Sulkiness, sullenness, and surliness

Apprentice In your last Vajra Letter, you mention that one must be able to ‘remain free of the prison of moodiness.’ What is that?

Ngak’chang Rinpoche The infantile tendency to the 3 Ss: sulkiness, sullenness, and surliness. We employ these three out of resentment that life is not what we feel it should be according to what is fair and just in relation to ‘ME’.

Apprentice In the same paragraph, you mention ‘practitioners whose experience of the non-dual state has had an unequivocal effect on perceptions in daily life.’

Ngak’chang Rinpoche Yes—people who are no longer subject to sulkiness, sullenness, and surliness. You see, for practise to mean anything, one has to change for the better. One has to be free—or freer—from habitual responses such as territorial avarice, petulance, selfishness, manipulativeness, and obdurate obfuscatory self protectiveness. As long as one is still ruled by these ‘Lords of Materialism’ one has to pay tribute to them vis-à-vis the absence of awareness.