This week I found that proverbial “lost thing” which I had been trying to find for years. In the past I read many of Pema Chodron’s books. Someplace, in one of them Pema riffed on right and wrong in a way that really opened me up and helped me to see things differently. Many times I wanted to go back to that passage, sometimes just to remind myself, and sometimes because I wanted to share it with others. Finally all these years later, not even looking for it, I stumbled on the passage in the book When Things Fall Apart.
This evening, below the orange divide, I’ll share the passage and confess some of my own shortcomings relative to the subject…who wouldn’t be curious about such an offer??? ;-)
Good evening and welcome to Monday Group Meditation. We will be sitting from 7:30 to 11:00 PM Eastern Time. It is not necessary to sit for the entire extended time, which is set up to make it convenient for people in four North American Time Zones; sit for as long as you like and when it is most convenient for you. Monday Group Meditation is open to everyone, believers and non-believers, who are interested in gathering in silence. If you are new to meditation and would like to try it for yourself, Mindful Nature gave a good description of one way to meditate in an earlier diary, copied and pasted below:
"It is a matter of focusing attention mostly. In many traditions, the idea is to sit and focus on the rising and falling of the breath. Not controlling it, but sitting in a relaxed fashion and merely observing experiences of breathing, sounds, etc. Be aware of your thoughts, but don't engage in them. When your mind wanders (it will, often), then return to focus on breath and repeat."
Sangha Co-hosts for meditation are:
7:30 - 10:00 Ooooh and davehouck
9:30 - 11:00 thanatokephaloides
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…We make ourselves right or we make ourselves wrong, every day, every week, every month and year of our lives. We feel that we have to be right so that we can feel good. We don’t want to be wrong because then we’ll feel bad. But we could be more compassionate toward all these parts of ourselves. When we feel right, we can look at that. Feeling right can feel good; we can be completely sure of how right we are and have a lot of people agreeing with us about how right we are. But suppose someone does not agree with us? Then what happens? Do we find ourselves getting angry and aggressive? If we look into the very moment of anger or aggression, we might see that this is what wars are made of…feeling that we have to be right, being thrown off and righteously indignant when someone disagrees with us. On the other hand, when we find ourselves feeling wrong, we could also look at that. The whole right and wrong business closes us down and makes our world smaller. Wanting situations and relationships to be solid, permanent and graspable obscures the pith of the matter, which is that things are fundamentally groundless.
Instead of making others right or wrong, or bottling up right and wrong in ourselves, there’s a middle way, a very powerful middle way. We could see it as sitting on the razor’s edge, not falling off to the right or the left. This middle way involves not hanging on to our version so tightly. It involves keeping our hearts and minds open long enough to entertain the idea that when we make things wrong, we do it out of a desire to obtain some kind of ground or security. Could our minds and hearts be big enough to just hang out in that space where we’re not entirely certain about who’s right and who’s wrong? Could we have no agenda when we walk into a room with a person, not know what to say, not make that person wrong or right? Could we see, hear, feel other people as they really are? It is powerful to practice this way, because we’ll find ourselves continually rushing around to try to feel secure again—to make ourselves or them either right or wrong. But true communication can happen only in that open space.
When I first encountered these paragraphs, I was very sure about a lot of things. Attached to my intellect, I was used to having the answers, maybe not to all the questions, but to an awful lot of them. These two paragraphs really challenged me to examine my relationship to right and wrong, and my need to be right. One of the things that quickly became evident was that being right only made me feel good for a very short period of time. Seeing how fleeting the feeling of certainty coming from feeling right actually was really devalued the quality of “rightness” and helped me to let go of my attachments to both being right, and my expectation that I should “have all the answers.”
This teaching of Pema Chodron's is something I’ve longed to share for some time; in a place where it seems people can fly off the handle at the drop of a hat, it seems particularly appropriate. I can’t help thinking that exposure to this teaching about right and wrong might make a difference for some people if, like me, they were merely exposed to it. If people were better able to stay in the sweet spot of not knowing exactly what is right and what is wrong, and could meet each other with beginner’s minds, free of preconceptions about who’s right and who’s wrong, perhaps there might be fewer pie fights...maybe. :-)
Finally coming across this passage all these years later, now I realize it isn’t only right and wrong that we can work with this way. We can practice with any of the infinite pairs of polar opposites in this same fashion: good/bad, attraction/aversion, pro/con, freedom/security, happiness/sadness, and on and on. We can practice hanging out in the middle, holding our seat on the razor, falling neither right, nor left. No longer needing to contract in fear, we become intimate friends with the current moment, and we can be relaxed with what is. Once we are no longer in conflict with the unfolding of life, our judgments are no longer in the way; in the spaciousness of groundlessness we are able to respond simply and appropriately to things exactly as they are.