"Mindfulness and Meditation allow us to open our hearts, relax our bodies, and clear our minds enough to experience the vast, mysterious, sacred reality of life directly. With Practice we come to know for ourselves that eternity is available in each moment.

Your MMM Courtesy Wake Up Call:
Musings on Life and Practice
by a Longtime Student of Meditation

Friday, October 23, 2015

Love Love Love

"The moment we give rise to the desire for all beings to be happy and at peace, the energy of love arises in our minds, and all our feelings, perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness is permeated by love: in fact, they become love."
-- Thich Nhat Hanh, Teachings on Love

"All you need is love."
-- The Beatles

We've had it on good authority.  Jesus and Buddha, as well as many of the myriad seers, sages and saints of the world's religions seem to agree with the Hippies -- and the Beatles.  In the final analysis: All you need is Love.  

That seems simple enough.

So, what's the problem? Why are so many folks suffering and why does the world appear to be going to hell in the proverbial hand basket? 

First of all, what many folks have learned to believe is love, the terrain of much music and Hollywood Movies -- isn't love.  What is presented as love is a form of desire and energetic attraction that has a lot more to do with fulfilling one's own ego needs for sex, security, status, and self-esteem than the quality of consciousness that emerges from what Buddhist Teacher Pema Chodron characterizes as an Awakened Heart.  Love is not the profound passionate grasping of deep attachment. True Love is much grander than that. (It's pretty clear that "I love you so much that I'll kill anyone who looks at you, then you, then myself." is not exactly what JC and the others had in mind, right?)  

True Love emerges, and is essentially inseparable from, Pure Being, the One Love that exists beyond the illusion of separation that characterizes the realm of relative reality.  Known in Buddhism as Buddhanature, True Love is the fundamental kindness, compassion and clarity that always exists in our heart of hearts.  Our innate ability to access True Love is the Ultimate Connectivity. 

Unlike the common contemporary understanding that views love as something that someone just "falls into",  in the Buddhist tradition, love is seen as a quality of heart, a mode of consciousness that can be consciously cultivated.  Although, we may stumble into glimpses of Oneness through an intimate connection to "Otherness" in a romantic relationship -- especially in its initial honeymoon phase -- True Love emerges from a fundamental choice to embrace Life itself, to let go of who we think we are and open our hearts and minds to the actual experience of the present moment.  

Although this can happen with the very next breath, the process of actually becoming a loving person generally doesn't just happen.  It is a Practice.  (Erich Fromm characterized it as an art in his classic work, The Art of Loving.) True Love takes commitment, time, and effort.  Like any discipline, it takes knowledge and understanding -- and patience.  I hope to still be Practicing with my final breath.
READ MORE
Cultivating True Love

In the Brahmavihara Practices of Buddhism, True Love is presented as having four qualities: kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity.  Known as the Four Immeasurables (or Divine Abodes, Boundless Abodes, Sublime States, etc.), each of these "sublime qualities" can be explored and developed in deep and lasting ways on the meditation cushion -- and the results will effect our thoughts, words, and actions in the course of our day to day lives as well. 

These practices emerge from our basic human aspiration -- and innate ability -- to experience true peace, happiness, and freedom.  That aspiration appears to be quite universal. I've seen that even those folks who aren't experiencing a lot of any of these positive qualities in their lives at the moment, can usually still get in touch with a deep longing, a yearning for these qualities to appear in our lives.  That yearning emerges from our Buddhanature.  It's impetus carries us toward wholeness and completion.  (Some refer to that as Enlightenment, although I think that term is often misconstrued.)

The Brahmavihara Practices use silent mental recitations to capture these aspirations in words as the primary object of meditation.  (Perhaps, the most widely known phrase is "May all beings be happy.") Although the specific techniques and phrases used to cultivate each of the qualities of True Love vary among the various traditions, generally a practitioner is instructed to begin with oneself (May I be...), then move to specific others, (May you be...), then move outward to all beings.  In some traditions the instruction is detailed as moving from ourselves, to specific "loved ones", then friends, then neutral persons, then "enemies", then groupings of each, then move outward to encompass all beings.  Although the traditional phrases used can be useful to get an idea of the what has been used to specifically address each of the four qualities of True Love, I've found it quite helpful to put the aspirations into my own words as well, especially when I focus on someone who I know well.  (I try to keep it real as I radiate the invisible energy of love to them. LOL)

These mental recitations are not the same as affirmations or self-hypnosis.  Although a major part of one's attention is focused on the statements that articulate one's aspirations, some of one's attention is also focused on what actually occurs in one's body and emotions.  Although feelings of the goodwill may immediately emerge, they may not -- especially in cases where one is attempting to extend  kindness and compassion to those who we find challenging.  

Yet in the cultivation of True Love, our willingness to be present for the more troublesome feelings and resistances that may emerge, to hold them with some degree of gentleness, kindness and compassion is a means, in itself, of cultivating those qualities.   And, all the while, the focus and concentration involved with staying with the mental recitation of the phrases, the dedicated "time on task" of being present for the entire experience is having its own effect in establishing a calmer, more spacious quality of mind.  

There are a multitude of  essays, books, articles, on the Brahmavihara Practices.   Most widely known in its form as Lovingkindness (or Metta or Maitri) Meditation, there are also numerous YouTube videos and guided meditations available through a simple search of the web as well.   An inveterate bookworm and practice geek, my own readings have taken me through Thich Nhat Hanh's Teachings on Love, B. Alan Wallace's The Four Immeasurables, Sharon Salzberg's Loving Kindness: The Revolutionary Heart of Happiness, and Pema Chodron's Awakening Loving-Kindness over the years.  Thich Nhat Hanh's True Love: A Practice for Awakening the Heart is on my short list.

And in the End
"And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make." -- The Beatles

Papa and GrandBabe Keaton Izzy
Although a day doesn't pass without me noticing that I could have responded with more kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity to those around me time and time again, I do know that there has been a deepening of my own ability to see that, to understand how and why it happens -- and move into the next moment more easily with greater kindness and care.

It just takes Practice.  

May all beings know True Love.

(Here's a brief collection of phrases used in Brahmavihara Practice)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

An yet another phrase to state what true love is....as stated by the most sought out inspirational teacher of OUR times. "love is the recognition of the formless in another, there by, recognizing the formless in ones self." The formless = the sacred.

Very sweet pic of you and grand baby.

Anonymous said...

I'm so sorry, I forgot to post this fantastic teacher's name. It's Eckhart Tolle.
Blessings.