You get together with someone, you hang out, and they’re using eighty percent of the words. When you start talking about you, they start looking for the check from the waiter, because it’s time to go. When you walk away from interacting with them, you feel smaller, not larger, routinely. Something’s kind of wrong with that.
In the story of the Buddha’s awakening, sitting under the Bodhi tree, in the middle of the process, in comes Mara, the trickster, the force of delusion, the confuser, the shapeshifter, sending pictures of beautiful, attractive others to draw him away through lust, sending images of horrible demons to trick him with anger. But the Buddha, recognizing what’s happening, simply says, I see you, Mara. I recognize what you’re doing. The Buddha does not fight with Mara, does not get complicated about it, does not feed the trolls, as it were. He just reaches down and touches the earth, grounds himself, and claims his place.
To claim for yourself the right to see clearly what’s actually happening is absolutely crucial. It’s often lost in childhood. Children are often faced with a fateful choice: is there something wrong with you, or with me? For a young child it’s very scary to recognize that something’s wrong with a parent or a caregiver or someone with authority, because if there’s something wrong with them, they can’t take care of you.
Here’s exactly what I want to walk you through: what to actually do with what someone hands you that you don’t want to carry, the much older instinct in you this draws on, and what to do when you realize certain supplies are simply never coming from a particular person or place, no matter how fair it would be if they did.
