1. A narrowly defined translation of the word ‘metta’ as loving kindness. Metta means love. This is an uncondiltional love, not a love dependent on the condition of our personality or on the body, speech and mind of others. This love also expresses itself as limitless friendship and boundless loving kindness. The power of such love makes it a divine abiding.
2. The belief that metta is a meditation practice rather than a Divine Abiding. The Theravada tradition must take responsibility for this, especially as its commentaries tell us that metta bhavana practice can lead only to concentration, not to liberating insight.
Brahma Vihara (The Abiding Place of God, of the Divine) stands as the equivalent to the Kingdom of God in Christianity. Devout Hindus believed that unity with God showed the supreme attainment – a view also shared with devout believers of monotheistic religions in India and elsewhere. Buddha disputed this view while acknowledging the power of metta, of love, to bridge the chasm between oneself the others. The Kingdom of Brahma is full of love.
Unconditional love, an immeasurable compassion, all pervading appreciative joy and unwavering equanimity reveal an extraordinarily expansive heart amidst the most challenging of circumstances. We are confusing very useful meditation practices on loving kindness etc as THE Brahma Viharas. They are a step towards such a Divine Abiding, to being in the realm of God.
We need to be very clear that the Creator God of ancient India cannot be compared to the Western belief in the Creator God. The Western God that springs initially from Middle East religions is absolute and all powerful. In India, Brahma is a God among the Gods.
There is nowhere in 5000 discourses that the Buddha offers a method and technique to develop metta. The modern concept of metta has become a practice to generate warm loving feelings – first to oneself and then to the three kinds for people, namely friends, strangers and the unfriendly. These three kinds of people then take second place oneself. Such a practice of metta for oneself, kindness for oneself and compassion for oneself can become uncomfortably close to the point of a narcissistic self-absorption. (See Chapter 7 of Visuddhimagga, a classical 5th century Theravada commentary on the Sutta).
Unconditional love is a powerful force that sweeps away negativity, pity, envy and indifference. It emerges out of deep realisations, insights in the nature of things and the authentic liberation of the heart. This love reveals itself equally in personal relationships as well as in great acts of selfless kindness towards others. Such a love can emerge from any deep insights and realisations, not just from a metta practice.
The Buddha pointed to love, compassion, appreciative joy and equanimity. He said we have the extraordinary capacity to go far beyond all limits and boundaries that the self tries to set. He offered his great insights and skilful approach to the religious experience of being with God or the Divine. He acknowledged the heart’s efforts of sincere seekers to be with God. He pointed the way to seekers. We have to ask: 'Are the current offerings of metta practices a major watering down of the liberating power of the Brahma Viharas?'
The Buddha certainly pointed to the experience of Oneness. He said: With a mind full of love (metta), one pervades the whole world with love. (See Buddhist Dictionary). Love (including loving kindness and deep friendship) is conducive to unity (MLD 104) he explained.
Practising Buddhists need to recognise the immense significance of the Brahma Viharas as the confirmation of the transformed heart.
The Buddha made frequent reference to liberation of the heart and mind through love (metta ceto-vimutti and metta-sahagatena cetasa - with a heart and mind full of love (D.1.250). See Pali-English Dictionary, page 541 on Metta.
‘The liberation of heart and mind by metta shines forth, bright and brilliant.’
‘By this liberation through love, one leaves nothing untouched, nothing unaffected in the sensuous sphere. This is the way to union with Brahma.’
‘The brightness of being that emerges through liberation by love shines 16 times more strongly than the sun, the moon and the morning’. . It27. 19-21
‘A young Brahmin, Subha, asked Gotama the way to be with God.” The Buddha gave him a very different interpretation of dwelling with Brahma than the Brahminical belief in the union of atman & Brahma
‘The Buddha replied: A man who has come from the village of Nalakara would be able to point the way to the village for others. Would that man be slow to answer?
‘Subha agreed that the man could easily and quickly point the way.
The Buddha said he knew the way to God – through liberation of mind through love, compassion, appreciative joy and equanimity.’MLD.99
Equanimity means a deep inner peace when confronted with immensely challenging circumstances. In the exchange with Subha, the Buddha did not attempt to refute Brahma (Brahma is known in India as God the Creator). He could have tried to explain to Subha that there was no Creator God, that it was a religious myth. Instead, he gave support to Subha’s deep yearning to be in God’s company. But the Buddha acknowledged the sincerity of the question and supported the young man’s earnest quest to find Brahma.
Yet, the Buddha did not treat the abiding in the Brahma Viharas as the ultimate goal since at a subtle level; our perception would remain tied to a sense of self-united with a sense of Brahma. He emphasised a total liberation - not bound to a religious experience, a construct of unity of the self with a transcendent, nor a transcendent realm, nor settling for the realm of relativity.
In a celebrated text in the first discourse of the Longer Discourses of the Buddha, the Buddha described the widespread belief in both God (Brahma) and the belief in self who finds God as two unconducive views (miccha ditthi) to total awakening to truth and reality.
He said:
“I am Brahma, the Great Brahma, the Conqueror, the Unconquered the All-Seeing, the All-Powerful, the Lord, the Maker and Creator, Ruler, Appointer and Order, Father of All That Have Been and Shall Be. These beings were created by me.
How so? Because I first had this thought: Oh, if only some other beings would come here!´ That was my wish, and then these other beings came into this existence!”
Human beings with regard to God:
“That Brahma, he made us, and he is permanent, stable, eternal not subject to change,
But we who were created by that Brahma, we are impermanent, unstable, short-lived, fated to fall away, and we have come to this world.”
The Buddha here is poking fun at the prevailing view that Brahha or God created the rest of us. Yet, the Buddha still supported the quest to experience Brahma, to abide (vihara) in God. He indicated that the problem arises only when we make Brahma into a personal God who desires that we surrender to Him. He did not regard such views as revealing an ultimate and liberating wisdom but only narrow beliefs. For the Buddha, the true Brahma Vihar is stripped of all notions of a personal God who desires the presence of loving souls.
Metta as a Personal Therapy
Contemporary techniques for developing metta are a useful an effective personal therapy. It is important to stress the important value of such practices for our emotional life so that loving kindness features more in our daily life. It is necessary to keep distinguishing these basic practices of love, compassion, appreciative joy and equanimity from the transformative experience found the Brahma Vihara.
There is nothing divine about using techniques to develop metta for oneself or others. These metta practices contribute to the creation of positive feelings towards all beings and diminishing of negative feelings. The techniques serve as a valid resource to help in the process of overcoming blame, resentment and negativity. But practitioners must journey to the deepest place in their heart if they truly wish to enter the realm of a Divine Abiding, and never return to mundane and reactive states of mind.
If a person’s heart suddenly enters into a Brahma Vihara, the person will never be the same again. He or she won’t go back into the mundane realms of greed and hate, desire and aversion. The Buddha has made this very clear. The current flux of metta practices and a Divine Abiding are light years apartin depth of realisation.
Furthermore, it seems hardly likely that the Buddha effectively belittled spiritual practitioners with a handful of simple tools to practice loving kindness, as if these preliminaries to the heart constituted union with Brahma. The consummation of such religious endeavours goes much further than sitting in meditation spreading loving kindness to oneself and others.
Yogis, Brahmins, rishis, mystics, sages, ascetics and dedicated devotees to God would not regarded use of simple techniques for metta and associated positive feelings as abiding in the Brahma Viharas.
The current lightweight teachings on the Brahma Viharas have become stripped of the religious and historical significance and probably represent the most watered down example in the spirit and letter of the original of the Buddha’s teachings, as found in the Pali discourses.
God as unconditional love is a sacred tenet of religions of the world. As their birthright, the Brahmins assumed that only they had access to Brahma but when the Buddha asked if people from all four castes could generate unconditional love and boundless kindness in all directions, the Brahmin scholar had to agree.The Buddha acknowledged the potential for total liberation through such love for all.
Love, the Rational and Equanimity
We live in an era of being impressed with neuroscience. Scientists lead us to believe that they can measure experiences through the activity of the brain. Neuroscientists believe experiences have a material cause. There is a notion that the brain causes the stimulation of biological compounds that triggers certain sensation that we refer to as love.
This one sided scientific and intellectual analysis bears little relationship to our hearts exposure to the liberating force of unconditional love and our dedication to the important and healthy actions that naturally flow on from it. It is not only science that discredits love but also theorists, rationalists, intellectuals, researchers, competitive business and hard hearted sports coaches. Rationalism discredits love as an unconscious desire, a search for attention and approval springing from isolation. Individuals feel immature for falling in love, being in love, loving too much or being too much of a feeling type. They believe they have to learn to be rational, to reduce the influence of the feelings emerging from their heart. People who serve others without seeking significant remuneration hear they are not living in the real world. There is a systematic undermining of the liberating power of love.
Those who live in the mind and believe in the measurement of thought become detached from their heart. They are prone to undermining ‘feeling types.’ If the scientific/rationalist view becomes the prevailing standpoint, we will become dry as dust – automatons for scientific materialism and totally tied to productivity, efficiency and profit in the workplace. We will only think for ourselves. The Buddha is a staunch supporter of the heart, of deep spiritual experiences and the power of love and compassion in the world. Scientists and secularists who believe they alone are living in the real world delude themselves.
The Pali word for equanimity ‘upekkha, the fourth Brahma Vihara, points to our extraordinary capacity to be at peace in the most trying of circumstances. The Buddha said let us be like the Earth that remains equanimous no matter how much we dump shit and piss on it. One is reminded of the terrible fate of the prisoners of war in Guantanamo Bay who have buckets of shit poured over them to humiliate them and degrade their dignity. Denied basic human rights, these prisoners will need to abide in a Divine Realm to withstand the obscene abuse of the interrogrators.. May Allah be with them.
Equanimity gets confused with neutralisation of feelings, a suppressed temperament and a passive indifference to oneself and others. To its credit, The tradition recognizes this danger, and describes indifference as the ‘near enemy’ of upekkha Secular culture encourages us to dampen down our feelings, to gain control over our emotional life. Some Buddhist traditions with the emphasis on intensive meditation are prone to this view. Some serious minded meditators have latched onto equanimity to justify their alienation from their heart. Their detachment inhibits the passion for liberating the heart through unconditional love without any traces of suppression. We need to be clear what we need to be equanimous about - namely towards the reactive forces of attraction and aversion, losing what we have and not getting what we want.
Equanimity can lose its relevance as an invaluable application to challenging circumstances and instead become a rigid, fixed state of mind devoid of heartfelt engagement with life. Indifference also is confused with equanimity, thus leaving us bereft from love, romance and Eros. From this inner place of emotional alienation, individuals will view others merely as products of their karma, as only subject to birth and death, or treat sentient beings as bundles of energy. There is heartlessness in these perceptions.
On a recent trip to Australia, a disc jockey, named Parvati interviewed me on her radio station in Byron Bay, New South Wales. Parvarti has a weekly programme on Love inviting spiritual teachers, psychologists and visiting gurus to explore with her contemporary issues. In the interview, she said that she had observed, and others as well, that dedicated Buddhists often seem very serious and appear at arm’s length from their emotional life. I agreed. It is an issue – despite all the Buddha’s teachings on love, passion, being with the divine, happiness and joy.
Intense retreats, extended periods of sitting meditation, using the will to be mindful from one moment to the next and the effort to concentrate on a certain goal can exclude the immeasurable expanse of the heart, the transformative power of love and the application of a creative vision.
We have to bring unconditional love back into the centre of the Dharma. We revere the explorations of the power of love in great works of literature, as well as what our songwriters, poets, artists, actors, and filmmakers offer us. It is rather ironic that we may have to turn our attention to fiction for insight and inspiration into the truth of the power of love rather than just non-fiction. There is certainly a intensely self-centred world found among artists but it would be totally unfair to tar all in the artistic community with the same brush. We have to concentrate on the insights into unconditional love so that our realisations transform our lives. Art matters. Art comes first, not the self.
The ego of the artist, whether riddled with self aggrandizement or self-doubt, can block off realisation of the power of love even while revealing an artistic expression of such love. The self’s desire for name and fame, the yearning for status and the wish for public and private recognition haunt the ego. In the intensely self-centred world of the arts, and widespread narcissicism in the lives of people dedicated to culture, the awakening of love can remain a secondary consideration to the inflammation of the ego. The story of the lives of actors and artists come to matter far more than the art. The desire to be the A-list is an ego trip.
The exploration of love in art and culture matter far more than the personal lives of the actors and artists involved. The layers of superficiality of the self obscure an opportunity for us to give attention to the arts as a means for inner realization. We escape our lives through the voyeuristic attention we give to the lives of others especially the rich and shameless. There is an emotional seduction when we slip into gossip about the love lives of others. We are fascinated with popular culture. Thus, insights into profound love elude us. Art and culture has let us down as artists have sold out to personal publicists, advertisers, binding contracts and self-promotion. Art then becomes a prostitute. Love is treated as a commodity.
Let us applaud those who stay true to art, true to love without compromise.
The Challenge of the Buddha
The Buddha questioned the range of beliefs, experiences and views about God and the self. He pointed out that these beliefs were dependent on what the self makes of feelings. The Buddha listed 62 different views around the permanent and the impermanent, the eternal and annihilation, the infinite and the finite.
Instead, he said that Unconditional Love belongs to the Divine. This love is the Brahma Vihara. It was a radical shift of emphasis away from devotion to God and adherence to practices, including rituals and services to get closer to God. In the Brahmajala Sutta (Discourse on the Net of God), the Buddha said that all priests and religious scholars (Brahmins) and samanas (homeless spiritual seekers, yogis) of past, present and future adhere to one or more of these views that involve beliefs about eternity, about the fate of the world, about existence after death, extinction and perceptions about personal liberation. It does not take much identification with certain feelings to spark our views and opinions. The entire structure of monotheism depends upon the interpretation of our feelings.
While philosophy concerns itself with the application of thought, analysis of our relationship to the world, linguistics and myriad number of views, the Dharma endorses the discipline of watching the impact of ALL feelilngs and thought upon our consciousness, our heart and mind and our lives. We inquire into our the speculative opinions, the projections that bolster our ideas and the clinging to standpoints about anything.
Without giving love an absolute status, the Buddha nevertheless recognised its liberating importance. He fully endorsed the power of love (metta) and further expressions of it in terms of compassion, appreciative joy and equanimity otherwise he would simply have dismissed the Brahma Viharas altogether from this teachings. The Buddha preferred to transform religious language rather than reject it. In ancient India, the people looked up to Indra, the leader of the Gods. So the Buddha taught the five Indriyas, the leaders for the inner life, namely trust, mindfulness, energy, meditative concentration and wisdom.
Indian religious history and religious dictionaries have consistently defined Brahma as the Creator God, and the Buddha would have been fully aware of the emotive and symbolic potency for believers in Brahma. The Buddha did not dump Brahma; nor reduce Brahma Viharas to the feel good factor, as in some metta practices, but acknowledged devotees’ love of God and how enriching the experience is. Incidentally Vihara is the Pali word for ‘monastery’ and ironically, Bihar, poorest, most violent and corrupt state in India, where Buddha came to full realisation, derives from Vihara. The current State of Bihar hardly reflects a Divine Aibiding!
Generally speaking, religion has fallen into the trap of substituting or mixing love with beliefs hence conflict, dogma, terror and a self-righteous morality. Religious institutions, including Buddhism, impose their standards and their codes on individuals. Those who fall foul of the religious authority get subjected to excommunication, banishment, being silenced or public announcements that present a woefully lopsided version of events. Protection of the name and reputation of the religion or the institution matter far more than truth, love or justice. We need to distinguish between hidden hostility in the name of clarity and wise action. In the name of metta, we can engage in unwholesome actions to get out own way.
Where is the love?
Love often takes second place to our oscillation between our obsessive preoccupation with ourselves, others important to us and those who exist outside of our coterie of contacts. Even if there is a genuine lack of interest in superficial culture often of television or sport, we may not escape the numbing impact of a comfortable lifestyle, financial pursuits, weekend entertainment, sandy beaches, holiday hotels and loss of adventure.
If we take fully on board the centrifugal force of unconditional love, it genuinely expands our potential for a truly awakened life, and even at the relative level opens up all manner of possibilities. We are much more likely to take risks, to venture out beyond the restrictions of consciousness especially when we feel supported, appreciated and loved. Love acts as an indispensable crucible for real change. It moves us beyond the limitations and inhibitions of the self.
Speaking on the four expressions of Love in the Divine Abidings, the Buddha repeatedly said that one with a mind full of love pervades first one direction, then a second one, then a third one, then a fourth one, just so above, below and all around, and everywhere one pervades the whole world with a mind full of love, wide, developed, unbounded, free from hate and ill will.
By any standards, this is a strong injunction that challenges every cell in our being. The Buddha offers no prescription for generating such love other than to wake up, to look deeply into the dependently arising conditions and to treat others as we wish to be treated. He reminded us that we are all subjected to birth, aging, pain and death. The Buddha said the power of unconditional love not only enables us to withstand blame and anger but also the most intense forms of hatred, verbal and physical abuse, even to the point of torture and a slow execution with a ‘two handed saw.’
It would be a restriction on such love to confine it to meditation practices or application to daily life through being non-judgemental. If we misunderstand the depth of love referred to in the Buddha’s teachings, we will interpret love as being a nice person, always politically correct, who never raises a critical voice or challenges the views or beliefs of others.
When an ascetic, named Kassapa claimed that real yogis fasted regularly and only cultivated sitting and standing practice to exhaust all their karma. The Buddha pointed to a different set of values – namely the cultivation and application of three-fold training of ethics, samadhi, and wisdom. He said that from the fruits of this training, metta (love) and liberation through direct knowing emerges. He referred to the Brahma Viharas as virtually a sysnonym for the ultimate truth – limitless.
The Buddha revealed a fearless determination to use the conventional religious language of the Kingdom of God, recognise its place in the field of religious/spiritual/mystical experience and reinterpret. He simply retained the language and redefined it. This may not sit easy with strictly non-theistic Buddhists so some Buddhist translators have translated the word “Brahma” as ‘Sublime.’ This misses the point of the Buddha’s wise use of skilful means.
The Buddha did not restrict himself to transform the self as a step towards personal salvation. He did not settle for this view, or all the accompanying perceptions that accompany it, nor treat love as the ultimate state. With the notion of the God of love can arise views of a God who loves us and call upon us to be with Him now and forever. We might also believe that we possess an immortal soul, a personal essence heind our personality.
As a result, we think we need to purify the self, find our True Self and realise our immortality. Skilfully, the Buddha made use of the language of Brahma and love while revealing the emptiness of the self and Other, self and God. He took hold of these constructs by the scruff of the neck, employed them and then went a big step further. While real love is truly divine and has the capacity to go in all directions, it still belongs to the field of dependent arising circumstances rather than an absolute state.
Love and Not Love
Real love makes us aware not only of the areas where we express love towards others and ourselves but also those localities where our love falls short of its potential. It may show itself towards ourselves, others, place and time, as well as our potential and vision. Love has genuinely liberating possibilities from the tyranny of the self, often showing as greed, hate and delusion.
An authentic love finds countless ways for its manifestation. Love stands not within the law but independent of it. Most forms of public service work within the law. The leader offers his or her services and charges a fee or stipend that the organisers agree to pay or the participants pay per person. It is a contract, similar to going to the shop with the agreement to pay for an item. Society functions on this legal approach to exchange whether of services or goods. Work, family, the arts can provide the catalyst for extraordinary expressions of love with personal benefits a minor consideration. One of the ways a profound and deep love reveals itself is through service to others.
There are countless numbers who support charities or foundations, without making any charge whatsoever. It is also a gift (dana) of love. As a Dharma teacher, who depends totally on donations, I am greatly appreciative for the love and generosity from the Sangha to support my work throughout the year. I offer different forms of Dharma programmes. The organisers agree to cover my travel expenses from door to door. At the end of the programme, I make a five minute appeal for donations for myself, other teachers and programme organisers to cover all the usual living expenses.
Love acts outside the law. Dharma participants make a voluntary donation. There is no obligation to express love in this form nor is it a payment for services thus defying legislation, social norms, rules of contract or a measurement of the service. In this sense, love reveals as a donation, time, energy, presence or commitment and emerging out of the heart, out of awareness. We are sometimes surprised at our unplanned acts of love that enter into an encounter with others. There is a genuine mystery to true love. Our heart suddenly responds with a gift, with the act of kindness and the purposeful gesture never planned.
The potency of our love enables not only a diminishing of our defensive patterns but a capacity to reach out to others without dependency on the consequences. We trust in love even when things go pear shaped or with results undesirable to others or ourselves. Jesus is the archetype of ‘self-less’ love. Brave, bold and deeply caring, he never compromised his message of unconditional love even though he knew the risks involved and the probability he would be brutally tortured, nailed to the cross, stripped naked and ignominiously left to die a horrendous death. Jesus stayed true to love, right until his last breath. The Buddha said that after he died the next Buddha would be Maitreya Buddha (the Buddha of Love). It is going to take a rather extraordinary human being to take love a step further than Jesus (born 500 years after the Buddha) whose name means so much to so many people on this Earth.
The last two lines of the second verse of the poem, The More Loving One, by W.H. Auden, the much loved English poet, has struck a chord in the hearts of many people.
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The More Loving One
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well That, for all they care, I can go to hell, But on earth indifference is the least We have to dread from man or beast.
With a passion for us we could not return? If equal affection cannot be, Let the more loving one be me.
Of stars that do not give a damn, I cannot, now I see them, say I missed one terribly all day.
Were all stars to disappear or die, I should learn to look at an empty sky And feel its total dark sublime, Though this might take me a little time |
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As a revolutionary force for consciousness, love stands free from the limitations that we impose upon it such as the capacity to feel connected or intimate with another, others or an environment. We easily associate love with connection and separation with the loss of love. Love is a force that stays steady whether we connect with another or others or not. In the Brahma Vihara, we love even though we are not loved.
Just as the Church gradually substitute the teachings of Jesus with the Church as the central authority, so the Theravada tradition and interpretation of the Buddha’s teachings gradually take on more importance than the original teachings. The transformative power of love gradually loses its significance and is replaced by techniques, rules and a self-righteous morality while the Brahma Vihara meditations become reduced from liberating practices to concentration techniques.
Love is more powerful than life and death, attraction and aversion, personal history, present circumstances or vulnerabilities in the future. It is a distinctive feature of love that it offers no assurance in any form whatsoever of a duration of circumstances.
A counsellor asked a young mother woman with a brain tumour how she felt knowing that in a matter of weeks or months, she would leave her children behind. The woman remained quiet for several moments, looked up, and said with total conviction. “Love is indestructible.” This is a beautiful expression of the divine love that the Buddha advocates.
The Buddha’s Discourse on Love
In the experience of love, as an intense and deep reflection, the cells reveal a certain charge, a vitalisation of energetic life, a natural sense of aliveness and a valid and dependable sense of being awake. This presence, at times, bursting into the quality of an electric charge, converts the ordinary into the experience of the extraordinary; a joyous, even blissful, sense pervades past, present and future. We easily forget that human life offers a natural and untroubled affinity with the dynamics of change, of presence and absence, the pleasant and the painful, the accepted and the rejected. In the very vibration of loving presence, we abide in an ease with the momentary features in daily life.
The Buddha makes it clear it is not possible to enter into the Brahma Vihara and then go back to unresolved negativity and then go back into the Brahma Vihara. Take notice of the last two lines in the much loved Metta Sutta of The Buddha.
This is what should be done
By one who is skilled in goodness
And who know the path of peace
Let them be able and upright
Straightforward and gentle in speech
Humble and not conceited
Contented and easily satisified
Unburdened with duties and frugal in their ways
Peaceful and calm, and wise and skilful,
Not proud and demanding in naure.
Let them not do the slilghtest thing
That the wise would later reprove.
Wishing: In gladness and in asafety,
May all beings be at ease.
Whatever living beings there may be
Whether they are weak or strong, omitting none
The great or the might, medium, short or small,
The seen and the unseen,
Those living near and far away,
Those born and to be born
may all beings be at ease.
Let none deceive another
Or despise any being in any state
Let none through anger or ill will
Wish harm upon another
Even as a mother protects with her life
Her child, her only child
So with a boundless heart
Should one cherish all lving beings;
Radiating kindness over the entire world;
Spreading upwards to the skies
And downwards to the depths
Outwards and unbounded
Freed from hatred and ill will
Whether standing or walking, seated lying down
Free from drowsiness,
One should sustain this recollection
This is said the divine abiding
By not holding to fixed views
The pure hearted ones, having clarity of vision
Being free from all sense-desires
Is not born again into this world.
Here the Buddha exhorts us a straightforward account of a boundless heart so that we abide in such a way that the divine offers a freedom from dependency on the pursuit of pleasure so that the ego, ‘I, me and my’ does not land in the world of selfish desire.
In this discourse, the Buddha made a powerful and unambiguous statement on the power of love as a force for liberation from desire, free from the pursuit of pleasure and feeding egotism. He urged dedicated dharma practitioners to sustain this recollection for clarity of vision and non-holding to views and standpoints. He placed love firmly in the very heart of his teachings. Any exaggerated emphasis on mindfulness or meditation alone will overlook the significance of love.
With love serving as a vehicle for real change, it often gives the sense not so much of a new and unfamiliar experience but rather the expression of a meaningful state of being that has been neglected or ignored for far too long. There is such a presence to divine love that it saturates the senses and sense objects. It would not be going too far to write that consciousness mutates when love fills the centre and outer edges of consciousness to the degree that wearisome old patterns and impulsive reactivity drops away. The world of self and other linger lightly in the freedom made available through love.
At times, love that generates in all directions seems far easier than love for oneself or those who are very close to us. In close relationships, we become haunted with various tendencies. There is a wish for acknowledgement, the desire to please and the effort to get our own way.
Real love changes the self, especially freeing it from a painful view of the past, present of future. We can regard love as a vital nucleus around which the life of ourselves and others revolve. With the expectations and demands of the self-lowered, it leaves the potential for an organic movement of consciousness into fresh directions. We experience an expansive flow of energy and being at ease with changing conditions.
Love Makes the World Go Around
I recall a few months ago a Dharma teacher in California asked me about my future timetable. I had just arrived in San Francisco from New York. I said that I arrived back in London from San Francisco on the Tuesday. I flew to Germany on the Wednesday, flew home on Sunday, taught the Dharma Facilitators Progamme (DFP) in Totnes, Devon, UK from the Thursday to Sunday and again taught the DFP in Brighton from the Thursday to Sunday, then flew to Germany on the following Friday. I flew back to London on the Sunday evening, then that same evening flew to Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, then within a few days, I gave the DFP with Radha in Balina in South Wales, immediately followed by giving a retreat, then a public talks, a few days with family, then onto lead the Dharma Gathering…
For a moment, I felt tired relating the schedule! Love gives energy. Resistance consumes it. Many have a far more rigorous and challenging timetable than I experience. I have long since realised for myself that love makes service possible – love of the Buddha, Dharma and Sangha, love of travel, aloneness, my partner and family, being with others and love of resting in what is unfolding in the here and now and love of being back home. The longest I have spent in one place in the past 32 years is two months. Meditation has taught me to be able to rest in the moment – whether on a plane, train, bus, car, on a platform, in an airport, wheeling luggage, sitting in a seat or standing. It is the perception of events, with love, that make rest and relaxation possible and minimises the sense of a long journey. Resistance to travel and serving the dharma makes life stressful. Metta makes for a relexed life, happines and vitality.
Love also brings extra enormous joy when it is reciprocated enabling regular renewals of creative vision, passionate engagement and a fearless trust. The Sangha is precious, supportive and worthy of wise counsel.
We need to sit up and take notice of the deep significance of the Brahma Viharas. Love is a creative, revolutionary and liberating force. Know the Divine through your own experience.
May all being live with unconditional love
May all beings know the heart’s liberation through love