Devadūtas

We often comment, sometimes humorously I hope, that we can irritate each other or experience other people as irritations – and that’s also true, isn’t it? What makes it that way? What makes other people irritations to us, disappointments to us, fears to us? What makes people that way? Why do we experience it like that?

How limited we feel within that experience! How made small we feel! How unsafe we feel! The heart drains in that experience, doesn’t it? So, what are people? Are they ‘irritations’, ‘people who challenge me’, ‘people who annoy me’, ‘people who get in my way’, ‘people who disturb me’, ‘people who don’t do what I have told them to do’? Is that true?

As I have said many times, relationship is important and when we’re feeling annoyed by someone, it is an afflictive relationship, isn’t it? It’s a relationship that brings us into a very limited, depleted state of being, and no matter what we do within that, we won’t get out of that state. There’s nothing criminal about being annoyed by someone, it’s just what can occur – and you can always find very good reasons why that does occur. We can be this or that to each other, deliberately and undeliberately, consciously or unconsciously.

What resets the relationship is remembering death: we’re all dying. You don’t have to be that old to do it, I can tell you. You’re totally kitted for it as soon as you’re born. Some people don’t even make it out of the womb. In the monastery, you receive all of it. A woman came here to tell us that her baby has died in her womb – he hasn’t even been born yet. She will have to go through the whole process of giving birth to a dead baby. Heartrending, isn’t it? Some people don’t even make it here. Some people die pretty soon after they’re born: one year, two years, five years.

In the monastery we’re receiving what are called the devadūtas, the ‘heavenly messengers’. Why are they ‘heavenly’? Because when they touch you, your heart opens in compassion. Suddenly the relationships are reset: ‘These annoying, irritating people … they too are subject to death, pain and fear.’ Once you start with death, you start to unravel the script of what must happen to all of us: not just death but also being blamed, feeling rejected, not getting it right, being seen with less than loving regard by other beings.

Any individual can feel they’re not liked or respected. We may cultivate kind regard to each and every one of us – that’s the practice of mettā – but strangely enough, what resets the relationship is remembering death. It resets many things actually. Compassion is one of them, and from that position we start to sense others as in that same predicament, along with all the other predicaments of dukkha: ‘I too am not separated from dukkha. She is not separated from it. He is not separated from it. They are not separated from it. They too have experienced the loss of those they love, the being blamed, criticized, hurt or abused. They too will experience this. They have not gone beyond this.’

When you see it like that, it resets the attitude, doesn’t it?

This reflection by Ajahn Sucitto is from the book, The Most Precious Gift, (pdf) pp. 406-407.