The  conversations and conflict in the wake of the shooting in Arizona provides a good object lesson about something Buddhists call “The Three Poisons.” These are concepts familiar to all of us – greed (or craving), hatred (or aversion) and delusion (or self-deception).

We can easily see the greed, hatred and delusion that we feel fuels the actions of others, those who we might consider our enemies, or those on the other side of the political spectrum. The greed of Wall Street bankers, doing their best to reap huge benefits while allowing others to assume the risk – or the greed of the super-rich, who have just recently been handed the continuation of huge tax cuts.

We can call easily to mind the delusion of watchers of Fox News, being fed a constant stream of lies that they seem to swallow easily and whole. And we can find hatred of our President, hatred of immigrants, and hatred of the poor rampant in conservative politics.

What is much harder for us to see is our own greed, hatred and delusion, and our unwillingness to admit that we share the same characteristics of people that we so easily deride. I can recall nights in previous years watching news about Vice President Cheney, and feeling nothing but hatred for who he was and what he stood for. I know I have, at times, swallowed left-wing conspiracy theories whole, just because of the people who were delivering them. And my greed might be small “g” greed – attachment to certain kinds of food, attachment to a particular way I want things to go – but it is attachment, nonetheless, and poisonous.

The Buddha called these poisons for good reason. He thought they were the three primary obstacles to happiness – the primary causes of suffering. And it takes more than pointing out that these poisons should be eliminated on the other side; we need to eliminate them in ourselves. We can’t demand that other people stop being hateful while we deride some of them as “tea baggers”. We can’t take them to task for inflammatory rhetoric unless we look very carefully at our own. We can’t indict their greed without examining our own lives and how we live them.

I almost walked by yet another panhandler today, on my way to lunch, but something made me stop. I was hungry and in a hurry – eager to get lunch quickly and get back to my desk. But something stopped me. She’d just said “Hi, can you help me?” and I turned and asked her what she wanted. It was a lunch from Burger King, just down the block.

Many thoughts went through my head, most of which revolved around being hungry, in a hurry, and attached to a certain outcome (greed). Add in a good dose of judgment about what it was she wanted to eat (hatred/aversion), and, for good measure, a dose of wondering how she was going to dupe me into giving her some cash (delusion).

In a rare moment of consciousness, I stopped all of that, and simply talked with her as we walked to Burger King. I went in and got her what she’d asked for. She thanked me, and we went on our way. Her name is Latoya, and she has epilepsy. She’d been waiting for 30 minutes for someone to buy her lunch, and was about to give up, but had started to pray, and then … I showed up.

The antidotes to the three poisons are there for us to find. For greed, it is cultivating a spirit of generosity. For hatred, the antidote is cultivating a spirit of compassion and patience. For delusion, the antidote is learning wisdom and being willing and able to look deeply at one’s own assumptions and points of view.

Our world feels on a perilous precipice, sometimes. And sometimes it feels as if the “don’t just sit there, do something” vies with the “don’t just do something, sit there,” points of view. And both, of course, are correct. We must act generously, compassionately and with consciousness, but we can’t do that unless we have looked closely at those poisons inside of ourselves.