necessary to stop talking to yourself about how wrong
everything is—or how right everything is, for that
matter.
I challenge you to experiment with dropping the
object of your emotion, doing tonglen, and seeing if
in fact the intensity of the so-called poison lessens. I
have experimented with this, because I didn’t believe
that it would work. I thought it couldn’t possibly be
true, and because my doubt was so strong, for a while
it seemed to me that it didn’t work. But as my trust
grew, I found that that’s what happens—the intensity
of the klesha lessens, and so does the duration. This
happens because the ego begins to be ventilated.
This big solid me—”I have a problem. Iam lonely. I
am angry. Iam addicted”—begins somehow to be
aerated when you just go against the grain and own
the feelings yourself instead of blaming the other.
The “one” in “Drive all blames into one” is the ten-
dency we have to want to protect ourselves: ego
clinging. When we drive all blames into this ten-
dency by owning our feelings and feeling fully, the
ongoing monolithic ME begins to lighten up, be-
cause it is fabricated with our opinions, our moods,
and a lot of ephemeral, but at the same time vivid and
convincing, stuff.
I know a fifteen-year-old Hispanic guy from Los
Angeles. He grew up in a violent neighborhood and
was in gangs from the age of thirteen. He was really
smart, and curiously enough, his name was Juan. He
74 Drive All Blames into One