialism as well. “Inasmuch as I am part of a particular lineage of meditators, associated with the church and its organization, because of my religious commitment, I must be a good boy or girl, an honest, good, church-going person. I must conform to the standards of the church, its rules and regulations. If I do not fulfill my obligations I will be condemned, reduced to a shrunken body.” There is the threat of solemnity and death—death in the sense of an end to any further creative process. This attitude has the feeling of limitation, rigidity; there is no room to move about at all.
You might ask then, “What about the great religious traditions, the teachings? They speak of discipline, rules and regulations. How do we reconcile these with the notion of a sense of humor?” Well, let’s examine the question properly. Are the regulations, the discipline, the practice of morality really based on the purely judgmental attitude of “good” as opposed to “bad”? Are the great spiritual teachings really advocating that we fight evil because we are on the side of light, the side of peace? Are they telling us to fight against that other “undesirable” side, the bad and the black? That is a big question. If there is wisdom in the sacred teachings, there should not be any war. As long as a person is involved with warfare, trying to defend or attack, then his action is not sacred; it is mundane, dualistic, a battlefield situation. One would not expect the great teachings to be as simple-minded as that, trying to be good, fighting the bad. Such would be the approach of the Hollywood western movie—even before you have seen the conclusion, you already know precisely that the “goodies” will not be killed and the “baddies” are going to get smashed. This approach is obviously simple-minded; but it is just this type of situation that we are creating in terms of “spiritual” struggle, “spiritual” achievement.
I am not saying that a sense of humor should be wildly unleashed. I am speaking of seeing something more than just warfare, struggle, duality. If we regard the path of spirituality as a battlefield, then we are weak and feeble. Then our progress on the path will depend upon how great an area we have conquered, upon the subjugation of our own and others’ faults, upon how much negativity we have eliminated. Relative to how much dark you have eliminated, that much light you have been able to produce. That is very feeble; one could hardly call it liberation or freedom or mukti or nirvana. You have achieved liberation by defeating something else: it is purely relative.
I do not want to make a “sense of humor” into something solemn; I am afraid that people are going to do that. But in order to really understand rigidity, that which is represented by the corpse, one cannot avoid the danger of making a sense of humor into a serious thing. Sense of humor means seeing both poles of a situation as they are, from an aerial point of view. There is good and there is bad and you see both with a panoramic view as though from above. Then you begin to feel that these little people on the ground, killing each other or making love or just being little people, are very insignificant in the sense that, if they begin to make a big deal of their warfare or love making, then we begin to see the ironic aspect of their clamor. If we try very hard to build something tremendous, really meaningful, powerful—“I’m really searching for something, I’m really trying to fight my faults,” or “I’m really trying to be good,”—then it loses its seriousness, becomes a paper tiger; it is extremely ironic.