Start Where You Are

Be Grateful to Everyone

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tieth century, kind of a crazy-wisdom character—
knew the meaning of this slogan. He was living not
too far from Paris in a big manor house with huge
lawns. All of his students came there to study with
him. One of his main teachings was to be awake to
whatever process you’re going through. He liked to
tighten the screws on his students. In fact, it’s said
that he would make you take the job that you most
didn’t want to take; if you thought you should be a
college professor, he would make you become a used
car salesman.
There was a man in the community who was really
bad tempered. He was everybody’s Juan; nobody
could stand this guy because he was so prickly. Every
little thing caused him to spin off into a tantrum.
Everything irritated him. He complained constantly,
so everyone felt the need to tiptoe around him be-
cause anything that might be said could cause him to
explode. People just wished that he would go away.
Gurdjieff liked to make his students do things that
were completely meaningless. One day there were
about forty people out cutting up a lawn into little
pieces and moving it to another place on the grounds.
This was too much for this fellow; it was the last
straw. He blew up, stormed out, got in his car, and
drove off, whereupon there was a spontaneous cele-
bration. People were thrilled, so happy he had gone.
But when they told Gurdjieff what had happened, he
said, “Oh no!” and went after him in his car.
Be Grateful to Everyone
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Three days later they both came back. That night
when Gurdjieff ’s attendant was serving him his sup-
per, he asked, “Sir, why did you bring him back?”
Gurdjieff answered in a very low voice, “You’re not
going to believe this, and this is just between you and
me; you must tell no one. I pay him to stay here.”
I told that story at a meditation center, and later
they wrote me a letter saying, “We used to have two
people here helping and there was a lot of harmony.
Now we have four and the trouble is beginning. So
every day we ask each other, ‘Is somebody paying you
to be here?’”
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Be Grateful to Everyone

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1 0
Cutting the Solidity 
of Thoughts
I
o n c e h a d a n i n t e r v i e w
with a student who
began by saying, “This is all pretty depressing, isn’t
it? There’s something sort of grim and discouraging
about what we’re doing here. Where’s the joy?
Where’s the cheerfulness in all of this?” We talked for
a while. Then at the end of the interview, she had her
own insight, “I guess the joy comes from getting real.”
That really struck me. Whether it’s connecting
with the genuine heart of sadness and the messy
areas of our lives, or connecting with vision and ex-
pansion and openness, what’s real is all included in
well-being; it’s all included in joy. Joy is not about
pleasure as opposed to pain or cheerfulness as op-
posed to sadness. Joy includes everything.
There’s a slogan that says, “Don’t wallow in self-
pity.” That’s a good one to remember if you find that
tonglen practice has you crying a lot. This whole ap-
proach could evolve into self-pity easily, and self-pity
takes a lot of maintenance. You have to talk to your-
self quite a bit to keep it up. The slogan is saying to
get to know what self-pity feels like underneath the
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story line. That’s how the training develops a gen-
uine, openhearted, intelligent relationship with the
whole variety of human experience.
We’re so funny: the people who are crying a lot
think that they shouldn’t be, and the people who
aren’t crying think that they should be. One man said
to me that since he’s not feeling anything when he
does tonglen practice, maybe he should leave; he felt
that he wasn’t getting the point. He wasn’t feeling
mushy or warm; he was just kind of numb. I had to
encourage him that a genuine experience of numb-
ness is a genuine experience of what it is to be
human.
It’s all raw material for waking up. You can use
numbness, mushiness, and self-pity even—it doesn’t
matter what it is—as long as you can go deeper, un-
derneath the story line. That’s where you connect
with what it is to be human, and that’s where the joy
and well-being come from—from the sense of being
real and seeing realness in others.
The slogan says that when the world is filled with
evil, or when the world is filled with things that you
just don’t want, that can all be transformed into the
path of awakening. Then there are various sugges-
tions, such as “Drive all blames into one” and “Be
grateful to everyone.” A third suggestion is that you
can transform seeming obstacles into awakening by
flashing on the nonsolidity of things—on shunyata or
absolute bodhichitta.
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Cutting the Solidity of Thoughts

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* * *
This slogan is quite a difficult one, and it’s on this
subject of shunyata: “Seeing confusion as the four
kayas / Is unsurpassable shunyata protection.” The