great beauty and joy; poison becomes medicine.
Whatever you do, don’t try to make the poisons go
away, because if you’re trying to make them go away,
you’re losing your wealth, along with your neurosis.
All this messy stuff is your richness, but saying this
once is not going to convince you. If nothing else,
however, it could cause you to wonder about these
teachings and begin to be curious whether they could
possibly be true, which might inspire you to try them
for yourself.
The main point is that when Mortimer walks by
and triggers your craving or your aversion or your ig-
norance or your jealousy or your arrogance or your
feeling of worthlessness—when Mortimer walks by
and a feeling arises—that could be like a little bell
going off in your head or a lightbulb going on: here’s
an opportunity to awaken your heart. Here’s an op-
portunity to ripen bodhichitta, to reconnect with the
sense of the soft spot, because as a result of these
poisons the shields usually come up. We react to the
poisons by armoring our hearts.
When the poisons arise, we counter them with two
main tactics. Step one: Mortimer walks by. Step two:
klesha arises. (It’s hard to separate the first two
steps.) Step three: we either act outor repress,which
is to say we either physically or mentally attack Mor-
timer or talk to ourself about what a jerk he is or how
we’re going to get even with him, or else we repress
those feelings.
40 Poison as Medicine