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For this week’s episode, we’re sharing a recent meditation Scott Snibbe led for our new Train a Happy Mind community on letting go of suffering. Every Sunday morning, he leads a meditation on one of the topics from How to Train a Happy Mind. Sometimes he also expands into other topics or leads practices relating to current events. In the book, this topic’s chapter is called Am I the Most Important Person in the Universe?

In this talk and its meditation, Scott touches on how our own delusions of anger and attachment connect to the bigger problems in the world like war and the activists working to stop it. He also shares some thoughts on what he’s learned about how to be an effective activist from the book America’s Racial Karma; and how racism, sexism, and colonialism connect to what Buddhists understand as the core delusion of pride.

What does it mean that “life is suffering?”

Scott Snibbe: Today’s topic is Am I the Most Important Person in the Universe. I feel kind of proud of coming up with that title because I think it’s a lot more of a draw than suffering. That is the typical Buddhist name for this topic, suffering. It was the first topic that the Buddha taught, the Four Noble Truths.

You’ve heard me say this before, but it’s kind of the worst possible marketing for Buddhism to start with the topic of suffering. Because you hear life is suffering and you’re like, Yeah, I don’t need somebody to tell me that. Then I think a lot of people move on. I’m going to talk a little bit about this topic. I actually do like this title for it, Am I the Most Important Person in the Universe because that just massively cuts to the chase of the source of suffering, which is this sense of feeling separate.

Naively, before I came to Buddhism, I thought Buddhism was about dissolving yourself (which in a lot of ways it is) but if you don’t know what that means, it’s pretty scary. I was really scared of it. My brother became a Buddhist before me and I was totally scared that he was going to lose his personality and become kind of blah: nothing exciting, nothing painful. Luckily, that didn’t happen. He was a skate punk and a photojournalist, very funny, and had a really amazing sense of humor. Those things never went away.

I saw that you don’t actually dissolve yourself, the way we think of a self. As the Dalai Lama really shows. In fact, I heard him say once, you can have a huge personality and no ego, those two things are separate, it’s possible. He also said everyone gets enlightened in their own way, which was very inspiring to me because I think a lot of us think of the path as kind of boring.

You can have a huge personality and no ego, those two things are separate.

It is sad that enlightenment sounds boring, but I do think it’s the way enlightenment’s described, it doesn’t seem interesting, where you even out all your emotions and you no longer have a self. I think it’s worth starting with that, the goal and the reason rather than the obvious point that there’s a lot of suffering.

What’s the point? The point is to be free from suffering in a way that’s original. “Everyone gets enlightened in their own way.” That is such a powerful statement, whether or not you believe in enlightenment, you get to say everyone moves toward enlightenment in their own way.

Everyone gets enlightened in their own way.

Venerable Robina is a good example, she’s a Buddhist nun and she was very aggressive and angry for very good reasons. I won’t get into all of those, but as a woman, she had awful things happen to her. Then she gradually purified those aspects, but she still has the power. She has the power and the energy of anger without actually being angry.

Mirror-like wisdom

In Vajrayana Buddhism, they say that when you purify your anger, it becomes what’s called a mirror-like wisdom. It’s not like you completely become free of anger, as if nothing bothers you. Not mad about the fighting in the Middle East or Ukraine. Everything’s, everything’s fine. No, not at all. This mirror-like root wisdom is seeing things really clearly.

That’s the essence of anger. When you get rid of the deluded aspects of anger, which we’ll talk about in a minute, what remains is the clarity. There’s an aspect of anger that’s really clearly seeing that something wrong is happening here to me, to the world, and I would like to change it. We’ll talk about the deluded aspect of anger in a second, but I kind of like this approach of starting from the purified aspect of anger, which is mirror-like wisdom. You see absolutely clearly, Wow, that conflict needs to end in the Middle East.

You also might see a path to it too, that’s the beauty of it because the deluded anger often doesn’t see a path. You see that in some ways people protest, it’s very angry, but that protesting is increasing division and fighting. Even though people out there protesting aren’t necessarily killing each other, they’re fighting their own little war out there on the street. Not everybody, some protests are very effective, non-violent, and constructive, but others are actually just mirroring the war out there.

Some protests are very effective, non-violent, and constructive, but others are actually just mirroring the war out there.

Whatever side you’re on too, without taking sides, they’re mirroring the war, just using verbal violence instead of physical violence to go out and fight our own little war on a college campus or in front of a government building. The purified aspect of anger, mirror-like wisdom, sees the problem very clearly and it points towards the solution. Here’s what I can do.

I’m not pretending I know that’s the solution. Although, you can think about it. You can look at the way other conflicts ended non-violently through discussion, through acknowledging the perspective of the other side, and that they have legitimate needs underlying potentially illegitimate actions.

I like that. I think it’s very nice to think about this because otherwise you think, Well, what’s the point? Why do I even want to get rid of suffering? The Western psychological perspective on suffering is actually more like you need a little bit of everything. You need a little bit of sadness. You need maybe a little depression, not like clinically depressed, but that the most a person can have is a kind of like ups and downs, going between sadness, dissatisfaction, and then fleeting pleasures.

That really is the Western psychological model. It doesn’t believe it’s possible to gradually grow your joy, enthusiasm, love, and compassion. Maybe more today with positive psychology, they are taking that perspective. But with the Buddhist psychological view, it’s extraordinary in saying there’s an unlimited capacity for fulfillment and satisfaction in life. That’s the reason to think a little bit about suffering and its causes. The reasons we suffer are because of mistaken views, a total misunderstanding of reality.

The reasons we suffer are because of mistaken views, a total misunderstanding of reality.

Everyday suffering

I think that’s a good way to start, because then it gives them motivation. Traditionally you go through these three forms of suffering, which is pretty illuminating if it’s not a turn-off. You could also say dissatisfaction. The earlier topic of impermanence really leads up to thinking about suffering because things are always changing, and not always for the good. The first form of suffering is the things we normally call suffering, like wars.

There are all these different lists and numbers, but getting what you don’t want and not getting what you want, I like to list those two. That’s a very normal kind of suffering that happens to each of us every single day. We wake up and we have certain things we want that day and certain things we don’t want. Then we don’t get them, and we’re disappointed.

Then we get things we don’t want, like someone criticizing us, we get a big bill, or something breaks. These are ordinary forms of suffering. When you get into it, you study it for a couple of weeks, and you go into all these long lists, loneliness is one of these forms of suffering, which is nice to acknowledge.

Feeling lonely is a normal form of everyday suffering. Constant change of status is another one. I was an artist, quite well-renowned, I have pieces in the MoMA and the Whitney Museum, and now I’m less known and people are like, Oh, what happened to him? Is he still alive? That kind of thing. It happens.

Feeling lonely is a normal form of everyday suffering.

My grandfather was an architect, he studied with Walter Gropius at Harvard, the great modern architect. He was flying high, working in Manhattan, a Mad Men kind of life, drinking and drinking, many drinks over lunch and flying all over the world in an age when there were the first jet planes.

Then he had kind of a downfall mostly because of his personality; he was quite egotistic. He lost his position and got in arguments with his bosses. Then he was turned in by his brother because he was a communist. He worked for labor rights and black rights very early in his life, for an American. His brother turned him in to the House Un-American Activities Committee. He was blacklisted and he couldn’t practice architecture at all.

Then I saw at the end of his life, I took care of him because he was a drunk, he beat up his kids. His kids didn’t want anything to do with him as he got older. I took care of him right to the end of his life at a nursing home. He was like a little baby, I think a lot of us have seen this with our grandparents, and some of our parents, he was like a little baby, everything forgotten. It was amazing in his nursing home because many powerful people had powerful lives, as incredible mothers or doctors, and now they’re all like babies, at the end of the line. That’s another constant change of status.

Each of these you could meditate on for an hour. When you study this topic deeply in the lamrim, you take every little subtopic. That’s just the first one, suffering. It’s just good to come to grips with the fact that it’s inevitable. It is inevitable that we have problems in life.

Recently, I was having some physical problems, some weird things happening with my body. My wife was like, Aren’t you worried? Because they are some concerning things. I just actually can’t muster the worry, I’ve been practicing for 25 years and I kind of try it a little bit.

She’s so worried. She’s staying up at night. I’m so worried about you, what’s going to happen? I was like, I don’t know. We have to find out what it is and if it really is a problem and if it is very serious, then you deal with it. If not, we don’t. Even if it leads to death, it’s like we’re all headed towards that. It’s quite nice to feel that this stuff does sink in.

I sit there because she’s like, “Are you worried? I’m so worried.” I sit there and I’m like, I can’t actually be worried about it. Once you think about this every single day, impermanence, death, sickness, suffering—it hits everybody. You’re like, Oh yeah, it might be my turn. You want to keep a constructive attitude through what it is.

Hopefully, it’s not that big. Hopefully, you’re not worried, I’m not worried. It’s nice when you get tested. You don’t really know how you’re going to respond in life until you get tested. That’s what the practice does. If you practice enough, eventually the test comes and you do okay on the test.

That’s the point of thinking about suffering is when real problems come, you’re like, Oh yeah, I’ve been practicing for this. This is normal. Now’s my chance to face this with grace and joy. Then my wife and I were on the plane yesterday, and we don’t know how this thing’s going to come out, but I said, how would you live your life today if this was your last day? She described it and she’s like, Oh, I would probably hug all my family and spend some time in nature and spend some time with family. I was like, Oh, that’s quite nice. That’s actually how you spend most of your days.

You really do live your life the way you would live your last day, which is the point of meditating on suffering, to get in touch with reality, and live your life in a meaningful way. That’s number one, just suffering and why you think about suffering, not if there weren’t a way out of it too, if there weren’t a way to process it, there wouldn’t be a point of thinking about it. Not that you can’t get out of suffering, but you can get out of the mental aspect of it making your life miserable.

The suffering of change

You have the suffering of suffering, then you have the suffering of change, which they say is pleasure. That goes back to the topic of impermanence. That one does give you pause because you don’t want to feel miserable about enjoying a nice breakfast or being with your partner or going out for a walk or something like that. It doesn’t mean that those things are really miserable and you’re just deluding yourself that they’re nice.

It just means that they don’t last. That they’re not enduring causes of happiness, that things run out, just like filling your tank with gas, or now you fill your battery with electricity, if you have an electric car, but that the suffering of change, can be a little depressing, depending on how you think about it.

I like to share it more in this way that connects directly to impermanence, that things don’t last like a kiss is almost like an impulse. It’s almost this unmeasurable amount of time that feels so nice. Kiss on the cheek, but how long did it, did it really last there? That’s impermanence. Then eventually you need another one. You’re like, Oh, I need another kiss. I don’t know.

Food’s another example. You keep eating and then eventually it doesn’t feel good at all if you eat too much. This is the suffering of change. It’s just pleasures aren’t an enduring source of happiness. I think there’s a middle ground, at least in Mahayana Buddhism, you don’t completely renounce them. You can really enjoy whatever you’re doing, but it is impermanent.

All-pervasive suffering

Then there’s the all-pervasive suffering, which I actually don’t talk that much about in the book because it’s a little more subtle. The Buddhist perspective is that ignorance—the ignorance of feeling separate from things, feeling that things outside yourself—is the cause of pleasure and pain. Believing that things exist solidly, separately, and independently, that’s the root of all suffering. That’s the all-pervasive suffering.

Believing that things exist solidly, separately, and independently, that’s the root of all suffering.

The Buddhist view is that’s what kind of creates the whole universe, that kind of ignorance that creates a universe where suffering is even possible, like ordinary types of suffering are possible and where lifespans are short and things like that.

For a Skeptic’s Path and How to Train a Happy Mind, you don’t take that approach. You take more the common sense approach of selfishness, self-centeredness, believing that we’re separate, more important, that’s how it connects to the name of the topic. Am I the most important person in the universe?

Because that’s seen as the root of all suffering is that last form of suffering, that all-pervasive suffering is ignorance. There’s more, so I tend to just use a more common sense approach, but today I like mentioning some of the more Buddhist aspects, that there is a deeper idea that that even creates the whole universe, our reality, and this life is that ignorance.

If you can cut that ignorance, that’s the real way to eliminate all forms of suffering. Just to talk a little bit about causes of suffering. This was the one that really surprised me because I did think coming into Buddhism that you’re supposed to stop enjoying pleasures and stop being bothered by pains.

But what surprised me is that the causes of our suffering are our delusions. These root delusions, there’s anger, which people debate about anger, but anger has a specific definition in Buddhism, which is exaggerating the negative aspects of something. It’s really nice to remember that because it’s true. Think about when you’re angry at a partner. It is a really good example because that person probably does more for you or did more for you than anyone in your life, spent more time, did more things for you, gave you everything, give you their body even, you’re so intimate.

Then you’re totally angry. When you’re angry at your partner, you can’t think anything good about them. It could be so trivial and stupid, the thing you’re angry about, like deciding where to go for the day or something like that.

It’s worth remembering that anger is a delusion of exaggerating the negative and then wanting to harm on top of it. These two things, they actually call inappropriate attention. It’s kind of a nice word because it’s a very generic word. It cools things down with inappropriate attention. Inappropriate attention is exaggerating the negative.

Anger is a delusion of exaggerating the negative and then wanting to harm on top of it.

When I start to feel angry at my wife is to have appropriate attention and to remember, I think I got this from one of my wonderful teachers, Elaine Jackson. Whenever I have an angry thought about my wife exaggerating the negative, I think, But she’s my best friend, and she loves me more than anyone in the world. It really works because it’s really true. I can’t contradict those things.

Of course, of everyone in the world, she’s most dedicated to me, and our daughter. It’s so silly, you see how it’s just, it’s your mind. It’s very courageous in Buddhism because you really do take total responsibility. It’s gnarly and people might get really mad at you for even talking this way. Like, Wow, it’s in my own mind for being mad at Netanyahu or Hamas or Vladimir Putin.

You want to project it out there and say, They’re the one making me angry, but it’s my own mind. I’m exaggerating the negative and making my life miserable. It doesn’t mean I can’t fight against what they’re doing. The mirror-like wisdom, the clarity of like, There’s something going wrong out there in the world and I want to help fix it. But to only see the negative and then to want to do harm, doesn’t do any good in the world. The Buddha said, Hatred never ceases hatred. Only love ceases hatred, this is an eternal law.

Hatred never ceases hatred. Only love ceases hatred. This is an eternal law.

The delusion of anger

Not exactly the first person to say this, but it’s nice to remember. Anger never ends anger, violence never ends violence, and hatred never ends hatred. That’s the delusion of anger. Delusion of attachment is exaggerating the positive in things, so in general, that temporal aspect of, If I get this thing, I’ll be happy forever.

Delusion of attachment is exaggerating the positive in things.

If only I get this achievement, car, possession, or a certain amount of money. I saw a study once that said everyone thought they would be happy if they got 10 percent more money, no matter how much they had. A lot of people make 10,000 a year in the United States, a very low amount of money.

Then people in the Bay Area, where I live, they’re often live on like 300,000 or 400,000, a year. They’re like, Oh, if I had another 40,000 or 50,000, I could pay for my daughter’s school or something. Then you meet some people who have 10 million dollars and they’re like, Oh, if I just had another million dollars. That attachment is exaggerating the positive.

It’s often true with desserts. They look so good. My daughter and I were walking through the airport and saw macarons, those little, pretty things made out of the different colors made out of meringue. I’d never tasted one my whole life. I finally tasted one and I thought it was terrible. I’m sorry if you like them, but I thought it was terrible. Same thing with my daughter, she was like, Oh, it’s awful.

I think it’s often that way with desserts. They look so much better than when you actually eat them. Then you’re like, Well, all right, I guess I might as well eat this whole piece of cake. Sometimes it still does taste fantastic too, if you choose the right dessert that you love. But even then, it runs out. That’s the suffering of change. It connects to the attachment. You exaggerate the positive quality. It’s funny how quickly something disappears too. How long does it take you to eat that slice of cake?

I used to always wonder, before I was a Buddhist, I used to really sit and think. I was always a natural meditator, even as a kid. I remember eating one bite of cake and thinking, Oh, that’s really delicious. I was like, Why do I need more? I remember thinking, There are like 20 bites or 15 bites of cake, why that many? Why isn’t one just satisfying? Then why will I sometimes eat a whole other slice and then make myself sick? Clearly, it’s your mind. You certainly don’t need all that nutrition in the cake. We’re all generally getting enough calories.

So what is it? It’s our mind. The Buddhist perspective is it’s our mind exaggerating those qualities, mostly through habit. You have the habit of having enjoyed that. Often we associate the pleasure with love because our parents gave us a piece of cake on a special occasion, like for our birthday or on a special night out or whatever.

It’s like eating that cake reminds you of love, but there’s no love coming from that cake. It’s just a reminder of the experience dissatisfying. Anyway, I encourage everyone to do it themselves. I’m sharing my own personal meditations. You don’t have to do these in the standard Buddhist way.

It’s nice to think for yourself about pleasures and their impermanence and what’s nice about them and what’s not. And am I really enjoying this? And if I am, why do I need so much or so little? When did this association begin? Some things are awful when we first tried them, like alcohol or tea. We say it’s an acquired taste, that’s weird. Why do we train ourselves to like something that tastes awful when we start? Or that’s quite bad for us, like vodka or something like that.

Anyway, I like going down these deeper chains, because that’s what, that’s what you do in meditation. That’s anger attachment. Then there’s ignorance, which we talked about a little bit already. Those are the root delusions. There’s also pride and jealousy.

I don’t have that much of a problem with jealousy for some reason. Especially really famous and successful people. That’s like a dominant delusion, wanting. The antidote to that is rejoicing in the good that other people have, but I do have a problem with pride. I’ve had problems with pride and that one’s really interesting.

Race, pride, and Buddhism

I just finished this book called America’s Racial Karma about race and Buddhism. I liked it because it connected racism with this fourth delusion of pride or arrogance, they call it sometimes. I liked that because people sometimes talk about issues like racism or sexism as if they’re unique, specific delusions, which they have their unique qualities. But from the Buddhist perspective, they’re manifestations of a broader principle.

Things like racism, sexism, oppression, and colonialism, they’re all manifestations of pride, this fifth delusion, which is an aspect of the other. It’s kind of an elaboration of the three root poisons as we call them, but it’s nice to talk about it separately, this one of arrogance. Because it’s feeling that you’re superior to someone else or inferior. It’s feeling that people aren’t equal and that you’re either superior or inferior to others.

That starts to put racism, oppression, and colonialism in their place. You see, Oh, it’s this manifestation of this universal delusion of feeling superior or inferior to somebody. You need both, both sides are codependent. They talk about this a lot in today’s writing on racism. There’s the inferiority and the superiority complex. But I like that a lot because the antidote is universal, which is equanimity, cultivating the feelings of equality. The antidote to pride is equanimity and remembering that all people are equal.

The antidote to pride is equanimity and remembering that all people are equal

But it was nice because it reminded me like, Oh, that would be the cause of the antidote to racism, oppression, colonialism, social inequity. The seeds of it are in the equanimity of feeling the equality of all people. It is actually a great topic as you get into it, suffering. I’m not sure it should be the first topic most people hear in Buddhism. But you see, it does get quite tasty and juicy as you start getting into it, you could talk about it for a week, actually in great detail, but we should do a meditation.

Letting go of suffering meditation

I’m going to do these the way that I do them in the book. We call this the meditation on letting go of suffering.

Get yourself into a meditation posture, then try to feel quite good about yourself. It’s nice that you made the effort to meditate today. There are many other things you could be doing right now,

But there’s nothing better I could be doing with my time than going inward, creating the cause, genuine causes of enduring happiness that aren’t dependent on food, sensual experiences, reputation, or entertainment—creating the causes for happiness and mental stability that is enduring and accessible anytime I want, anytime I need it.

For a minute, let’s meditate on the breath to stabilize our minds.

Cultivating a clear-eyed view of reality

The purpose of meditating on suffering isn’t to get depressed but to get a clear-eyed view of reality. We can’t avoid life’s problems, but if we prepare for them, we suffer less and we grow our resilience and compassion.

We first remind ourselves of the first form of suffering, called the suffering of suffering. Again, we do this just to be clear about the world, not to get depressed about it.

We can reflect on the billions of people who don’t have enough to eat every day, who don’t have clean water or a safe place to live.

You can think about the physical pain that many of us might be feeling right now, and the suffering of sickness from colds to cancer, sufferings of war, imprisonment, oppression, and the natural suffering of aging as our bodies wear out.

Even though it’s earlier in the path, I find it nice to infuse this with compassion, wanting to take away that suffering if we possibly could. It does get a bit overwhelming to just think about suffering without necessarily any warmth, so I find it nice to always infuse some compassion. Yes, there’s suffering, and boy would I love to take it all away.

Think about everyday forms of suffering, like not getting what we want, getting what we don’t want, the suffering of loneliness, the instability of our reputation and job and relationships, and the anxiety and competitiveness we feel from life’s pressures.

As we do this, we not only expand our compassion, but we also prepare ourselves better for the problems that we’ll inevitably face in the future.

The truth of impermanence

We move on to this suffering of change, experiences we normally call pleasures.

The truth of impermanence demands that everything we enjoy wears out or breaks down.

Everything that begins also ends: phones, cars, homes. Even civilization itself. I read once that the average civilization lasts about 300 years, an entire civilization, not just a nation, a country.

Then even before things wear out, our minds can change.

We get tired of the fancy phones we once unboxed with excitement. We get annoyed with a partner we thought would make us happy forever. People even get sick of their country, and decide to leave it, if a leader is elected that they don’t like.

Our feelings are unstable.

Some things do last a lifetime, if we’re lucky. My grandparents were married for 71 years or something like that. Some people live in a home their whole life that they love. Other heirloom objects are quite durable, but then we still have to accept that when we die we lose these things too, which is a very important part of contemplating impermanence every day, if you can.

We don’t think about this to bring us down, but to motivate us to live the most meaningful life possible right now because when it really sinks in that everything’s changing, the problems are natural. It helps us to not be annoyed by the smaller problems and to be more present for life’s impermanent pleasures and fleeting relationships.

Our delusions of attachment, anger, and ignorance

Then we go into the sources of suffering, our delusions of attachment, anger, and ignorance.

Attachments are when we exaggerate the positive in someone or something when we look at a product or a person or an achievement, and all we think about is how it’s going to make us happy.

Bring to mind an object of strong attachment for you. How does your mind see it?

Do you believe if you got it, you’d be truly happy? Whether it’s some amount of money, someone to love you, some change in the world. Is this realistic?

Let’s see if your attachment goes beyond healthy goals. We say there’s a mental factor called aspiration, which is a positive mental factor of wanting something to happen in the world that’s beneficial. See if attachment is what you have in your mind sometimes that goes beyond having a healthy goal to become this agitated state of mind that can’t be satisfied unless it gets what it wants.

How do we counter attachment? One way is to remember the drawbacks of the object.

Is this person always going to please you? Will this thing you want work as well as you hope and make you as happy as you imagine? What if it gets damaged or stolen or puts you into debt, and forces you to work longer and harder?

It’s nice to remember the drawbacks of success, wealth, and fame. We often project that famous wealthy people have it all, but it’s not difficult at all to see that they have enormous sources of suffering too, and if we obtained that wealth, success, or fame, we would have those sufferings too.

Think back to your object, the thing that you’re attached to, and quietly consider its drawbacks. What problems might it lead to in your life? Does your happiness really depend on it?

Anger is when you see an object or a person, an experience, and all you can think of is the negative. You exaggerate its power to harm and you can’t see any good in it at all.

Bring someone to mind who you’re angry with, a colleague, family member, politician, business person, someone in the world who you feel is harming you, harming others, or you might even consider your enemy.

It’s funny because you might be angrier at someone you have a tiny, someone you’re close to, who you have a tiny disagreement with. You might feel angrier at them than you do at Vladimir Putin, someone causing great harm in the world. When you really look at your mind, it’s shocking.

The person you’re angry at, can you see any good in them? Or does your mind project only harm and annoyance?

The antidote to anger is to remember that that person you’re angry with, many people admire them, love them: their mother, children, colleagues, and friends.

Does this person do good things as well as bad? Help as well as harm?

This is difficult, but if you put yourself in another person’s shoes for a minute, can you see how their actions make sense to them? Can you see that they have painful delusions too? Like yours, maybe a lot worse. Anger, attachment, ignorance, that drive them to do very harmful acts.

Going even deeper, could this person’s annoying or destructive behavior even help you to lessen your own anger by giving you the opportunity to practice patience as the antidote?

Could an unbiased insight into your enemy’s behavior even help you better oppose the harm they do in the world?

Then we look at ignorance. It asks ourselves honestly whether we think, I’m just a little more important than everyone else, my problems, my suffering, my needs, my relationships. Or the opposite, I’m less important.

Ask yourself whether either of these biased ways of seeing yourself as more or less important, could be the root of your suffering?

Is it possible to cultivate equanimity, find a more balanced way of seeing ourselves, not more or less important than others, but equally deserving of happiness and freedom from suffering?

It’s nice to look at the flaws of anger and attachment. Does getting angry feel good? Every time you get angry, does it make it more likely you’re going to get angry that much sooner and stronger?

When you’re patient or forgiving, how do you feel about yourself? What habits does that build in our minds?

When we feel attachment, is it energizing or agitating? Does it really feel good feeling that attachment?

How does it feel when we’re content and what habits does that form? You don’t see big billboards advertising contentment, but you ask yourself, is that the superior state contentment versus the agitation of attachment?

How much control do each of us really have over reality, people, the planet, trying to satisfy our anger and attachment externally? It’s quite exhausting. Then how much control do we have over our mind? It may be difficult, but by gaining control over our minds, could we find a more stable source of happiness and even a more stable ground to genuinely help others?

Imagine what it would be like giving up attachment. Imagine enjoying something, a meal, a sensual experience, or being praised, gaining some status or wealth. Imagine those things happening and not feeling attached, how much nicer is that to gently allow this thing to ripen into your life without clinging to it like a junkie?

When you let go of anger, imagine more clearly seeing the cause and effect behind people’s actions. How what they do follows back a long, long chain of cause and effect that began so long ago, how their actions, however wrong they seem to us, make sense to them, and that the most powerful path to resolving conflicts is through genuine understanding, dialogue, compassion, and empathy.

Is it even possible to see the benefits of difficult experiences that they can offer us the chance to strengthen our patience, kindness, forgiveness, and non-attachment? Imagine being able to do that.

As we come out of the meditation, we can set an intention to watch our attachment and anger more mindfully. Become aware of the drawbacks of craving, choosing healthier ways of responding or not responding to our urges. Notice when anger arises, how it exaggerates the negative so extremely in others, especially people close to you.

With people further away, do they do good things too? Are their own minds subject to delusions?

May we all be able to see reality more clearly, gain control over these delusions, and steer them towards genuinely enjoying life and genuinely being an effective agent of change in the world.

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