Compassion, Cooperation, Communication: Three Keys to Working Together and Serving Others
A talk given at Windhorse Community Services on June 12, 2019
It’s my pleasure, as always, to be here and to help Windhorse in whatever ways I can. In particular, it’s my pleasure to try and bring a little more perspective of dharma to your work. The dharma tradition I come from is the Mahayana, which emphasizes cultivating a heart full of loving-kindness and compassion. Whatever we do in the world, it’s important to be grounded in these practices, which give us the strength to be in a good state of mind. And in this context, they help you serve others, such as elderly people and those who have difficulties because their minds are tormented or imbalanced. Not only do loving-kindness and compassion enable you to provide good care for others, they also allow these relationships to benefit yourself as well. Instead of Windhorse employees merely providing services for those who need them, both sides can form a relationship that will have a greater impact and allow both provider and client to grow simultaneously. This will bring deeper meaning to your work and to your life.
I think what you all do is very great, and I’m not trying to flatter you because you’re my friends. I’ve always believed in this organization and the services it provides. We really need these kinds of services in our rapidly changing world. In some ways, the world is changing for the better. Average people today have better living conditions and amenities than kings and queens who lived during the Renaissance. In the Buddhist teachings, there are descriptions of Dewachen, the Celestial Realm of Great Bliss, which is the realm of the Buddha Amitabha. These descriptions sound like our modern world and its conveniences. By pressing a button, you can have air conditioning and heating. You have a cushy carpet and an even more cushy bed. When you want to listen to music or teachings, you have them immediately available to you. When you don’t want to listen, you can just switch off your device. The gardens, flowers, and environment in the descriptions of Dewachen are similar to what many people enjoy in today’s world.
All this has come to be, but on the other hand, our world contains immense suffering, especially mental suffering. People are alienated from one another. Many suffer from emotional disturbances and breakdowns. It seems like we shouldn’t have these problems because outwardly everything appears so nice and convenient. How could there so much inward suffering? This is possible because mental suffering can’t be completely remedied from the outside. Since our mind itself creates much of our suffering, this suffering must be remedied by mind. Excellent facilities and outward conditions can’t address our self-created pain.
Tracing Suffering to Its Root
If you’re interested, you can learn about how the mind creates its own suffering. You can trace this suffering to its root. But if you’re not interested, it will be like putting green grass in front of a dog. A cow would find the grass delicious, but a dog is not interested. Interest is not universal. But if you’re interested in tracing suffering to its root, you can seek out the appropriate wisdom. This wisdom must be coherent and resonate with your innate intelligence and your capacity to understand your own mind and your experiences. This ensures that it’s not just dogma or hearsay.
Buddhism is a major world religion, but it’s also like a science. We don’t just following rules and guidelines without using our innate intelligence to examine the teachings. We find truth and certitude by matching the teachings to our own experience. By examining our own experience, we can verify what the Buddha taught: all our suffering comes from the self. That may sound like a cliché. It may sound like self is a villain and self-sacrifice is the act of a hero. This is the attitude of many religions, which give people moral encouragement to self-sacrifice.
In Buddhism, we approach the self in a different way. Before trying to do something about it, we have to understand when and how it’s a problem. We have had a self from birth—in fact we say it was there even there before this life. We’ve always had a self, and this self needs to be cared for. This is evident from birth. As soon as we are born, we crawl up and reach for the mother’s breast to nourish ourselves. There’s nothing negative about caring for and feeling tender toward this self. Care and tenderness are very important and go hand in hand: without care, there can be no tenderness, and without tenderness there can be no care. In the Buddhist teachings, we speak about the importance of realizing egolessness, which may sound like ego needs to be destroyed. But we shouldn’t misunderstand this. Even as we aspire to attain a state of egolessness, caring for the self is very important. It’s what allows us to strive in this life and to protect ourselves from threats, pain, and suffering. Without care and tenderness to the self, I don’t know how we could manage our lives.
Self-Reflecting on Our Thought Process
So if we practice to attain selflessness or egolessness, we find that it’s not so simple. We can’t just destroy this ego through our efforts. It requires a process of working with our mind through self-reflection. This is something we can only do as mature adults. Children don’t have enough knowledge and ability to self-reflect deeply. As parents and mentors, we can and should try to help them work with their minds. Instead of thinking only about improving their outer conditions, we can give them guidance in this area. But as adults, we are able to go much deeper into our self-reflections, so we must take advantage of this capacity.
When we talk about working with our “mind,” we’re talking about our thought process, not our sensory consciousness. Our thought process shapes our perceptions of the world and others. It is always narrating and interpreting our experience. It determines our sense of what is positive and negative, of who we should be close to and who we should be distant from. Our thought process is always narrating what we should be doing. We call our thought process the “sixth consciousness” because it comes after the five sensory consciousness. It comments on everything that happens in our life—all the input that comes to us through our senses.
The thought process is what brings forth emotions such as desire and anger. From the Buddhist perspective, thoughts are like fire, and emotions are like smoke. The emotions are under the surface, like seeds. Thoughts bring them out into the open and activate their potential. Thoughts and emotions are closely intertwined. Thoughts lead to emotions, which often provoke more mental commentary, which brings up more emotions, and so on. If we don’t work with our mind, we will still continue to have thoughts and emotions. But our thoughts will be left to their own devices: freely making comments, judgments, conclusions, and storylines that we take to be true and real. From there emotions will naturally follow. And emotions contain feelings.
Physical and Mental Feelings
In the Buddhist teachings, feelings are put into two main categories. First, there are physical feelings. For example, if someone hits you on the knee, you’ll feel pain there. Then there are the mind’s feelings, which we call yi-tsor in Tibetan. (Yi means mind and tsor means feeling.) These feelings are the results of our own thoughts. If you don’t get something you want—or if you do get something you don’t want—you feel pain even though nothing is happening to you physically. This is an emotional pain produced by the mind.
Of the two—painful physical feelings and painful mental feelings—which are more powerful? At first glance, if someone hits you, that would seem more painful than a feeling that comes from a negative thought. But human beings can endure a lot of physical pain if they think there’s a good reason to. Many people, for example, climb Mount Everest with great zeal, even though that involves not only physical hardship but a high risk of death. Putting themselves through the experience of climbing this mountain brings them immense pleasure.
But mental pain can be more problematic. First of all, we are not necessarily aware of the pain created by our thoughts. For example, when I’m speaking to a crowd, as I am now, I could feel insecure that you aren’t understanding what I’m saying. Or I could worry that you think it’s all bullshit. If I have low self-esteem or lack confidence, many insecure thoughts could bubble up in my mind: “I don’t know these people. I’m trying to be funny, but it’s not working. They all look so serious.” In this way, I could make my insecurity worse and worse. I could spin off without knowing where I started spinning off and where this spinning off will lead—and all this without my really being aware of what’s happening.
We can have all kinds of experiences and not be aware. When it comes to our thoughts and emotions, being unaware is a big suffering. Without being self-aware, we can’t relate properly to what’s happening. We can’t apply an effective formula to work with it. Even if we are aware of our thoughts and emotions, we may still follow habitual patterns that are too strong to resist. But having self-awareness of our mind is the beginning of being able to do something about it.
The process of developing self-awareness begins with hearing wisdom: we hear or read teachings that resonate and make sense to us. In order for these teachings to transform our minds, we need to contemplate them and integrate them into our being, but even just hearing them has the power to help us start making a change. In this case, hearing wisdom helps us become more aware of our mental pain and of how it’s often more challenging than physical pain. Compared to physical feelings, the feelings produced by our thought process can have more impact on our lives and the lives of others. This happens when we don’t know how to relate to these feelings. Instead, we do things in a state of confusion and raging emotions. What we do in this state has a strong adverse effect on others and then comes back to us as painful feedback. This is the reason the great Buddhist masters consider mental suffering to be more powerful than physical suffering.
Bringing Self-Awareness to Our Mental Suffering
In order to begin working with our mental suffering, let’s take a closer look at this mind that we all have. Our mind flows in a continuum, like a river. A river seems to be one thing, but it changes continuously. You can observe this by watching one part of the river. Every moment, the water that is in front of you goes by. It’s as if that water has become part of the past. At the same time, water that wasn’t yet in front of you appears—as if this water is coming from the future and becoming part of the present. We have no contact with the past or the future water; all we see is the ever-changing present. This is our experience of “river.” Our thought process and the emotions that follow have a similar flow. Our past mental experiences are gone, so we can only recollect them. Our future mental experiences have not yet arrived, so we can only imagine what they will be. All that we have to work with is the present—what’s here in front of us.
In every moment of consciousness, there is rang-rik, which means self-awareness. This is what enables us to know what we’re thinking and feeling. Without rang-rik, we would be like machines. A computer has many functions that are similar to mind, but it doesn’t know what it’s experiencing. But we have rang-rik as part of our mental make-up. Because the past is gone and the future has not yet arisen, rang-rik only applies to the present moment. When we have a memory of the past or an idea about the future, these are actually thoughts that take place in the present. It’s not as if we have direct awareness of our past or future mind.
All sentient beings have rang-rik, but often we are not tuned into it. If we’re always engaged with our sensory consciousnesses, our ability to know our thoughts and emotions becomes dull. We still have some level of self-awareness because we can later recollect what we were thinking. But that awareness is quite limited. If you take five or ten minutes every day to remove yourself from sensory stimulation and tune into your rang-rik, you will gather a lot of information about what’s going on in your mind. You can ask yourself questions: What’s happening to me? What’s happening in my mind? What thoughts and emotions am I engaged in? What are my feelings? How strong are they? Are they painful feelings that disturb me or peaceful feelings that contain some bliss?
The Problem of Attachment
From this first step, you can then go deeper. You have hearing wisdom and you have your own experience. See if you can match the two. The teachings say we all have an experience of self. Is that true? You will find that it is. The teachings say we all have tenderness and care. Is that true for you? Yes, it is—you have tenderness and care for yourself and your loved ones. Is that a problem? No, it isn’t. So where does the problem start? Is it when you get excessively attached to yourself and your loved ones? See if the teachings match your experience. This is how to integrate the dharma into your life.
See for yourself whether all this is true: You get excessively attached when the sheer force of your emotions gets the better of you. This makes you forget your surroundings and forget other beings who are not in your circle of affection and care. You not only forget to hold them with your tender heart, you may even start to treat their well-being as unimportant. Only your own well-being and that of your loved ones is important. In this state, you may not even think much about hurting others if you have to do something for the sake of your own happiness and that of your loved ones. That is when attachment becomes excessive. When your own agenda is so important that fulfilling it comes at the expense of others, you’re forgetting your moral principles and starting to impair your own sanity. If you don’t bring any vigilance to your mind, your attachment will grow bigger and bigger, without limit. None of this happens because you are bad. No one has the conscious desire to be bad. But when we don’t apply any remedy to our attachments, our habits naturally take over.
It’s easy to see what mind is attached to because it gets so fixated that it almost becomes the object of its attachment. Then, if we don’t work with our mind, our attachments tend to multiply. For example, if you’re attached to a person, you become attached to various aspects of their well-being, such as their health or prosperity. In this way, five attachments turn into a hundred related attachments, which proliferate into a thousand. And when these attachments are excessive, they bring us anxiety. Will the object of my attachment stay secure and safe, or will it somehow be damaged or destroyed? As mind gets increasingly anxious, it comes up with many worrying scenarios. When you’re anxious, you can’t stop these scenarios from coming up. And you can’t stop anxiety from coming up when you are excessively attached.
Self-Centered Emotions and Deep Mental Fog
The root of all attachment is self-centered mind. Then, once attachment is present, any threat to it tends to provokes our anger. In this way, attachment and anger are closely related. Anger may not arise if a natural event such as a storm threatens you. But if it’s a person, you will naturally feel the aggressive desire—whether you act on it or not—to eliminate the threat somehow. When you become too angry, you lose your sanity. And this anger is usually not toward any real threat. His Holiness Dalai Lama often quotes a psychologist named Aaron Beck who worked with many people with anger problems. Beck said that when we are angry, 90% of our reaction is to our own mental projection.
All this happens because our mind is not clear. We lack perspective about what’s happening in our mind and emotions. In the Buddhist teachings, we call this timuk, which means “deep mental fog.” The great Indian teacher Aryadeva made the following analogy. The head is the basis of four of our sense organs: eyes, ears, nose, and tongue. In a similar way, the subtle state of timuk is the basis of our four main gross negative emotions: first, we have attachment and aggression; then jealousy comes as an extension of aggression, and arrogance comes as an extension of attachment. All these emotions are by-products of deep mental fog—an unclear, confused state of mind. This state of mind has no perspective on what’s happening. The mind just does what it does, left to its own devices.
This is the essential problem of humanity, especially in our modern world. We’re almost encouraged to be lost in our self-centered emotions. You are the most important person and who cares about anything else as long as you take care of your own needs and desires? As long as your passions and drives are met, as long as you achieve your goals, who cares about the consequences?
Our culture of capitalism influences us to compete all the time. Siblings compete with each other, as do parents, as do co-workers. There is an idea that competition can be healthy, but one never examines what’s good and what’s harmful on an emotional level. You could be competing in order to be the best you can be and not be left behind—but without trying to get ahead of others and seeing them as a threat. That would be a healthier form of competition. On the other hand, you could be competing with jealousy and envy ravaging your heart and mind. Most competition is like this. It starts from a self-centered mind, which produces attachment and aggression, and then jealousy and competitiveness. People find it hard to be happy for one another, which is why many tend to hide their accomplishments. It’s difficult to be truly happy for others without envy, like a mother wanting the best for her child.
Tenderness is the Remedy for Self-Centered Emotions
There is no force greater than self-centered emotions for bringing humanity repeatedly into suffering. So is there a remedy? Yes there is, because we are not born with only negative emotions. We also have tenderness in our heart. We naturally feel this toward ourselves and our loved ones, but we can learn to share it with a larger audience and eventually all of humanity. We can begin by expanding our tenderness within our personal field, among the people with whom we naturally interact: parents, children, friends, co-workers, and so on. This is where we are actively engaged—where we make a difference for others and where others make a difference for us. With these people we have a natural responsibility to give and take. These relationships come from bonds that have been arranged mysteriously as the result of our past actions. In Buddhist language, we say we are connected by our karma.
If you treat those in your field with tenderness, it’s a win-win situation. If you don’t, you not only cause them suffering, you suffer as well. But when you open our heart to any of these people, you should not regard them as extensions of your ego. Instead, you should relate to them as other individuals. They have their own body, their own gender, their own sexual preference; they may be older or younger, richer or poorer, from a different culture or different background. But instead of focusing on those differences, you should focus on what you have in common. All of these people are living beings, and all living beings aspire to be happy and free from suffering.
The Equality of All Living Beings
In our internal lives, none of us are different at the core. All of us appreciate happiness and try to gather the conditions of happiness, day and night, even in our sleep. You can see how this is true from your own experience. What’s happening in your mind is what’s happening in the minds of all living beings. Since others’ experiences never become your experiences, you don’t know this directly. But you can infer from your own experience what others are going through and what their aspirations are. Through contemplating and using inference, you can shape your mind and heart to relate to others as equals.
If we think along these lines, it makes sense for us to share our tenderness with all who have these common aspirations, rather than keeping it exclusively for ourselves and our loved ones. This kind of thinking creates new pathways in our brains. It jolts our heart open and releases our potential to feel tenderness toward many others. With this tenderness in your heart, we should make aspirations on behalf of others. Wish them to fulfill their own aspirations, both in the short term and in the long term. Wish them to have whatever they are working towards. Make these wishes from your tender heart, acknowledging all others who share this planet with you as your equals. We are all identical at the core.
This tender quality of heart that wishes the best for others is what we call tsewa in Tibetan. When you grow your tsewa, the first result is that you curb any tendency to hurt or take advantage of others. Since you wouldn’t hurt or take advantage of yourself, you wouldn’t do these things to those who are equal to you. You can’t hurt anyone while your tender heart of tsewa is flowing towards them. You could only hurt someone else if you went into a different mode of thoughts and emotions.
When you hurt others, you can’t expect to be in peace yourself. The consequences of hurting others will eventually catch up with you. When you don’t hurt others, you have the foundation for sanity and peace. From that basis, you do whatever you can on their behalf. Sometimes you have the means to help and sometimes you don’t. But having the means or not doesn’t affect the level of your tsewa. The idea is not to become an all-capable savior. The idea is simply to build your sanity from the ground up, to be able to relate with others consciously, with wakefulness and a tender heart. If you have the means to serve others, you offer that, and this often comes back to you as joy in return. But the source of your trying to benefit others shouldn’t be an extreme position or dogma. Simply do whatever is within your limit and capacity. Let you heart stretch itself in whatever way it is pleased to stretch. But make sure you do stretch your heart, for if left to its own devices the heart is more likely to shrink with fear.
We develop compassion, which is the wish to free others from suffering, by stretching our heart. Nying-je, the Tibetan word usually translated as “compassion,” literally means “king of heart.” Compassion is the heart’s most noble quality. This is where the work you do should come from. Compassion is the remedy for all the disturbing emotions that get in the way of your work. If what you do comes from compassion, it will be be good in the beginning, good in the middle, and good at the end. But without nying-je it won’t even be good in the beginning. Something else will rule over your heart, and that will most likely be your pursuit of your own gain. Or even if your aim is not quite so self-centered, your main motivation could be something much less significant than compassion, such as the responsibility you feel because you’re being paid. You work hard mainly so that you can feel you’ve earned your paycheck. With that mode of thinking, you will not grow. Your only reward for working will be money. But good pay alone won’t bring meaning to your life. Something has to grow within your mind and heart.
The Three C’s
I like to speak of “The Three C’s,” which I consider the three most important ingredients for working together as a community and serving others. The first C is compassion. If the basis of what you do is compassion, you have room to learn about working effectively within your own field, and you will become better and better at serving others. At the same time, you will grow and find meaning in your life.
The second C is cooperation. Whatever position you are in—whether you lead, follow, or work among equals—you have to listen to each another and work together. You need the flexibility to change your opinions, your attitudes, your ways of working, and your ways of manifesting. If everyone sticks to their guns, nothing will go well. Leaders need to be flexible most of all, instead of feeling like they have to stick to their guns in order to lead strongly. In any given situation, who takes the lead should be based on who has the knowledge, formula, or coherent pathway to achieve the group’s goals. This is what must inspire you, instead of being threatened and insecure if you are not the one taking the lead. Be able to appreciate whoever is leading. Honor, welcome, and solicit their contribution. Cherish all ways in which the objectives of the organization could be fulfilled through teamwork.
Without cooperation and teamwork, at some point most organizations will not be sustainable. If leaders work in isolation, what will happen when they are no longer around? The sustainable model is cooperation—teamwork based on soliciting those who have the most knowledge and can present the soundest way to meet the group’s goals. Instead of feeling threatened, we should welcome and cherish this model as the best way to go forward.
The third C is communication. Don’t assume that others understand you telepathically—that they should know what you’re thinking and already be informed about what you want. As human beings, our greatest power is speech. The main purpose of speech is to communicate. Through the pathway of speech, you can reveal your intentions, thoughts, and views. You can communicate your mind and emotions. At work, use speech to reveal your intentions, your wisdom, and your skillful means. Try to communicate patiently, rather than being lazy about it. Even if you need to communicate the same thing over and over again, do that rather than quit because you’re tired of communicating.
Faultless communication involves avoiding three things. The first is not putting anyone down. It’s especially important to remember this when others’ speech contains flaws. The second is not making insinuations to expose others’ downfalls or weaknesses. The third is not being insulting, even when you refute what someone else says. If your speech is free from these things, then it will be more gentle and sane. You will be able to acknowledge and praise others and to appreciate their work.
In the first place, you have to see what needs to be done. To do that, see who has the best idea, the greatest knowledge, the most wisdom. Work together to figure out the best way for individuals or for the group as a whole to achieve their higher goals. All this has to be sorted out through the pathway of speech. It won’t do to be clubby and make alliances that exclude others. In a small community that has to live, work, and move forward together, it won’t do to play favorites.
The Importance of Taking Joy in Your Work
Leaders and all community members will do well if they operate according to the Three C’s, with compassion being the most important and the basis of the other two. But in addition to the Three C’s, there has to be joy. The work you’re doing to serve others is very demanding. It can tax your mind and emotions, as well as those of your family. You’re vulnerable to getting burned out and running out of gas. How well you sustain yourself in this work depends on how much pleasure you take in it. This comes from your own effort to generate joy in being engaged in this work. You can only generate this joy if your principal aim is to make a difference in others’ lives. It’s not about what you get, it’s about how much you grow internally. If you are here only to serve yourself, then you will quickly get burned out by the work.
The bodhisattvas never get burned out because of the joy they take in affecting others’ lives and in experiencing their own growth. This can also be the case with you. But you have to contemplate these things. This way of thinking doesn’t come naturally. You have to contemplate and see the merit of making your own growth and the benefit of others into the guiding principles of your life. These contemplations will support your being able to put all three C’s in action together.
I hope these words have been helpful. I am also involved in the field of serving others, so I’m speaking from my own experience. There are always challenges, but I take them as ways to grow and stretch myself. I know how beneficial this attitude has been for myself, so I’m speaking from that place in order to share that benefit with all of you.