vision
lessons about how people respond to missing when we look at homelessness or learn to accept the world shaped by that
what they think they need. Sometimes war is the fact that children are suffering fear as reality. That false view of reality is
before they even respond to you they and dying. How can we accept that? We embedded deep in the heart. Even if the
attack you. If you don’t want to perpetu- can only accept it if we ignore it, if we’re mother experiences isolation or loneli-
Fluxion
ate that rage, you have to respond in a willfully unaware of it. ness during pregnancy, the child will
different way. It’s very easy of course to have that fear in himself. Unless the child
issue
speak of these things, but they are very so this is the connection between your eventually learns to get at the root of that
4
difficult to apply. Yet even if we apply work with children and the problems we fear—unless he can let go of the ghosts
them just a little bit, the world becomes see in the news? of the past through therapy or religious
a very different place. Exactly. The problems we see in the practice—he will create a world based on
news have to do with the fact that we fear. Other children will suffer because
You mentioned vivid awareness. What don’t honestly see the children we claim he ignores them, just as he was ignored.
do you mean by that? to cherish. If we did, war would be un-
You begin by doing the first thing: Look thinkable because we would not ignore How do we stop this cycle?
around you. Just look around. I train the bodies of children in the rubble we We establish what I call “love before
myself to look for objects that I miss even leave behind. Tolerating poverty would the beginning.” Why would we not want
when they are right in front of my eyes-- be unthinkable because we would not to do everything we can to ensure that
that happens so often! Anyway, you make ignore the children living on the street in children are born into good relationships
it a practice to pay attention to what’s the same cities where we live. where there is lots of human contact? It’s
right in front of you-- then you extend obvious that the good qualities in one re-
that awareness to what’s actually happen- Where’s the disconnection? How have lationship transfer to other relationships.
ing in your immediate environment, then we become habituated to the practice If we want to change the world we live in
in the larger global environment. of not seeing the children who suffer now, children must be respected before
because of how we live and what we do? they are conceived. That’s the essence
That’s tricky, though. When you move That’s just part of the constitution of of love before the beginning. For many
from paying attention to the table or the person. It’s learned behavior. We people the preparation for buying a car
chair in front of you to paying atten- ignore others because we ourselves were is bigger than the preparation for having
tion to homelessness or war, how do ignored. If in the beginning children are a child!
you keep from clouding the issues with left alone—if they are not aware of the
ideological debate? love of a parent or some other adult— it sounds good. But how do you translate
It’s quite easily, really. The thing we’re there remains this constant fear. We what sounds like a fuzzy “domestic
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