Fear of lacking: I know I have a friend who’s like that a little bit. For New Year’s Eve, they’re always very paranoid, very worried that they’re not going to be in the right place for New Year. So many things happening, it’s like you can only choose one place to be, so they suffer, and, in the end, they project, they expect so much, so wherever they are, even everybody’s celebrating, they’re unhappy. They think, “Oh, somewhere else is better, somewhere else, people are having more fun.” So then in the end, after New Year, they’re looking on the videos and photos of everybody else, and they’re like, “Oh I should have gone there. I should have done that.” It’s a little bit like in life, many times it happens to us, you know, we’re unsatisfied.
And here we come into the first reason of suffering. So, like in Star Wars, they say from the attachment, comes the suffering. But what brings the attachment? The fear of losing. So, the fear brings attachment, and attachment brings suffering, and the suffering takes you to the dark side. So, you become best friends with Darth Vader even though after he became a good guy. Because inside he was good always, and that’s how it is we all have the potential of Buddha, no matter what. So, you can never say, “Oh, this person is a bad person”, or “This person doesn’t deserve my respect, doesn’t deserve my love.” This is ridiculous because deep, deep, deep down inside, we all come from the same source, which is love. I don’t want to go too deep there, but I’m sure you all understand; the air we breathe, we all share, yeah, just like the space, we all share.
Anyway, fear of lacking, so that fear, that fear is what brings the suffering because we get attached; the fear brings attachment. Why are we attached? Because if you think about it, not even our body is ours because one day, it becomes worm food. It goes back to star dust. So maybe temporarily, we can say, “Oh this, my body is mine,” but if it’s really ours, we would know exactly what’s going inside, no? But we have no idea what’s happening; we don’t even know what’s happening in our mind, which mind is so subtle. Imagine the body, it’s gross and we still don’t know about that, so it’s very complicated but it’s very simple; the complications, we make them. So, when we stop complicating things, then we can really see the ils sont malheureux, the simpleness of life, the simplicity. So why do we complicate everything so much, that is the question, but that’s also another story so let’s just focus on what we are talking about.
So, we fear losing something that we don’t own; we fear losing something that we can never have or own. You can say, “Oh I bought a new car” but then tomorrow somebody steals the car, and then it’s not your car. The same thing happens to the body. So, if you say, “This is my body” but then tomorrow you become sick and you die, and then where did your body go? Is it really yours? So, what is really yours?
Your intention, your karma, this can be yours, and this you can work on. And you don’t have to fear of losing that. As a matter of fact, the real values, interior values, when you share, when you give, it multiplies and then it comes back a thousand times stronger. So that’s the real wealth, the true value, and that is, I think, something that inside the education system is maybe missing a little bit, because they teach us how to work but they don’t teach how to live. We work to live; we don’t live to work. So that’s why instead of fearing of losing something or not gaining something, let’s focus on what we really have, which is intention, and from there, comes the karma. So that is what we must focus on, and next time we are afraid of losing or attachment, or this, or that, switch your mind.
Because I know, like there’s a saying in English, the grass always looks greener on the other side. But the only reason is because we’re not looking inside, we’re always looking outside. We don’t realize that life for us starts from the inside, not from the outside, understanding comes from the inside. The learning comes from the inside. The experience comes from the inside, you know. Everything starts from there, so we focus on that. And if we can understand that properly, then we can understand the outside.
We can really be of benefit because we see, we understand reality. We can help others also to have that transformation. And that intention, we can call Dharma, the intention in action through the three: body, speech and mind. So fear sometimes can save our lives, if we have fear of losing our body or hurting ourselves, this is instinct –thanks to that, we are able to continue the evolution of the species, whatever you want to call it, but that’s a different type of fear. We must focus on why we have this mind fear like me, me, me, this grasping.
This is based on a pattern. How do you say patrón in English? Conditioning, maybe? Habit. Habit, like conditioning, and it’s not just from this life, it comes from many lives. So, we perceive the sensation, we react to the sensation, then we create the conditionment, and this conditionment is the base of suffering. If we change the reaction that we have, then we can eliminate the suffering. So how do we that? By being more equanimous. If we are neutral to the sensation, then we don’t have to react.
There are three types of reactions; grasping, neutrality or indifference, I don’t care – and rejection. That’s something that we must also be able to change. For example, compassion is for all sentient beings, not just for the people that you know, the close people, “Oh, I have compassion for them, but I don’t have compassion for somebody else.” This doesn’t make sense; this is not real compassion. Like you can do prostrations, you can do meditation, mantras, this blah, blah, everything, and then you go to the restaurant and you talk bad to the waiter, for example. Or you talk to somebody. Or maybe, you don’t treat yourself with respect, and you say, “Oh, I’m stupid”, and the body believes it, so that’s also not good. So, the practice – mainly like the prostrations, the mantra, the meditation- all of this, is complementary. It’s not the main practice; the main practice is a warm heart, starting with yourself, expanding from there, OK?
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