OK, this person obviously has a bad case of psoriasis. Maybe none of you have ever had that, but I think you can identify with having maybe just one big pimple on your face or something, and having to meet with people and worrying about their opinions and their possible disgust with what we look like. This ties in a lot with the eight worldly dhammas, the eight worldly conditions. We're afraid of the blame, we're afraid of being obscure, we're afraid of people turning away from us, we're afraid of the pain that's going to happen. The loss of their friendship because we don't look right, due to in this case to health, a medical infection and so on. And then we feel guilty because our skin doesn't look right, we feel that we're a failure, all this sort of stuff, it all ties in with the eight worldly dhammas, the eight worldly conditions.
When these sorts of thoughts come up, it can be very helpful to consider who you would like to sit down and talk with, comparing two different people. The first type of person, it's either the most handsome, debonair man on the planet, or the most beautiful woman on the planet (depending on which one you're normally attracted to). Now that's the first type, either one of those. The second person is either a man or a woman who's grossly overweight, pimples, whatever else that makes them what we normally call "ugly." Now you have these two different people, two different types of people. You're sitting down with the beautiful man or woman, and they're angry. They're speaking nothing but foul stuff, it's just burning your ears, it's like, "Whoa." Despite their outward beauty, this inward stuff that's coming out of their mouth is really hard to take. You're sitting with this person who's normally called "ugly" in our normal words, and they're loving and they're kind and they're talking so gentle and it feels so peaceful. Who would you rather be with? I don't think there's much of a question, most of us would like to be with the person that we would normally call ugly, but actually they're beautiful. Their inner beauty is coming out. The person who wins all the awards and gets their face on every magazine and whatever else, when their character and inner qualities are so ugly, we just want to go away, we don't want to be with them at all.
So it's helpful to consider, if you ever have a bad case of psoriasis or a big pimple or whatever, that your inner beauty is the most important thing, what you share with other people. If they look at your outer appearance and you look ugly, but you're beautiful within, they're going to stay around. Unless they're totally a prejudiced person who is lost, they're going to stay around. People like me and Rosemary have to deal with this stuff quite often, we have to meet people all the time in lots of interviews. We don't look perfect in every single interview. But if I sit there and think to myself, "Oh Gosh, I forgot to shave, they're going to think I'm a jerk," I'll be so frozen that I won't be able to give this person anything. Or I can think to myself, "Oh, I forgot to shave today. Oh well, they've got to look at an unshaven face. What can I do for them?" So this is it, when we're working on inner beauty, then if the outside isn't looking perfect today, we don't want to get too hung up about it. We keep living as kind and gentle as we can, and not worry if the other people get upset with us. If they are, in these words, disgusted because of us, OK, that's their problem. And we still try to deal with them in a nice way.