You have to look deep inside the mind. The more we look at our own mind the more we can kind of touch on some of these things, the cravings and desires and aversions that lead people to desperation.
It's incredible, when President Clinton of the U.S. was elected in 1992, he had a friend from nursery school. They were friends from 4 years old, they worked together when he was governor, before he was president, they had always been together for 50 years. After Clinton got elected, everything was wonderful, great, and then they found him dead in his car near the Potomac river.
He committed suicide because he had done a bit of money dealings that weren't quite right, and it was being investigated. It wasn't totally proven but obviously he was guilty. Yet all that may happen to him was that maybe he'd go to jail for a couple of years and in that case the President would have pardoned him anyhow, but he committed suicide.
We've got to look deeper into the mental Dukkha of people who have all this money or privileges and then they commit suicide. But it's not just that, it's looking deeper at other things, such as the fact that the money doesn't bring happiness, that not only do rich wealthy people commit suicide, but also drug and alcohol addicts, all sorts of people with mental Dukkha.
One of the richest people in America 40-50 years ago, Howard Hughes was so scared that he never had a home. He was a billionaire, as rich as Bill Gates today, but he never had a home, he always lived in hotels because he was paranoid. I once read that whenever he wrote instructions for his staff he wrote them on a little piece of paper and they would have to burn it, destroy it, or put it down the toilet straight away after reading it. He died of what appeared to be drug overdose, at 70 years old, either in a hotel room or airplane going from one hotel to another. Billionaire.
What's missing in these people's lives? Something very important, and this is where we want to open the compassion for them. We don't want to open the compassion for them because they're rich, but we're going to open the compassion for the person who's got mental Dukkha..
There's an illness and this is what we want to open up to in our own meditation practice to see where we touch on those same elements of desperation, fear and loneliness.
Yesterday afternoon I did a meditation on loneliness. Loneliness can drive people crazy, as it did in the meditation, doesn't matter if you're rich, doesn't matter if you're not rich. Loneliness is one of many challenging emotions. We have to open to them within ourselves. The more we touch these different elements within ourselves, the more we see that everyone else is similar.
There are different variations of quantity, but loneliness is there in all of us, fear is there, all these things, and we're going to open to them, we're going to open our heart to all of them.
Part of how we teach is to watch your breathing or your footsteps and walk back and forth, to let go of thought. This brings more calm. Too many people get attached to this as the only practice.
You've all heard the Hammer Story, we can't get attached to just one method, or wanting to get calm and feel peaceful and happy within ourselves.
We've got to touch on the reflection side, we've got to open up the wisdom eye by investigating into our thought patterns or hindrances. In that way we open to our own conditioning and mental Dukkha. And the more we open to our own fears and worries then the more we're able to have compassion for other people no matter how rich or well-off they are.