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This week's summary:
We must remember: the
rendition of meditation we so often see in pop culture -- that is,
through television, magazines, and advertisement -- is not
representative of the meditation Buddhism teaches, nor the breathing
meditation we wish to practice. Neither is it something altogether
esoteric from the world; it is something we do in as action response
to the observation of our wandering mind. We do not meditate to
become like the people we see in the ads, but to habitually exercise
our control over mind. The moment that we feel that our involvement
with a thought is more important than our practice -- this is the
moment, over all others, for us to let it go, and we do this by
meditating.
There is a story of an
old man who interrogated the Buddha regarding happiness. The Buddha
told him to venture out into the world and find out. On the man's
journey, he met a young girl, whom he asked regarding happiness. She
told him that happiness is love. He then carried on to meet a king,
who told him happiness was surrendering. Finally, a passing soldier
confided that happiness was nothing other than peace.
The young girl's answer,
love, comprises today's lesson. Love is a single word with many,
varied meanings. A sense of love we can all likely identify with,
however, is one that is in near proximity to its seemed opposition:
hate. How is this so? How is it we can feel such love for someone,
to then be capable of turning against them -- or them against you --
in the flash of a moment's passing? How is it that we can feel such
love for our parents, our siblings, our children, and yet discover
tempered resentment toward the object of our passions, our lover,
our partner?
Love is certainly
emotion; we feel it in the presense of someone we care for. Just as
well, we can feel hate, and even for the same person for whom we
felt love. Love of this sort is addressed in the teachings of the
Buddha in the same fashion other emotions are. They are all capable
of controlling us, puppeteering us, making us lose sight of what is
happening beyond our tantrums and yearnings. Love of this sort, like
all things, is subject to change, and like everything else, it does
just this. Love transforms into one of two particular other emotions
(though anyone can also easily experience both of these at a given
time): pain, and fear.
Where love induces pain
or fear, one can be sure to trace it to a fundamental problematic
for all sufferings: attachments. Where love really takes the form of
lust (though we may not immediately recognize it), one experiences
attachment to the object of passions, which brings suffering as both
loved and lover change through time. This is a limited love, one
that can easily, and intermittently, become hatred for the other, a
self-induced estrangement by the nature of attachment.
However, if one really
come to understand love, as we strive to do in our personal
development through meditation, we can recognize a righteous sort of
love, one that bears no hint of attachment but merely an
unconditional respect for one's partner. There is another story that
the wife the Buddha left in his search for truth eventually became a
nun under his teachings and practiced techniques of personal
development as we do today.
As the two became older,
the Buddha's wife realized that she would soon die and sook the
Buddha out to tell him of her vision. The Buddha, whose immense
respect for his wife helped him see her unconditional respect for
him, weighed this new information and decided he too would leave
this world. Together, they escaped samsara, leaving with what they
had the good fortune to discover before their end: their undying
love that, like them, took no part in the attachments of those who
suffer, but in the transcendence of those who recognize the
unconditional truth.
If
one can cultivate a love of this second sort, they will never encounter through
it the pains and fears the former love entails. The love between the Buddha and
his wife is the sort that a parent feels for their children, or a sibling for
another sibling. It stems from the righteous act of giving and forgiving, and
in this way love resembles no emotion but deliberate, intentional action. This
comparison demonstrates the difference between having love and giving love; for
one can never truly 'have' anything, including love, but can always be in the
ever perpetual and ever rewarding process of giving. Giving is kindness, and
together we recognize the manifest characteristic of unconditional love: loving
kindness.
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