Start Where You Are

Particularly, we are 100 percent predictable in that
if we don’t like something we’ll run the other way, and
if we do like it we’ll spend quite a lot of time and ef-
fort trying to somehow eat it whole. If someone does
something nice for you, you always remember it and
you want to repay their kindness. But if somebody
hurts you, you remember it for the rest of your life
and you always want to get revenge in one way or an-
other. That’s the meaning of this slogan “Don’t be so
predictable.” Don’t always react so predictably to
pleasure and pain. Don’t keep taking the wrong med-
icine for the illness.
The next one is very easy to understand: “Don’t ma-
lign others.” We put a lot of energy and time into
gossiping about others. Perhaps there’s somebody,
maybe it’s just one person, that you have a problem
with. Maybe it’s Pearl, who is so pitiful. She is always
feeling left out, and you find yourself reminded of
your mother, who’s also like that. Somehow Pearl and
your mother become all mixed up together, and you
find yourself continually irritated and disgusted by
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the pitifulness of Pearl, and it keeps triggering a lot of
stuff in you. Yet you don’t have the slightest interest
in actually getting to know Pearl and finding out
what’s going on there. You have no desire to commu-
nicate with Pearl and find out who she is. Instead
there’s some kind of satisfaction that you get from not
liking her, and you spend a lot of time and energy
talking to yourself about Pitiful Pearl, or whoever it
might be—Horrible Horatio or Miserable Mortimer.
The next one is “Don’t wait in ambush,” yet another
“naked truth” slogan. You have been taught that you
should be a nice person; on the other hand, you don’t
feel so nice. Maybe you know something about your
husband that he doesn’t know you know. You keep it
up your sleeve, waiting for just the right moment to
spring it on him. One day you’re in the middle of a big
argument, very heated. He has just insulted you roy-
ally. At that moment you bring the ace down from
your sleeve and really let him have it. That’s called
waiting in ambush. You are willing to be very patient
until just the right moment comes along, and then
you let someone have it. This isn’t the path of the
warrior, it’s the path of the coward. Not only do you
want to “win”; you aren’t even willing to communi-
cate. The aspiration to communicate with another
person—to be able to listen and to speak from the
heart—is what changes our old stuck patterns.
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The next slogan, “Don’t bring things to a painful
point,” in some way is saying the same thing. These
are nuances of the human tragedy, nuances of the
tragicomic situation in which we find ourselves.
“Don’t bring things to a painful point” is again saying,
“Don’t humiliate people.” We do all of these things
because we feel pain, because we feel hurt and sepa-
rate. Instead of first making friends with what we’re
feeling and then, second, trying to communicate, we
have all these ways of keeping the “us and them”
story solid and strong. That’s what causes all the pain
on this earth, including the fact that the ecosystem is
turned upside down. All of that comes from people
not making friends with themselves and never being
willing to communicate with the one they consider to
be the troublemaker. That’s how we stay caught in
this battleground, this war zone.
The next slogan is “Don’t transfer the ox’s load to the
cow.” Let’s say you’re Juan’s boss. When something
comes along that you find unpleasant and don’t want
to do, you pass it on to Juan. You pass the burden to
someone else. It’s like that Greek myth about Atlas.
He was just walking along innocently and somebody
said, “Oh, Atlas, would you mind for a moment just
holding the earth?”
We do that. When we don’t like it, it doesn’t occur
to us to actually work with that feeling and commu-
nicate with the person who is asking us to do this, to