Making the Bird’s-Eye View Your Permanent Standpoint – 2

People See the Soft Places Deep in Their Hearts Reflected in Others

Then, to make a bird’s-eye view your own and make it your permanent standpoint, what concretely should you keep in mind and practice?

It is what I always talk about: rather than leaving what you feel about the world outside the physical body as the fault of society or other people, turn it back toward your own heart and clearly recognize the real cause that lay within you (the reason you felt that way).

This can be said of anyone: the creature called a human being cannot feel in the world outside the physical body anything whose cause is not within themselves.

The very fact of feeling something is proof that you are feeling your own inner self reflected.

For example, there are cases where something A does that B doesn’t mind at all, when done by A to C, badly clouds C’s heart and throws C’s thoughts into turmoil.

In such a case, you can say, “There was no cause to snag on in B’s heart, but there was a cause to snag on in C’s heart.”

The soft places, which you might call the heartstrings, differ from person to person.

People see the soft places deep in their own hearts reflected in others.

You could say they are the untrained parts of the heart, or that there are regions of the heart that aren’t receiving enough of the light of life; you could also call it the darkness of the heart.

The True Nature of Attachment

Every event, every spiritual and material thing, has yin and yang qualities that could be called the elements that bring it into being, and when that balance is out of harmony, we feel snagged by the movements of society or the words and deeds of others.

Those yin and yang qualities are like the positive and negative ions of the life elements that lie a dozen or more stages deeper than atoms.

This “state in which the balance of yin and yang in the life elements has been lost” is called “attachment.”

Seen on the surface, that attachment is the lump of thoughts of the kinds I always mention: “assumptions,” “fixations,” “snap judgments,” and “clinging.”

When you look within your heart, using the eye of the heart, at those feelings you had about others, you’ll see a self acting like the one doing harm and a self acting like the victim, who were in a place the light of life had not reached.

For example, if your emotions were thrown into turmoil when someone said something unpleasant to you, it means you had been doing the same thing to yourself.

Furthermore, the fact that you had been doing the same thing to yourself means that a self to whom the same thing was being done by you also existed at the same time.

When you find both selves, the yin and the yang, at the same time, embrace them without a word.

Open the arms of your heart wide and cherish the self acting like the one doing harm and the self acting like the victim equally, without taking either side.

Speak words from the heart to them, like: “I’m sorry I didn’t notice. That was hard for you. That was painful. But it’s all right. It’s all right now….”

Then both selves can be released at the same time.

Those unresolved thoughts were the true nature of attachment.

(To be continued)