by Adele Hulse

Maybe you were just born a really nice person with a sweet caring heart that just beats on and on, bestowing honey-love and gentleness wherever you turn. There are such people, thank God, but I am not one of them. As a columnist, I get to airbrush myself and maybe look pretty okay, but you should know – I’m an extremely judgemental arrogant fool.

Twenty-two years ago after my first lam-rim course, dozens of initiations (many almost forgotten), a few retreats, a few ngondros and what do I face: more blind stupidity.

Old Dharma students easily accept that the power of self-interest in determining how sentient beings divide up into friend, enemy and stranger is ruthless and easily comparable with our insectivorous parents’ habit of devouring each other on sight – and especially after sex.

We know how it goes. Friend comes down the corridor: eyes shine, hearts lift, steps lighten. We grin, high five, punch shoulders and pass on, happy happy happy.

Now here comes enemy: eyes freeze, hearts shrink, lead in the legs, a brutal relegation to peripheral vision and we continue, diminished, ugly, unhappy.

Or, the painted smile: “I’m okay, I’m intact, it’s you who are the poor louse here.” The warmer the smile the deeper the damnation.

During the week in Sydney with His Holiness the Dalai Lama, I resolved to tackle this fact: that I am a judgmental arrogant fool – and wrote myself a secret list of twenty people I “don’t like.” Not politicians and other space-junk, but real people, people to whom I close my heart in the corridor. It was so scary writing the list and so easy to find twenty names – I put it away for a month because I couldn’t bear to face it.

But I dragged it out one day and thought: Okay, what is it you don’t like about all these people – write one or two words to describe that, getting to the essence. Well, that was even more scary because they were nearly all the same words. It was like a gob of spit blowing back in my face, obviously saying more about me than those I was accusing. I put the list away again.

Next time I faced it I had a hit list for my hit list: how long has each person been an “enemy”; how long ago was that person a “friend”; what caused the turning point. I listed the data ruthlessly and was confronted with even greater self-accusations: what had caused the worm to turn in every situation were threats to my self-esteem. It all came down to stuff like: “Who does she think she is!” when it should have been “Who do I think I am!”

Big fat stupid pride. Lama Zopa Rinpoche, so good at hit lists, lists seven types of pride in his Wish-fulfilling Golden Sun of the Mahayana Thought Training: a general feeling of being higher than others, a feeling of being on the same level of others yet somehow more extraordinary; feeling most special in even a very special group; thinking one’s perceptions are higher than others’; feeling just as important as the most important person imaginable or only slightly less so; believing one’s ignorant practices and beliefs to be correct; regarding the mental and physical aggregates as forming an independently existing “I,” a delusion causing all the other kinds of pride.

I looked up all my books. The antidote to this malfunction, they said, is to think of things I can’t do. So I got out my list and started attributing talents to each of my “enemies,” considering them, congratulating them, monitoring the shriveled muscles of my mean heart.

The last step was to list all the things I do that I think are so absolutely fabulous – like thinking I’m, cool being poor, solitary, unfashionable, which is all plainly ridiculous.

It’s a testing analysis, evidence of how much I have invested in my vanity and my ability to integrate logically acquired information. But liberating too – real growth always is.

The alternative is to go backwards – like start disliking another 20 people every year until I’ve got a little stack of black books smoking away foully in a filing cabinet, full of blame for others – for anybody, so long as it’s someone else’s fault, so long as I come out looking all right. An intolerable way to spend one’s last days, quite repulsive. Time, then, to seize the nettle.