The following is an excerpt from a teaching by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo called “Bringing Virtue into Life”
Why is it we’re not facing that? Because of the very nature of samsara. It is like drinking alcohol. It is like taking a narcotic. There is something about the way we perceive in samsara. There is something about the way we register data that causes us to not see time passing, to remain fixated on a certain internal idea and not really taking into account what is actually happening. We learn instead to accommodate ourselves. We start dying our hair. We put on more makeup than we did 10 years ago. What else do we do? If we are men, women are not the only ones who dye their hair. This I have found out! This is the truth! Women are not the only ones that are doing it. Men are doing it too, or they use that, what is that stuff that you comb in and it takes, Grecian formula. Yeah. Some men use the Grecian formula.
Then others of us, we have different ways of not dealing with reality. You know, you get to be maybe 45, 50 years old and you realize that you can’t do what you did before. You just cannot. You don’t do it. You don’t want to do what you did before, but you simply cannot. Physically you cannot do what you did before and so the way you deal with that, instead of really dealing with that and really looking at that, is you sort of change your life style and you think, “What I’d really like now is a change of life style where coincidentally I am slower. I don’t have to walk or run as fast. I coincidentally would like to have a house with less stairs. I coincidentally would like to have clothes that are a little looser on me than they used to be.”
Some of us, the men for instance, when they are younger what they really want most in this world is motorcycles. You want a motorcycle so bad you can taste it! You’d do anything for a motorcycle or maybe a new guitar or fast car or whatever it is that young men really want. Then when we get older we don’t face the fact that we’re older, but suddenly we want a town and country car, the kind that has a special kind of seat for lower back pain. Then we get one of those beaded things you put on the seat for hemoroids. It’s all right, because nothing has really changed. I’m still a good looking man. You know, that’s the way we think. We’re just missing something here. We are not facing reality.
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