..续本文上一页I would love to send them a copy of “Awakening Compassion.” (laughter)

　　Pema Chödrön: It”s seeing that the cause of someone”s aggression is their suffering. And you could also realize that your aggression is not going to help anything.

　　So you”re standing there, you are being provoked, you are feeling aggression, and what do you do

　　 That”s when tonglen becomes very helpful. You breathe in and connect with your own aggression with a lot of honesty. You have such a strong recognition in that moment of all the oppressed people who are provoked and feeling like you do. If you just keep doing that, something different might come out of your mouth.

　　Alice Walker: And war will not be what comes out.

　　Judy Lief: It seems to me that Dr. Martin Luther King had the quality of a tonglen practitioner. Yet he didn”t ask us not to take stands.

　　Alice Walker: He was from a long line of Baptist preachers, someone who could really get to that place of centeredness through prayer and through love. I think the person who has a great capacity to love, which often flowers when you can see and feel the suffering of other people, can also strategize. I think he was a great strategist. I think he often got very angry and upset, but at the same time he knew what he was up against. Sometimes he was the only really lucid person in a situation, so he knew how much of the load he was carrying and how much depended on him.

　　As activists, it is really important to have some kind of practice, so that when we go out into the world to confront horrible situations we can do it knowing we”re in the right place ourselves. Knowing we”re not bringing more fuel to the fire, more anger, more despair. It”s difficult but that should not be a deterrent. The more difficult something seems, the more it”s possibile to give up hope. You approach the situation with the feeling of having already given up hope, but that doesn”t stop you. You said we should put that slogan about abandoning hope on our refrigerators.

　　Pema Chödrön: Give up all hope of fruition.

　　Alice Walker: Right. Just do it because you”re doing it and it feels like the right thing to do, but without feeling it”s necessarily going to change anything.

　　Pema Chödrön: Something that I heard Trungpa Rinpoche say has been a big help to me. He said to live your life as an experiment, so that you”re always experimenting. You could experiment with yelling back and see what that happens. You could experiment with tonglen and see how that works. You could see what actually allows some kind of communication to happen. You learn pretty fast what closes down communication, and that”s the strong sense of enemy. If the other person feels your hatred, then everyone closes down.

　　Alice Walker: I feel that fear is what closes people down more than anything, just being afraid. The times when I have really been afraid to go forward, with a relationship or a problem, is because there is fear. I think practice of being with your feelings, letting them come up and not trying to push them away, is incredibly helpful.

　　Question from the audience: Thank you both for being here and bringing so much pleasure to so many people tonight. I”m asking a question for a friend who couldn”t come tonight. She was at Pema”s three day seminar and she left on Saturday feeling badly because she had got in touch with her anger and couldn”t stay. Now she feels she”s a bad Buddhist, a bad practitioner. I”ve been trying to tell her it”s okay but I think she needs to hear your words.

　　Pema Chödrön: Well, tell her we”re used to using everything that we hear against ourselves, so it”s really common to just the dharma teachings and use them against yourself. But the fact is we don”t have to do that anymore. We don”t have to …

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