Will Buckingham posts the following report at thinkBuddha.org:
It was not that long into my visit that I stumbled across an interesting insight into the workings of my mind. I was meeting a lot of people, every single day, and it was pretty exhausting. And what I noticed was this: that my initial response to others was a kind of aversion. It was only a brief flicker, a fleeting recoil at being faced by another human being, but it was there; and once I noticed it, I also noticed that it was always there, in every single one of my encounters, as if I started off every relationship with every other being I encountered with a brief, and silent “no!” It was only fleeting, and once I was engaged in conversation, very often this “no” passed away entirely, but it was there, a grumpy gatekeeper trying to hold at bay the possibility of deeper human contact.
Of course, there is perhaps good reason for this aversion. We are vulnerable, and afraid of our vulnerability. Quite reasonably, we don’t like pain. Any new encounter brings with it the possibility of pain. Yet it is also an aversion built upon a futile hope: that if we insulate ourselves sufficiently, we can insulate ourselves from pain. So, noticing this response, I began to pay closer attention to it, watching it arise in each new encounter. As I watched it arise, over time it began to fade so that, whilst I would not want to claim that I now encounter every new person or every new situation with a kind of joyful affirmation (this, alas, would be a fib!), I don’t think that “no” is the default response in the way it once was.
Religion and Philosophy
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