The practice encourages us to look farther, and as the person controlled the stick to hit us, anger controlled the person to control the stick to hit us. Therefore (this is just thought experiment, mind you), we should think of the person as being no more unaccountable than the stick. Our energy should be used against the person's anger, the real enemy, and to assuage it by understanding it and acting according to that understanding.
So when I think of the ways my parents cause me suffering, I need to look at what is causing them to act in a way that is causing me suffering. They aren't my enemy, I acknowledge that they don't intend to maliciously cause me suffering. But they act the way they do because of their own suffering.
When I look at it that way, I see their deep suffering. They have money, but they aren't free. They are slaves to their own greed, their ideas of status, of success and failure, and what they think their children should be and do. They are oppressed by their own ultra-normative, narrow-minded way of looking at the world.
They suffer because their happiness depends on what I do with my life – which is that they want me to live a superficial and normative life as they, an impossibility. If anything, they are the tragic figures. In my worldview, it's always a tragedy when happiness is dependent upon something outside of ourselves. Tragic world I live in.
Of course, I'm a cause of suffering to them. So if they applied the same meditation, they should look at the causes of my suffering which causes me to act in a way that causes them suffering. Um, isn't it . . . them?
If I'm suffering because of them, am I not looking for happiness outside of myself? Yay, I am tragic! not
Bangkok, Thailand - July 19, 1998
