In this world people have a lot of difficulties and there is a lot of suffering. It’s a very good practice sometimes to forget all your problems, all the difficulties you are going through, and learn to relate to the suffering of other people, to translate loving-kindness into action. These kinds of actions can generate a lot of joy and a lot of happiness. It can be a very meaningful way to live when you are being your own best friend and you are being a friend to others also.
We can really feel as though we are a nobody. We say to ourselves: “No one likes me. Everyone rejects me. I’m a victim. Poor me”. This is what I call being a nobody in the sense that you’re giving minuses to yourself and you’re getting minuses from other people. From feeling like nobody we need to feel like somebody. For that we need plusses from ourselves: we have to learn to see the positive in ourselves, to rejoice in the good things that we have been doing. This is why I emphasise loving-kindness very much. We all have the qualities by which we can really free ourselves. They are all hidden inside us. Meditation or the spiritual life should enable us to see these inner resources that we have. The practice is to see that the Buddha-nature is within us and to allow this Buddha-nature to flower out.
You can also be nobody in the true sense of the word. When you are truly nobody, you are no longer dependant on plusses or minuses. You have gone beyond plusses and minuses. That is where you learn to be your own toy and you learn to be really self-contained within yourself.
We have given such power and energy to other people. Our happiness and our unhappiness are dependent on what other people think of us. We all have this tendency. Most of the time we are trying to please other people. We do this because we are starving for the plusses of other people. Over time we have developed this dependency which manifests in whatever we are doing. It is like being dependent on a toy we would like to get, and only when we get it do we feel that we are really happy.
When I meet such people I feel very sad about them. They are trying their best, but of course they are not getting enough plusses. They can never be satisfied with the plusses they get. Then they try more, and the more they are trying the less successful they are, and they end up suffering. They give themselves minuses and they feel rejected. These aspects are very important in relationships, because our happiness and our unhappiness are really dependent on how we relate to ourselves and how we relate to others. What is important to realise is that we need friendliness, self-confidence, self-esteem. We are not giving enough to ourselves. We are suffering from a kind of lack, and we try to cover it up by creating a dependency on other people.
Our problem is that we take this crazy, subjective world very seriously, we believe it to be true. If you can really understand that we are living in such a world, a world where there is such a lot of delusion, such a lot of grief and such a lot of hatred, that we live in a world where human beings are imperfect simply because they are still human, then you learn to see yourself and others in an entirely different way. I would suggest that this is real loving-kindness. When you see the shortcomings and faults of other people and you can remember that both you and they are living in a subjective world coloured with so much delusion, then you’ll be relating to them with more understanding, tolerance and compassion.
There’s a very simple aspect in the Buddha’s teaching in relation to human behaviour. It is said that human beings have three strong drives which are motivating them to act in particular ways. One is greed, another is hatred, and a more subtle and difficult one is delusion. We all have those three drives in us, and the Buddha said that unless and until we really overcome our subjugation to these drives completely, we are still crazy. We relate to the outer world, the external world, through a private world that we have constructed ourselves. In other words, we are being subjective and not objective.
A very valuable skill is to learn to see an action or a word from another person not from your own point of view, but from the other person’s point of view. It is very difficult because we are so fixed with our own plusses and minuses, with our own assumptions, our own beliefs and our own value judgements. To be able to forget all that and try to understand another person from his or her point of view we need to have a lot of space and a lot of understanding about human nature.
When we see the shortcomings and the faults of other people it is important to realise that we’re not free from them either. When we judge others, when we give minuses to other people, when we give advice to other people, we tend to forget that we also have similar qualities ourselves.
When we see someone behaving in a way that we think he or she should not behave, we assume that the other person is acting with full responsibility and knows what he or she is doing. This is just a belief on our part. The other person sometimes doesn’t know why he or she is behaving in that particular way. Often we don’t know ourselves why we are acting in a particular way. Yet we assume that others always know what they are doing.
When we come across such a situation, rather than immediately giving a plus or minus to the other person, rather than getting angry and reacting to the other person, we can have a dialogue to find out why that person is behaving in a particular way. If you can do this with other people in such situations, you’ll be really helpful to them. Maybe for the first time they are encouraged to reflect on what they are doing. In relation to your own actions, rather then giving yourself a minus, try to have a dialogue with yourself about why you’re behaving in this particular way. This is a very important skill that we need to learn in relationships.
A challenge can arise in relationships when we see the shortcomings of other people. Whatever the relationship, sometimes we see the other person behaving differently from how we think they should behave. Normally what we do when we see other people’s weaknesses is that we become very judgmental. We want them to be different and we get angry with them. We give them a minus and try to correct them. This shows that we are demanding how other people should behave.
It is funny how in life we make demands on ourselves, how we should behave. We demand from ourselves that we behave according to our own model of perfection. In the same way we project our model of perfection onto others. Consequently we demand that their behaviour should correspond to the model of perfection that we hold in relation to them.
But do we stop at that? No, we even demand from life how it should be. Take for example the weather. When there is Dutch weather we demand that we should have Sri Lankan weather! When there is Sri Lankan weather we are very happy and when there is Dutch weather we are very unhappy.
Though we are grown up, we still have our toys in the form of external things that we have become dependant on for our amusement and our happiness. Like children, we keep on changing toys. When we have one toy we think: “Now this is going to make me happy”, but very soon we are unhappy with that particular toy and we start looking for other toys. Our whole lives we are looking for toys, and at the end of it we are still dissatisfied.
Meditation helps us to become our own toy: that is the only difference, but it’s a very big difference. Having loving-kindness and being our own best friend helps us to have a relationship with ourselves where we become our own toy and where we’ll be contented and happy with ourselves. That doesn’t mean that when we are with other people we are unhappy. It is more that when we are with ourselves we can be happy and contented with ourselves, and when we are with other people we can still be happy.
In everyday life when we lead a very busy life, one thing we can do is not to learn to focus but generally have awareness in relation to thoughts that we have. Don’t try to be aware of all the thoughts during the day, it won’t be easy; but during the day as often as possible just to come back to your mind and realize, now what are the thoughts that I am having.
The second suggestion is in relation to the thoughts, just find out during the day as often as possible, what are the emotions I am having, am I anxious, do I have stress, do I have fear; just to know, especially the emotions in relation to your thoughts. And the third suggestion is to be conscious, to be aware when no unpleasant emotions are there.
During the day there are times when we are free of these unpleasant emotions so unless we have awareness we even don’t know that our mind is free. And the last suggestion is during the day try to come back to the present, just to when you are doing something to really be present with what you are doing, not every action you do but even some actions, this will enable us to develop this quality of being in the present. So in this way we can use awareness to integrate in our way of living daily.
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