In his book Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki says that in most religions practitioners become like a sharp angle pointing away from themselves, while in Zen the angle points towards ourselves. The events Monday at Virginia Tech showed clearly what can happen when someone keeps sharpening and sharpening that angle pointing away from himself. We can say that the worthless piece of garbage who committed those murders was a nut case, schizophrenic or whatever multi-syllable word they finally settle on to describe him, and maybe it’s true. But he wasn’t the least bit different from the rest of us.

We all strengthen and enlarge our egos by constantly raging against things outside ourselves that we say make us upset — exactly like that dirtbag did. Maybe in our case it's different stuff we blame for our troubles and maybe we don't deal with it the same way. But we are absolutely convinced, just as he was, that the source of our problems is out there somewhere, not inside our own hearts, minds and bodies. That sharp angle points ever and always utterly away from the real source of trouble.

Thankfully most of us don’t take things to the kind of extremes we saw on Monday. We’re more likely to simmer and stew in our own misery occasionally pausing to rail at a world we never asked to be born into, but mostly just feeling sad and sorry for ourselves. Trust me, friends and neighbors, I know all about this. I was the sharpest angle pointing away from himself you could ever want to meet. My unhappiness was everybody’s fault but mine. There was never any lack of evidence of this, so nobody could ever convince me I was wrong. Not that most people I knew ever tried very hard. Cuz if my troubles weren’t out there then neither were theirs. And that’s not an easy thing to own up to. I was lucky enough to meet one person who had admitted to himself where the real source of his problems were and who helped me to see the real source of mine. I later discovered there was a long tradition of people who did this. But it’s always been a tiny, tiny minority.

It is the hardest thing in the world to admit that you are the real source of your own problems and your own pain. Harder than anything you can possibly imagine. We’ll commit any kind of atrocity, endure any kind of agony, slaughter our families, friends and neighbors, terrorize each other, do pretty much anything horrible, wrong, deceitful and stupid all just to get away from putting the blame for our troubles where it really belongs. Not out there in those bad people. Not out there in those terrible circumstances. But right in here. It’s you. It’s always been you and it always will be you.

Pretending the trouble is out there is a great way to avoid doing the real work that actually needs to be done. You can never really do anything about your problems as long as they’re out there. It’s hopeless to try and change the whole wide world into something more to your liking. You can write blogs or letters to the editor or scream and shout on street corners. You can shoot up your whole campus or post office or blow up a few major buildings. Or you can just do the little things we all usually do, act like jerks, insist on our own way, cut in line, litter, pardy hardy and wake up our lousy neighbors. But no matter what you do to all those people out there who’ve made you so upset it’s never, ever, ever going to solve your real problem. September 11th didn’t convert the world to the Muslim faith. McVey didn’t topple the United States government. That asswipe in Virginia didn’t teach the rich and the debauched a damn thing. And nothing you do against all those people and things out there you think caused all the shit in your life will ever make a bit of difference either. But when you change your attitude and change your focus, point that sharp angle back at yourself then — presto! — everything changes completely.

Does this mean you never do anything to put the outside world right cuz everything's, like, groovy now and you're all enlightened? Not a chance. You’ll be working at it every second of every day for the rest of your life. Because the most important thing you can do to put the outside world right is to get yourself together. And that's a job that never ends.

This is a very serious matter. The idea that our problems are all out there beyond ourselves is the cause of all human misery — every crime, every suicide, every act of terrorism, every war. Even your common garden-variety complaints can always be traced back to the deeper underlying idea that our problems are somewhere out there.

If you really want to do something to make sure other tragedies like this don’t occur anymore, you can. There’s a lot of work to be done, and it’s going to take time. But it’s work you can do right here and right now. More than that, it's the work you really want to do. It's what you were born for. It takes real courage to do this work because what you’re going to see is that the crazed killer isn’t out there in Virginia or out there in the hills of Afghanistan or out there in the White House. He’s you. But the good news is that once you see that, then you can take real, useful action. And it doesn’t start by watching that idiot’s dumbass manifesto over and over and over on YouTube or whatever. Or watching the folks at NBC lie to us that their motivation for releasing the tape was anything other than irresponsible greed. Or even with reading what I or Shunryu Suzuki or anyone else has to say about it. It starts with you being very quiet and seeing who you really are.

This won't fix everything today or tomorrow or by the end of next year or in the next decade. But slowly the effect will spread. It's all up to you.

Brad Warner is the author of Hardcore Zen and the forthcoming Sit Down and Shut Up!. He maintains a blog about Buddhist stuff. If you're in Southern California and you want to try some Zazen for yourself, he has a group that meets every Saturday in Santa Monica.