Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. The most striking moment in this 45-minute session with Ven Jampa Gendun is an extended story about Hazel, a dying hospital patient whose hour of greatest agony became a breakthrough into what she called “the ten thousand in pain” — a visceral experience of universal suffering that dissolved her isolation and transformed her final weeks. The talk begins by re-grounding the group in the basic human condition: dissatisfaction, self-absorption, and the need to confront suffering honestly before genuine happiness is possible. Ven Jampa Gendun then explains how including even one other person in one’s motivation creates immediate release from self-centeredness, leads a guided Tonglen (taking and giving) meditation with nine-round breathing and posture instruction, and closes by showing how real personal pain — not imagined suffering — can become a doorway to universal compassion and an antidote to isolation.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 03 HMA 1997 04 30.mp3
UUID: b69fb68e-39d4-48ac-81a2-e62398113214
Teacher: Ven Jampa Gendun
Collection: The Heart and Mind of Awakening 1996-1997 (Ven Jampa Gendun)
Date: 1997-04-30
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.4 minutes
Words: ~6,652
To whatever it is that we do. So we we we want the best for ourselves at some level. And so it’s incumbent upon us to ensure that we what we do is going to bring that best and that it’s very much dependent on why we do it, you know, the purpose. You know, I think we’ve we’ve not seen each other for a few weeks now. And it’s as if we have to perhaps reorientate ourselves back in basics.
And the basic nature of our situation is the human dilemma, what it means to be an ordinary human being. It’s a basic truth about our lives, the quality of frustration, disappointment, disappointment, dissatisfaction, inauthenticity, guilt, shame. I think we can all add to this list. That is a suffering. It’s not a very pleasurable topic to talk about.
Maybe that’s why it never gets talked about. Maybe that’s why things never really change. If we’re going to change, we have to begin to confront what it means to be an ordinary human being that we are. And here by ordinary, I mean just that we’re involved in a situation in which we are influenced by the afflicted emotions, the most basic ignorance that we’re enveloped in, that our life is, that our life is not in our control to a large degree, that we’re victims of our own self centeredness, our own hatred and attachment. You know, it’s like we’re from an abused family.
We don’t even realize it and we don’t have any place to go. And so, you know, looking at the nature of our situation so that we develop some determination around develop some kind of intention and purpose behind what we do. You know, it’s it’s I think Buddhism is terribly interesting. It’s quite fascinating. It’s very stimulating.
But over and above all of that, it is most basically a method to change. I think the Dalai Lama has said on other occasions, the purpose of the religion is to find happiness. Or at least that is the reason it should be its purpose. However, each of us might conceive of what constitutes happiness for ourselves as a means to solve our problem. But it’s only but we’re only aware of our problems to the degree that survival makes it necessary that much and no more.
And if we’re ever going to really make use of Buddhism, if we’re going to make use of our spiritual path, make use of our own potential, then we’re going to have to raise that level of awareness a little bit more to where we develop an underlying anxiety around the continuation of such suffering in our life. And, you know, I don’t think we have to be heavy handed with self. I don’t you know, we aren’t basket cases. I don’t think this is to dismiss the importance of happiness in our life nor does it to, in a perverted manner, to preoccupy ourselves with suffering. I think Buddhism is very much concerned with happiness.
But it’s without facing the fact of our human suffering first, we’re never really going to find the genuine happiness that we’re all looking for. You know, it’s just the simple fact is suffering is the problem and happiness isn’t. So we have to we continue coming back to the problem of suffering. You know, what what we do, how we’re going to work with our suffering, how we’re going to respond to it, how we’re going to understand it. You know, we’ve all developed our methods over the course of our life to work with our problems, to find the happiness that we’re looking for.
And maybe we have to confront the reality of our particular methods haven’t been all that successful or that they could be improved upon or maybe we could enlist other means to find what it is that we’re looking for in combination with the what we all what we have already learned, the methods that we’ve already worked out for ourselves. So that the it seems intelligent. It seems useful way to go about living one’s life. So maybe Buddhism has something to offer. Maybe in the course of listening to the teachings, even if they’re presented only in a haphazard and limited way as as the best that I can do, maybe there’s something about you to be learned, something that’s going to help you to solve your problems at a more fundamental level.
And maybe we could also go beyond that level of motivation, the purpose for listening to and discussing the topics of Buddhism as we do about the Dharma. But, you know, if we can take into consideration one other person than ourselves in our life, another notion which is fundamental to Buddhism is that especially to the Buddhism of the universal vehicle, the Mahāyāna, is that it is our our total preoccupation with ourselves alone, with our own problems alone to the exclusion and the expense of others that makes all of our efforts to solve our problems part of the problem itself, the greater problem of our life. And that maybe part of this vision is to begin to concern ourselves a little more with others in trying to find a good life and what that might look like. Beginning to integrate ourselves into a greater vision of a greater world of others, the the people about us, even if only one other person. You know, who is the spiritual director of the Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahāyāna Tradition of which Buddha House is a member.
Again and again, this emphasizes the fact that if we can include one other person in our motivation, the purpose behind what it is that we’re doing, automatically there’s some liberation of the heart, there’s some burden lifted off our shoulder, the burden of self-cherishing, the burden of our exaggerated self concern, of our own self centeredness. You know, that that we’re not holding ourselves too tightly. It’s it’s like a steel ring wrapped around the heart. But the moment we think, you know, if I can learn something, if I can only develop myself, if I can understand and be a little more caring and develop my tolerance just a little bit more so that I can relate with my with my partner, my parent, my my children, the people I work with, the people I come across in my everyday life, even just a little bit better. If we can have that kind of motivation, then automatically that opening up, that that beyond this parochial vision, this myopic vision which we normally relate with our problems in the world, then automatically release of the heart.
In that moment, as they would say, there’s some kind of enlightenment, maybe at the foretaste, some spark, some movement toward solving our problems in a very fundamental and practical way. So, you know, whether whether I have anything to say or not is perhaps beside the point I just repeat as best I can in my own confused manner. What my teachers have have tried to get across to me. But from your side, and I I try to adjust my my motivation to stay out of the way of the teaching as best I can to have a positive motivation behind doing what I do. And if from your side, if you can do very much the same in terms of listening and taking what you hear, reflecting upon it, analyzing in terms of your own experience, in terms of your own reason, and if it is of use, then by all means to adapt it in some practical fashion to your everyday life, help help yourself to solve your own problem.
If it’s not, then by all means leave it on the shelf. It doesn’t matter. Not important. But if we can just go beyond that, maybe if what you hear can be help you to help another person, only one other person, then I think there’s something there’s some kind of assurance that we can bring to the experience that only something positive can will come out of it. You know, we may not be able to see in an immediate fashion the the beneficial result, but we can have some kind of confidence that they’re going to be there.
We can have that kind of faith. You know, it becomes a way of style of our life. So in this process, the inner focus of our life becomes Buddha. And I’m talking about in a formal sense of going for refuge, the clarifying for ourselves what it is we’re about and what we’re doing. You know, there’s a Buddha, a happy, healthy, loving, sane human being as it were, at least in a potential form, at least in in a there is an image of health and wholeness about ourselves.
And we have to create the inner ecology to to we have to embrace that image of ourselves, of what we can possibly be. Perhaps this sounds very abstract. Perhaps it almost romantic. But maybe that’s the reason that we’ve continued to circle in these these dissatisfactory compulsive patterns that we’re very much stuck in because we haven’t been able to look outside of the known and what we’ve grown to expect, what we legitimately believe that we can know in our lifetime. Maybe there is something that we have to open up to with even with inside ourselves.
Something that needs to be embraced and access some potential, some an image of wholeness and health about ourselves, which has gone unknown. Unknown because not looked for, but heard, half heard between two waves of the sea. You know? The inarticulate whispering of our own heart, you know, asking the calling. You know, calling us to be the calling of who we can be.
You know, this, again, perhaps sounds abstract and romantic in some nature, but maybe that’s what life is all about. Living struggling to live at a higher order of being, having your dreams, not losing them, not allowing them to go to not allowing them to go to waste. But not only dreaming and holding on to your dreams about what life could be, but trying to you know, the the castles that we built in the sky, we’re beginning to, in a very realistic fashion, to build foundations beneath them, And you can try to translate the dreams of who you feel at some depth of your being that you could be into some kind of practical reality in your everyday life, and the quality of relationships in your everyday life. So this is what it means where we’re sort of inter focus of our life becomes Buddha. This image of health and wholeness, and becoming a possibility of becoming a happy, healthy, loving, sane human being.
And that becomes a focus, a priority, creating that that inner space and putting forth the attention and energy to make to actualize that potential by means of the Dharma, you know, the what we’re doing, what we’re the teachings, the truth, the various trainings, the meditation techniques. But these are like refuges. We all have our refuges. This is another refuge. We have to maybe, you know, we’ve we’ve tried over the course of our life.
As I mentioned in terms of of the the tools that we’ve developed in order to to get what we want, to be rid of what we don’t want. So we all have worked out some kind of refuges. And if we’re not happy, if we haven’t found what it is that we want out of life up to now, we have we have to begin to we have to stop and take stock and begin to to look to see whether it’s a matter of trying harder with what we already know, with the tools that we’ve already developed for ourselves, or whether it’s a matter of trying differently, going to another refuge, developing other tools, other possibility, alternative means to find what it is that we’re looking for. So this process occurs within the the social context, in that we’re social beings, and occurs within the social context as fellow practitioners and those who assist us in the process of implementing the Dharma in our day everyday life by means of which we actualize the Buddha. And we try again and again to to raise the level of our motivation, and the purpose, the why.
And if we do it again and again and again, everything becomes easier upon acquaintanceship, upon being accustomed, upon familiarity. It’s it’s it may be almost artificial, totally artificial initiative. But as you as you make sincere effort and consistently, there are moments when it’s not quite so artificial. It comes a little more readily until finally it becomes a natural part of where you are, That is a basic person a part of your personality structure. You become a very altruistic, loving, caring person, and that becomes the motivation behind your practice.
To the Buddha, the Dharma, and the supreme community, I go for refuge until awakening. Through the creative potential of my listening to the Dharma, may I achieve the state of a Buddha for the sake of all living beings. To the Buddha, the Dharma, and the supreme community, I go for refuge until awakening. Through the creative potential of my listening to the Dharma, may I achieve the state of the Buddha for the sake of all living beings. To the Buddha, the Dharma, and the supreme community, I go for refuge into awakening.
Through the creative potential of my listening to the Dharma. May I achieve the state of a Buddha for the sake of all living beings. Reverently, I pay homage with my body, speech, mind and pleasant clouds of every type of offering, those actual and imagined. I disclose all my destructive acts accumulated since time without beginning, and rejoice in the skillful actions of holy and ordinary beings. Please remain until cyclic existence has ended and turn the wheel of Dharma for living beings.
I dedicate the skillful actions of myself and others to the great awakening. We’re going to meditate. Would you like to stand up for minute and stretch your legs? I think most of you are familiar with end result of our discussion over the last few weeks, our last few sessions together in terms of the practice of taking and giving.
And I thought we’d meditate on that tonight. And taking upon suffering of others onto ourselves, we take it we take it and place it upon our own self centeredness. And we give away our happiness to others. And this was the outcome, the visualization technique of the one of the two meditative traditions for developing an awakened heart, that of equalizing and exchanging self with others. So this was bringing all of what we learned through that through all of those discussions over the series of first, you know, looking at the quality of self and others, looking at the disadvantages of self centeredness, the advantages of other centeredness, the actual exchange of self with others, and this all finds consummation, comes together in this imagined visualization technique of taking and giving.
So I thought we’d do that together, and I’ll I’ll lead you through that. So I think most of you are familiar with that practice. So we’ll we’ll take as the person we’re going to work with, someone that you’re very close with, someone that you, you know, is very significant in your life, someone that you love, that you can naturally develop any of these feelings and emotions toward. We’ll begin as we, you know, we’ve been we have usually been doing in terms of first, you know, adjusting our our physical posture. Posture.
Then we can do the nine round breathing meditation. It’s about blocking beginning by blocking the left nostril, breathing in this brilliant white light through the right. And and giving this making it meaningful for yourself in some way that this light, what it might symbol be symbolic of or what it represents for you, you know, whatever is positive, benevolent in universe, the blessings of all the Buddhas and bodhisattvas, whatever is right about the world is as if you’re taking it upon yourself, breathing in in the form of this brilliant white light which comes into your right nostril and down, and then shifts over to moves over to the left channel and breathing out all of the negativities, heaviness, all the obstructions, especially those associated with desire in this black in a form of thick black smoke which goes off in a far distance and disappears. I’m doing that three times and and blocking the right nostril. Breathing into this bright white light to the left, it comes down to the left channel, crosses over to the right, and blocking the left channel, left nostril, and begins to rise up the right channel and bringing out in the form, again, thick black smoke of all the negativities and obstructions, heaviness of mind and body as but especially those associated with anger, hostility, aggression.
And then finally, doing that three times, breathing in through both nostrils, this brilliant white light coming down to side channels, joining the central channel just about three fingers below the navel and breathing out. And now the thick black smoke represents all the negativities and heaviness and obstructions associated with ignorance, with closed mindedness, with up to all the various obscurations, going off in the distance and disappearing. And then we’ll, again, adjust our motivation as we’ve been doing, working with these. You know, the word meditation, as I probably have said many, many times, but it might be useful just to remind in the Tibetan language is gom which has a is it is related to the word meaning habituation or accustoming or acquaintance or familiarization. So it’s very much meditation is a consistent familiarization with a particular subject, particular object.
And that’s what we’re doing. And this is where we begin to change these dysfunctional patterns of our mind to more functional, more skillful, more constructive, and useful ways of thinking which thereby change the quality of our life. So we can begin we’ll begin with ourselves, working through the spectrum of individuals. And now we’re going to begin with ourselves again and developing the three levels of first compassion, then the three levels of love for ourselves as the motivation behind our practice of meditation, and then for listening to the teachings in general. And we’ll do mindfulness.
We’ll do taking and giving practice. So if you take a firm those two, we’re gonna do some mindfulness of breathing. So take a firm comfortable posture. So if if you can if you can develop a good posture and you’ll be able to relax your body. So this perhaps mainly involves keeping a straight back.
And by straight back just, you know, the vertebrae will stack one on top of the other like a stack of coins. And then it might be helpful to slightly bow your neck. Sometimes it’s likened to the the way a swan cranes its neck and bring your chin slightly in, a slight pressure on your Adam’s apple. So I think that will keep your bodily position, I think, in a way which way you’ll be able to sit in a very comfortable fashion for long periods of time without any strain, without any getting any sore muscles. You’ll be able to relax your body.
So taking a a firm comfortable posture, first getting in touch with the body and noticing any tightness and any tensions in the body and bringing your awareness to those areas and conscious relaxing, softening. You can feel this sense of tension moving down and out of the body into the ground. Your body becoming comfortable. At ease. Soft.
Relax. We’ve been looking at the second of the three principal aspects of the path, that of the awakened heart, the third being the awakened mind, and we’ve we’ve discussed the the first of these, the will to awaken. Within the awakened heart, there were two meditative traditions by which by means of which to develop this altruistic aspiration to to realize our highest potential for the benefit of all other living beings. The first of these two meditative traditions was equalizing, exchanging self for other. And we that was a series of five meditative teachings essentially.
First, developing an unconditional positive regard equally for living beings. And then looking at the disadvantages of self centeredness, the advantages of other centeredness, and the actual exchange self others where we identify where we develop the the distinctive ability to identify to with others, to be able to empathize, to be able to see quite naturally the world as others might be experiencing it rather than our own single pointed point of view. Then we as we just did, this was all brought together in this practice of taking, giving, taking upon ourselves, that is taking upon our own self centeredness, the suffering of others, and giving away our happiness to them. And it comes completely contrary to habitual way of relating with the world. Then out of that comes an intense resolve, you know, that what we just did now.
You know, it has great meaning both immediately in developing ourselves and then ultimately in developing the ability to actually be a benefit to others. But in fact, it’s only an imaginative process, you know, even though this person that you love so very much, that you might be willing to to give your life for now. In fact, you might. But you really have they’re still suffering just as much as they were before you did the meditation. So, you know, we have to some kind of translate translate this aspiration, this intention into some kind of of reality.
You know, it can’t really remain at the level of of an attitude of mind. We have to actually do something in fact. And so we develop a resolve to develop the, in fact, the abilities and the necessary realizations, all of what it takes to be a real benefit to others. Otherwise, we’re, you know, we’re very much like the blind leading the blind. Even with with the best of intentions, make mistakes.
We lead people down in wrong directions. Sometimes, even with the best of intentions, we cause more harm than good. So we have to go beyond that. We have to do something. We have to become a Buddha or whatever model of sanity we want to work with, whatever you want to call it.
It’s someone who who has experiences unremitting peace with inside themselves and motivated out of compassion, works fearlessly equally with every living being to help them to experience the same. That’s that’s the goal. That’s where we’re all the Buddhism is trying to take us to that place within our mind. So out of this intense resolve, I must become a Buddha for the sake of every living being. Any being that you see, any person that you see, that when instinctively, naturally, in uncontrived fashion, the thought, I have to become a Buddha for this person.
I have to become a Buddha for that dog. I have to become a Buddha for that insect. When that arises, instinctively, naturally, spontaneously, and you’ve awakened your heart. I like to even though we we, in in effect, finished in the first of these two meditative traditions, the meditative tradition on equalizing and exchanging self for others. There there is a an adaptation you can that can be made.
I mean, I think it’s quite useful. It’s like a supplement to this practice of taking and giving, this notion. It’s very practical and and it’s very useful in our everyday life to so we don’t compound our suffering, magnify our difficulties. So we don’t you know, there’s an adaptation of this practice of taking giving is we can make use of when we, in fact, not just imaginatively, but in fact, when we’re undergoing some difficulty of ourselves, when we’re in a difficult situation, when we’re having some kind of painful experience. Yeah.
That is to say, we can use the difficulties of our everyday life as a means to awaken our heart. Right? We can transform them into a path. They can become useful. They they can become meaningful.
If we’re going to suffer, at let’s have our suffering become meaningful in some way rather than useless. Nothing but suffering. So it’s in the context of our own suffering, our own difficulties, and to a lesser extent, when we’re experiencing our greatest joys that we are most open and able to connect up with others. And then we can begin to that we’re open. Our hearts are very much open to others.
That we can most readily identify with and participate in the lives of others. And and and have the strong sense of the primacy of feeling that living beings are essentially feeling beings. You know, it’s it is at a moment of our most our greatest suffering and our greatest joy that we that we this becomes most obvious to us, that to be a living being or a human being, a person is to be a feeling being. Feeling is primary to life. So this is the key point about Tonglen.
And as I mentioned, Tonglen is simply the this is a quotation that uses the term Tonglen. Tonglen is Tibetan word for taking and giving. Tong means to give. Literally, len means to take, giving and taking. This is the key point about Tonglen.
Your own experience of pleasure and pain becomes the way that you recognize your kinship with all sentient beings. You know, we’re trying to integrate ourselves rather than isolate ourselves from others. The way that you can share in the joy and the sorrow of everyone who’s ever lived, Everyone who’s lived now and everyone who will ever live. You are acknowledging that the discomfort that you feel is something that all human beings feel. And the joy that you feel is also people’s birthright.
You are breathing in that same pain. But now think to yourself, let me feel it, so no one else on the whole earth has to feel it. In other words, it becomes useful. I’m miserable. I’m depressed.
Okay. Let me feel it fully so that nobody else has to feel it. You know, they’re awakening at the level of imagination where reality begins so that others could be free of it. It starts to awaken your heart because you have this aspiration to say, this pain can be a benefit to others because I can be courageous enough to feel it fully so no one else has to feel it. You know, normally we react to pain by narrowing down, to contracting the focus of our awareness and shrinking the area of our concern to ourselves alone.
That’s our normal reaction to whenever we have difficulty, whenever we experience suffering. To a certain extent this is quite necessary. This makes a lot of sense that we we can in concentrating on ourselves when we’re undergoing difficulties, when we have some kind of suffering, some problem, some trouble. We can begin to focus our attention and energies on directing our healing and alleviating the pain, the situation. But in addition, our pain can can only can also cannot only be a call for for self assertion in the process of healing.
It can also be a powerful reminder that others are at the same time experiencing very much the same pain that you’re feeling in a greater healing, a greater healing of integration with others in the process of waking our hearts. There’s there are different levels of healing that we can be con we can we can be concerned with. And we perhaps we have to work at those various levels. If we’re having a problem, we have to deal with it. But that problem in order to alleviate that difficulty, that suffering we don’t want, and that’s quite realistic and that’s legitimate by all means.
Means. But at the same time, that very problem, that very worry or disappointment or pain in some form or another that we’re feeling can be a powerful reminder that there are others, that I’m not unique in this, that somehow the universe hasn’t singled me out, that I’m not alone in pain and difficulties and troubles in my life, that there are others in this world at this very moment who are experiencing similar difficulties just like myself. And we can begin that is to say, that very pain, that difficulty that we don’t want, it can become a catalyst for us to remember that there are others in the world as a way of identifying with the difficulties of the world and keeping our hearts open to the rest of the world in a process of a greater healing and then going beyond our own self centeredness and opening up to a universal responsibility. We are this is quite a long quotation, but I think it’s it’s a very nice story getting across this idea. We were working with Hazel, a woman who had come into the hospital in a very contracted state.
She was a very difficult patient. The nurses called her a real bitch on wheels. Few wished to spend time with her. Hazel’s physician and attendant said that whenever she rang the bell, they were greeted with nasty comments and considerable verbal abuse. And so, of course, every time she rang the bell, it took a bit longer to answer to be answered.
All her life had been a struggle for control. Seldom had she just let life be. All that she didn’t want or could not have was judged and pushed away from her heart. All that she could get was grasp that feverishly. And so she found herself dying alone in a great deal of pain.
She had judged so many so often that even her grown children could not visit. She was becoming a self fulfilling prophecy of anger and despair. For six weeks her isolation and pain increased until one night something changed. She came to a point where she could no longer stand the suffering in her back and legs or the pain of her unlived life. At four a.
M, feeling like jumping out of her skin, she began to review her life amidst the pulsation of her pain. Never had it become so clear how her intense holding had created such intense pain, such a sense of dissolution and loneliness. She saw how the considerable suffering she had caused during her lifetime had come back to her at death time. She she had nowhere to turn. She had never felt more alone or helpless.
Feeling death approach, she remembered herself as a youngster, open and hungry for the world. She saw how she had closed down over the years. With a deep sigh, she let the helpless ness wash over her and, exhausted, unable to fight another moment, she surrendered. She let go, and she died into her life, into the moment. Letting go into the pain in her spine and legs, she began to sense quite beyond reason that she was somehow not alone in her suffering.
She felt what she later called the ten thousand in pain. She began to experience all the other beings who at that very moment were lying in that same bed of agony. At first there rose the experience of herself as a brown skinned woman, breasts slack from malnutrition lying on her side, a starving child sucking at her empty breast, spine and legs twisted in pain, the musculature contracted from starvation and disease. For instance, she became the Ethiopian woman with this same pain in the back and legs and hips lying on her side, dying in the mud. Then there arose the experience of an Eskimo woman lying on her side, dying during childbirth, tremendous pain in her back, hips, legs, and dying in the same the same death.
Then her experience became that of the body of a woman in a twisted car wreckage, her back and legs broken, slowly dying alone by the side of a deserted road. Image after image arose at of the ten thousand in pain. She experienced herself as a young as a youth with yellowed skin curled up on her side on a dirty mattress dying of hepatitis in a junkie flat, as an old woman with gray skin dying of old age, each with the same pain in the lower back and legs. She saw herself as a woman, her lower back crushed by rock fall, dying by the banks of a river alone, bereft of the touch of another human being. She saw herself dying of cholera as an Asian mother with an ill child in a thatched hut.
She was each dying beside the other. She experienced the ten thousand sufferings simultaneously. In the hour of her greatest agony, something in her connected with the enormity of the suffering she was sharing at that moment. The pain was beyond my bearing. I couldn’t stand it any longer, and something broke.
Maybe it was my heart. But I saw it wasn’t just my pain. It was the pain. It wasn’t just my life, it was all life. It was life itself.
As the days unfolded after this extraordinary experience, Hazel’s heart opened more and more, and to all the others in pain in hospital. She constantly asked after others. As the weeks went by, she continued to get a deeper sense of what she had participated in. She went beyond herself, and the room became a place where the nurses would come on their break because it was a room of love. Soon, her children came to visit because of the warmth and surrender of her phone calls, responding to her plea for forgiveness.
Her grandchildren sitting on the edge of her bed, the grandchildren she had never met, the hearts she had rejected before they were born. Her room became a place of healing, of unfinished business, of universal care. Hazel’s teaching to us was that the deepest healing cannot be done solely in the separate. It needs to be done for the whole, for the pain we share. At the very root of healing is a sense of universal within the separate, the personal.
So in in the throes of our of our pain, you know, we we can use our pain as a means of of of joining the community of pain. You know, the that you we can use our pain as a means to open our hearts to the pain, the pain of the ten thousand. We we can use our pain to to go beyond the particular to the archetypical, to to go to go we can use our pain to go beyond take our our experience from the personal to the universal. Our pain all of our difficulties can be a a reoccurring reminder that of the human condition in which we all share. It’s it is a reflection of that.
It becomes a way you know, it becomes a way we become like brothers and sisters in this community of pain. It’s like I have a kinship. We all have that relationship involved in the human condition, the human dilemma, the truth of suffering in our lives. And it can be an antidote to our habitual tendency to lapse into self absorption, to lapse into isolation and to close our hearts to others. Now our pain can become meaningful in such a way, in such a situation, with such an attitude if we can gain that perspective, if we can maintain that mindfulness.
You know, whatever the pain or difficulty we may be experiencing, we can be sure that there are hundreds, that there are thousands. I I mean, quite literally, whatever you’re experiencing, and however much you may think it’s unique to yourself, you if you pause and become mindful, you can gain the conviction that there are tens of thousands of people on this earth who are experiencing the exact same pain that you’re experiencing at that very moment. You can be sure that of all the, what, six billion people on the planet, there must be ten thousand at least. You know, whether it’s whether it’s all the way from a simple headache up to having just lost someone that you love very much and everything in between. There’s nothing unique to any of us.
There are others who are experiencing who are at that very moment. It’s not just an abstract idea, but a very much a physical reality are experiencing very much what you’re experiencing at that moment. And and this the point is or moreover, we can know exactly how those people are feeling. They’re quite often we can only know people’s feelings vicariously, secondhandedly. We can only, you know, guess, as it were.
I’ve been there myself. I can understand a little bit about what they may be going through. But but but we at that moment of our pain, we can know exactly what these ten thousand others are experiencing. We don’t even have to project or guess or empathize. We can know.
You know, we can we can read their pain. We can you know, we have developed this clairvoyance where we know other people’s agony at that very moment. Whatever it might be, there’s there’s always people feeling the exact same feeling at that exact same moment that we are feeling it. So, you know, we are related in that pain. Know, you aren’t alone in that pain.
You you there are brothers and sisters out there who are blood brothers in that pain, blood sisters in that pain. You know, born they’re born of the same pain that you that you have been born of at this moment, who you are at that present moment. And if we if we if we have to feel this pain, you know, we can why why can’t if we you know, if if I have to endure this difficulty, then why not make use of it to open our hearts to others? Use it to help our ourselves to destroy our own self centeredness. You know, I know how it feels.
I I know how this pain feels, how what you must be going through, these ten thousand others. I know exactly how it feels. I know exactly how it is being felt for you. I know how you don’t want to be experiencing this pain, how I don’t want to be experiencing this pain. We’re both reacting in the same manner.
You know, I I can read your agony. We don’t want it. You don’t want it. I don’t want it. But if somebody’s going to have to experience this pain, why not That would be me.
You know, the you know, if there’s if there’s somebody’s going to have to be a there’s going to be a healing, why can’t I heal for all of you? You know, it would be wonderful if my pain were enough for all of us. And we’re this is, you know, this is an aspiration of the mind, isn’t it? You know, if somebody in this universe has to feel this pain, let it be let my pain be enough for all of us.