..续本文上一页e to begin meditating many years ago. What I liked was how familiar that state was. The place that I most love is when I disappear. You know, there”s a point where you just disappear. That is so wonderful, because I”m sure that”s how it will be after we die, that you”re just not here, but it”s fine.

　　Pema Chödrön: What do you mean exactly, you disappear

　　Alice Walker: Well, you reach that point where it”s just like space, and you don”t feel yourself. You”re not thinking about what you”re going to cook, and you”re not thinking about what you”re going to wear, and you”re not really aware of your body. I like that because as a writer I spend a lot of time in spaces that I”ve created myself and it”s a relief to have another place that is basically empty.

　　Pema Chödrön: I don”t think I have the same experience. It”s more like being here—fully and completely here. It”s true that mediation practice is liberating and timeless and that, definitely, there is no caught-up-ness. But is is also profoundly simple and immediate. In contrast, everything else feels like fantasy, like it is completely made up by mind.

　　Alice Walker: Well, I feel like I live a lot of my life in a different realm anyway, especially when I”m out in nature. So meditation takes me to that place when I”m not in nature. It is a place of really feeling the oneness, that you”re not kept from it by the fact that you”re wearing a suit. You”re just in it; that”s one of the really good things about meditation for me.

　　Judy Lief: I assume, Alice, that as an activist your job is to take on situations of extreme suffering and try to alleviate them to some degree. How has this practice affected your approach to activism

　　Alice Walker: Well, my activism really is for myself, because I see places in the world where I really feel I should be. If there is something really bad, really evil, happening somewhere, then that is where I should be. I need, for myself, to feel that I have stood there. It feels a lot better than just watching it on television.

　　Judy Lief: This is where you bring together your private practice and your public action.

　　Alice Walker: Yes. Before I was sort of feeling my way. I went to places like Mississippi and stood with the people and realized the suffering they were experiencing. I shared the danger they put themselves in by demanding their rights, I felt this incredible opening, a feeling of finally being at home in my world, which was what I needed. I needed to feel I could be at home there, and the only way was to actually go and connect with the people.

　　Pema Chödrön: And the other extreme is when our primary motivation is avoidance of pain. Then the world becomes scarier and scarier.

　　Alice Walker: Exactly.

　　Pema Chödrön: That”s the really sad thing—the world becomes more and more frightening, and you don”t want to go out your door. Sure there”s a lot of danger out there, but the tonglen approach makes you more open to the fear it evokes in you, and your world gets bigger.

　　Judy Lief: When you are practicing tonglen, taking on pain of others, what causes that to flip into something positive, as opposed to being stuck in a negative space or seeing yourself as a martyr

　　Alice Walker: I think it”s knowing that you”re not the only one suffering. That”s just what happens on earth. There may be other places in the galaxy where people don”t suffer, where beings are just fine, where they never get parking tickets even. But what seems to be happening here is just really heavy duty suffering.

　　I remember years ago, when I was asking myself what was the use of all this suffering. I was reading the Gnostic Gospels, in which Jesus says something that really struck me. He says basically, learn how to suffer and you will not su…

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