..续本文上一页wakens compassion.

　　Alice Walker: I remember the day I really got it that we”re not connected as human beings because of our perfection, but because of our flaws. That was such a relief.

　　Pema Chödrön: Rumi wrote a poem called "Night Travelers," It”s about how all the darkness of human beings is a shared thing from the beginning of time, and how understanding that opens up your heart and opens up your world. You begin to think bigger. Rather than depressing you, it makes you feel part of the whole.

　　Alice Walker: I like what you say about understanding that the darkness represents our wealth, because that”s true, There”s so much fixation on the light, as if the darkness can be dispensed with, but of course it cannot. After all, there is night, there is earth; so this is a wonderful acknowledgment of richness.

　　I think the Jamaicans are right when they call each other “fellow sufferer,” because that”s how it feels. We aren”t angels, we aren”t saints, we”re all down here doing the best we can. We”re trying to be good people, but we do get really mad. You talk in your tapes about when you discovered that your former husband was seeing someone else, and you threw a rock at him. This was very helpful (laughter). It was really good to have a humorous, earthy, real person as a teacher. This was great.

　　Pema Chödrön: When that marriage broke up, I don”t know why it devastated me so much but it was really a kind of annihilation. It was the beginning of my spiritual path, definitely, because I was looking for answers. I was in the lowest point in my life and I read this article by Trungpa Rinpoche called “Working With Negativity.” I was scared by my anger and looking for answers to it. I kept having all these fantasies of destroying my ex-husband and they were hard to shake. There was an enormous feeling of groundlessness and fear that came from not being able to entertain myself out of the pain. The usual exits, the usual ways of distracting myself—nothing was working.

　　Alice Walker: Nothing worked.

　　Pema Chödrön: And Trungpa Rinpoche basically said that there”s nothing wrong with negativity per se. He said there”s a lot you can learn from it, that it”s a very strong creative energy. He said the real problem is what he called negative negativity, which is when you don”t just stay with negativity but spin off into all the endless cycle of things you can say to yourself about it.

　　Alice Walker: What gets us is the spinoff. If you could just sit with the basic feeling then you could free yourself, but it”s almost impossible if you”re caught up in one mental drama after another. That”s what happens.

　　Pema Chödrön: This is an essential understanding of vajrayana, or tantric, Buddhism. In vajrayana Buddhism they talk about how what we call negative energies—such as anger, lust, envy, jealousy, these powerful energies—are all actually wisdoms in disguise. But to experience that you have to not spin off; you have to be able to relax with the energy.

　　So tonglen, which is considered more of a mahayana practice, was my entry into being able to sit with that kind of energy. And it gave me a way to include all the other people, to recognize that so many people were in the same boat as I was.

　　Alice Walker: You do recognize that everybody is in that boat sooner or later, in one form or other. It”s good to feel that you”re not alone.

　　Pema Chödrön: I want to ask you about joy. It”s all very well to talk about poison as medicine and breathing in the suffering and sending out relief and so forth, but did you find any joy coming out of this

　　Alice Walker: Oh Yes!. Even just not being so miserable.

　　Part of the joyousness was knowing we have help. It was great to know that this wisdom is so old. That means …

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