Don’t make Special!

I decided a long time ago that I wanted to get to some sort of ‘full disclosure’ with all people - to stop making special, hold nothing back. This way I don’t have to worry about being around a stranger. A stranger is a friend. That means the waiter, the bag boy, the flight attendant, are all friends. Why not? Why treat them differently? Sometimes people don’t like my attitude. People who consider me a friend want to be special, or else they feel they are wasting their time. But I think everyone is special. It feels good to be friendly and it is good for your health. The more you can smile and open up, the better you feel. So even a bum or whatever, you can open up to, and you will benefit.

There are people that I wouldn’t invite into my house, but that’s not because of some secret I need to keep, or some sense of specialness that I need to maintain. I don’t make a big difference between friend and stranger. A friend is only a stranger that you have memories with. But first all friends were strangers. Trust comes in over things like personal possessions and secrets. But I have friends that I wouldn’t trust to watch my house! So I don’t know if trust is really what makes it count. I wouldn’t let a stranger watch my house because that wouldn’t be smart, I don’t know them that well. But I can still consider them my friend.

Most people feel like they need to have high standards for friendship. I say I have no standards and people think that’s weird. I don’t really ever meet someone who says, ‘oh that’s great, that you are friends with everyone’. The just doubt my intelligence or think that I haven’t looked into it enough. Something like that. I hear of loyalty and trust and things. There are all kinds of excuses and protection mechanism that keep us separate from each other. No good!

The Dalai Lama says that every person he meets, he feels as if he has known his whole life. “Well that’s the Dalai Lama, I’m just an ordinary person!”, one might say. But the Dalai Lama shouldn’t be so special. We could all approach that level of kindness and openness. People like the Dalai Lama are only rare because we think, ‘Oh he’s something special, who am I?’ We should aspire to his friendliness though, we will be safe in the world. He has lived through the killing of many friends, students, and family members, but he still is a great friend to all beings! He sees the value of being open and loving. So when one starts to see the value in that openness, one can move in that direction.

It’s all just about changing the mind - just because you suddenly feel like every one’s friend, like a friend to every being, doesn’t mean that you get run over and that people will necessarily start to mistreat you. That doesn’t happen. You change inside, but outside, not much change. “But people take advantage of kindness!” Not true! People take advantage of weakness. Weakness and kindness are not the same thing. If you know your purpose then no one can get in your way. If you know your true job, nothing can stop you.

You can go to a coffee shop, for instance, and feel genuinely friendly to all those people there, just wishing them the best and celebrating any happiness that they might be feeling. Your heart will feel good and they might even benefit from your warmth. You don’t even have to open your mouth, you don’t have to demonstrate it. Just feeling it will be good. No one can take advantage of that. This type of friendliness is true friendship. We don’t even get this kind of sincere friendliness from those that we label as friends! Our ‘friends’ can be assholes, gossipy, grossly misinformed, but still we will call them ‘friend’ and ignore our brother on the street! So we can just be, ourselves, sincerely friendly. If we don’t care how people treat us or how they take us then they can say whatever they want. It doesn’t matter. Whatever they say is just their opinion, which you have no control over. So even if they bad mouth you, that’s on them. It has nothing to do with you, really!

So that’s why I said at the beginning, ‘don’t make special’ But we all want special we want something to stand out and be precious. What about ‘everything is special?’ That’s the same as saying nothing is special. Which means you get down to only, ‘everything is’.

Everything is.

And nothing is more ‘issy’ than anything else, so everything is special, and nothing is special. If you get into that idea you can start to get a good feeling. You can start to get a really open feeling.

Not making special means you can see everything as special. Like color can make you blissful. Just the color green. Everything has its place and can provide real joy if we take the time to look deeply. It’s all harmonious and all blissful. Whether you are looking at life or death, special or not special, its all the same flow, MAN! Everything you see is color and shape, nothing is left out. So maybe sometimes the problem is that we get too focused on the interpersonal to be happy. We focus on how our friends are and who we want to be with and all of that and we lose sight of the always-present blissful form that is there all the time. Maybe we just get too crazy with relationships, grasping at everything for meaning and specialness and so we stop enjoying the seasons and the colors, sounds, smells, tastes. Of course we can get stuck in that too, trying to find the BEST smell, the best taste. Again we slip into special making. But if we can let go of all that, even in a jail cell there is all this form and the potential to open up to that. But usually our heads are just too busy.

Letting go of the obstacles to happiness is the way to find our own happiness. We do not have to gain something, collect something, own something, think something. Happiness is innate, only obscured. We just need to change our focus. Not detach though, that is going too far in the other direction. It’s important to find a balance. We need to look for a happiness that is not dependant on the outside things, but at the same time not reject anything. know that everything is precious because it provides an opportunity to connect with our inside bliss. Outside things can activate some sort of joy and then we can recognize that joy as totally empty, totally open. But they are not special like they have sort of status that makes them, on their own side, bliss giving.

So maybe now you can understand:

When Un Mun was asked, ‘what is Buddha?’, he replied, ’shit on a stick’.