A Review of The Eightfold Path
Part III: Right Speech
Dharma Talk -- Eric Kolvig -- July 16, 1998 -- Albuquerque, New Mexico

We've spent about a year and a half doing a very detailed examination of the core teachings about our spiritual practice from the Buddha's teachings: the Noble Eightfold Path. The Buddha said that if you want to be free, then you need to cultivate eight things. We've spent quite a bit of time on each of these aspects, and we're now going back on a quick return journey, spending one evening on each of these eight aspects.

So the Buddha said: if you want to be free, cultivate wisdom or understanding; cultivate clear intention, Right Intention, True Intention; cultivate Right Speech; cultivate Right Action; cultivate Right Livelihood, how we make our living in the world; cultivate Right Effort or energy; cultivate Right Mindfulness; cultivate concentration -- those eight things. If I have kept track well enough, we're to spend this evening on the third aspect of the Eightfold Path: Right Speech or True Speech. We're going at a somewhat different pace in Santa Fe because we meet every week there, so am I right -- this is the third one? That's good, because that's what I prepared.

So this subject of speech or communication -- I think if you were to ask people, "What is your spiritual practice?", many people in this contemporary world would say, "I don't have one," but of the many people who do have a spiritual practice, I think it would be very rare to hear someone say, "Conscious speech is part of my spiritual practice." It's very unusual in this world. Someone might say, "Well, I try to go to Mass every week, and I go to confession once a month, and I try to do my prayers every day," or "I do my Sufi dancing," or "I do my meditation practice," but actually to think about speech as spiritual practice, I think, is fairly unusual.

From the perspective of the teachings of this particular tradition, speech, or how we communicate, is crucial. Basically you have to cultivate all eight aspects of this path. If you habitually lie to people, for example, or if you habitually speak harshly, or if you slander people -- if that's a deep habit of behavior for you, then there's no way that your mind is going to come to deep understanding and deep awakening. Your mind is not going to be enlightened, because causing harm in those ways causes a certain degree of agitation in our minds. The value of making an effort to be nonharming in our speech really allows us the tranquillity, the calm, of self-acceptance and self-esteem.

There are three of these eight aspects that have to do with ethical conduct, with nonharming conduct: speech; action, which we will deal with next time; and livelihood, how we make our living in the world. The Buddha said that anyone who seeks happiness -- and he said that the one thing that all living beings have in common is they want to be happy; it's a universal characteristic of living beings -- anyone who seeks happiness by harming those others who seek happiness, will never find happiness. So again, as we're talking about the ethical aspects of our spiritual practice, I think it's really important to remember that this tradition is not about right and wrong, or good and bad, or being a wrong or bad person for having, say, harmed someone through your speech. From the point of view of the Buddha's teachings, there are no moral judgments like that. It's a system or a world view that is entirely free from those kinds of judgments. The only criterion is: does our speech or our action or our work, does it lead to happiness, or does it lead to suffering? We consider it important to do things that lead to happiness and to decrease or eliminate the things that cause suffering. So it's very practical, very pragmatic. We all know what suffering is, we all know what happiness is, but there's no judgment.

It's important to remember this, because we can really beat up on ourselves if we think, "Oh! I just told a terrible lie. I must be a bad person." That kind of judgment comes from our Western understanding of things. It doesn't come from this particular tradition. It's something that's added on; it's a form of harm that's added onto a harm. So if you lie to someone and you hurt them, and then you say "I'm a bad person," and you heap guilt on yourself, then you're harming yourself as well.

It's really important for us to consider our communication in the world -- our speech and our other forms of communication -- because really our speech and our words have very significant effects. People often kill each other over words. It's amazing to think about, but it actually happens; it happens a lot. There is tremendous capacity for doing harm through our words, and there's also tremendous capacity for doing good, for benefiting beings through our words. Just to think of the benefits that we've had -- to me, it seems like an extraordinary miracle that these liberating teachings have survived for over 2,500 years; that these words that were spoken by some obscure teacher in northern India, somewhere between 560 and 480 B.C., have somehow come down to us in true enough form that they're still useful to us. I think that's incredible. Just thinking about the benevolent power of words -- millions of people have benefited from these teachings, by putting them actually into practice and transforming their minds and hearts. Or the teachings of Jesus, that have survived for nearly 2,000 years now. And other great spiritual teachers -- it's quite wonderful. So the benevolent power of words as well as the harm of words -- it's very significant.

I think it's easy for us to think, when we say something or when we do something, "Oh, it won't matter much." But actually, the law of karma tells us that it matters, it really matters. We're planting seeds each time we say something, each time we do something, each time even that we think something -- we are planting seeds that will either lead to more happiness or they'll lead to more pain. So it's important to be able to become more and more conscious in our use of words. In the wonderful little summary that the Buddha makes of the entire path, he says, in effect, "If you want to be free, if you want to be liberated, just do three things: do good, avoid doing harm, and purify your mind through meditation." These aspects of speech and action and livelihood -- these three aspects -- really have to do with those first two prescriptions: do good; avoid doing harm.

It's very significant what we say but it's also really valuable to have some sense about how much communication can do and how much it actually can't do. There's a place where words don't go. Our deepest liberation, which comes through meditation practice, takes us to a place beyond words, beyond thought. So that's why I hold talks like this fairly lightly in my mind -- these kinds of talks come and go; they're just words. They can do this much good [fingers an inch apart], but not that much good [hands a foot apart], because we actually need to come to some deep place in ourselves beyond thinking, beyond the realm of thought and words. That all sounds very august but it's actually really simple. When you hear a sound [meditation bell rings], in the moment of hearing it's only sound and the hearing of it, the knowing of it. In the next moment there might be, "Oh! That's a bell." You see, we have an experience before thought, it's that simple. If you can be with whatever physical sensations you have in your body right now, you can know the sensations for what they are, and then notice how thought comes in: "Oh, that's a pain," or "That's a pleasure," or "That's my knee." Those are just thoughts; those are just concepts. Our practice takes us beyond the realm of thoughts.

I think I mentioned a few weeks ago that I've been reading Krishnamurti's journal, and I came across just a little tiny passage that moved me so much -- it's only about three sentences -- that has to do with this. He writes:

Now Krishnamurti is not saying to leave the world, literally. What he's saying is to leave the chatter of your mind, that identification with the constant rat-a-tat-tat that goes on in our minds. We have to leave that, on some level. You can't suppress it, you can't get rid of it -- our minds think. But there's a way in which we can disidentify with it in order to be really present for the stream. We've all had that experience -- some rapturous experience where you see a rainbow, or you see a baby laugh, or whatever it is -- where you're just there with it. And it's beyond thought -- you've left the world behind in order to be really present for whatever is happening.

I think it's really important for us to pay close attention to our communication in this world particularly, because if you compare our situation today with the situation in the Buddha's time, it's extraordinary. We live in this post-industrial world where our dominant element is communication. We're flooded with it. In the Buddha's time, a very tiny minority of people were literate, which meant that writing and reading were basically not done very much. It's conceivable that the Buddha himself was illiterate. His teachings were passed down orally for centuries before they were written down; they were memorized and passed from generation to generation for centuries.

So in the Buddha's time, overwhelmingly for the most part, the only communication was face-to-face speech, nothing else. Think about what kinds of communication we deal with in our world. What kinds of communication have you been exposed to just today? You've probably had face-to-face speech with someone; you've probably used the telephone, most of us, I would guess; a good many of us have done e-mail, and think of the extraordinary range of communication that now can come in through the computer. You may have listened to the radio; you may have watched television; you may have gone to a movie; you may have read a book; you may have seen flyers up all over the place -- it's just amazing how much communication we're in the midst of.

A lot of our task, I think, is not only to pay attention to what kind of communication we generate, but also what kind of communication we want to let into our psyches in this world where we're flooded by communication. It's such a different world than the one in which the Buddha lived and walked in. So our task is a much more challenging one; it's not only Right Speech, which is the traditional language, but it's also "right e-mail" and "right telephone" and "right whatever."

So the Buddha's guidelines on speech are actually very simple. He basically said, try to do four things when you communicate: 1) Try to be truthful in your communication. 2) Try to be appropriate in your communication. It's really interesting that it's fairly easy to tell when we're being truthful or not, but then to understand the context well enough to know whether it's appropriate is really important, because I'm sure -- I certainly have, and my guess is that you probably have -- that we sometimes use the truth as a weapon at times in our lives. You know, you're really angry at somebody and you're going to let them know the truth. And so it's important to know whether what we're saying is really appropriate to say. 3) Try to notice whether your communication is kind; to make an effort for your communication to be kind. 4) Finally, for our speech or however we're communicating, to be helpful to others.

And then he was very clear about what kinds of communication to avoid, and this has to do with the Five Precepts of ethical conduct, which is part of our training in this tradition: we undertake the training to train ourselves not to kill or commit violence; not to steal or to take what isn't given; not to commit sexual misconduct, like rape or sexual harassment or objectifying people; the fourth precept is about speech; and the fifth is about intoxicants. The Buddha said in terms of the fourth precept, about conscious speech or Right Speech: to avoid lying; to avoid harsh speech; to avoid slander; and to avoid idle speech.

I find it interesting, just for me, to reflect on why I do those four things -- what is my intention? What is the motivation to lie, for example? In terms of the relationship of the aspects of the Eightfold Path, it's out of our understanding that our intentions come, and out of our intentions come our speech and our actions. And so, what are the intentions that I might have when I lie? And for me, it seems pretty obvious that it's generally to avoid some kind of unpleasantness: if this person knew something then they'd be upset. So it's really interesting to notice, when we say something that isn't true, why would we say it? For me it has a lot to do with that, to avoid conflict and unpleasantness.

Why do I speak harshly? It's because I'm not really conscious of being angry. To speak automatically and reactively out of anger -- unless we're very clear, it's hard to stay clean on that one. The Buddha said that the biggest difference between animals and humans is that humans have more choice, but we don't actually get a choice unless we're quite conscious, quite aware. If you see that you're angry, then you can make a choice whether to speak out of that anger, or to work with your anger and then speak out of clarity. So it's very interesting. I notice that when someone ticks me off and I spurt out words of anger it's because I haven't taken a moment to step back and say, "What's really going on here? What's the quality of the emotion that's going on here?" For most of us it's an automatic knee-jerk response: somebody speaks in anger to us and we speak in anger back.

Why do we speak slander, or pass along information that we don't really know to be true about someone? My guess, just from my own experience, why we talk about people who aren't present, especially in disparaging ways, comes from a quality of consciousness the Buddha called -- translated into English -- "conceit". It's that quality of comparing ourselves to others, as being inferior or superior or even equal to others. And the Buddha called conceit a form of insanity that we all share, that we all have, because we all compare ourselves to others. But my feeling about, you know, when you're sitting and talking about someone -- there's a kind of collusion of feeling superior to the person that we're talking about, and that gives a nice ego boost.

And then why do we indulge in idle speech, the yammer-yammer and the idle chatter of our lives? I think that there's some good social function for chatter -- we talk about the weather or whatever -- but my guess is, at least from watching this mind, that this mind indulges in idle chatter because it doesn't want to be with its own experience. Sharon Salzberg, a senior teacher in our tradition, co-led a retreat recently up north of Santa Fe, and she talked about so often getting into her car and without even thinking about it automatically turning on the radio, and realizing that she turns on the radio so that she doesn't have to be with herself in silence in the car. She doesn't have to be with painful feelings or whatever might be going on at any given time. So we chatter, chatter, chatter in order not to feel fear, or anger, or pride, or envy, or whatever it is that we might be feeling. So we can just pay attention to see what might be causing forms of unwholesome speech that cause harm to others.

I think the really simple, important question to ask, in terms of making this a spiritual practice of speech or communication, is just to ask ourselves two questions: What am I saying, and then to ask, why am I saying it? Just to be able to step back and have that level of consciousness or awareness: "What am I saying? Why am I saying it?" When you ask that question -- "Why am I saying this?" -- it gets us below the story line of whatever we're saying and it gets us to the underlying emotions that are impelling the speech. So if we're speaking out of love, if we're speaking out of generosity, if we're speaking out of compassion or kindness -- to know that, and to know that our speech will lead to more happiness for ourselves and others. If we're speaking out of anger, or fear, or grief, or envy, or whatever -- to know that, simply to understand that. What am I saying, and why am I saying it?

I find it useful for myself -- and this is not a teaching that I've heard anywhere, so take it with a grain of salt; it's not part of the traditional teachings -- but I find it really helpful to actually consider the inner chatter of my mind, the endless thought-monologue that's going on in here, the thought process, as speech. It's language; it's words; it goes on and on and on. And it's really useful to pay close attention to what's going on in there -- to really see it as a form of speech or communication -- and to ask the same questions: What's being said in the thought process, and why is it being said? And then to notice: what are the underlying mind states or emotions that are impelling the thoughts, because for the most part we're completely unconscious of it.

Just a little example. A few months ago someone said something to me that was actually the most wounding thing that had ever been said to me; just because of the person and the particular circumstances, it was extremely wounding. And for a long time after that, my mind was in a state of resentment and anger, and it went on and on. As long as I was focused on that person and caught up in the story line of the thinking, I wasn't able to actually see what was impelling it, which was resentment and anger. And as soon as I could say, "OK, it's not about this person any more, because those words were said weeks ago, what it's really about now is this mind and this heart," then I could drop down out of the story line and actually feel the resentment and the anger. Not to try to get rid of them, but to allow them to be there. Not to try to get in some idealistic way to some place of love and forgiveness, but knowing that, if I can just be with those feelings of resentment and anger and really be with them and allow them to be there without identifying with them too much, eventually they'll work their way through. And when they're gone, love and forgiveness will move in, automatically, into the vacuum that's left by them. But as long as I'm caught up in the story line and focused on the person, I'll never get to work through those feelings, because they're not identified, they're unconscious.

It's no longer so true, but I actually spent years and years of my life hanging out around a kind of subculture of what you could describe as progressive or leftist intellectuals. I found over the years that we would all get together at a dinner party or whatever, at a gathering, and that particular group of people would invariably end up talking a whole lot about how dreadful the situation of the world was, and how impossible it was to bring change to the situation. And my feeling was, actually, that that group, from my own perspective, had a very good analysis on militarism and nuclear weapons and large multinational corporations and exploitation -- you know, all that, the gap between the rich and the poor. The analysis seemed pretty accurate to me, but the particular mind states that came up were feelings of cynicism, of despair, of negativity, of anger, of resentment, of fear, and I would come away from gatherings like that feeling drained of energy instead of energized. And I realized that this was not helping me. It doesn't help me because what we're actually doing is conditioning qualities in our minds and our hearts that don't lead to anything positive. And so I find myself now not so much seeking out that crowd any more but seeking out the fellowship and the community of people who understand how difficult things are in the world -- who aren't in denial about it -- but who are prepared to do something about it, to try to bring about wholesome change, so that you don't get into this kind of sad state of irony which you find often (that I've found, at least) among a certain class of people. So just paying attention to what gets conditioned in our hearts from our communication is important.

Just in terms of this feeling of resentment and anger toward the person who said something that was very wounding -- if you stay in that state of resentment and anger, what you want is revenge, to be able to say something equally painful back. And I keep reminding myself of the wonderful words of Mohandas Gandhi who said, "An eye for an eye is a terrible way to blind the world" -- that it doesn't work to seek revenge. It's fine to have resentment, it's fine to have anger, it's fine to work through them, but I think acting out of them doesn't help -- it simply ends up compounding the pain.

And then finally, all of this talk about communication for ourselves -- how we speak, how we write, what the chatter in our mind is, and paying attention to those things -- but I think it's also very important to pay attention to the communication that we receive from others, either in direct speech or through any of our media. We really need to ask the same questions: What is being said here? What is being communicated here? Why is it being communicated? This seems to me to be a very important question, because we are flooded by communication, and our minds are not separate. Our minds are actually quite open, and they're quite permeable, and what comes into them through communication affects them. It's really important to ask the question, "How do I want to condition this mind and heart?"

As a spiritual exercise I read the paper each morning, because I don't want to be too isolated and too cut off from the world. I want to be able to be aware of what's happening in the world around me. It feels important to me, and yet it's very important to me to pay attention to how reading the newspaper (which is basically a catalog of horrors) first thing every morning -- I get up, I sit, I make breakfast and read the paper -- how taking that in, early in the morning, to make sure that it's not conditioning grief and anger and fear and all the rest of it in my heart, of really making an effort to keep this heart positive even as it opens to the suffering of the world.

I also made a decision years ago that I wouldn't go to movies that had a lot of violence in them, so, as I'm sure you can realize, I don't go to the movies much. I select very carefully, because I had a lot of violence when I was a child, and it really affects me. And I find I go to a movie which seems OK to go to but then I have to sit through the previews, and I can't believe it. I have to look at the floor, and I think the children are being conditioned in this way about violence, and it's all streaming in. It's not being monitored, it's not being screened by their own discriminating wisdom. And what I'm suggesting is that we need to cultivate that discriminating wisdom -- it's really important to us, because we basically live to a large extent in a toxic environment in terms of the communications around us. What are we going to do with those toxins? We're either going to take those toxins in and transform them, which is an interesting exercise, or we're going to be careful about how much of it comes in. So it seems really important to ask those questions about all of our forms of communication.

You know, I've made decisions about friendships, of being with friends who are habitually negative in their speech, just habitually, all the time negative in their speech, and I've decided, "You know, it doesn't really serve me to have this friendship, to be exposed to this constant negativity," and letting the friendship go. Sometimes the decisions that we have to make are hard.

The last thing is, I'd like to read one of the precepts on speech from the Tiep Hien Order of Interbeing, a Buddhist order that is connected with the Vietnamese teacher Thich Nhat Hanh. There are two precepts among fourteen that have to do with speech, and I'd like to read the ninth, because I find it so useful that this particular perspective on ethical conduct talks about taking personal responsibility for our own speech, for example, but always opens out into the social reality as well. That's what happens in the last sentence of this precept on mindful speech:

That last sentence to me is so moving: have the courage to speak out against situations of injustice even if it means endangering your own safety. That it's one thing for us to purify our own communication in terms of Right Speech, but at times we really have to take a stand on the social level as well, when we see injustice happening.

Just to say again, as I've said a number of times: there's one Buddhist teacher who said, "Keeping the precepts is impossible." I think it's really important for us to remember that. If we take it too seriously -- "I'm going to clean up my speech, and I'm going to clean up my action; I'm no longer going to lie and I'm not going to speak harshly to anybody" -- and we take it on as a kind of idealistic practice, we're going to fail. Trying to keep these precepts about not killing, not stealing, not committing sexual misconduct and all the rest, of speech and the use of intoxicants -- we're constantly confronted with our own failure.

The other day I killed a spider while I was dusting because I wasn't mindful enough -- I wasn't being clear and aware enough. If I hadn't been lost in thought, I would have seen the spider and caught it and put it out, but I killed it instead. We can't help doing these things, we can't help it; even if you really try, you find yourself distorting the facts as you speak. So it's very important for us to realize that it's really nice to work at this, but to see it as a practice, and that we're not going to be perfect at it, and to cut ourselves a lot of slack, to really extend forgiveness to ourselves when our speech isn't perfect, for example. To understand that this is a long process of purification and it's OK to make mistakes. To really allow ourselves to make mistakes and forgive ourselves for making mistakes. It seems really important to have that perspective, because otherwise the whole system gets pretty rigid and pretty moralistic, and we end up condemning ourselves and others. And that's not the intention or the purpose of this aspect of Right Speech or Right Action or Right Livelihood.

It's hard summing up several talks into one talk. In Santa Fe, I think we probably had four or five sessions on Right Speech, so in pulling it all together, it's hard to know what to emphasize.

* * * * * Questions * * * * *

Q: At the beginning of your talk you gave several examples of more modern types of what you called "speech" and one of them was a poster (or a flyer). I'm wondering if that's really speech in the sense that the Buddha meant it, because it isn't promoting communication, it's sort of there but there's no communication. I'm wondering if that's an essential part of what is meant by Right Speech.

Eric: Actually what I meant are the kind of flyers you see on bulletin boards that are announcing this or that -- that kind of communication. I brought a flyer (which I'll probably forget to announce) of a retreat we're having the weekend after next in Santa Fe. It's got communication on it; I hope it's skillful. Does that answer your question or am I missing it?

Q: Are we confusing communication with information?

Eric: If it's just lists then it's information. But when information is conveyed to us with underlying values, it's communication. As long as there's some kind of underlying values, or it's expecting some kind of response from us, it is communication, as far as I can see. So if you're going through the phone book and you're seeing a list of names, that's one thing, but this flyer has communication in it.

Comment: Bumper stickers. That is a real communication.

Eric: Oh yes, I think bumper stickers are the great graffiti of our time. My favorite is, "A clean car is a sign of a sick mind." [Laughter]

Q: You were talking about converting the toxins that come in. Could you say something more about that?

Eric: Yes, that's really more from the Tantric tradition of Buddhism, but also the Tantric tradition from other traditions. For example, in the Tibetan tradition they have a wonderful practice of breathing in the suffering of the world and breathing out joy or benevolence. In order to do that, if you're willing to breathe in all of the suffering of the world, you'd better be able to transform it, otherwise you're going to become very toxified. Do you see what I'm saying? That there is a way of transforming suffering into joy and compassion, but it is not an easy process.

Q: Yeah, I'm finding that I get stuck. There's a hook somewhere in there.

Eric: Right; we have to be really clean. Just as a concrete example, because this sounds kind of fuzzy: if someone is talking to you and they're expressing great fear, for example, fear about being hit with lightning, let's say, it's possible to hear them, to hear their fear and to transform the situation through clarity. Maybe if someone is terrified of being hit by lightning, you might say, "Well, the chances are probably 1 in 33,000,000 that you'll be hit by lightning in your lifetime, so let's put it in perspective," or whatever. It's really experiencing their fear and transforming it into a kind of clarity. We do it all the time -- we do it with each other all the time, if we're skillful in our communication.

Q: I went to an interesting talk on Tuesday night by Brad Blanton, who wrote a book called Radical Honesty, and his recommendation is different than what you were talking about tonight with anger. His recommendation is to risk everything, if you have a conflict with someone or you're angry or resentful, and just let 'em have it. I have a particular person in mind [laughter] (Eric: "I could name five" [laughter]) and I'm not willing to do that because he's my brother-in-law and I want to see my sister and her kids. But I was intrigued by this and it's much in conflict with what you're talking about. He just said, "You can't do it by yourself, by forgiving him and meditating; you have to go into the relationship and be present and stay to the end."

Eric: I'm just going to give you the perspective from our tradition -- I don't want to judge that. But from our perspective there are two unhealthy ways of dealing with, say, anger. One is to repress it, and most of us have had a long tradition of repressing our anger -- you know, trying to make it go away; thinking it's not really there. That doesn't work; it actually feeds the anger; it strengthens it. The other extreme is being highly identified with the anger: "I am angry; I'm angry at you and I'm going to let you have it." And what I'm hearing is, in reaction to repression he's going to the other extreme: get totally identified with it, get it out there. From our perspective, both of those things are basically unwholesome and they feed the anger. It feeds it to identify with it; it feeds it to repress it. There's a third choice which is neither of those things, which is to allow the anger to be there, even to welcome it, and to work with it and allow it to work through your system, as it were, to the point where you purify your system of it, and choose not to express it in ways that are harmful. Because that does bring unhappiness. And if you go out and clobber someone, they're going to resent you, and so what you're doing is setting up the conditions to be clobbered back, and it goes on and on and on.

The Buddha said that hatred has never been overcome by hatred; hatred can only be overcome by love. And that doesn't mean that you have to let go or repress your anger and your hatred -- it means allow them to be there, even welcome them, feel the pain of them, and allow them to work their way through. And for me, the transformation of anger into clarity is the most helpful thing. If I'm feeling really angry at someone, if I can stay with the anger long enough to say, "What's really going on here? What's going on between us? What's going on in my own heart? Why am I so angry?" And really to investigate that and absolutely understand it, at some point the clarity pushes the anger away; no, it doesn't push it away, the clarity dissolves the anger. And out of a place of clarity I can speak to someone and be very clear and very strong, but without hurting them. Do you see the difference? So for me, getting really identified with it and going out and clobbering someone may bring a certain degree of satisfaction, but it's just setting up conditions for more suffering. Does that answer your question? It's a really important one.

Q: Yes. Just to defend him [Blanton] for a moment, the object was to stay engaged until there's a resolution, until there's love and connection. It's not just to go clobber him and go home, but to stay engaged. My question is, I'm probably not going to do that, it's way too risky, so can I do what you're saying all by myself, without engaging him [my brother-in-law] at all in the process?

Eric: I really like the idea of engagement. I may have mentioned that I once, in a work situation, dealt with the most difficult person I've ever encountered as an adult -- someone who was very, very difficult. And you felt like whenever something got resolved with this person, as soon as you turned your back -- "Pow!" And I made a decision that I would not give up on this person in terms of staying engaged; if something came up, I'd deal with it and deal with it and deal with it, and come to resolution. And it's been a very interesting process. I think we would both say of the other that we're friends. Fortunately I don't have to work with this person any more [laughter], but we're friends because I refused to turn my back and say, "OK, this is enough; I can't deal with this person." But I wouldn't advise staying engaged by unloading -- stay engaged by trying to come to clarity together. It's a really important question; thank you.

Q: Can't you also approach this problem by using metta meditation? That's a way of generating love and compassion and equanimity for your enemies. That's self-healing without the confrontation.

Eric: Yes, I think it's wonderful -- metta lovingkindness can be really transformative. As the Buddha said, "You can only overcome hatred with love." It's a wonderful thing. But we can also use it as a kind of tool for suppressing our anger, and our resentment, and our hatred, and all the rest. And if we're using it in that way we're actually not using it skillfully. I think it's great to generate lovingkindness toward those who are very difficult in our lives, but I think we also need to engage our own toxic feelings, because that's the only way we can purify our hearts of them. Thanks.

Q: One of the things I'm curious about, and I've had occasion to think a lot about, is dealing with people who are either somehow very toxic in their speech and actions or, in one case that I encountered, a person who truly could be called a sociopath, who would simply invent very damaging things about other people, and very skillfully. If people are lucky they've never encountered them, but many of us probably have. I try and think about how you address that. I had this experience in the past -- I was feeling pretty hurt by it and I saw others feeling hurt, and I'm thankfully no longer in that situation. I'm curious what thoughts you might have about that.

Eric: It's hard; it's very difficult. Just a few things that may or may not be useful. This person I just mentioned, who was such a very difficult person, was doing a lot of damage through speech. And finally, in a meeting just between the two of us, I said, "From now on, every time you make unskillful speech, I'm going to challenge you, wherever we are." And I said it in a really loving way; I just said, "I'm going to challenge you; it's not going to go unchallenged." And that was very useful, actually; it just put this person on notice that it wasn't that I was going to become an opponent, but I was going to challenge that speech. So that's one thing we can do, is just to make an effort to stay very clear ourselves and to name what is happening, because so much of the damage that happens through communication is that we don't name it -- we let it go by. That's one way to do it.

Another thing that may be useful with a very difficult person is to see that the only way they became very difficult is because they were very hurt themselves, and they're suffering, and this is their particularly unpleasant way of expressing their suffering. If you can see that, if you can see this person as suffering (otherwise they wouldn't be talking this way), it really helps to develop some kind of compassion rather than just resentment. That's compassion; another approach is lovingkindness or metta, which is seeing the goodness in beings. I practiced this with this person, where I saw that this person was very generous, as well as very mean, actually quite generous, spending money to help others. I would just bring myself back to that realization that this is a very generous person as well as a very destructive one, of seeing the goodness in them. And that's not excusing the harmful behavior, but it's putting it in some kind of context -- seeing there is a good person somewhere under there. And so it's very difficult.

Q: You were talking about negative speech and other people's toxicity. I know that if I've been through a traumatic situation I will "vent", as it were. Do you consider that that is not a valuable thing, that it would be better for me to just sit and deal with it, or is venting considered toxic to my friends?

Eric: Not if there's an understanding. I've come through a very difficult phase of my life in the last few months and I've really relied on friends, and there's just an understanding: "Can you hold this space for me while I discharge some of this stuff?" And they say, "Sure." And so all the toxins come out, and it's not harmful to them as long as there's this kind of understanding. I think that mostly we unconsciously unload on each other, and that can be harmful. You see, if there's an understanding, an agreement, it's one of the gifts that we give to each other as friends. You know, "You can cry on my shoulder -- I'll cry on yours." Does that make sense? ("Yes.") I vent a lot these days. [Laughter]

Comment: I'd like to just say one thing. I personally feel really strongly that where communication is designed to maximize profits by exciting anger and fear and hatred, I think it's really despicable. I can't even watch TV, because I think TV is one of the worst bad guys in that respect. I keep thinking of these people who are raising children in very sheltered, loving environments and educating them at top-dollar institutions with money they've made from destroying whole groups of other people by laying this trash out on the airwaves. So I'd really encourage you to stop watching TV.

Eric: And again, it's really useful to ask, "What's being said and why is it being said?" to understand those underlying forces. Thank you for that.

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