*
May all beings find happiness and the cause of happiness.
May they be free from suffering and the cause of suffering.
May they not be separated from the great happiness that is free from suffering.
May they abide in great equanimity, free from attachment and aversion to those near and far.
*
So, that’s a prayer that I recite daily. More than daily. The Four Immeasurables, or Brahmaviharas. The prayer is a very sweet one I think, pretty hard to object to. You want everyone to be happy, to be free from suffering, and to gain equanimity and enlightenment. Everyone. Everyone. Everyone.
It’s a way of changing your own conditioned thinking. Before this practice I did not have a lot of experience wishing good things for other people. I mean, I thought I kind of did, in a way, I mean, I didn’t hate everyone. Just that guy at work. And this lady in front of me in the check out line. And that asshole in the fast lane. Etc.
I had never made it a part of my day to just say, “Hey, I want everyone to be happy and not to suffer.”
Does it work?
Yeah, I think so. I think it does. I’ve seen that it has helped me be more actively compassionate. More patient. More willing to see everyone around me as kind of in the same boat. Everyone wants to be happy. That guy just wants the pain to stop and he’s doing the best he knows how. That lady, man, she’d give anything not to feel the way she’s feeling right now. That old man on the bench. The guy driving the bus.
We are all the same in that simple reality.
The equanimity part is a little bit strange at first. I thought it was at least. “May they abide in great equanimity”…that part I get, but… “free from attachment and aversion to those near and far.”- that part gave me pause. I am attached. I am attached to those around me, those I love. And I have aversion to those I don’t love, those who harm me and my family and you, too. So, what’s that mean to say that? Do I want everyone to be a kind of emotionally dead robot who neither loves nor hates anyone, but treats everyone the same? Reacts to everyone the same? Isn’t that a kind of death? I mean, isn’t there an objective good and bad and shouldn’t we draw our lines accordingly? Aren’t we abdicating what it means to be a fully human entity if we seek that kind of equanimity for ourselves and even wish it on others?
For me the key is that concept of “attachment” and “aversion.” It doesn’t say, or mean, that we should not love. We must love. But we don’t need to attach. Attachment is an unnecessary aspect of love and doesn’t really add anything to the pure expression of love. Right? I mean, we’ve all felt that ugly clinging side to love where it comes with this plea- “don’t leave me! do what I want! meet my needs!”
That’s not the kind of love we should be cultivating.
The same with aversion. We can understand that someone is harming us or acting unskillfully without having aversion. Without hating them. If we see clearly enough, we begin to understand that they are also simply seeking happiness and trying to avoid pain, whatever the pain they’re inflicting on us and others. They’re confused. They’re acting out of a lack of understanding about what really works when it comes to happiness.
So the goal really does become “love everyone.” Love. Everyone. Love them knowing that they are doing their best, just like you. Love them knowing they’ll let you down and betray you, despite their best intentions. Love knowing they will die in car crashes and falling in the bathtub and of old age and cancer and the other million ways they do. Love them knowing they’re not at all any different from you, that they are full of all the same fears and doubts and inadequacies that you are.
Maybe it’s impossible. But I make the wish in a very concrete way, out loud, first thing every morning when I sit. I say it last thing at night when I get into bed. I think it as often as I can manage during the day. And that’s where the change happens. It happens inside my own brain. After doing this for a while, I start to see everyone as my brother. I’m like George Bailey running down the streets of Bedford Falls. I want to hug everyone. Everyone. Everyone. When I find myself getting irritated I can sometimes now remember that they’re trying, too, just like me. And my heart wells up with love for them. For the burdens they’re bearing with such dignity and for their brave, tangled hearts. And then a really strange thing happens and that is that you see that although it is all just happening in your own brain, it actually changes the whole world outside you.
It actually becomes a different kind of world.
*
To me this is why I practice Buddhism with such intensity and fervor. It has an observable effect on my inner world and an undeniable effect on the outer world as a result. It is like getting Photoshop that works on the world I see around me.
It is an efficacious pursuit.
*
Namaste.
***
The Dishwasher's Tears 
Yes
indeed.
thanks for coming by and sharing.
may you, too, be happy. And free from suffering. May you abide in great equanimity.
i mean it!
yrs-
Scott
Scott, you are an inspiration – you have no idea how helpful it is to hear these things this morning. I have just been through a pretty prolonged and confounding heart-shattering experience, part of it to do with my own illusions and delusions. Quite a shock to realise the compassion and steadfastness I aspire towards have such shaky foundations. I woke up on Friday to a vital piece of ‘missing’ piece of complex relationship puzzle I’ve been close-to-completely undone by. An email I’d hoped to receive last June never arrived and because I was unable to trust (specifically and generally) I spiralled into a loop of unproductive suffering and shadow projections that were confounding and wounding both to self and other. One missing email was all it took to completely unhinge me. I have a reasonable regular meditation practice and have considered myself a diligent student of life, only to find that at a point of deep personal testing, I failed abysmally, setting in motion a string of unanticipated events that could have been entirely avoided. It grieved me to find myself plummeting back into the reactivity of the jagged and wounded warrior. I found it very hard to maintain equanimity or to be in any way graceful. Ouch. Ouch. Ouch. And yet, ‘oh’ and ‘yes’, too, for every experience like this brings us to our knees and becomes an opportunity to humbly try again. . . I find I struggle with shame when I get something horribly wrong and have to draw on all my ‘head/learned’ resources to steer a way through without falling over. Apologies for the long saga. Everything you’ve written here today feels like balm and encouragement. I am grateful – thank you. And warm encouragements to you, too. Claire
Claire-
It’s always heartbreaking when we see our own hand in our suffering. And worse when we see how we inflict pain on others out of our confusion and lack of skill. But it is a beautiful gift, too, to be present enough to see it clearly. That clarity provides the best hope for change. It’s just much too easy to turn a blind eye to our own contribution to unhappiness- I think we’re pretty good at seeing most of our own faults but we really have a hard time seeing how we hurt ourselves and others by trying always to follow the dictates of our screaming egos.
When we feel threatened, abandoned, unloved, cheated, ignored, that’s when the risk is greatest. Our egos go into overdrive, desperate to gain solid footing, and that’s when we tend to act with the least skill, the most reactivity.
By we, I mean myself of course.
I’m so grateful to you for sharing this with me and letting me know that this post was of benefit to you in some small way.
And bravo to you for using the whole thing as an impetus to humbly try again to regain your grace and equanimity. It’s always there for us, we just need to remember to avail ourselves of it.
yours,
Scott
Dear Scott.
Thank you.
I came upon these two paragraphs later this morning —
“. . . And before you can attain knowledge you must have passed through all places, foul and clean alike. Therefore, remember that the soiled garment you shrink from touching may have been yours yesterday, may be yours tomorrow. And if you turn with horror from it, when it is flung upon your shoulders, it will cling the more closely to you. The self-righteous man makes for himself a bed of mire. Abstain because it is right to abstain — not that yourself shall be kept clean.
Look for it and listen to it first in your own heart. At first you may say it is not there; when I search I find only discord. Look deeper. If again you are disappointed, pause and look deeper again. There is a natural melody, an obscure fount in every human heart. It may be hidden over and utterly concealed and silenced — but it is there. At the very base of your nature you will find faith, hope, and love. He that chooses evil refuses to look within himself, shuts his ears to the melody of his heart, as he blinds his eyes to the light of his soul. He does this because he finds it easier to live in desires. But underneath all life is the strong current that cannot be checked; the great waters are there in reality. Find them, and you will perceive that none, not the most wretched of creatures, but is a part of it, however he blind himself to the fact and build up for himself a phantasmal outer form of horror. In that sense it is that I say to you — All those beings among whom you struggle on are fragments of the Divine. And so deceptive is the illusion in which you live, that it is hard to guess where you will first detect the sweet voice in the hearts of others. But know that it is certainly within yourself. Look for it there, and once having heard it, you will more readily recognize it around you. . . ”
Namaste.
Steady as we go.
C
Claire-
Where’d you find that? It’s really amazing. So completely true and correct and inspiring. Thank you so much for sharing it, and for sharing yourself with me here.
all best,
Scott
your final paragraph really sums it up – the interconnectedness of all, the possibility to feel that lightness of the big love, the kind where you feel you have no physical boundaries, molecules moving and mixing with all other life. for me it is fleeting. but having even just knowing that feeling is possible, keeps it all going. i thank you for sharing the discipline and challenges – but ultimately, the beauty and value. for you, for your family, for all.
Thank you so much for your kind words. I really find that this path is a very direct way of training my mind and heart to perceive the interconnectedness and vastness of the whole show. I am constantly immersed in, and reminded of, and nurtured by the luminous clarity of this unbounded reality. It’s amazing.
all best-
Scott
The most ironic think about me may perhaps be the fact that compassion comes incredibly easy to me. Except…for those who seem to show no compassion themselves. I suppose I should work on that.
Yeah, I’ve spent my whole professional life dealing with people who seem to have no compassion for others, and it’s hard to find it for them. Hard, but vital, I think. We don’t gain anything by hating them for their ignorance and lack of skill.
Of course having compassion for them does not mean that we have to let them walk all over us or keep hurting us or other people. We still do what we need to do, but we can do it in a way that is more skillful and less reactive and it doesn’t cause us the same suffering that acting in anger and fear does.
As always, I’m grateful to you for being in this world and being who you are. You light this place up.
yrs-
Scott
I think a sense of humor is absolutely a vital part of it all. I mean otherwise….?
Sometimes all I can do is laugh. Which is better than hating. Or judging. Although truthfully, I am perfectly capable of doing all of them at the same time. Just being honest here.