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membered with a hot saw, but there are people who have been
stabbed and hacked to death. It takes work to imagine our-
selves in such a situation or to take others undergoing or per-
petrating this as objects of compassion, because we tend not
to want to see extreme pain and are polarized into distancing
ourselves from it.
If it is such a shock to imagine persons being cut by a saw,
you can see how quickly we lose the mindset of equanimity
or compassion. It is frightening: Let me out of here! I don t
want to see this! Or it makes us angry: What is this? What s
going on here? Therefore, the best practitioners are those who,
with great enthusiasm, put their mind into every possible situ-
ation that they can think of. They read descriptions of the hells
and the difficulties of the hungry ghosts; they imagine people
attacking them, and they imagine themselves lying there
someone is drawing a line across them, getting the saw ready
and they generate the sense of fright they would have. Within
that, they begin to transform their own feeling into compassion
for the person who is attacking them. That removes a threshold
of hatred. In order to do this, a practitioner has to have great
enthusiasm for meditating on individual situations.
We want pleasure and do not want pain, but often we rush
facing horror 81
toward pain and away from pleasure. One horrible event has
just ended and we re seeking a similar situation all over again.
My favorite description of this is of a hell described in Bud-
dhist texts. When you get out of one of the worst hells cre-
ated by your own karma, you are, of course, tremendously
relieved. You come to a hill. On top of the hill is a friend who
says, What are you doing down there? Come on up! So you
start going up, but the hill is made of sharp steel much like
a grater. Your flesh is grated on the hillside. Then, when you
get to the top, your friend turns into a monster whose mouth
opens up and bites your head and you swoon in pain. Doesn t
this sound like many relationships?
But the story does not end there. You revive and look down
the hill, and now your friend is down there. What are you
doing up on top of the hill? Come on down! So, you go down
the hill and again your flesh is grated. It s called the Iron Grater
Hell. You have one pleasurable relationship, it ends up pain-
fully horrible; you seek another pleasurable relationship, and
it becomes insufferably horrible; you seek even another rela-
tionship. . . I think this is a pattern that most of us play out at
one time or another.
Meditation:
Reflecting on Horrible Situations to Increase
Compassion and Equanimity
Horrific descriptions are used to generate a concern for the
consequences of actions. They also have another function
related to increasing compassion. In meditation, imagine a
82 a truthful heart
person trapped on the Iron Grater and then from your heart
spread out rays of light to enter into this person. The rays of
many colors also enter into the Iron Grater, making it a nice,
smooth area. The rays of light enter into the two friends, who
then act intelligently. It s a powerful technique.
Also, in meditation, imagine somebody crawling on the
Iron Grater and contemplate: Just as I want happiness and
don t want suffering, so that person wants happiness and
doesn t want suffering. This can be very moving. The image
disturbs our persona of calm meditator and brings us into the
type of personal confrontation that we experience in daily
life. Otherwise, you as the meditator seem rather neutral; it s
important to stimulate the mind on many different emotional
levels and extend the force of the practice through those lev-
els imagination is the key.
Begin this practice imagining stronger and then lesser
friends, then work with neutral people, and finally work with
enemies. Start off picturing in meditation someone as he or
she usually is; then imagine that person on the Iron Grater
and contemplate: Just as I want happiness and don t want
suffering, Lou wants happiness and doesn t want suffering.
Think it to the point where you feel it; then pass on to the next
person.
Eventually, you will get to enemies. Enemy means some-
body who has harmed, is harming, or will harm you or your
friends. To find enemies, some meditators have to go back to
childhood, when the line of friend and enemy was very clear.
Sometimes you have to think of a difficult situation. In the mid-
dle of that difficult situation, do you have an enemy? For the
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period of that difficult situation whether it is thirty seconds,
or five minutes, or ten minutes at that time, do you have an
enemy? The more neutral or even kind mind that performs the
meditation wouldn t consider this person an enemy, and thus
it is necessary to put yourself within that agitated situation.
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