It was Day 9 of the 13-day advance of 2026, the culmination of our training season, and at this point we were expected to be very deep in the direct experience of the present moment, far beyond the concerns of our lives. However, I still was spending most of the time obsessing about various people in my life! So I asked Soryu during Q&A: “how do I stop thinking about people…who aren’t even here! At this point in the advance I shouldn’t be doing this anymore but I spend all day thinking about what I will say to people, things people have done, ways that I’m disappointed in people, ways that I did something wrong to people, etc. etc. etc. It just goes on and on.”
Soryu grew sombre and pondered for awhile, and then said “It’s sad, isn’t it?”
I agreed.
“Maybe you hate them,” he said, “is that possible?”
I said that I was not aware of hating them.
Soryu said that maybe I don’t, but he is just looking at the evidence at hand. I am not doing the thing that would benefit them (that is, clarifying my mind), and instead I am harming them by obsessing about them. He clarified that he was not saying that I hate them, he was just proposing a theory for why I was acting to their harm rather than to their benefit.
He explained further that this is a powerful advance. So when I obsess about people, I will inculcate my ideas about them, and then when I meet them I will subject them to that.
I asked Soryu to explain in more detail how that is harmful. He said, “Is there anything else harmful? What else is harmful in the universe?”
I proposed, “Violence. Physical harm.”
Soryu explained: “Yes, but when you physically harm someone, it’s because you don’t perceive them. You perceive an idea of them, and you think you’re enacting violence on that idea, which is okay. But you’re deluded in that way. You couldn’t harm someone if you could see them; if you could actually connect, you couldn’t do it. Why don’t you connect? Because you’re lost in an idea. You’ve used them to create an idea of them, that serves your purposes.”
I said, “It really feels like I have to do this, that I have to obsess about this in order to prepare to do the right thing in the future, to care for them.”
He said, “There is a certain mind that sees things that way. But again, in the future, when you meet them, you will do the thing you prepared to do. And the thing you prepared to do was think about them, rather than meet what’s present. That is what you prepared to do, and so that is very likely what you will do. If you spend time thinking about them now, then when you meet them you’ll spend time thinking about them then. You will not meet them, you will subject them to your ideas about them. That will not be helpful to them. If you’re present here and now then when you meet them you’ll be present with them. That will be helpful to them. If you practice using them as a mental slave, then when you meet them you will use them as a mental slave. This is just how it is. This is how patterns work. If you practice patterns, especially under these circumstances, they’ll be very powerful. So if you’re practicing being present, when you meet them you’ll be present. If you’re practicing thinking about them, then when you meet them you’ll be thinking about them. But the worst thing is, that if you really practice this behavior, and you get good at it, then when you meet them you’ll be thinking about them but sincerely believe that you’re present with them because you will have sincerely mistaken them for your idea of them, and that is harmful.”
“At this point it sounds like you’re sincerely practicing thinking about them, and you even said, ‘it seems like I have to do this.’ So if that’s the mind that you’re in, then it’s very likely that that will be the consequence.”
Having understood the harm, I asked Soryu how I could stop.
“Well even if all you’re doing is acting as if you hate them,…that might be enough for motivation. Right?”
It was. Later that day I remembered what it was like to live in the confines of other people’s ideas about me, and how many times people had hurt me without realizing it because they didn’t see me, they just saw a particular idea of me they had inculcated in their own mind. I reflected shamefully on how I had used substantial parts of every previous advance to practice inculcating ideas about people, coming out of it with an arsenal of ideas ready to inflict them on the people and situations in my life. I wondered, maybe I shouldn’t be allowed to do advances if I am going to use them for harm in this way.
I was so relieved to see that enough shame was evoked that I could stop. For the rest of the advance, the obsessive ideas about people would still arise, but as soon as I noticed what was happening I would realize that it was harmful to those I loved, so I would cut off the ideas and return to my breath. This freedom allowed me to make significant progress in my practice in the remaining days of the advance.