..续本文上一页ogue you are blaming and criticizing, and then probably feeling guilty and beating yourself up for doing that. It”s torturous, because you feel bad about being so angry at the same time that you really are extremely angry, and you can”t drop it. It”s painful to experience such awful confusion. Still, you just wait and remain patient with your confusion and the pain that comes with it.

　　Patience has a quality of enormous honesty in it, but it also has a quality of not escalating things, allowing a lot of space for the other person to speak, for the other person to express themselves, while you don”t react, even though inside you are reacting. You let the words go and just be there.

　　This suggests the fearlessness that goes with patience. If you practice the kind of patience that leads to the de-escalation of aggression and the cessation of suffering, you will be cultivating enormous courage. You will really get to know anger and how it breeds violent words and actions. You will see the whole thing without acting it out. When you practice patience, you”re not repressing anger, you”re just sitting there with it—going cold turkey with the aggression. As a result, you really get to know the energy of anger and you also get to know where it leads, even without going there. You”ve expressed your anger so many times, you know where it will lead. The desire to say something mean, to gossip or slander, to complain—to just somehow get rid of that aggression—is like a tidal wave. But you realize that such actions don”t get rid of the aggression; they escalate it. So instead you”re patient, patient with yourself.

　　Developing patience and fearlessness means learning to sit still with the edginess of the energy. It”s like sitting on a wild horse, or on a wild tiger that could eat you up. There”s a limerick to that effect: “There was a young lady of Niger, who smiled as she rode on a tiger. They came back from the ride with the lady inside and the smile on the face of the tiger.” Sitting with your discomfort feels like riding on that tiger, because it”s so frightening.

　　When we examine this process we learn something very interesting: there is no resolution. The resolution that human beings seek comes from a tremendous misunderstanding. We think we can resolve everything! When we human beings feel powerful energy, we tend to be extremely uncomfortable until things are resolved in some kind of secure and comforting way, either on the side of yes or the side of no. Or the side of right or the side of wrong. Or the side of anything at all that we can hold on to.

　　But the practice we”re doing gives us nothing to hold on to. Actually, the teachings themselves give us nothing to hold on to. In working with patience and fearlessness, we learn to be patient with the fact that we”re human beings, that everyone who is born and dies from the beginning of time until the end of time is naturally going to want some kind of resolution to this edgy, moody energy. And there isn”t any. The only resolution is temporary and just causes more suffering. We discover that as a matter of fact joy and happiness, peace, harmony and being at home with yourself and your world come from sitting still with the moodiness of the energy until it rises, dwells and passes away. The energy never resolves itself into something solid.

　　So all the while, we stay in the middle of the energy. The path of touching in on the inherent softness of the genuine heart is to sit still and be patient with that kind of energy. We don”t have to criticize ourselves when we fail, even for a moment, because we”re just completely typical human beings; the only thing that”s unique about us is that we”re brave enough to go into these things more deeply and explore beneath our surface reaction of trying …

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