AJAHN SUMEDHO

AJAHN SUMEDHO

SEEING AVERSION IN OURSELVES 

"We always start metta (or loving-kindness) practice with ourselves. We say, “May I be at peace. May I be happy or contented. May I be at ease with myself and with whatever is going on in my mind and body.” It is not difficult to be at ease with ourselves when everything is going well, but when things are not, we tend to try to annihilate the things we don’t like in ourselves.

People come to me all the time, asking, “How do I get rid of anger? How do I get rid of jealousy? How do I get rid of greed and lust? 

How do I get rid of fear? How do I get rid of everything? I could go to a psychiatrist, maybe; he might help me to get rid of it.” Or sometimes we practice meditation to get rid of all these awful things, so that we can achieve blissful states of mind and bodhisattva-like visions. We hope we will never have those nasty feelings ever again. On the one hand, there is the hope and longing to be happy. On the other hand, there is resentment and the reaction of disgust and aversion to our hellish, unpleasant mental states.

I notice that people in Britain are very self-critical, very self-disparaging. 

Then when I ask, “Do you practice metta?” the people who disparage themselves the most, who really need to practice metta, are the ones who say they can’t stand it. This ability to criticize ourselves sounds like we are being terribly honest, doesn’t it? We have intelligent, critical minds, so we think about ourselves in very negative ways. We criticise ourselves because a lot of the things we have done in the past come up in the present--memories, tendencies, or habits--and they don’t live up to what we would like them to be. Likewise, we don’t live up to what we think we should be.

Then, because we can be very self-critical and disparaging. We also tend to project our negative opinions onto others. I remember myself always being disappointed with people because they just couldn't live up to my standards, to the way I thought they should be. 

I'd see somebody and think, "Oh, here's one, here's the person, the truly kind, generous heart, the loving being. At last, I've found her." 

Then I would find out that she'd get angry, jealous, frightened, possessive, or greedy. And I'd think, "Oh, you've disappointed me. I'll have to look for someone else now. I'll have to find someone who can live up to my high standards." But then, when I'd really look at myself, I'd ask, "How well do I live up to these standards?" 

Then I could see that there were the same unpleasant conditions in me, also. 

When I was trying to be a good monk, I was desperately trying to live up to an ideal. I could do that to a certain degree. Through the life we live as monks and the restrictions on it, we are restrained from involving ourselves in heavy karmic activities. 

However, we still have to face the repressed emotional fears and desires of the mind--we really can’t get away with anything in this life. 

As monks, we must also be willing to allow even the most unpleasant, awful things to attain a conscious state, and we must confront these things. In meditation, we allow things that we’ve turned away from or rejected to take conscious form. In order to do this, we must develop metta, the attitude of patience and kindness toward these repressed fears and doubts, and toward our own anger.

When I was newly ordained, I thought of myself as a very good-natured person who wasn’t very angry and didn’t hate people. But after ordination when I started meditating, I began to feel vast amounts of hatred for everybody, and I thought, “This meditation is making me into a demon!” I had thought, “I’ll go and meditate, live out in the jungle alone, get very calm, and be able to communicate with celestial beings and stay in a high state of bliss.” 

Instead, when I first started meditating as a novice, the first two months were nothing but unmitigated aversion. I hated everyone I could think of. I even hated the people I loved, and I hated myself.

I began to see that this was a side of myself that had been repressed, expelled from my consciousness, by the ideal image of myself that I had tried to hold on to. I had never allowed real hatred, aversion, disappointment, or despair to be fully conscious; I had always reacted to it. Before I was ordained, I had a general weariness and despair with regard to social situations that arose because I had been living on the level of smiles and pleasant greetings. I had been getting along socially in a superficial way, so I had never allowed the fears and hatred to take a conscious form. In meditation, when I could no longer stop them, all these repressed feelings began to arise in consciousness.

There was resistance to them, of course, because that was the way I had always dealt with those conditions: “How do I get rid of them?” “How can I stop them?” “Oh, I shouldn’t be feeling like this; it’s disgusting!” 

“After all they’ve done for me, and I still hate them.” These feelings made me hate myself. 

So instead of trying to stop them, I had to learn to accept them. And it was only through acceptance that the mind was able to go through a kind of catharsis in which all the negativity manifested--and passed away."

* * *From "The Mind and the Way; Buddhist Reflections on Life"