I want to begin with a reading from the Dhammapada.
And in the Theravada Buddhist tradition,
The Dhammapada is regarded as a source of guidance and considered a wise counselor to turn to for help in resolving the difficult moral and personal problems that are basically inescapable in our life.
So this line is,
Look how he abused me and beat me.
How he threw me down and robbed me.
Live with such thoughts and you will live in hate.
Abandon such thoughts and live in love.
In this world,
Hate never ends through hatred.
Only by love alone is healed.
This is an ancient and eternal truth.
So many of you have heard this in different forms from different teachers over the years,
Including myself.
And I believe we understand this intellectually.
The aim is to show us the way to live in peace with ourselves and fellow human beings.
So if we're complaining,
He beat me,
She abused me,
This language,
You know,
Threw me down and robbed me.
What the Dhammapada is saying is live with such thoughts and you will live with hatred.
This seems pretty clear.
Then it goes on,
Abandon such thoughts and live in love.
So last time we were together,
Kurt brought a beautiful teaching that encapsulated,
It was encapsulated in this one phrase.
He said,
Love is the absence of othering.
And he couldn't recall who the teacher was,
But I found out because I was so,
Just loved this,
This phrase,
Love is the absence of othering.
And it comes from the non-dual teacher,
Rupert Spira.
He also said that,
Uh,
We,
All of us long for one thing above all else.
And that one thing is love,
Love,
Connection,
Awareness,
Consciousness,
Love.
If you ask anyone on their deathbed,
What is the most important experience in your life?
Probably everyone will say love.
And we experience love all the time in our friendships,
In our intimate relationships,
Coming together in this way in the morning,
Even in nature,
You know,
Nature is,
Uh,
We experience that connection in our friendships and intimate relationships.
What we experience,
Um,
Is the sense of the separation of our daily life dissolves to some degree.
So when we're connecting with our friends and loved ones,
What shines is love.
I think we feel this when we get up together and sit in the mornings,
You know,
When we,
Um,
Just connect for an hour and we get off the zoom call.
What is left is,
Um,
This kind of residue of love,
Of non-separation.
Like we have this community.
Rumi said,
True lovers don't finally meet each other.
They are in each other all along.
It's like that when we can see in each other,
See ourselves in the other.
Love is not a meeting of people.
It's the disillusion of separation.
And in these non-dual teachings,
I love how Spirit describes love.
He says,
Love is a trace of God's presence in the mind.
And if God,
The word God doesn't work for you,
Fine.
Consciousness is love.
The trace of God's presence in the mind,
Isn't that beautiful?
So longing,
Like what we want to see in the world and we're not seeing is kind of like love being veiled,
Covered over.
Our longing is experienced in the body as separate,
Separate from the beloved of what we're longing for.
And the separate self,
What it longs for is to be divested from separation.
And we experience this all the time when we connect with somebody.
So desire for anything really is kind of an act of getting back to love,
Getting back to the experience of one.
So then the next section that I read from the Dhammapada,
The message that has come down through the centuries and speaks to us with this,
These present conditions.
Hatred never ends through hatred,
But by love alone is healed.
This is the ancient and eternal truth.
So the Soto Zen priest,
Zen Jew,
Earthlin Manuel said,
We must use our suffering to find the medicine.
Suffering hurts,
But it's accessible and we can make it pliable.
You understand?
We can use our suffering.
It hurts,
But it's not solid.
So hatred is in all its intensity,
You know,
From the weakest to the strongest.
Becoming wise about how it works is helpful.
We feel energized by hatred and aversion.
There is an energy to aversion.
My teacher calls hatred or the energy that's associated with aversion as the caffeine of the soul.
It's like that.
The way we get energized and present and engaged,
But it's with hostility as its fuel.
We get a buzz from it.
So it's important to learn to be with the discomfort of,
Of hatred or aversion to feel the energy and that that's challenging because it's not comfortable,
Right?
We want to,
And we're always seeking out comfort to feel the energy.
And when we don't feed it,
What,
What occurs in the body is kind of a withdrawal of hatred into something more like sadness and grief and helplessness and longing,
Longing.
And what is it that we long for love?
If love is the highest experience that we can have,
And we all long for it,
Perhaps this longing is actually divine.
It's like God or consciousness calling us back to itself.
So as this teacher that I've been listening to and marveling at,
Rupert Spiro said,
All words come to an end in the face of love.
All words come to an end in the face of love.
So I,
I offer this for your consideration.
Thank you.
