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Living From a Healthy Source

I want to begin this talk by recounting a famous psychology experiment some of you have probably heard of. Being told again is maybe not so interesting, you know it, but the implications of it are interesting and I think important to consider.

This was an experiment done at the Princeton Theological Seminary in 1970^[1]. The subjects who were going to unwittingly go through this experiment were theology students being trained to be Christian ministers, and who supposedly were quite familiar with their scriptures and the stories in their scriptures. The experiment was that at these different times, the theology student was told that they were late, but they really needed to go across campus to give a talk on the story of the Good Samaritan.

The Good Samaritan story, if you don't know, had to do with a man who was sick on the side of the road. I think he'd been robbed and beaten up and was very sick, and maybe in danger of dying. A variety of people coming down the road just ignored him, until this man who belonged to the people called the Samaritans stopped and helped him. He supported him, took him to an inn, left, and made it possible for the person not to die, to save the person's life. So the Good Samaritan was a stranger who stops to care for someone.

I told my wife this morning that I was going to give this talk on this kind of story, and she says, "Well, if on the way to IMC^[2] someone needs you, you better stop." [Laughter] And then I thought I better have left earlier then.

So they did this experiment. The theology students had to go give this talk about the Good Samaritan, but they were given very little time. They were late for giving the talk, so they were told to go across campus to give the talk. On the way there, unbeknownst to them, an actor was there—disheveled and dirty, sitting propped up against the wall, kind of slumped over, hiding their hands or something in their knees. As the person walked by, this actor was moaning and groaning. The study was to see who would stop. After all, the subject of their talk was that very thing! And a great majority of the seminary students did not stop, but just kept going.

The idea being that somehow in being in a hurry, people don't have time to help. In the hurried mindset, maybe you don't even notice what's there because you're in such a hurry to get somewhere. Maybe it's high pressure; maybe they're being graded on giving this talk. All kinds of things contributed to not stopping to take care of someone. It's kind of heartbreaking that that's how it works.

The implication of this story for us is that, certainly, one simple one is that if we want to live in the world in a way to help people, to help society, to help this world of ours: don't be in a hurry. Don't even be in a hurry to help, maybe. Don't be in a hurry. Give yourself time. Live a different life. Because there are certain ways of living life where you're not in the mindset and the heart-set to be able to notice and stop and care, and come from that caring place for the world.

This world of ours, for some of us, has so many temptations, so many things to do, so many demands. The more there have been time-saving devices invented over the last 150 years or so, the more it gives us a chance to do more things, and more things, and more things. And so it's kind of epidemic in our circles for some of us how little time there is to do all the things that we can do and fill our time with. How does that affect us? I think one of the ways is that it causes us sometimes to be out of touch with important, healthy, valuable places within us, because we're so distracted. We're so caught up in a hurry. We're preoccupied. We're doing things, rather than feeling things and being present.

In Buddhism, there's a lot of discussion of opposites. Like there's greed and there's generosity; there's hatred and there's love; there's delusion and there's wisdom. There's this idea that we've talked about: the unwholesome and the wholesome^[3]. When we present that kind of simple divide between these two, it could almost seem like they're kind of not exactly of equal value, but have some equality to them. It's like a seesaw or a spectrum, and it's one side and the other side, and they kind of have equal weight in that spectrum or something.

But they're radically different: the wholesome and the unwholesome. The healthy place we can come from, where we can help others, and the other place which is unwholesome, the place where we're not just simply not helpful, but maybe worse, or maybe even cruel or unkind to people. They are very different in a number of ways. It's not either-or.

First of all, the wholesome side has a different source inside of us than the unwholesome side. This different source, this different place, the origin from where they're born, is so different that if we're interested in one more than the other, live in that source. Live in that place where they arise from. It's not either-or; it's in some ways possible to have both coexisting. This is actually very important for our healing. It's very important for the path of practice that's trying to, in a healthy way, find freedom from some of the unwholesome motivations and ways of being in the world that we have.

The preoccupied mind—the mind that's spinning and ruminating, caught up in its concerns, its worries, its conceits, its problems—all kinds of things that we can get lost in the labyrinth of our concerns and preoccupations. There's so much energy there, and so many certain kinds of emotions that go into it. Anxiety is a common one. Desires, wanting, is another one. Ill will, aversion, not wanting, is another one. There's a lot of energy that goes into that kind of preoccupied, caught up mind state that comes with insistence. Sometimes it comes with despair, it comes with undermining us, it comes with keeping us in touch with a part of ourselves that hurts, that's difficult.

And in the pain of it all, we can recoil from it in such a way that we put more energy into that kind of mindset. We're more spinning out, and there's anger and hate that just cultivates more of the same. There's greed that cultivates more of the same. There's fear that cultivates more of the same. If we stay in this reactive kind of state, I think of it as especially higher up in the head. Where we are in the head, spinning.

There's another source, a source that I think spatially is deeper within us, maybe in the heart or maybe in the belly. When we're settled in ourselves, when we're not caught in the rumination and preoccupations of our lives, when we're not caught in this spinning of emotions that are pushing us and driving us and reinforcing themselves in us. If those can become quiet enough and still enough, soft and more in the background or not even there, and we can become settled here, then there are places of love, of care. There are places of generosity, there are places of wisdom and of patience, that really need time to exist. They need space to exist.

I like to think of these really healthy parts of ourselves, often in the ways people live their lives, as shy. They're shy; they need to be given time and space and to feel safe to come forward and be there. If we are lost in self-criticism and self-hate, lost in blaming the world for all our problems, lost in our fear and preoccupations, the healthy parts of us are kind of shy, right? They're maybe a little tender and tentative about showing up.

But if we could give time, and quiet, and openness, and enough time to let these shy places come forward, enough time to give ourselves a real opportunity to feel or sense the generosity, the love, the care—all these healthy parts that exist in us—then those can condition us. Those can affect us. They have an impact to live close to them. They also are self-reinforcing. But we have to give time for them to be able to be self-reinforcing, support, and change us, open us, and develop us.

It's not like you check it off: "Generous, done that. Now let's go out and get the ice cream. I deserve it, and we need to rush around town trying all the different ice creams until we find the right one that's going to do it for us, because I checked off the generosity thing because I smiled at someone, and that's done." The idea is to live a different way. To come from this place, to make time to feel the generosity, to feel this different source.

And that's one of the possibilities that comes from something like meditation. It's not the only way to do this, but it's one of the purposes of meditation. It is to give time to settle, and feel, and open, and start feeling, "What's this deeper place?" and live in that source. Let that be the source.

In case you're interested in the pursuit of wealth over everything else, the Buddha had a response to that. He said what comes from this source is the greatest wealth. Greatest wealth is not money and goods and material things. It's really your loving-kindness, your compassion that lives within you there, your integrity. And so that's how you become wealthy, and it's a wonderful wealth because it fills you from the inside out, that external wealth can never do. It's not uncommon for me to hear stories about people who are phenomenally wealthy who are empty inside, who are not in touch with this inner wealth. Some years ago, there was a person in my circle of friends, people I knew, who was probably the poorest person I knew, and the way that he lived his life, I saw him as the wealthiest. Materially he was poor, but in terms of how he lived his life, not just how he felt his life was, but just the feeling of abundance, it was quite inspiring to me.

To really appreciate this different source of what motivates our life, what animates our life, I would like to suggest that there's no one but you who can take responsibility for where you come from, what motivates you deep down inside. There's no pill that can do it for you, I hope not. There's no one else who can do it for you. It isn't that you wait until you find the person you can be around, that then you can do it. It's for you to do. And it's really a choice. It's a choice point.

And don't think it's so all-or-nothing. It's like, "I have to choose to be all good and choose to avoid all bad." It's not that kind of all-or-nothing. But it's a choice about where you lean. A choice of where you want to come back to, what you want to be reminded of, what you want to try to do the best you can.

And this brings it to the second topic around this, in that these things can coexist. Luckily they can coexist, and they can coexist in a variety of ways. But the most important way for a practitioner is that the part of us that's a healthy part can hold and care for the part that is unhealthy. That part which is full of greed, hatred, delusion, fear. We don't want to dismiss it, because then it'll come back and bite us, I think. We don't want to then think, "Oh, I can't do that. Now I have to feel good," and then set up a resistance or a wall between these parts of ourselves. But rather, as we get more and more aware of this deeper place to come from, then we want to have that deeper place hold or be present for the part that's difficult. Because otherwise, the part that is difficult, if it's ignored or repressed, will fester and come back in all kinds of unhealthy ways. So pretending you're good doesn't work.

The simplest way of doing this is not to come from places of generosity and love and wisdom as if they are easy to find, but to bring mindfulness, attention, to what's happening. Mindfulness is considered to be a healthy part of who we are. And so if we can bring attentiveness and hold the difficult parts of ourselves, and learn how to hold them without adding more hatred to our hate, without adding more greed, wanting something so desperately—"If only I can get rid of my greed, then I can really have that good stuff"—or feeling like, "I'm a bad person because I have delusion; I'm supposed to be wise. I better get more books and read, then I can practice." Rather, these difficult parts are almost like... it's useful to think of them as needing to be healed. They're parts of us that are kind of wounded or broken, or hurt or undeveloped.

So to hold them in awareness, to hold them in our good will, to hold them in friendliness, to be present for them, to make room for them—not so they can motivate us, not so that they drive us anymore. The driving force hopefully is this more healthy place, to whatever small degree you can access it. And from that place, to hold what is an unhealthy part that needs to be resolved or settled or healed.

Some of us have a lot of pain. A tremendous amount of psychological, emotional, even physical pain sometimes, that's associated one way or the other with how we live from this different source. Some of it is because the deeper source, the deeper parts, the tender parts, the shy parts, have been hurt, have been betrayed. Welcome to society—people do all kinds of terrible things to each other. And so all kinds of things make it difficult even to be in that deeper place because of the pain. So part of this "we can do both" means we learn how to be present for the pain, the difficulty. We don't dismiss anything, but we allow it to settle, to open, and slowly we become more and more at home in this place of a deeper source, this deeper wellspring for the emotions, the motivations, that according to this psychology experiment I discussed, are considered the helping dispositions.

The world needs more helpers, doesn't it? I think that there's not enough, but there are plenty. Some of you probably heard the famous story that Mr. Rogers told of his childhood. When he was a young kid, and there was some catastrophe in the world, terrible things happening in the world—I think he grew up probably during World War II—his mother would say, "Look for the helpers^[4]. In many situations, there are more people helping than the people who did the terrible things. Remember that. Remember the helpers."

So what about the helper in you? What about you living from a place of care in this world? Not because it's an obligation, not because you should do it, but because you will do that in your own personal way if you can find that deeper source within. If you can rest there, come from there, and learn to be very careful to recognize the difference between these two different sources for your behavior, your speech, and even how you think. The source from which life comes is crucial to who you are.

Many people don't know that there are these two sources. Most people think that the spinning, ruminating, difficult, challenging, preoccupied, reactive kind of mind is what there is. It's all they've ever known. And it's a radical thing to begin discovering, slowly, maybe at first as just trusting it is possible, to begin finding your way to this other source within, and thinking that it's shy. That if you want to receive the benefits of it, you have to spend time there, close to it.

So for example, if you get in touch with this a little bit at the end during something like meditation, or other things you do in your life, when the meditation or whatever thing is over, don't live the checklist approach to life. "Okay, done that," and pop out of your meditation and rush off to figure out what the best Netflix is to watch on your commute to work while you're checking emails and the news. Don't do that right after meditation. I mean, you could, but then you're not giving it an opportunity, a chance for this deeper source to condition you, to affect you, to benefit you, to reinforce something really great. We have to live a different life if you want to have a different life. If you want to have a different life but not change anything, it can't be a different life.

And maybe, just maybe, you're more likely today to be the Good Samaritan if the need arises. That would be nice. Or this week. This year. This life. So thank you all very much.

Reflections

And as I said earlier, those of you who would like to come and meet outside, we need to have the folding chairs, which are in the cabinet. Some people know where they are, just down the hall. We'll carry them out there, and I'll come out as soon as I can and join you, and we'll spend about half an hour together just chatting about this. Thank you.