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Resource Index | Left Brain | Right Brain | Courses | Site Directory What Have You, If You Have Not Love? --An Essay on Loving Kindness by Catherine Jetsun Yeshe Love is a topic that probably consumes more thoughts and words than any other in the history of human development. Yet it is hard to pinpoint and its various stages difficult to comprehend, for it is mixed up with ideas of lust and attachment, "do-gooderism" and even indifference. I have met angry people who speak of vegetarianism as the way to cure aggression and promote the state of love. I have met monks who pretend to demonstrate loving kindness while showing their narrowness of view, a kind of self-satisfied narcissism. I have listened to the old saw that "one must be cruel to be kind". I have yearned for lovers missing and lost. I have known the deep contentment from a love relationship founded on mutual respect and caring. I have cradled babies at my breast and walked the floors all night with sick ones. I have waited in the darkness for the dawn and watched the eternal mystery of the sky paintings of sunset wash over me. I have read and I have pondered and this is what I have found. Love is a multistoried tower; its layers both uniquely individual as well as common to us all. We begin our journey in life with the love attraction of our parents, however momentary this may be. The attraction principle is so strong that it pulls our consciousness like a comet down from the ethers into the womb. For 9 long months we dwell there, feeling so at one with our mothers that we cannot differentiate between her "selfness" and our own. Washes of feelings, good and bad, come over us and our consciousness and our sense of self is slowly formed by this nourishment. We ourselves trigger our birth with a chemical release. How we are received into this world, whether with gentle kindness or the rough forgetfulness of drugs and forceps affects our ability to function for the rest of our lives. At the breast, we learn the blessing of abhisheka, the flow of milk bliss pouring into our stomachs. Or we learn the smell of polyethylene and feel a coldness in our subtle veins. As teenagers and as young adults, we experience the excitement and torment of the energy that dwells within our loins, as it leaps and twists its way up from our bellies, flushing our faces and causing endless turnings of the mind. As parents we enter the field of tenderness, the exquisite flow of feeling that pours forth to the divine child and we experience the rage of frustrated love when all does not go well as the child develops into the young adult. Then we experience the ache that love brings when the child departs and we know that love's action is to let them go free. Again we experience the ache in the chest when our loved ones die. Finally we experience the ache of departure ourselves, sometimes held for too long by those who care for us, unwilling or unable to let us go as we return to the pool of consciousness. Love is, then, always and everywhere a part of us and of this, our human journey. At any step in life, when love is missing, our life flow is halted or twisted from its natural state. So the first step must be to repair the love within us. The teachings of Buddha and of Christ speak of loving others as we love ourselves. But, frankly, sometimes this seems the hardest step of all. The Buddha said: "I visited all quarters with my mind / Nor found I any dearer than myself / Self is likewise to every other dear / Who loves himself will never harm another." Clearly, there is an underlying assumption that the sense of self is wholesome and appropriate, at least as long as we love ourselves. In the West, however, this is often not the case. Many people have to spend years trying to rebuild the self which has been destroyed or was never formed because of the psychological damage caused by lack of love or a warped expression of love. This repair may take the form of therapy or insight practice. It can be found in the development of a craft or a skill. Perhaps best, it can be found in nature, where the ebb and flow of life seems to have love and inevitability of change at its core in equal measures. My observations tell me that when self-hatred dies, when guilt dissolves, when occupations which are wholesome and positive are taken up, that loving kindness begins to dawn within, like a valued guest who sneaks quietly into the party unannounced but not uninvited. In the patriarchal religious forms which we know today, love became divisible; its parts evidencing different aspects of it. Christian theological treatises have been written on the differences between agape and eros. Buddhists have given discourses on the attachment of the lay life which needs to be abandoned in order to take up a life of the spirit. These different aspects of love became ranked as higher and lower, reinforcing the view that the single, celibate life was somehow better, higher, or more refined than married life with children and social responsibilities. Blind following of these dictates too often resulted in abandonment of those too fragile to bear the burden they were left with. In effect, the celibate was often really running away from the healing necessary for the wound within himself or herself and the church or temple colluded by offering safe haven and deifying the action as a higher aspiration. Contrary to popular and established belief, I think there is error here. The nature of love is that it is indivisible. By that I mean, that the state of love when we are in it produces an intense experience of union, a sense of oneness that is experienced at all levels of our being. Physically, science tells us that people who are in love are less likely to fall ill; in a similar way, those who perform activities for the love of the Divine are often credited with having boundless energy. Psychologically, we know that caring for another with a heart full of love surpasses just looking after ourselves. Why? Because there is a loosening that takes place within us, a loosening and a lightening that somehow refines our innermost being. When we cease to think of our selves alone, the citadel of self, so long protected, begins to dissolve and we open to a miracle. The "grip" of self lets go and we see in our opening hearts the ebb and flow of life between beings; the law of interdependent arising becomes a living reflection, no longer a dry observation of particle physics. Paradoxically, when we focus on giving love, we find we are the greater recipients, for the love flow that comes to us comes from everywhere, certainly not just from the object of our love. When we are called upon to give up our loved ones, through death or separation or even betrayal, the depths of anguish can open us still further into love. Keeping the heart open and tender in these moments of life can result in our compassion being forged in the fires of hell, purifying our innermost nature into a place of honesty and humility in the august presence of Nature and the Divine. Obviously, to dwell in a state of love is good for us, both physically and because it opens us to a wider field of attention and knowledge than before. To act with kindness from this base becomes a natural event, for it flows from the sense of non-division which love engenders. So when the Buddha said in the Sutra on Metta that we should act with loving kindness in the same way as a mother would care for her only child, he surely did not mean that this love bond was somehow "lesser" than the love for the Divine. Rather, he used this example to indicate how knowledge of one kind of loving contact can be used to open us to a broader kind, deepening our experience of this principle. As we become secure in acting from a basis of loving kindness, its reach develops until, finally, there is no place where this cannot extend, even into the darkest corners of our souls. In the extension, the sense of self becomes ever more transparent until finally there is only Openness and Presence: Divine Love has entered and we are One. SARVA MANGALAM - BLESSINGS TO ALL
Catherine Jetsun Yeshe
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