Love is the great four letter word. The greatest art, the latest video clips,
the most sublime religious poetry are all about love. Our whole culture is
driven by the search for love, but we have become cynical, because our
experience is mixed up with attachment, possession, clinging, expectation and
demands.
In the Buddhist tradition, love is one of the four immeasurably
great catalysts of being, along with equanimity, joy and compassion. Love is an
indispenable foundation of spiritual practice. Love is the soil in which the
flower of compassion may flower, nurtured by the pure water of joy in the shade
of equanimity.
Yet we usually find ourselves slaves to love, held in the
thrall of an elusive ideal in hope of deliverance from the complicated lives we
have created for ourselves. Love so often is the name we give to a euphoric
state which perpetuates our habitual lack of genuineness, or authenticity. In
the name of love we make so many demands on others, we expect so much, we work
out intellectually a whole drama. "Maybe she loves me, maybe she doesn't."
Intellectualizing the love we think we feel loses touch with it.
The Buddhist
tradition is to generate love unconditionally, without exceptions of being loved
in return. In Buddhist meditation, the practitioner imaginatively pervades the
world with love, in every direction. Start with yourself, filling your heart
with loving kindness, abundant, grown great, free from enmity and free from
distress. To love yourself is to be able to love all sentient beings, without
reserve. There is nothing intellectual about this. There is no story to tell
yourself about whom you love and whom you can't.
You may be able to pause,
and imagine someone who is hard to get on with, a difficult person in your life,
and remember that they too are driven by the same desire for happiness as is
everyone. Make use of your enemy to teach yourself patience, and the ability to
love unconditionally.
Love is of the heart. It manifests in the level of
intuition rather than intellect. You don't need to interpret, or make
judgements, or give yourself a part in a soap opera version of your own life.
The heart directly experiences love. If you love completely then you don't need
to say, "I love you." Because love becomes you and I. Love actually dissolves
the gate between you and I, and between I and the universe.
Unconditional
love is without desire to possess, because ultimately there is no possession and
no possessor. Love does not take the inborn sense of I, me, mine as the constant
reference point. It is spacious, neither selecting nor
excluding.
Intellectualizing love creates such confusion you know longer no
whether you love the person or hate him. You can no longer differentiate. Then,
even when the relationship begins to break up you are still attached, still
clinging to how it used to be in the past, still hoping it can magically come
good again. You don't even have enough space for a new relationship, a new space
where you could actually appreciate and love someone else. When that happens we
have to generate something else - compassion.
If we are to be effective and capable in daily life, if we are to live up to
our ideals, if we are to be of actual help to others, we need to train. The
Buddhist tradition offers us a wide range of tools we can use to train
ourselves. There are specific methods practiced over many centuries, to generate
equanimity, to create a little spaciousness amidst our habitual clutter. There
are methods to allow us to become more loving. But love can go stale and cold.
This is when we need to generate compassion, which has larger connotations than
love.
Compassion means openness or spaciousness, opening up to all situations
we are in. It means not bogging down in subjective judgements. It means dropping
the compulsion to be constantly asking: "How does this affect me? What do I
think about this?" We create space, which allows us to sit back and look at
everything properly and precisely. We can then see where our attachment comes
from, how we colour our view of the world, how things go wrong.
In order to
generate compassion one has first to generate warmth, firstly warmth towards
oneself. One has to learn how to accept and like oneself, as only then can one
like someone else. Unless you know how to have warmth and compassion towards
yourself, you won't be able to have it for other people. When you have it, then
you can share it with others. You can't share what you don't have.
Compassion
fulfils the needs of situations, as they arise. It is a readiness, an openness
to respond properly and precisely, spontaneously, without the selfish agenda,
without being so needy that the self gets in the way.
Compassion is the
opposite of passion. Passion is egocentric. It is demanding, it makes demands on
people. Compassion is open space, it's undemanding, it's generous. Compassion is
direct, spontaneous. It is felt, rather than manufactured. It requires no
investment of your identity or personality. It may take a bit of practice, but
it is a natural capacity.
But then compassion can also go askew. You get
involved with someone, trying to help them, but you judgement is tinged with
sentimentality. It becomes part of ego's game. You try to help someone, only
they don't respond as you want them to. You can't rescue them, and that is
frustrating. They insist on learning the hard way. No matter how hard you try to
help him or her, they don't change. You feel terrible and get depressed. You
feel it would have been better if you hadn't taken up the practice of
compassion. At that point, you need another spiritual practice, which is to
generate joy.
As an old Buddhist prayer says:
May all sentient beings
enjoy
happiness and the root of happiness.
May they be free from
suffering
and the root of suffering.
May they not be separated from the
great happiness devoid of suffering.
May they enjoy the great equanimity
that is
free from passion, aggression and prejudice.
JOY
Buddhist tradition teaches us equanimity, love, compassion and joy. These
four attitudes can be developed, with practice. They are helpful in daily life,
and are the root of the spiritual life.
How does one cultivate joy? First,
let's be clear about what we mean. Joy is not the momentary elation of backing a
winner. Joy is the steady appreciation of the qualities and potential of others
without envy.
The basis of joy is self acceptance. I may be confused, I may
suffer from conflicting emotions, and from intellectual perplexity, yet
basically I recognise my capacitay to attain liberation. Joy arises from
recognizing that your confusion is not inherent, your sufferings are not
inevitable, that you do have choice. Your anxiety is not your human nature, it
is merely a passing cloud, which will pass from the sky of its own
accord.
This historic Buddha was a human being, who awoke to reality, and to
his actual nature. He isn't a god to be worshipped but a person whose example
can be followed. What he did, is open to each person to do. None of us is a
terrible person, or beyond redemption. No-one can save us from ourselves, but
each of us can save ourselves. There is no person who does not have the capacity
to become enlightened.
With that attitude one begins to have joy, which is
the ability to look at things without being overwhelmed by emotion. Joy is the
ability to appreciate the attributes and abilities of others, to rejoice in
their beauty and strength, rather than become envious or judgemental. Joy is the
antidote to competitiveness, Joy unlocks our ability to relate to the social
world.
Joy is a sense of richness, of unboundedness, of not being necessarily
a prisoner of the past. It is the opposite of a poverty stricken attitude, which
is always comparing oneself, judging, ranking, criticising myself as better or
worse than others.
But joy can also beome a prop. a reassurance that things
aren't so bad after all. Joy can become elation, you begin to congratulate
yourself, which is nothing but an ego boost. Elation is just as irrelevant as
feeling depressed.
It's a highly emotional, unstable state, and it's not the
same as a quiet, steady joy.
When joy becomes elation, it's time to go back
to equanimity, to the practice of accommodating everything as it is in
actuality. You accommodate your depression, elation, joy, happiness,
dissatisfaction. You can actually sit back and accommodate everything without
judgement. You aren't trying to force anything. You can accomodate your own
emotional ups and downs and the whole universe. This isn't some mystical process
of becoming one with the universe, or that you identify yourself with the
universe, but you actually are the universe, and you realize that.
Equanimity, love, compassion and joy are four specific attitudes which
Buddhists cultivate so as to enter the path of spiritual development.
The
beginning of spirituality is facing up to the reality of personal experience,
which is the kaleidoscopic mix of pain, suffering, happiness, dissatisfaction.
There must be more to life than alternating pleasure and pain.
Our usual way
of dealing with suffering and pain is to try to possess pleasure and happiness.
We try to fight off whatever is unpleasant.
Buddhist spirituality asks of us
that we awaken, that we wake up to our selves, that we recognize that there is
no such thing as one hundred percent pleasure or one hundred percent pain.
When we experience pleasure or happiness there is always a fraction of
suffering at the same time. Without suffering, we cannot experience one hundred
percent pleasure. That applies the other way round, to suffering as well.
Suffering and pleasure both help us to exist, and confirm our existence.
Suffering, pleasure and pain exist simultaneously. It's a basic fact of
existence, like a dog having hair or the sun radiating warmth, we can't have one
without the other. So we don't have to condemn pain, or anything else that
happens.
We simply accept our experience as a message that comes from our
Buddha Nature. That everything requires courage, the courage needed to deal with
everyday life.
Usually we feel we are going to be overwhelmed by our
emotions. We become depressed or unhappy, and then defensive and avoid looking
into things as they are. We fail to learn how depression comes about, from where
depression actually comes. So we need courage to face situations as they arise,
without becoming alarmed or defensive.
Courage to face life comes from the
practice of developing equanimity, love, compassion and joy. These four
attitudes are the first steps on the great path of spiritual development which,
in the Buddhist tradition, culminates in enlightenment. The courage to face life
is practical and immediate, yet it is also a necessary preliminary to the
process of mental cultivation as practiced over many centuries by Buddhist
meditators.
Enlightenment may seem like a far distant goal, but Buddhists
have always stressed that we all possess the seed of enlightenment, whether we
are aware of it or not. In fact, enlightenment isn't really the right word, it
would be more accurate to speak of awakening, or of wakefulness.
There is
no-one to turn to who can wake us up. It is up to us to do it for ourselves. We
are not woken up by anything divine, or magical or mystical. Enlightenment is
not a hypotheses, it is not a theroy or a dogma, it is born from personal
experience.
With equanimity, love, compassion and joy we are ready to fully
wake up.