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| Bettina F. / pixelio.de |
Our ideas about love can be sorted in
two categories. There is a love that transcends birth and death. God
can never die. The essence of being will never die either. On the
other hand, beauty will pass. Where there is happiness, there must be
suffering as well. Trust is impermanent; maybe we trust one person
today, but tomorrow we won't trust him or her anymore. When I am
satisfied, I have enough, I might want more after a short time.
There are two categories of love. We
can call these two kinds of love „deep love“ and „true love“.
Deep love can grow, it can become deeper over time. True love is
already there. God is already there. The essence of our being is
already there. When we are breathing in and out, all trees are
breathing with us, the whole universe is breathing with us. We are
already in a flow.
In order to arrive at true love, we
have to cultivate deep love first. I would like to explain an example
about deep love. In our life, we have relationships with other
people, for example with our friends or with our wife or husband.
Here we speak about all relationships in our daily life. The love
that occurs in our relationships needs to be cultivated. We have to
take care of this love, so it can develop. In true love, this is
different. True love is the love that we have for God. We flow with
the river of life. In this love, we dwell in freedom. We are fully
present in the here and now. In this love, there is always peace.
True creativity also arises from this love. In this love, there is
always respect; it respects even simple things like a small flower or
a ray of sunlight.
Cultivating deep love – developing
understanding
In each of us there are these two kinds
of love. Here we want to first talk about the deep love. When we get
in touch with deep love, we will also get in touch with true love.
Deep love and true love are like two sides of one coin. When we touch
one side of love, we touch the other side at the same time. We might
think that we love a particular person. But sometimes our love makes
that other person suffer. This happens when in us there is not enough
understanding.
Our
teacher often tells a story related to that topic. In Vietnam, there
is a fruit called „durian“. Thay doesn't particularly like to eat
that fruit, he doesn't like its smell. But in Vietnam, this fruit is
a delicacy, and many people like its special fragrance very much.
After eating the fruit, many people like to keep the paring in order
to enjoy its fragrance. But my teacher doesn't like the
durian-fruit. One day there were some lay friends coming who love Thay
very much, and they offered him a durian-fruit. They put the fruit on
the altar, and while chanting, the smell came to Thay's nose, so he
was no longer able to sing. Later he turned around the bell and put
it on the durian-fruit, so the fruit was covered by the bell. In this
way Thay was able to continue chanting.
Sometimes we think
that we know what is good for the other person. And we want to do
everything in order to make our beloved one happy. But because we
don't have deep understanding, it may happen that the other person
doesn't feel well while we try to make him or her happy.
The four elements of true love
When we talk about love in buddhism, we
often speak about the „four elements of true love“. By
cultivating these four elements, it is possible to develop the mind
of love. In this practice of growing the four elements of true love,
there is no end. The four elements are called Maitreya (loving
kindness), Karuna (compassion), Mudita (joy) and Upeka
(inclusiveness). We wish to bring happiness to the people we love;
this is Maitreya. But the willingness itself is not enough. We need
to be able to actually bring joy and happiness. In order to develop
this capacity, we have to practice looking deeply in order to truly
understand our beloved ones. We need to understand their deepest
desires, their deep aspiration. We need to look deeply to be able to
see and understand their suffering. Having compassion does not only
mean that we want to reduce the suffering in other people, but it
means that we are actually capable of doing so. How can we make our
love deepen? We need to learn to look deeply. How can we look deeply
into things and into the people we love? We need to practice
meditation in order to develop this capacity. We need to learn how we
can be fully present, and how we can develop the energy of
mindfulness inside our own heart.
The ocean and the drop of water
When we are washing our hands, we can
observe thousands of drops of water falling down from our hands. Each
drop will run through the escape pipe and will then reach the water
pipeline under the surface of the earth. It will connect with the
water in the pipeline. In that moment there will be no drop of water
perceivable any more; it will be dissolved into the water.
Imagine that you see a big ocean in
front of you, as well as a raindrop that is on its way falling down,
approaching the surface of the ocean. In this moment, there is still
a distance observable between the raindrop and the ocean. Now imagine
the raindrop is falling down, and in the moment it reaches the
surface of the ocean, the drop of water disappears. It is losing its
self. It is merging with the water in the ocean. In the realm of
love, the same is happening. We lose ourselves, and we enter the
selflessness. In that moment we ourselves are the ocean, we are not a
drop of water anymore. This ocean is sometimes called God. God's love
is very big, it is immense, and we as a human being have the chance to
experience that kind of love, if we are able to lose our self. We
merge with the ocean, we dissolve into it. If we look from the point
of view of the raindrop, it looks like the drop is dissolving into
the ocean. But if we are the ocean, it looks like the ocean is
merging with the drop. There is no longer any drop, and there is no
longer any ocean. What is left is pure love.
During
the time the drop of water is still on its way falling down, when
there is still a distance observable between the drop and the ocean,
we can still see its identity. But it is already on the way falling
down, on the way of connecting with the ocean and merging with it. In
the moment we are falling, it is already sure that we will continue
to fall and at one point we will reach the surface of the ocean. But
as long as the drop of water is still on its way, it still has an
identity. The distance to the ocean is getting shorter and shorter,
and during this time we are developing what I call „deep love“.
If our deep love gets very deep, it is very close to true love, very
close to the love of God. That is why Jesus recommended to love our
neighbors. In reality, there is no separation between deep love and
true love.
The love of babies
Most people like babies. We feel happy
when we see a baby. Babies are really beautiful. This beauty is a
special beauty, it is not just a physical beauty. In babies, there is
an inner beauty, an inner strength. We feel love for the baby we see.
Everyone of us was a baby. We, too, were loved in this way. The
people around us wanted to be near to us, they wanted to kiss us and
hold us in their arms. When we see a master and carefully look at his
face, we will see that he also sometimes looks like a baby. The way
he shares also reminds us of a baby sometimes. What we sense is the
energy of love. All of us have that kind of love in us. But for a
long time we didn't know how we can return to that place.
We
have the feeling that we lost something, and now we are searching for
it. But we don't know what it is that we are looking for. Maybe we
say that we are looking for the truth, or for love. But we don't
really know what truth is, what love is. We are in the same situation
as a Vietnamese doctor who wants to find out the problem in the body
of his patient by using pulse diagnosis, but he cannot recognize the
sickness. If he doesn't know his patient's sickness, how can he find
the right medicine for him?
There
is a way that leads us to what we are seeking. We come back to our
body, to our mind. We observe what happens in us and around us. We
want to understand our body and mind more deeply. We learn to love
this body, and to love this mind. Body and mind are one.
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