The job at hand is to make the heart supremely active rather than receptive. If it is just receptive then feelings will crash in and constantly knock the sensitive student off balance. I've known such students crippled by their sensitivity. In our work sensitivity is considered a useful tool – an aspect of talent – but not a vital prerequisite because it can be developed. The good student is the one who feels the truth of what the teacher says so deeply that they practice all the time. This feeling has nothing to do with sensitivity – it is instead a matter of heart and destiny.
In my experience, sensitive people are often highly tuned to their own feelings but oblivious to those of others. It often belies a selfishness – an insensitivity to others. My teacher has had numerous students with sensitive powers – clairvoyants etc and he said that generally their powers were real and often considerable, but the mistake they made was in thinking that what they felt was all that was there. They weren't stimulated and amazed by the magic and mystery of what lay before them but by their own feelings. Sensitivity often becomes yet another self-obsession. To try and make sense of what you feel is the wrong approach because it doesn't really matter – who cares? When in front of another person what is more important to you – what you feel of them, or them – the actual person. There is a big difference. It's the use you put yourself to that matters and for that you need heart.
To feel the suffering of others is considered a high human quality (in fact all animals do it – they just don't make a song and dance about it). My teacher told me once of a Tibetan teacher of his who had been meditating regularly with a great master in Tibet before the Chinese invasion. On one occasion a dog outside let out a terrific yelp because a child had thrown a rock at it. The master moved slightly and the dog stopped crying. A large bruise then gradually began to appear on the master's body. His compassion had simply taken the injury from the dog and he had borne it himself. Not only could he feel suffering, he also had the personal power to do something about it – his heart was able to leap out and swallow, and it was so well trained that it did so automatically.
The model we always come back to in our work is that of yielding. How do you survive the onslaught of energy impinging and impressing on you all the time? This energy could be the intense suffering of a poor animal in your presence or it could be a deadly attack from your arch enemy, for us there is no difference – it is all energy, and life is too short to train adequately for any more than one eventuality. We have to have a single response that works for everything. That response is to leap out with the heart, join (connect) and transform. The heart is beautifully appropriate and has its own rules and morality which have nothing to do with those of society or the mind. If you manage to let go sufficiently for the heart to be free in its actions then the transformation it undergoes and initiates will be enough to both manage the situation and in some sense to initiate the next. At no point do we have time or inclination to observe and judge what is happening. We are too embroiled, too involved, too interested, too active to register whether that energy is from a dying child or from an aggressive drunken lout. In fact we only really begin to have problems with sensitivity when the mind starts to register what it is that we actually feel. This use of the mind should only kick in after the event is well over, when it may be useful in distilling a principle or insight from the occasion that can be incorporated into the work. This is itself a process of transformation – having the heart and intelligence to use your experiences and in that use to change them into an aspect of the work. A bit like sitting down to write a poem about an intense experience you've had and in the process generating an even more intense experience – the poem.
In my experience, sensitive people are often highly tuned to their own feelings but oblivious to those of others. It often belies a selfishness – an insensitivity to others. My teacher has had numerous students with sensitive powers – clairvoyants etc and he said that generally their powers were real and often considerable, but the mistake they made was in thinking that what they felt was all that was there. They weren't stimulated and amazed by the magic and mystery of what lay before them but by their own feelings. Sensitivity often becomes yet another self-obsession. To try and make sense of what you feel is the wrong approach because it doesn't really matter – who cares? When in front of another person what is more important to you – what you feel of them, or them – the actual person. There is a big difference. It's the use you put yourself to that matters and for that you need heart.
To feel the suffering of others is considered a high human quality (in fact all animals do it – they just don't make a song and dance about it). My teacher told me once of a Tibetan teacher of his who had been meditating regularly with a great master in Tibet before the Chinese invasion. On one occasion a dog outside let out a terrific yelp because a child had thrown a rock at it. The master moved slightly and the dog stopped crying. A large bruise then gradually began to appear on the master's body. His compassion had simply taken the injury from the dog and he had borne it himself. Not only could he feel suffering, he also had the personal power to do something about it – his heart was able to leap out and swallow, and it was so well trained that it did so automatically.
The model we always come back to in our work is that of yielding. How do you survive the onslaught of energy impinging and impressing on you all the time? This energy could be the intense suffering of a poor animal in your presence or it could be a deadly attack from your arch enemy, for us there is no difference – it is all energy, and life is too short to train adequately for any more than one eventuality. We have to have a single response that works for everything. That response is to leap out with the heart, join (connect) and transform. The heart is beautifully appropriate and has its own rules and morality which have nothing to do with those of society or the mind. If you manage to let go sufficiently for the heart to be free in its actions then the transformation it undergoes and initiates will be enough to both manage the situation and in some sense to initiate the next. At no point do we have time or inclination to observe and judge what is happening. We are too embroiled, too involved, too interested, too active to register whether that energy is from a dying child or from an aggressive drunken lout. In fact we only really begin to have problems with sensitivity when the mind starts to register what it is that we actually feel. This use of the mind should only kick in after the event is well over, when it may be useful in distilling a principle or insight from the occasion that can be incorporated into the work. This is itself a process of transformation – having the heart and intelligence to use your experiences and in that use to change them into an aspect of the work. A bit like sitting down to write a poem about an intense experience you've had and in the process generating an even more intense experience – the poem.
No comments
Post a Comment