Negativity

There’s a saying in Christian circles that even the devil can quote scripture to his own purposes. And there’s a similar saying in Dhamma circles, which is that the defilements can quote the Dhamma for their purposes. This is especially bad when your inner voices are toxic and they do everything they can to make you feel bad, make you feel guilty over things you’ve done in the past that were wrong. They themselves sound like they’re in the right in making you feel miserable.

Part of this is due to the fact that we come from a culture in which a sense of your own guilt is regarded as a spiritual virtue, but for the Buddha, it’s not a virtue at all. He talks about the proper way to deal with mistakes you’ve made. The first step, of course, is to recognize that it was a mistake. The second step is to realize that getting tied up in thoughts of guilt and remorse is not going to undo the mistake. It’ll actually weaken you when you need to make your mind strong so that you don’t repeat the mistake.

He recommends two things. One is a healthy sense of shame. Now, shame may sound very similar to guilt, but it’s not. It’s actually an aspect of self-esteem—basically, telling yourself that you’ve aimed at a good goal, you’ve got goodness to you, but you’ve slipped and that what you did was beneath you. Notice that: It’s beneath you. That means that you should have some self-esteem.

Think about what noble people would say or think if they saw the mistake. They would recognize it as a mistake. But remember, they’re compassionate. They care for your well-being. They want you to know that it’s a mistake, but also to know that you have the potential within you to do better. And they want to encourage that potential.

That leads to the second way to strengthen your mind, which is to develop thoughts of limitless goodwill, compassion, empathetic joy, and equanimity—in other words, the brahmavihāras. Once you’ve recognized a mistake, have some goodwill for yourself. Remind yourself that you are aiming at happiness, and that any voices inside you that are not aiming at happiness are not Dhamma at all. As I said, they may sound like Dhamma because they can tell you what’s wrong in what you’ve done. But the Buddha pointed out mistakes not to punish people, but to just make them note, “Okay, this is a mistake, something that shouldn’t be repeated.” That’s as far as he would take it. His overriding purpose was to get people out of suffering. So you tell yourself, “I’m here for the sake of true happiness.”

Then you extend thoughts of goodwill to the people you’ve wronged, and then thoughts of goodwill to everybody. If the mistake you made to begin with was based on ill will, you tell yourself you have no reason to repeat it or to maintain that unskillful attitude. If it was based on other things like carelessness, that’s when you need to have compassion.

Again, you tell yourself, “Human beings make mistakes. It’s normal.” You’re not the only one who’s made a mistake. If you beat yourself up over a mistake, there comes to be a voice inside that says, “I don’t care.” Then you go back and forth between the sense of guilt and the sense of not caring, neither of which is going to be helpful. If you really have compassion for yourself, you tell yourself, “Okay, I recognize the mistake and that’s as far as I need to go with the discussion inside about that mistake.”

Then thoughts of equanimity: You remind yourself you’re not the only person in the world who has made mistakes. You think of other people everywhere. They’ve made mistakes, too. It’s part of being in saṁsāra. And it’s interesting that the Buddha’s reflections on equanimity with regard to saṁsāra also lead to a sense of saṁvega. This is what it’s like. As long as you stay in saṁsāra, it’s going to be like this. There are going to be mistakes: mistakes you make, mistakes other people make. Saṁsāra is chock full of mistakes. That should lead to a desire to get out.

So the proper attitude to the Dhamma is always this: We’re here to get out. We’re here to develop a sense of disenchantment with the world, a sense of dispassion. That’s what’s called practicing the Dhamma in accordance with the Dhamma, when you’re trying to develop whatever attitudes are in line with that. One of those attitudes, the Buddha said, is a sense of competence. In other words, you can do this. You can follow the path. Now, whether it’s going to go quickly or slowly, that’s another matter. But the fact that you can do this is an attitude you want to keep developing over and over and over again.

So anything that’s in line with that—that you can do this—is a voice of the Dhamma. The voice that says you’re incapable of doing this is not Dhamma at all.

There are stories of the ajaans in Thailand dealing with very poor people up in the northeast. They themselves came from poor families and they knew that if you want to make something of yourself, it takes effort. Part of that effort is a sense of competency: “Yes, I can do this.” They lived in a society that was telling them, “No,” and there were a lot of people around them that were telling them, “No.” And those people were also saying that they themselvels couldn’t do it, either.

Ajaan Suwat tells of a time when he was with Ajaan Funn. A woman came and started complaining, “I’m just a poor person. I have no potential within me.” And Ajaan Funn got really fierce with her. He said, “You’re the person destroying yourself.” The reason he got fierce with her was probably because he in the past had had to be fierce with that voice in himself.

The ajaans rarely talk about times when they were discouraged in the practice, but occasionally you’ll read a passage here and there. Ajaan Maha Boowa has a nice passage where he talks about how he was in a little hut in the forest one time, feeling very discouraged about his practice. Off in the distance he could hear a village festival, like the music we can hear off in the distance tonight. He started feeling sorry for himself. He said, “At least these people know how to have a good time. I’m here miserable.” But then he stopped to think, “Where are they going with their good time? At least I’m on a good path. There are a lot of people out in the world who have had the opportunity of following this good path, but they said, ‘No.’ At least I’m headed in the right direction.” That was the attitude he developed. And that’s the attitude you should carry with you: that you’re headed in the right direction.

There are so many people who deliberately do things that are harmful. There actually are people who are planning war as if it were a good thing. You’re not headed in that direction. You’re trying to straighten out your mind.

As the Buddha said: Every thought to abandon something unskillful inside is a skillful thought. Just the thought that you would like to abandon unskillful thoughts is a skillful thought. Nourish that. See its value. Value your good intentions, because they’re the basis of the path and your ability to stick with it.