Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Using Carlos Castaneda’s image of a lone dog barking at dusk — the voice of a man whose life passed like a hot, dull Sunday afternoon — Ven Jampa Gendun argues in this 45-minute session that suffering is not Buddhism’s pessimism but the necessary beginning of the path. He first completes the four forces for purifying negative karma: regret (the most essential), reliance, antidote, and reversal, insisting sincere regret outweighs any ritual. He then covers the three marks of conditioned existence, using a sharp analogy: ordinary ego-awareness is like a hair in the palm; genuine renunciation is feeling that same hair in the eye. The session closes on the awakening heart — understanding as the root of love — and a Desert Fathers parable about two hermits who each set out to seek the other’s counsel and unknowingly lead each other home.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 22 HoM 1993 09 15.mp3
UUID: 1b3430ec-a000-4ced-908d-7552640619f5
Teacher: Ven Jampa Gendun
Collection: The Heart and Mind of Awakening (Ven Jampa Gendun)
Date: 1993-09-15
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.0 minutes
Words: ~6,000
The force of regret is the most important amongst these four. There’s no magical means at work here. If there’s no regret, then there’s no purification. It is the most important of these four counteracting agents. If there’s no sincere regret, there’s no purification.
No matter what kind of rituals that we may perform, whatever else we may do, there has to be some level of regret. The deeper the regret, the more forceful the purification, removal of these, the potency and these negative actions we’ve created. The second one is called the force of reliance. This involves reevaluating our priorities and recommitting ourselves to the direction of growth in our lives. There are said to be two objects towards which we can create a negative action.
One of these is the Buddha and the other is sentient beings or living beings in general. Now when I say creating a negative action against the Buddha, what I mean is as I’ve tried to emphasize, the Buddha is the personification of the principle of the evolutionary potential of humanity, of living kind. This is the consummation of all that is worthwhile of what we can be. If during certain moments of clarity in the course of our lives, when we have some insight, for example, all living beings, they want to be happy. They don’t want to suffer.
So perhaps you used to enjoy sport fishing. Just as a way of mundane example. Even those fish want to be happy. They don’t want to die. How can I just for a sport bring suffering?
So you as it were in a moment of clarity, some insight, you make some type of determination within your mind, some type of promise to yourself or some type of vow. Maybe you even make such a vow in front of someone else or just a representation of something which you respect a great deal. I’m not going to fish for sport anymore. In a moment of clarity we come up. This is the value of vows and precepts and promises because they’re able to see us through those times when our wisdom is not operating, when our mind is not so clear, when we’re being buffeted by our desires and our fears and our hopes, when we’re susceptible to the influences of negative factors within our own mind, factors within our environment, the remnants of our wisdom is able to operate even in the course of difficult situations when we’re not operating in all our potential at that present time.
So if one were to make a vow or a precept or promise to oneself but overlooked it. So you went ahead and went sport fishing for example. Would be as if you were turning your back on your highest most potential within yourself which we call Buddha, the awakened state. And so in the force of reliance we recommit ourselves to the Buddha inside of ourselves. We recommit ourselves to awaken, to development of our potential.
The reason it’s called the power of reliance is because just as when you fall down on the ground, you use that same ground to push yourself back up. You rely upon that same ground to raise back up. Likewise, having fallen down with respect to the goal, your internal focus of your spiritual life, it is if you’ve fallen down with respect to that. And by recommitting, you rely upon that same goal to bring yourself up, recommitting yourself to growth, to wisdom, to love, to the Buddha withinside of ourselves, the Christ withinside of ourselves, You know whatever. We can also commit a negative action against living beings in general.
And the way that we enact the force of reliance with respect to them is by rededicating ourselves to the development of compassion and love. When you hurt somebody, it is not an act of love. It is not an act of compassion. And if our goal is to become a loving and compassionate human being, then we have turned our back on living being. And so we have to get ourselves back on track, redirect ourselves.
So development of love and compassion, getting back to our prime values. In all of this, we ‘re cutting, we’re trying to cut our identity with these negative states. Getting back, reprioritizing, getting ourselves back on the track, on the road in the clarity of our wisdom and our understanding that we have set for ourselves our highest priorities, our principles of life, our guidelines that we want to live by, getting back. And the third force is the force of antidote. And there are some traditional types of antidotes.
By this I mean these are particularly powerful positive types of actions that we can consciously and purposely engage in to as it were balance the negative action that we’ve created before. There is a traditional list of the offering of prostration, the recitation of mantras, reading of texts, meditation on emptiness. Any type of positive action which you consciously engage in as a counterbalance to this previously negative action can act as a force of antidote. And then the force of reversal. This is within the realistic limits, capabilities, honestly determining that you’re going to not reenact this particular act again for a specific amount of time.
Example, it would make no sense if you say, well, I’m not going to lie for the rest of my life. You probably couldn’t do that. You say for the next fifteen minutes that would require some mindfulness, wouldn’t it? It’s very important. It’s determination.
It’s a very important factor in mindfulness. You know, that you could be mindful of the fact that you’re not going to lie for the next fifteen minutes. And this would interrupt that pattern. One of the results of actions, of karma, is the result which is concordant with the cause functionally. All this means is that we form habits.
One of the results of actions is that we have a tendency to create the same actions again and again and again and again. That creating the action once, thinking in a certain way once, speaking in a certain way once, acting in a certain way once facilitates talking, thinking and acting in that same way again. It becomes easier and easier and easier and we form a habit, we form a groove. And by reversing from that, by interrupting that, we are breaking up these patterns, interrupting these cycles, these repetitive cycles that we’re bound up in. So the fourth is, you know for some even if it’s only fifteen minutes, I’m not going to blah, I’m not going to do this, I’m not going to act in this way, whatever.
At least we’ve interrupted it for that amount of time such that we’ve weakened that habit. We’ve interrupted it. It is said that if we apply these four counteracting agents with sincerity and forcefully over a period of time, there’s no negativity cannot be completely purified, cannot be completely eliminated. So in all of these, in the application of these four counteracting agents, it’s important that we are doing this for ourselves. There’s no outside agent which we are availing ourselves to.
We are working within our own minds, within the factors present. We are the sources of our happiness. We are the sources of all our suffering. The significance of karma, the implication of the karma is that we do not have to remain victims, that we have a choice, that we can begin to fashion the kind of destiny that we most want for ourselves. If we’re willing to learn the methods, to develop the skills and make the effort, then we can create the type of life that we desire.
It’s in our capacity. We have that choice, that option open up to us. Otherwise, if there’s no choice, then it’s simply going to be the playing out of repetitive patterns, these reoccurring compulsive cycles of dissatisfaction, mindlessly played out. And what kind of play now? What kind of experience are we going to go through?
And this brings us to the question of suffering. You know, lot of people There are reasons. You know, a lot of these things that Buddhism is going into are reality. You know, it’s and we’re talking about something which is very real to us, isn’t it? So people quite often they don’t want to talk about it.
Let’s not talk about it like in death. You know, we’re all going to die. Death is happening about us. But people don’t want to confront that issue. They want to hide it away as if it doesn’t exist.
And also suffering is very real in all of our lives. It is a our immediately lived experience. And we have to confront that issue of dissatisfaction, disappointment, frustration if we’re ever going to come to an understanding of it and begin determination, develop the determination to work through it, to solve that. So, I mean, some people they because Buddhism talks about such issues as, you know, fundamental issues as death and suffering, they view Buddhism as being pessimistic. But on the contrary, without ever dealing with these issues, there’s never way we’re going to solve them.
And moreover, it is by confronting these issues that we can ultimately transcend this situation altogether that Buddhism is tremendously optimistic. We can solve our problems if we’re willing to confront them. So what type of world are we creating for ourselves? The quality of suffering. You know there’s nothing to be ashamed about from suffering.
There’s nothing wrong with us as individuals. It is the situation in which we find ourselves. And moreover coming to grips with our own suffering, confronting our own confusion and dissatisfaction, we can develop a sincere love for ourselves and have compassion for ourselves and understand ourselves. And in doing that we can really perhaps for the first time develop compassion for others. You know without having loving compassion for ourselves born out of the will to you know as I define love.
The will to extend oneself for the purpose of nourishing one’s own or another’s well-being. And that’s why, you know, without confronting the fact of suffering, we are never going to choose to extend because to extend means to work, to make effort, to go beyond our present limit which requires to go some uncomfortability. We will never choose that to Carl Jung said that the source of all neurosis is the unwillingness to accept legitimate suffering. We don’t want unlegitimate suffering, but there is necessary in the process of growth to accept a certain degree of legitimate suffering. The avoidance of that is neurosis.
To grow is not easy. If it were, everyone would be Buddhist now. Everyone would have solved problems, but that’s not the case. So we’re not going to make this effort. We’re not going to go through that legitimate suffering unless we develop this determination to be free.
And we’re not going to develop that determination to be free unless we begin to see the problem in which we’re dissatisfaction which permeates our life. I’m just going to talk a few minutes about suffering. So you won’t suffer so much. Know, because we don’t have. There’s a nice passage from a book called The Journey to Ixtlan by Don Juan by Carlos Castaneda was a, the time he wrote this book, I think he was a PhD candidate in anthropology at the University of Southern California, University of California at Los Angeles, UCLA.
And he a sophisticated academic who thought he knew it all and he was working, interviewing with Don Juan. Don Juan was by appearances an old bum living in the deserts of probably northern Mexico but in fact he was a man of knowledge, a Yaqui Indian, a man of great wisdom. And there’s a scene which I’m going to quote from where Don Juan is speaking to Carlos Castaneda and you can imagine the scene it’s in the desert and it’s growing toward evening, sun’s going down there on the probably on a mesa, a rise of the land overlooking a village. And there’s a there’s a barking of a lone dog and the wind is is softly hissing. Carlos Castaneda says, he paused, the silence around us was frightening.
The wind hissed softly and then I heard the distant barking of a lone dog. Listen to that barking Don Juan went on. That is the way my beloved earth is helping me now to bring this last point to you. That barking is the saddest thing one can hear. We were quiet for a moment.
The barking of that lone dog was so sad and the stillness around us so intense that I experienced a numbing anguish. It made me think of my own life, my sadness, my not knowing where to go and what to do. That dog’s barking is the nocturnal voice of a man, Don Juan said. It comes from a house in the valley towards the south. A man is shouting through his dog since they are companion slaves for life.
Don Juan’s words had caught a most disturbing ring in me. I felt he was speaking directly to me. That barking and the loneliness it creates speaks of the feelings of men he went on. Men for whom an entire life was like a Sunday afternoon. An afternoon which was not altogether miserable but rather hot and dull and uncomfortable.
They sweated and fussed a great deal. They didn’t know where to go or what to do. That afternoon left them only with the memory of petty annoyances and tedium and then suddenly it was over. It was already night. You know we do not come to this path, exploration and this questioning that we’re all going through voluntarily as it may appear, but only through a deep crisis, some emotional pain, an important level of a feeling of recognized unmanageability in our lives.
That is to say the reason that we’re here is because we’re suffering. If one is unhappy one wants to know the reason why. But it never occurs to one to ask why one is happy. It is therefore unhappiness rather than happiness that causes us to reflect upon our condition. It is unhappiness that makes us think.
Some kind of acknowledgment of suffering and the question, what is the meaning to it all? This thing called life is the beginning of a spiritual You know, it’s a it’s a frightening acknowledgment because it’s always associated with pain, with some some degree of despair, some kind of hopelessness almost. You know we don’t know where to turn or what to do or what to believe in or if in fact there is anything to believe in. It all seems like quite a monstrous game and we’re afraid that this feeling is never quite going to go away. And in response to that, we can either run away by ignoring, cultivating an unawareness, desensitizing ourselves, numbing ourselves, becoming absorbed in particularities, distracting ourselves, or we can begin to confront the issues of our life, confront the suffering and meaninglessness of our life.
So this confrontation needs to the confrontation and the need to resolve the tension aroused by it is the beginning of the path. Out of this will grow wisdom. The mind will find a way. Once believing in our basic sanity, if we’re willing to work through our difficulties and confront the issues of our life, then we can avail ourselves of our resource. And mind will find a solution.
Otherwise there’s no solution. There’s simply avoidance. There’s never really dealing with the real problems of life. You know there are two basic attitudes that we can take toward pain and suffering in our lives. One is that pain and suffering are something to overcome.
They are like interruption, an obstruction to life itself. Things shouldn’t be this way. Things should be other than the way they are. We should not have to be suffering. It’s just that something is temporarily going wrong, which I can set right.
The other attitude is that suffering gives us a glimpse of what needs to be done. That our pain and our suffering are our kind of truth. They’re making a statement about our lives and the way we’re living our lives. They’re saying that there’s something wrong. You know just as in physical pain can be seen as a sign that there’s some imbalance, there’s some disharmony that’s inside our body.
It’s calling attention to some difficulty, some internal physical problem. Likewise mental suffering can be seen as a sign of mental ill health that there’s an imbalance, there’s a disharmony, something wrong in the way that we’re living our life, the way that we’re viewing our world. The wound is like a mouth and it’s necessary to listen. You know, we can, for example, the depression of a breakup in a relationship, we can either see it simply as suffering, as a suffering state which is to be gotten rid of as quickly as possible and as an obstruction to our happiness and move on as quickly as possible to a new relationship to eliminate that pain. Or we can see that this suffering, the depression, the breakup as a symptom of some kind of inappropriate way of relating to the fact of change, the fact of impermanency, and the underlying problem of attachment, unrealistic expectations.
So the suffering is telling us something, telling us what needs to be looked into, what needs to be worked on, where do we need to grow. I think you know it may be a truism that positive psychological growth and change only come about when there is a deep awareness of and associated discontentment with our present state of being, with our present dissatisfactory state of being. When there’s a deep awareness and a discontentment with it, then some change will occur. The mind always at work seeking to eliminate distress. But if there’s no deeply felt dissatisfaction, then there will inevitably be effort to maintain the status quo.
There’s inertia. We’re involved in a system which is self perpetuating, is, in which there are negative reinforcement continually operating which keep us bound into the same cycles of ways of thinking, speaking, and acting, which keep us going through these reoccurring compulsive patterns. And without the real strong determination to work our way out of this reoccurring pattern, we will remain stuck just by the nature of the system that we’re involved in. But you know even if we’re sitting in a comfortable chair, there’s regret about getting up out of the chair. But it is pleasure and pain take priority over logic.
Pleasure and pain take priority over logic. I know I shouldn’t do this but it feels so good I can’t stop. Something like that. That’s our reality. So we have to see within our own experience, not as a matter of intellectual curiosity.
This awareness must be more than mere speculation if it’s going to be a catalyst for change. It must be seen within our own experience. With sitting in that chair, the moment that you become aware that your position has become uncomfortable, then spontaneously you shift your position. You don’t have to think about blah blah blah. There’s no logic involved.
That there’s some that simple fact of awareness brings about some shift. You move to another position without without having to consider. There is more operation than an intellect once once the fact, the experience, is become aware of. And this is what I mean by the, when we get sick and tired of being sick and tired we find a way to get well, that the mind will find a way to get well. The necessity is the mother of invention.
Necessity is the mother of creative change. But we must see the necessity. They must become more and more apparent. And this is why it’s necessary to investigate the nature of our situation in terms of its dissatisfactory quality. I’ll just talk a few more minutes.
I’m take I won’t break for now. Okay. The different know the, what I call the three marks of conditioned existence. The three marks of conditioned existence dissatisfactoriness, impermanence and insubstantiability within ego based existence in which we exist. There’s nothing worth having or becoming as long as these three marks are present, these three characteristics.
In terms of dissatisfactoriness, the various levels of dissatisfactoriness. First there’s the level of dissatisfactoriness of physical and mental pain. Every day we go through some level of physical and mental pain, headaches, toothaches, stomachaches, pain of humor, mental pain, pain of boredom, pain of waiting for lunch, depression, loneliness, sadness, being separated from that which we desire, meeting that which we don’t desire, not finding the happiness that we seek. But okay, go through these every day of our life. Some dissatisfactoriness of physical and mental pain.
But we think, oh, okay, we can either take the attitude of I can fix that. I can get some, you know, there’s something I can buy, some materials, medicine. There’s some factor X, some technique I can learn, I can fix that up. Some factor X that I basically don’t have to change my attitude in order to alleviate these problems. Or life is a bitch, you know, what can I expect?
You gotta take the good with the bad. You It’s okay, you You gotta take the good with the bad. Or do you have to take the good with the bad? Do you have to take the bad? I don’t know.
Buddhism is asking that question. That’s what the Buddha tried to figure out, whether we just have to accept suffering or whether it’s in some way out of it. So anyway, this listing of sufferings of our physical and mental pains really doesn’t move us very much. We figure there’s a way out of it or we just have to live with it, put up with it. So if we move on beyond that to more profound levels of dissatisfactoriness in terms of dissatisfactoriness of what I call oscillation, sometimes called change.
That the very nature of our dualistic thinking process binds us to dissatisfaction, that there’s no way out of it as long as we have, we are controlled, that we live in the context of a dualistic thinking process where, you know, I think I mentioned this yesterday, that we can never know pleasure without knowing pain. We can never know the happiness of a friendship without knowing the pain of an enemy. The warmth, all of the various dualisms that we’re involved in. We can never know success without knowing failure. They only have meaning with respect to their opposites.
Long only has meaning with respect to short. High only has meaning with respect to low. Therefore, if going to experience happiness, we’re going to have to know pain. We’re going to have to experience pain as a reference, as a standard. And then the most subtle type of pain, The dissatisfactoriness of I call universal conditionality.
This is what I mean by ego based existence. Our ego is like carrying a bundle of thorns around on our back. Wherever we go, whatever we do, it’s stickiness. You know this constant having to guard our territory, maintain, reestablish our credentials. Maintain our you know this constant having to be self conscious, having to this constant feeling of isolation, of loneliness, of anxiety, of dread.
Having this constant struggle which we’re involved in to reestablish our basic existence. Always trying to find union with ourselves, with others, with nature, this feeling of fragmentation, alienation, isolation. And these are very subtle but they’re very real. And these come about simply through having an ego, being conditioned. So maybe if we begin to, you know for us it doesn’t perhaps it still doesn’t sound like much.
The analogy which is usually given which portrays this degree of awareness that we can have about this for example this third type of dissatisfactoriness of universal conditionality is like you know we can talk about these things in terms of having to, be on guard, having to reestablish our credentials, having to prove ourselves to others to ourselves, having to find union, having this feeling of alienation, fragmentation, all of these subtle types of dissatisfactoriness that we experience. This for us is like a hair in the palm of our hand. It hardly makes any difference. But to someone who has cultivated a real awareness of the level of dissatisfaction, it is like taking the same hair and putting it in their eye. They can’t stand it.
They want to be free from it. So that’s what we mean by the development of determination to be free, to develop that degree of awareness and discontentment with our present state of dissatisfaction is such that you’re going find a way to be free from it. It becomes an imperative, it becomes a central central focus of your spiritual life. An impermanence, the mark of impermanence. If there’s nothing we can hold on to, even when we get a little bit of happiness, it it slips through our fingers.
Constant things are constantly changing. We simply can’t hold on to the happiness even once we have it. And then the mark of insubstantiability. The things have no inherent pleasurability to them as we just talked about in terms of karma. If they did, if things had inherent pleasurability then we could carry a little bag of pleasure around and every now and then take a hit.
But we know that’s not the case. Sometimes the same object at one moment can bring us pleasure. The next day it can be a real hassle. It can be just a source of suffering. So even when we are able to hold on to those things they don’t have the substance of it.
They don’t have an inherent pleasurability about them. So this is the situation that we find ourselves in terms of ego based existence. And so out of this, first beginning to have an appreciation that we have the basis for transformation, that we have all the external and internal conditions necessary to actualize our potential, but this chance isn’t going to last forever, that our present state is definitely going to pass away and when it’s going to pass away is indefinite, and that what type of future reality are we creating for ourselves in terms of our actions, in terms of karma and then any state which is bound by ego is dissatisfactory and out of this arises the sense that I want to change, that I really want to grow and developing a consistent determination to go beyond the reoccurring neurotic patterns which very much constitute our lives. This does not mean that you leave your family, that you leave your commitments, that you leave this world of mundane existence. It means that you begin to reprioritize some of your values, you make sure that you create some space and time in your everyday life to healing your wounds and transcending your problems.
As a real fundamental way of finding the quality of life that we all want, that it is not enough to cope. And it’s lunchtime, Let’s stop there. The three fundamentals of the path, you develop a new determination to be free. And then when developing a determination to be free then how are we going to grow. This is in terms of the latter two fundamentals, the awakening heart and the awakening mind.
In order to overcome selfishness it is necessary to be daring. It is though you were dressed in your swimsuit standing on the diving board with a pool in front of you and you ask yourself now what? The obvious answer is jump, That is daring. You might wonder if you will sink or hurt yourself if you jump. We are attracted to our cocoons and our selfishness and so we are afraid of selflessness stepping beyond ourselves.
So in order to overcome our hesitation about giving up our privacy, in order to commit ourselves to others welfare, some kind of leap is necessary. This leap is the awakening of our hearts to others. The overcoming of our hesitation about giving up the cocoons of our egocentric world and committing ourselves to the welfare of others. And you know I’d like to emphasize that, what I probably mentioned before, that mental health is very much of a social phenomenon. That it occurs in relationship to others.
We’re failing to understand this, a great part of a human dilemma is that we are constantly and completely absorbed in our own problems to the exclusion of others. That part of our basic problem is that we are completely absorbed in our own problems and we are unable to gain some kind of perspective on our difficulties in terms of the global problems, universal problems. You know it’s not to say that we don’t have to deal with the problems, we simply can’t escape from them. We have to deal with them but in the course of dealing with them, we can keep some sort of perspective therefore they become all the more workable and manageable. Though growth is, essentially an individual task, it occurs as an authentic response not only to our own needs which are limited and exclusive but also and this responding to our own needs which limited and exclusive this leads only to a partial and narrow growth.
But it also is an authentic response to the needs of others which are unlimited and universal. And this leads to a complete and all encompassing actualization of all our potential. So it is only in loving others that we can ever actualize our fullest potential. We can never be actualized in isolation from others. So opening up and responding to the needs of others is the way of overcoming our cowardice, inertia, the way of summoning up our inner strength, our courage necessary to crawl out of our cocoons and fly.
And as I mentioned yesterday morning too, in order to fly it takes two wings. These two wings are the awakening heart and the awakening mind. And I think the reason that we don’t help one another, that we have the time and energy for one another is because we don’t understand each other, each other’s needs and each other’s problems. Probably because we don’t understand our own problems, our own needs very well. I’m talking about this Vietnamese master who now lives in France by the name of Thich Nhat Hanh.
Suppose we have a son who becomes unbearable young man. It may be hard for us to love him. This is natural in order to be loved a person should be lovable. If our son has become difficult to love we would be very unhappy. We wish we could love him but the only way we can is to understand him, to understand his situation.
We have to take our son as the subject of our meditation. Instead of taking the concept of emptiness or some other subject, we can take our son as a concrete subject for our meditation. We don’t blame our son, we just want to understand why he has become like that. Through this method of meditation we find out all the causes near and far that have led to our son’s present state of being. The more we see, the more we understand.
The more we understand, the easier it is for us to have compassion and love. Understanding is love itself. Understanding is another name for love. Love is another name for understanding. So in acknowledging our own pain we begin to understand it and thus ourselves, in beginning to understand ourselves we actually begin to love ourselves.
That is to say to take our problems seriously and develop the will that is to choose to extend oneself, to make the effort, to nourish for the purpose of nourishing our well-being to make a perfect effort in solving our problems because we love ourselves. And in understanding our own pain we begin to understand the pain of others. And thus understand them and begin to truly, perhaps for the first time, to love others. Once we begin to understand our own selves, how our own neurotic compulsive patterns are operating, then we can extrapolate from that and understand others are in situations very much like our own. There’s very little difference except for superficial differences.
And thereby understanding their situation we can begin to love them. You’re taking responsibility for others is the most skillful method available to us as a means to develop ourselves. Because you know in order to take responsibility for the needs of others we have to develop the ability to respond to their needs. And ultimately we can only do this through growing, through our self development. Through growing in love, growing in wisdom, through growing in inner strength.
So accepting the responsibility is the first step in developing the ability to respond. In order to be able to respond we have to grow. And in the course of growth we not only help them but we help ourselves. You know there’s a nice story which Thomas Merton tells in a book called Stories of the Desert Fathers in which there is it takes place in ancient Egypt where two Christian fathers living in the desert and one Christian father was rather you know, these two people used to come to them for confession and one would give very harsh penance And the other one’s quite easy going, he’d give very easy going gentle penance. And so depending upon whether you’re into a guilt trip or whether you just wanted to feel good about yourself, you’d go to one or the other fathers to go for confession.
But that’s kind of a sidelight, not important to the story. But they were very renowned in their area for having great insight and understanding. But it occurred about the same time that they both experienced some doubts about their vocation. They began to question whether in fact they were doing the right thing. And being assailed by these doubts they decided to seek out each other’s advice for counsel to clear up this questioning in their mind.
And so unbeknownst to each other they both set out for each other’s caves. Toward evening they came to a place in the desert which was halfway between each of their caves. And they met there in the middle of the desert toward evening and the kindly father he said to the what shall we call him? Strict, strict father? He said, I’m I’m looking for such and such cave of this of this hermit.
Can you direct me there? He said, I know of him. Why were you going? And he said, oh, I I am such and such a father, and I I have been living in the desert leading a very secluded life and trying my best to find to lead a spiritual life. And now I’m assailed with some doubts and I’m going to this father to aid me, to seek some counsel from him, some advice.
And The strict father listened and he said, I know of the father that you’re looking for, I will lead you there. So the next morning they set off and they both lead him to his own cave as it were. The strict father led the gentle father to his own cave and the strict father said I am in fact the father that you were looking for.