Start Where You Are: A Guide to Compassionate Living Read Online Free PDF Page B

become mindful, awake, and gentle with our hope and fear. We see them clearly with less bias, less judgment, less sense of a heavy trip. When this happens, the world will speak for itself.
    I heard a story about Trungpa Rinpoche sitting in a garden with His Holiness Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche. People were standing around at a distance, close enough to hear but far enough away to give them privacy and space. It was a beautiful day. These two gentlemen had been sitting in the garden for a long time, just sitting there not saying anything. Time went on, and they just sat in the garden not saying anything and seeming to enjoy it very much. Then Trungpa Rinpoche broke the silence and began to laugh. He said to Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, pointing across the lawn, “They call that a tree.” Whereupon Khyentse Rinpoche started to laugh too. Had we been there, I think we might have had a little transmission of what it means to be a child of illusion.
    We can practice this way in our postmeditation now and for the rest of our lives. Whatever we’re doing, whether we’re having tea or working, we could do that completely. We could be wherever we are completely, 100 percent.
    Take the whole teatime just to drink your tea. I started doing this in airports. Instead of reading, I sit there and look at everything, and appreciate it. Even if you don’t feel appreciation, just look. Feel what you feel; take an interest and be curious. Write less; don’t try to capture it all on paper. Sometimes writing, instead of being a fresh take, is like trying to catch something and nail it down. This capturing blinds us and there’s no fresh outlook, no wide-open eyes, no curiosity. When we are not trying to capture anything we become like a child of illusion.
    In the morning you feel one way; in the afternoon, it can seem as if years have passed. It’s just astounding how it all just keeps moving on. When you write a letter, you say, “I’m feeling crummy.” But by the time the person gets the letter, it’s all changed. Have you ever gotten back an answer to your letter and then thought, “What are they talking about?” You don’t remember this long-forgotten identity you sent out in the mail.
    There was a Native American man called Ishi, which in his language meant “person” or “human being.” He was a good example of what it means to be a child of illusion. Ishi lived in northern California at the beginning of the century. Everyone in his whole tribe had been methodically killed, hunted down like coyotes and wolves. Ishi was the only one left. He had lived alone for a long time. No one knew exactly why, but one day he just appeared in Oroville, California, at dawn. There stood this naked man. They quickly put some clothes on him and put him in jail, until the Bureau of Indian Affairs told them what to do with him. It was front-page news in the San Francisco newspapers, where an anthropologist named Alfred Kroeber read the story.
    Here was an anthropologist’s dream come true. This native person had been living in the wilds all his life and could reveal his tribe’s way of life. Ishi was brought on the train down to San Francisco into a totally unknown world, where he lived—pretty happily, it appears—for the rest of his life. Ishi seemed to be fully awake. He was completely at home with himself and the world, even when it changed so dramatically almost overnight.
    For instance, when they took him to San Francisco, he happily wore the suit and tie they gave him, but he carried the shoes in his hand, because he still wanted to feel the earth with his feet. He had been living as a caveman might, always having to remain hidden for fear of being killed. But very soon after he arrived in the city they took him to a formal dinner party. He sat there unperturbed by this unfamiliar ritual, just observing, and then ate the way everybody else did. He was full of wonder, completely curious about everything, and seemingly not afraid or