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it’s neutral, it triggers ignorance. Craving, aversion, and ignorance are the three poisons.
    Our experience would write the formula as “Three objects, three poisons, and lots of misery” or “Three objects, three poisons, and three seeds of confusion, bewilderment, and pain,” because the more the poisons arise and the bigger they get in our life, the more they drive us crazy. They keep us from seeing the world as it is; they make us blind, deaf, and dumb. The world doesn’t speak for itself because we’re so caught up in our story line that instead of feeling that there’s a lot of space in which we could lead our life as a child of illusion, we’re robbing ourselves, robbing ourselves from letting the world speak for itself. You just keep speaking to yourself, so nothing speaks to you.
    The three poisons are always trapping you in one way or another, imprisoning you and making your world really small. When you feel craving, you could be sitting on the edge of the Grand Canyon, but all you can see is this piece of chocolate cake that you’re craving. With aversion, you’re sitting on the edge of the Grand Canyon, and all you can hear is the angry words you said to someone ten years ago. With ignorance, you’re sitting on the edge of the Grand Canyon with a paper bag over your head. Each of the three poisons has the power to capture you so completely that you don’t even perceive what’s in front of you.
    This “Three objects, three poisons, and three seeds of virtue” is really a peculiar idea. It turns the conventional formula on its head in an unpredictable, nonhabitual way. It points to how the three poisons can be three seeds of becoming a child of illusion, how to step out of this limited world of ego fixation, how to step out of the world of tunnel vision. And the slogan is just an introduction to how this notion works. Tonglen practice will give you a very explicit method for working with this kind of lojong logic or, you could say, big-heart logic.
    There’s nothing really wrong with passion or aggression or ignorance, except that we take it so personally and therefore waste all that juicy stuff. The peacock eats poison and that’s what makes the colors of its tail so brilliant. That’s the traditional image for this practice, that the poison becomes the source of 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 ignorance 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 opportunity 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 out or repress, which is to say we either physically or mentally attack Mortimer 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.
    Acting out and repressing are the main ways that we shield our hearts, the main ways that we never really connect with our vulnerability, our compassion, our sense of the open, fresh dimension of our being. By acting out or