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exercise of compassionate abiding, and in this case specifically, abiding with the experience of aversion, consists of breathing in the negative feeling and then relaxing outward. Then you breathe the feeling in and relax outward again and again. You could do this for five minutes or for hours or anytime, on the spot, when aggressive feelings arise. We do this for ourselves and all other people who feel prejudice and disgust and have no way of working with it so it escalates into self-denigration, into jealousy, and violence, and creates endless suffering all over the world.
    We contact the aversion, experiencing it as fully as possible as we breathe in, and then we relax as we breathe out. We let the feeling be a basis for compassion, and also—gradually, over time—we realize that it’s like a phantom; when we stay with it in this way, the aversion dissolves; it’s not an opponent that we’re struggling against; it’s not anything except energy that gets solidified and that we justify and then, on the basis of that justification, we hurt people.
    There’s a quote that is usually attributed to Carl Jung that says, “The only way out is through.” This is very much the approach here. It’s not a way of getting rid of strong emotions, nor is it a way of indulging in them. Gradually we learn to simply abide with our experience just as it is, without building it up or tearing it down, without getting carried away, knowing our own unfabricated energy as the same fluid, dynamic, unpindownable energy that courses through all living things.

Positive Insecurity
     

     
    I N THIS BOOK I’ve been exploring the topic of peace at the personal level, the level of each of us working with our own minds and our hearts. But I want to make it very clear that however we work with our minds and hearts these days will impact the future of this planet.
    The Buddhist teachings on karma, put very simply, tell us that each moment in time—whether in our personal lives or in our life together on earth—is the result of our previous actions. According to these teachings, what we experience in the present is the result of the seeds we ve sown for hundreds of years, over the course of many lifetimes. It’s also the case that the seeds you sowed yesterday have their result in your own life today. And the seeds that the United States has sown in the last year, five years, fifty years, hundred years, and so forth are having their impact on the world right now—and not just what the United States has sown but all the countries that are involved in the world situation today, being as painful as it is. We’ve been sowing these seeds for a long time.
    I know many of us feel a kind of despair about whether all this can ever unwind it self. The message of this book is that it has to happen at the level of individuals working with their own minds, because even if these tumultuous times are the result of seeds that have been sown and reaped by whole nations, these nations of course are made up of millions of people who, just like ourselves, want happiness.
    So whatever we do today, tomorrow, and every day of our lives until we die sows the seeds for our own future in this lifetime and sows the seeds for the future of this planet. The Buddhist teachings also say that the seeds of our present-day actions will bear fruit hundreds of years from now. This may seem like an impossibly long time to wait, but if you think in terms of sowing seeds for your children’s future and for your grandchildren’s future and your grandchildren’s grandchildren’s future, perhaps that’s more real and immediate to you. Nevertheless how we work with ourselves today is how a shift away from widespread aggression will come about.
    The other day I was given an article that contained a quote by the German political thinker Rudolph Bahro. He writes, “When an old culture is dying, the new culture is created by those people who are not afraid to be insecure.”
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