You have the opportunity to build a more peaceful century. When you face conflict, you need to resolve it through dialogue and compromise. To do this you need to respect others' rights, views, and humanity, considering them as brothers and sisters. You need to think of humanity as one family.
Dalai Lama ( Desk top Calendar; Andrews McMeel; 2018)
Hmmm! Thinking of Metta kindness today. Yes...even before I came across this quote from yesterday lol. There is that cool synchronicity again at play!
Metta and Loving Kindness
Though the word Metta is a Pali term and this practice is essential to Buddhist belief, it was taught by many great teachers including Christ. In Saint Francis Assissi's famous poem , he prays "Lord, make me an instrument of your peace...where there is hatred let me sow love..." etc etc (https://grow.ourcatholicradio.org/st-francis-prayer?gclid=EAIaIQobChMIs7i059Cr5gIVGMZkCh3KCw78EAAYAiAAEgIkR_D_BwE)
Metta or Loving Kindness is a training practice that can be learned by anyone regardless of religious belief or cultural conditioning. That means one can not excuse themselves by saying, "Well I am just not the warm and mushy type "or "I am not a Buddhist and I don't believe in that stuff."
A Training Practice
Anyone can learn it and not only that...it is imperative that we must learn it if humanity is going to survive. It is a "practice" requiring a willingness and commitment to master it.
It is a training that will require many steps, many trials, many less than successful endeavors and that is okay. We simply start where we are.
Steven Schwartzberg in his Huff post article, The Two Tiers of Loving-Kindness Practice, explains two steps that the practice involves. First of all we must be willing to "try it on". We become willing to experiment with it to see what kind of changes it will make in us and in others. We might begin by practicing this with loving thoughts for those we love during our meditation practice. We open our hearts in this way. We may then practice it in our service to humanity by "giving" ourselves to the ones we love and to those who are easy to love. The old axiom, "charity begins at home" may apply here.
But...again you knew there was going to be a but right?
We cannot leave it here. We do not stop at what A Course in Miracles calls the special relationship. We don't stop at those people who we deem as special and close to us. We need to expand beyond our in groups and apply it to the out group (Tolle, 2013) . We must go beyond those who are easy to love because they somehow enrich our sense of personal and tribal self, those who are easy to love because they agree with our beliefs and opinions, those who make our life experience easier....to all. We expand beyond our narrow version of family to see all of humanity as One family. We practice offering loving-kindness to all unconditionally. Schwartsberg refers to this as the No matter what step. ( 2017 )
Not Always Easy
Of course, this is not an easy thing to master. We are so conditioned in this idea that we are separate and must protect our sense of me, my and mine ( which may include the people who we consider special) at all costs against the "thems" of the world. We spend a great deal of our mental energy both individually and collectively making lines in the sand between us and them. We spend a great deal of our resources making others into enemies in order to maintain this sense of individualized or nationalized self. Eckhart Tolle explains in the video, Conversations on Compassion with Eckhart Tolle (February 2013): The egoic self loves its enemies ; the personal self loves its problems.
It will, therefore, take some devoted training and practice to undo our need for problematic enemies and separation so we can expand our loving kindness to all. Recognizing humanity as one family may be a wonderful place to start.
Hmmm! That is just my thoughts for the day,
All is well.
ACIM
Eckhart Tolle (Feb 2103) Conversations on compassion with Eckhart Tolle. CCare at Stanford. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M00VLswZdyc
Steven Schwartzberg (December, 2017) The Two Tiers of Loving Kindness. Huff Post. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-two-tiers-of-buddhist_b_9488502
Covenant Network/Catholic Radio. Prayer of Saint Francis https://grow.ourcatholicradio.org/st-francis-prayer?gclid=EAIaIQobChMIs7i059Cr5gIVGMZkCh3KCw78EAAYAiAAEgIkR_D_BwE
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