At first it seemed fine. The guy was going to come out of the door and we would make contact with him. No problem. Do it every day. There were only three ways out of the building and we had all of them covered. It was an office building. There were 50 to 100 people an hour going in and out of the building, except at 9 am and 5 pm. So we waited. And watched.

We did not know if he would come out of our door, or when. But he might come out any time. You couldn’t look away for more than a second. In a second he could disappear into the crowd on the street. And be gone.

This wasn’t the usual arrest. He was about to pull the trigger on a very big deal and many people would be hurt.

At first, watching that entrance was no problem. But unless you are trained to do this you will not be able to do it. People coming and going through an entrance are mostly very boring and your mind wants to wander away.

Some of the people coming and going are impossible not to watch. Your phone is on, it has to be, but you can’t look down to check it.

The world is swirling around you, your heart is beating, and your legs are cramped, and you have plenty of time to think, with a lifetime of dreams and regrets, fantasies and perplexities, and your mind would love to be absorbed by it all but you can’t let it. Not now. Not with what is at stake. So you keep your eyes on the door and your mind upon the deal.

You cannot pull off that level of vigilance just because you need it, just because you want to. No matter how sincere and motivated you are you have to train to do this.

Sitting in a meditation retreat in a cold mountain hut at first seemed not a problem. It was a great opportunity. After a few hours, more so after a few days, even in the pristine silence of the alpine slope, a world swirls around you.

Wind blows, water runs through the ravine, the wood stove crackles and then it cools and somehow a fly comes to life here in the dead of winter and performs swan lake in the rafters. Your heart is beating, and your legs are cramped, and you have time to think, with a lifetime of dreams and regrets, fantasies and perplexities.  Your mind would love to be absorbed by it all but you can’t. Not now. Not with what is at stake.

To get your mind to settle down is just the beginning. After a few days you are ready to begin to probe the quality of your mind. There is no way you can do this just because you want to. Just because you are persuaded that it is a good idea; even if you are persuaded that it is essential, you have to train to do this. You have to prepare.

I had memorized the face of the bomber we were looking for. His threats were real. He had the capability to do what he threatened to do. I looked at the images of his face again and again. A lot of people look sort of like him. But not exactly. I wondered if I would recognize him when I saw him.

It is possible to shoot a missile out of the sky from a thousand miles away. And the lead time may even be long enough to get a second shot. But if a thousand missiles are heading your way it’s a different story. You can’t afford to miss even one. You have to stop all of them or your city is cooked.

Master Shantideva wrote the classic “Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life” when he lived at Nalanda University in India 1300 years ago. 90% of it is about self restraint and ethics. And about practicing them, so you get better at them. That requires understanding of what to do and how to do it. But it also requires motivation. He explains in that book that if you were asked to walk across a room with a bowl filled with oil you would probably spill a few drops on the way. But if someone put a knife to your throat and told you not to spill a drop or you would be killed, then you would pay very careful attention to what you were doing, and by trying really hard you could get across the room without spilling a drop.

His point was not about being able to carry full bowls of oil. His point was that if you are motivated by urgency you will perform at a higher level and your ability will increase as you train. The urgency to succeed in the practice of ethical conduct and deep meditation and the insight that results comes from an understanding that you will be able to put an end to suffering for yourself and others. If you fail to achieve that in this life then, as you will learn, you will spend endless eons helpless in torment. If you are convinced of this then you will work very hard to be a spiritual hero.

In the ancient Indian Buddhist vow system that was taught at Nalanda in those days practitioners were advised, among many other things, not to destroy cities. That was included on the list of prohibited conduct, along with not killing, not stealing, not lying, etc. – conduct that was understood to cause misery for the person who does it as well as the victims of it – because many of the students of Buddhism in those days were high status people who had the power, if they wished to, to destroy cities. Or they were monks who were representatives and teachers of those powerful leaders.

Then, as now, there were many people who believed that it was good to destroy cities and kill all the inhabitants.

A contemporary example of this belief being the guy I was watching for at the side door of the office building.

And as I watched for him I saw so many people go by. Some were dull and some were beautiful. There were happy and sad ones, arrogant and humble, wealthy and broke, some were looking forward to a long and adventurous life, and some who looked like they’d had it.

And not one of those people deserved to be hurt for no reason. Not one of them, however you feel about their race or class or gender, deserves to be incinerated in thunder and heat, or torn from their family before they are ready, before they have made their peace, before they have said goodbye, before they have done what they needed to do in this world with the one short life they have, before they had their chance to go on their long mountain retreat and finally do go deep deep deep into their heart and mind and see the nature of reality for what it is and free themselves from suffering forever and maybe teach you and me how to do it too.

So I really watched for that guy. All day. I watched every face that came out of that door, hour after hour, long after it seemed fine, even when it was hard to do, and I made sure all the people in that city who never knew what they faced got the chance to go home, that day.