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　　Patience is an enormously wonderful and supportive and even magical practice. It”s a way of completely changing the fundamental human habit of trying to resolve things by going either to the right or the left, calling things right or calling things wrong. It”s the way to develop courage, the way to find out what life is really about.

　　Patience is also not ignoring. In fact, patience and curiosity go together. You wonder, Who am I

　　 Who am I at the level of my neurotic patterns

　　 Who am I at the level beyond birth and death

　　 If you wish to look into the nature of your own being, you need to be inquisitive. The path is a journey of investigation, beginning to look more deeply at what”s going on. The teachings give us a lot of suggestions about what we can look for, and the practices give us a lot of suggestions on how to look. Patience is one extremely helpful suggestion. Aggression, on the other hand, prevents us from looking: it puts a tight lid on our curiosity. Aggression is an energy that is determined to resolve the situation into a hard, solid, fixed pattern in which somebody wins and somebody loses.

　　When you begin to investigate, you notice, for one thing, that whenever there is pain of any kind—the pain of aggression, grieving, loss, irritation, resentment, jealousy, indigestion, physical pain—if you really look into that, you can find out for yourself that behind the pain there is always something we are attached to. There is always something we”re holding on to.

　　I say that with such confidence, but you have to find out for yourself whether this is really true. You can read about it: the first thing the Buddha ever taught was the truth that suffering comes from attachment. That”s in the books. But when you discover it yourself, it goes a little deeper right away.

　　As soon as you discover that behind your pain is something you”re holding on to, you are at a place that you will frequently experience on the spiritual path. After a while it seems like almost every moment of your life you”re there, at a point where you realize you actually have a choice. You have a choice whether to open or close, whether to hold on or let go, whether to harden or soften.

　　That choice is presented to you again and again and again. For instance, you”re feeling pain, you look deeply into it, and you notice that there”s something very hard you”re holding on to. And then you have a choice: you can let go of it, which basically means you connect with the softness behind all that hardness. Perhaps each one of us has made the discovery that behind all the hardness of resistance, stress, aggression and jealousy, there is enormous softness that we”re trying to cover over. Aggression usually begins when someone hurts our feelings. The first response is very soft, but before we even notice what we”re doing, we harden. So we can either let go and connect with that softness or we can continue to hold on, which means that the suffering will continue.

　　It requires enormous patience even to be curious enough to look, to investigate. And then when you realize you have a choice, and that there”s actually something there that you”re attached to, it requires great patience to keep going into it. Because you will want to go into denial, to shut down. You”re going to say to yourself, “I don”t want to see this.” You”ll be afraid, because even if you”re starting to get close to it, the thought of letting go is usually very frightening. You may feel that you”re going to die, or that something is going to die. And you will be right. If you let go, something will die. But it”s something that needs to die and you will benefit greatly from its death.

　　On the other hand, sometimes it”s easy to let go. If you make this journey of looking…

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