Most everything that we have to say about life and our relationships with others — and how we talk about the part of us that wants to smooth things over, keep them from being disturbed — is a form of saying something nice about what is killing us.

Here’s the bottom line: We just don’t want to go through the pain of doing what’s right when it’s right to do it. That’s the whole shebang.

It isn’t you I’m afraid of, it’s my own pain. It isn’t the condition I don’t want to get in and mess with. I don’t want to get in mess with the parts of me that are going to beat me over the head with threats and all other forms of conditioned reactions.

Everything about your work is bringing you to a point where you understand the need to bear yourself and to do so despite being unable to do it. Then you are upon a cross. Then you go through what is required of you to have your own life.

You cannot have your own life as long as you are afraid of the pain that part of your life produces when you challenge the status quo — whatever that may be for you or in you. This is the point (spiritually speaking) when a man or a woman begins to become serious. They are not afraid anymore of how they’ll be perceived — what they’re going to say, or how it will be understood.

You understand that whatever you are suffering in the moment isn’t because someone doesn’t like you or because something has to be changed and you don’t want to get in and do it. It’s because there’s something in you that doesn’t want to be changed at all. The path to changing that nature is through it — not letting it guide you to what it wants you to do when it wants you to do it — and that’s a big difference.

That’s why a true school is a kind of nurturing ground. It’s a place where a person is just ever so slowly introduced to the fact that something in them never stops running and dancing and finding ways to get through one more situation without having to suffer too intensely. You don’t know how intensely you suffer now from the pretense of being a sweet, good, kind, or otherwise understanding human being! Real understanding never compromises itself for the sake of pain that threatens it.