Sunday, March 22, 2015

Sharon Salzberg: Relearning Loveliness

Whatever our spiritual or religious tradition, this is for each of us. 
May we all recover knowledge of the loveliness that is our essential nature.
Namaste ~ Molly


"To reteach a thing its loveliness" is the nature of metta. Through lovingkindness, everyone and everything can flower again from within. When we recover knowledge of  our own loveliness and that of others, self-blessing happens naturally and beautifully.

 Metta, which can be translated from Pali as "love" or "loveliness," is the first of the brahma-viharas, the "heavenly abodes." The others - compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity - grow out of metta, which supports and extends these states.

In our culture, when we talk about love, we usually mean either passion or sentimentality. It is crucial to distinguish metta from both of these states. Passion is enmeshed with feelings of desire, of wanting or of owning and possessing. Passion gets entangled with needing things to be a certain way, with having our expectations met. The expectation of exchange that underlies most passion is both conditional and ultimately defeating. "I will love you as long as you behave in the following fifteen ways, or as long as you love me in return at least as much as I love you." It is not a coincidence that the word passion derives from the Latin word for "suffering." Wanting and expectation inevitably entail suffering.

By contrast, the spirit of metta is unconditional: open and unobstructed. Like water poured from one vessel to another, metta flows freely, taking the shape of each situation without changing its essence. A friend may disappoint us; she may not meet our expectations, but we do not stop being a friend to her. We may in fact disappoint ourselves, may not meet our own expectations, but we do not cease to be a friend to ourselves.

Sentimentaliy, like the other mental state that masquerades as love, is really an ally of delusion. It is a facsimile of caring that limits itself only to experiences of pleasure. Like looking through the lens of a camera that has been smeared with a little Vaseline, sentimentality puts things into what is called "soft focus." We cannot see the rough edges, the trouble spots, or the defects. Everything appears just too nice. Sentimentality finds pain unbearable and so rejects it.

Our vision becomes very narrow when we need things to be a certain way and cannot accept things the way they actually are. Denial functions almost as a kind of narcotic, so that vital parts of our lives end up missing.

It is fear of pain that provokes and sustains this splitting off of parts of ourselves. To avoid feeling pain, we shut out crucial portions of awareness, even though this closing off, this internal separation, is deadening. 

 Sometimes as individuals, or as members of a group, we may sacrifice the truth in order to secure our identity, or preserve a sense of belonging. Anything that threatens this gives rise to fear and anxiety, so we deny, we cut off our feelings. The end result of this pattern is dehumanization. We become split from our own lives and feel great distance from other living beings as well. As we lose touch with our inner life, we become dependent on the shifting winds of external change for a sense of who we are, what we care about, and what we value. The fear of pain that we tried to escape becomes, in fact, our constant compassion...

When we practice metta, we open continuously to the truth of our actual experience, changing our relationship to life. Metta - the sense of love that is not bound to desire, that does not have to pretend that things are other than the way they are - overcomes the illusion of separateness, of not being part of a whole. Thereby metta overcomes all of the states that accompany this fundamental error of separateness - fear, alienation, loneliness, and despair - all of the feelings of fragmentation. In place of these, the genuine realization of connectedness brings unification, confidence, and safety...

Metta is the ability to embrace all parts of ourselves, as well as all parts of the world. Practicing metta illuminates our inner integrity because it relieves us of the need to deny different aspects of ourselves. We can open to everything with the healing force of love. When we feel love, our mind is expansive and open enough to include the entirety of life in full awareness, both its pleasures and its pains. We feel neither betrayed by pain or overcome by it, and thus we can contact that which is undamaged within us regardless of the situation. Metta sees truly that our integrity is inviolate, no matter what our life situation may be. We do not need to fear anything. We are whole: our deepest happiness is intrinsic to the nature of our minds, and it is not damaged through uncertainty and change...

We can understand the inherent radiance and purity of our minds by understanding metta. Like the mind, metta is not distorted by what it encounters. Anger generated within ourselves or within others can be met with love; the love is not ruined by the anger. Metta is its own support, and thus it is free of inherently unstable conditions. The loving mind can observe joy and peace in one moment, and then grief in the next moment, and it will not be shattered by the change. A mind filled with love can be likened to the sky with a variety of clouds moving through it - some light and fluffy, others ominous and threatening. No matter the situation, the sky is not affected by the clouds. It is free.

The Buddha taught that the forces in the mind that bring suffering are able to temporarily hold down the positive forces such as love or wisdom, but they can never destroy them. The negative forces can never uproot the positive, whereas the positive forces can actually uproot the negative forces. Love can uproot fear or anger or guilt, because it is a greater power...

 The practice of metta, uncovering the force of love that can uproot fear, anger, and guilt, begins with befriending ourselves. The foundation of metta practice is to know how to be our own friend... With metta practice we uncover the possibility of truly respecting ourselves. We discover, as Walt Whitman put it, "I am larger and better than I thought. I did not think I held so much goodness."

 Directly seeing the natural radiance of our minds reteaches us own own loveliness. To allude to a phrase in the Zen tradition, this is our original face before we were born - before we were born into identification with a separate, limited self. Recognizing our own power to love points us directly to recognizing this primordial radiance.
- Sharon Salzberg: excerpted from Lovingkindness: 
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