See how meaningless it is to get worked up about a particular issue where you’ve been wronged or where you’ve wronged somebody, because these stories have been going on for so long.

"When you take one person’s many lifetimes, all too often there doesn’t seem to be much of a pattern. Sometimes you do good in this lifetime and you go to a bad destination afterwards because your mind has fallen in the meantime. Or you do something bad, but then your mind rises to a better stage, and so you go to a good place. It might seem like karma doesn’t have any effect. But when you see the long-term results and you see them spread out over many, many beings, many, many lifetimes, you realize that’s what drives the universe: our actions.

And it just keeps going on, and on, and on. [The Buddha] said you cannot even conceive of a beginning point, it’s been going on that long, while the tears you’ve shed over these many, many lifetimes are greater than the water in the ocean. And that’s just tears over the loss of a mother. Tears from the loss of a father are also more than the tears in the ocean. Loss of a brother, sister, child: in each case, more than the water in the ocean. It’s been going on for that long. When he saw how immense the whole issue was, and how immense all these many, many stories were, the individual stories begin to lose a lot of their meaning and interest.

It was from that perspective that he moved into the present moment and focused on what was going on in his mind right here, right now — and that was how he gained awakening.

So you notice the pattern. Instead of going straight from the narratives back to the present moment, he stopped for a minute to think about how huge the universe was, and how long these stories have been going on, and how many different roles he had had. As he said, it would be hard to find someone who hasn’t been your mother and your father and your brother and your sister and your child your son and your daughter in the course of that long, long time. We’ve switched roles that many times. Sometimes we’ve been on the good side; sometimes we’ve been on the bad side. It’s back and forth.

There’s a story in the commentary of two women come running in to see the Buddha. The first one is holding a child. She’s being chased by the second woman, who’s trying to kill the child, and she has gone to the Buddha for protection. So he talks to them about their many lifetimes. In one case there was a major wife who had no children, and then a minor wife who had a child, and the major wife was jealous, afraid that she would lose her power, so she killed the child of the minor wife. The minor wife swore revenge, so in the following lifetime the minor wife was born as a fox, the major wife was born as a chicken, the fox ate the chicks of the chicken, so the chicken swore revenge. And they kept going on, and on, and on, to the point where you forget who was who.

And the whole purpose of this is to see how meaningless it is to get worked up about a particular issue where you’ve been wronged or where you’ve wronged somebody, because these stories have been going on for so long. You develop a sense of dispassion for the story, you spread goodwill [mettā] for everybody, everybody involved: goodwill for yourself, goodwill for the other people. Goodwill doesn’t mean that you’re hoping to continue the stories. It basically means: May you be happy. And you realize that each person’s happiness is going to depend on his or her own actions.

So it’s this combination of seeing the process of rebirth and karma, and having goodwill for everybody — a goodwill that leads to samvega and eventually to a sense of equanimity, realizing we don’t want to continue these stories. That’s the Buddha’s universal narrative solvent for painful memories.

So if you find your mind veering off in that direction, try to look at the narrative in this much larger context. Instead of, “He did this,” or “She did this, and then I did that,” and then it goes back and forth, just think, “It’s just living beings taking on many different roles as they go from life to life, looking for happiness but in an ignorant way, harming themselves, harming others.” When you see how long it’s been going on, and how huge the process is, how many beings there are, it gives rise to a sense of dispassion.

In this way, you can make greed and distress with reference to the world uninteresting, and you get back to the breath. Because as you focus on the breath, you’re learning not only about the breath, but also about your mind. And this is where it gets really interesting — you begin to see how your mind shapes your experience right now."

~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Dissolving Distress"