The next morning in meditation, all my caustic old hateful thoughts come up again. I'm starting to think of them as irritating telemarketers, always calling at the most inopportune moments. What I'm alarmed to find in meditation is that my mind is actually not that interesting a place, after all. In actuality I really only think about a few things, and I think about them constantly. I believe the official term is "brooding." I brood about my divorce, and all the pain of my marriage, and all the mistakes I made, and all the mistakes my husband made, and then (and there's no return from this dark topic) I start brooding about David . . .
隔天早晨禅坐时，所有令人深恶痛绝的老旧思维再次出现。我开始把这些思维当做讨人厌的电话推销员，老是不合时宜地打电话来。我惊骇地发现，在禅坐中，自己的脑子并非是那么有趣的地方。骨子里其实我只想着几件事情，而且老是在想这些事情。我想可以用“沉思”来形容。我沉思我的离婚、婚姻的痛苦、我犯过的错、我先生犯过的错，接着（从这黑暗主题开始，没有任何倒退余地），我开始沉思大卫……

Which is getting embarrassing, to be quite honest. I mean—here I am in this sacred place of study in the middle of India, and all I can think about is my ex-boyfriend? What am I, in eighth grade?
说实话，这令人有些尴尬。我是说——我在印度的修院中，却只能想“前任男友”？我难道是初中生吗？

And then I remember a story my friend Deborah the psychologist told me once. Back in the 1980s, she was asked by the city of Philadelphia if she could volunteer to offer psychological counseling to a group of Cambodian refugees—boat people—who had recently arrived in the city. Deborah is an exceptional psychologist, but she was terribly daunted by this task. These Cambodians had suffered the worst of what humans can inflict on each other—genocide, rape, torture, starvation, the murder of their relatives before their eyes, then long years in refugee camps and dangerous boat trips to the West where people died and corpses were fed to sharks—what could Deborah offer these people in terms of help? How could she possibly relate to their suffering?
而后我想起心理学家朋友黛博拉告诉过我的故事。20世纪80年代，费城当局请她为一群刚抵城不久的高棉难民——船民——提供义工心理辅导。黛博拉是杰出的心理学家，却对这项任务感到畏惧。这些高棉人遭受过最惨的人类际遇——种族屠杀，奸淫掳掠、饥饿、眼睁睁看亲人遭杀害，而后长年待在难民营，甘冒危险乘船前往西方，途中死了人，尸体喂鲨鱼——黛博拉能为这些人提供什么帮助？她如何认同他们的苦难？

"But don't you know," Deborah reported to me, "what all these people wanted to talk about, once they could see a counselor?"
“可是你知不知道，”黛博拉跟我叙述，“这些人见到咨询人员的时候，想谈些什么？”

It was all: I met this guy when I was living in the refugee camp, and we fell in love. I thought he really loved me, but then we were separated on different boats, and he took up with my cousin. Now he's married to her, but he says he really loves me, and he keeps calling me, and I know I should tell him to go away, but I still love him and I can't stop thinking about him. And I don't know what to do . . .
是这样的：住难民营的时候，我遇上一个小伙子，我们坠入爱河。我以为他真的爱我，之后我们被分开，住不同的船，他开始和我表妹交往。现在他们结了婚，却说他真心爱我，不断地打电话给我，我知道我该叫他滚蛋，但我仍爱他，想他。我不知该怎么办……

This is what we are like. Collectively, as a species, this is our emotional landscape. I met an old lady once, almost one hundred years old, and she told me, "There are only two questions that human beings have ever fought over, all through history. How much do you love me? And Who's in charge?" Everything else is somehow manageable. But these two questions of love and control undo us all, trip us up and cause war, grief and suffering. And both of them, unfortunately (or maybe obviously), are what I'm dealing with at this Ashram. When I sit in my silence and look at my mind, it is only questions of longing and control that emerge to agitate me, and this agitation is what keeps me from evolving forward.
这就是我们的真相。从集体来说，这是我们身为人类的情绪风景。我遇过一位年近百岁的老太太，她告诉我：“有史以来，只有两个问题使人类大动干戈。‘你爱我有多深？’‘谁做主？’”而其他的事情则多少都能控制。唯有这两个爱与支配的问题扰乱每个人，使我们犯错，导致战争、悲伤和苦难。不幸（或者明显）的是，我在道场处理的正是这两个问题。在静坐观心之时，仅浮现渴望与支配的问题使我焦虑，而焦虑阻碍我的成长。