Inner Viciousness

The most difficult part of my teachers teaching, and for that reason probably the most important, is its inner viciousness. He has also variously called it ruthless, wicked, biting, cogging, cutting, mean, grim, gritty. It is really a development of the place of no pity I talked about yesterday and he confided in me that he has found it as difficult as anyone. It is an amoral presence - a refusal to allow yourself to be constrained by any concerns, those of society no more than your own. Without it you will not enter - entering will be something you'll have to turn on and it will always be too late. My teacher developed it partly by going at his Tai Chi like a possessed mad man, practising all hours of the day whether he had the energy or not ("Never give in to tiredness - it's always an illusion"), and partly through teaching: he learnt quite early I suspect that, as he once said to me, "Mr Nice Guy don't get the job done". Paradoxically without this ruthless streak sweeping through your being you cannot be compassionate: your compassion will instead be a weak, sentimental pity, more to do with your own distaste or fear of suffering. Compassion means taking on board the other's suffering: you don't take it away from them, you join them in it and lend them a little energy and support. A truly compassionate person does this automatically without thought: their entering is part of their essence. But also they enter from the ground up, through the root, so to speak. This is only possible if you have the immediacy and presence of real ruthlessness - if you are that ground. Without this your entering will always be inappropriate, it will either be too much or too little, too late or too soon, it will be unnatural and against the grain. With this ruthlessness you become the other, and entering or listening will not be necessary. Listening especially has always felt far too inactive and back-foot for me to have any sympathy with.