Facets of Metta
by Sharon Salzberg
A pearl goes up for auction
No one has enough,
so the pearl buys itself
-- Rumi
Love exists in itself, not relying on owning or being owned.
Like the pearl, love can only buy itself, because love is not a
matter of currency or exchange. No one has enough to buy it but
everyone has enough to cultivate it. Metta reunites us with what it
means to be alive and unbound.
Researchers once gave a plant to every resident of a nursing
home. They told half of these elderly people that the plants were
theirs to care for -- they had to pay close attention to their
plants' needs for water and sunlight, and they had to respond
carefully to those needs. The researchers told the other half of
the residents that their plants were theirs to enjoy but that they
did not have to take any responsibility for them; the nursing staff
would care for the plants.
At the end of a year, the researchers compared the two groups of
elders. The residents who had been asked to care for their plants
were living considerably longer than the norm, were much healthier,
and were more oriented towards and connected to their world. The
other residents, those who had plants but did not have to stay
responsive to them, simply reflected the norms for people their age
in longevity, health, alertness, and engagement with the world.
This study shows, among other things, the enlivening power of
connection, of love, of intimacy. This is the effect that metta can
have on our lives. But when I heard about the study, I also
reflected on how often we regard intimacy as a force between
ourselves and something outside ourselves -- another person, or
even a plant -- and how rarely we consider the force of being
intimate with ourselves, with our own inner experience. How rarely
do we lay claim to our own lives and feel connected to
ourselves!
A way to discover intimacy with ourselves and all of life is to
live with integrity, basing our lives on a vision of compassionate
nonharming. When we dedicate ourselves to actions that do not hurt
ourselves or others, our lives become all of one piece, a "seamless
garment" with nothing separate or disconnected in the spiritual
reality we discover.
In order to live with integrity, we must stop fragmenting and
compartmentalizing our lives. Telling lies at work and expecting
great truths in meditation is nonsensical. Using our sexual energy
in a way that harms ourselves or others, and then expecting to know
transcendent love in another arena, is mindless. Every aspect of
our lives is connected to every other aspect of our lives. This
truth is the basis for an awakened life. When we live with
integrity, we further enhance intimacy with ourselves by being able
to rejoice, taking active delight in our actions. Rejoicing opens
us tremendously, dissolving our barriers, thereby enabling intimacy
to extend to all of life. Joy has so much capacity to eliminate
separation that the Buddha said, "Rapture is the gateway to
nirvana."
The enlivening force itself is rapture. It brightens our
vitality, our gratitude, and our love. We begin to develop rapture
by rejoicing in our own goodness. We reflect on the good things we
have done, recollecting times when we have been generous, or times
when we have been caring. Perhaps we can think of a time when it
would have been easy to hurt somebody, or to tell a lie, or to be
dismissive, yet we made the effort not to do that. Perhaps we can
think of a time when we gave something up in a way that freed our
mind and helped someone else. Or perhaps we can think of a time
when we have overcome some fear and reached out to someone. These
reflections open us to a wellspring of happiness that may have been
hidden from us before.
Contemplating the goodness within ourselves is a classical
meditation, done to bring light, joy, and rapture to the mind. In
contemporary times this practice might be considered rather
embarrassing, because so often the emphasis is on all the
unfortunate things we have done, all the disturbing mistakes we
have made. Yet this classical reflection is not a way of increasing
conceit. It is rather a commitment to our own happiness, seeing our
happiness as the basis for intimacy with all of life. It fills us
with joy and love for ourselves and a great deal of
self-respect.
Significantly, when we do metta practice, we begin by directing
metta toward ourselves. This is the essential foundation for being
able to offer genuine love to others. When we truly love ourselves,
we want to take care of others, because that is what is most
enriching, or nourishing, for us. When we have a genuine inner
life, we are intimate with ourselves and intimate with others. The
insight into our inner world allows us to connect to everything
around us, so that we can see quite clearly the oneness of all that
lives. We see that all beings want to be happy, and that this
impulse unites us. We can recognize the rightness and beauty of our
common urge towards happiness, and realize intimacy in this shared
urge.
If we are practicing metta and we cannot see the goodness in
ourselves or in someone else, then we reflect on that fundamental
wish to be happy that underlies all action. "Just as I want to be
happy, all beings want to be happy." This reflection gives rise to
openness, awareness, and love. As we commit to these values, we
become embodiments of a lineage that stretches back through
beginningless time. All good people of all time have wanted to
express openness, awareness, and love. With every phrase of metta,
we are declaring our alignment with these values.
From this beginning, metta practice proceeds in a very
structured way and specific way. After we have spent some time
directing metta to ourselves, we then move on to someone who has
been very good to us, for whom we feel gratitude and respect. In
the traditional terminology, this person is known as a
"benefactor." Later we move to someone who is a beloved friend. It
is relatively easy to direct lovingkindness to these categories of
beings (we say beings rather than people to include the possibility
of animals in these categories.) After we have established this
state of connection, we move on to those that it may be harder to
direct lovingkindness toward. In this way we open up our limits and
extend our capacity for benevolence.
Thus, next we direct lovingkindness to someone whom we feel
neutral toward, someone for whom we feel neither great liking nor
disliking. This is often an interesting time in the practice,
because it may be difficult to find somebody for whom we have no
instantaneous judgment. If we can find such a neutral person, we
direct metta toward them.
After this, we are ready for the next step -- directing metta
toward someone with whom we have experienced conflict, someone
toward whom we feel lack of forgiveness, or anger, or fear. In the
Buddhist scriptures this person is somewhat dramatically known as
"the enemy." This is a very powerful stage in the practice, because
the enemy, or the person with whom we have difficulty stands right
at the division between the finite and the infinite radiance of
love. At this point, conditional love unfolds into unconditional
love. Here dependent love can turn to the flowering of an
independent love that is not based upon getting what we want or
having our expectations met. Here we learn that the inherent
happiness of love is not compromised by likes and dislikes, and
thus, like the sun, it can shine on everything. This love is truly
boundless. It is born out of freedom, and it is offered freely.
Through the power of this practice, we cultivate an equality of
loving feeling toward ourselves and all beings. There was a time in
Burma when I was practicing metta intensively. I had taken about
six weeks to go through all the different categories: myself,
benefactor, friend, neutral person, and enemy. After I had spent
these six weeks doing the metta meditation all day long, my
teacher, U Pandita, called me into his room and said, "Say you were
walking in the forest with your benefactor, your friend, your
neutral person, and your enemy. Bandits come up and demand that you
choose one person in your group to be sacrificed. Which one would
you choose to die?"
I was shocked at U Pandita's question. I sat there and looked
deep into my heart, trying to find a basis from which I could
choose. I saw that I could not feel any distinction between any of
those people, including myself. Finally I looked at U Pandita and
replied, "I couldn't choose; everyone seems the same to me."
U Pandita then asked, "You wouldn't choose your enemy?" I
thought a minute and then answered, "No, I couldn't."
Finally U Pandita asked me, "Don't you think you should be able
to sacrifice yourself to save the others?" He asked the question as
if more than anything else in the world he wanted me to say, "Yes,
I'd sacrifice myself." A lot of conditioning rose up in me -- an
urge to please him, to be "right" and to win approval. But there
was no way I could honestly say "yes," so I said, "No, I can't see
any difference between myself and any of the others." He simply
nodded in response, and I left.
Later I was reading the Visuddhi Magga, one of the great
commentarial works of Buddhist literature which describes different
meditation techniques and the experiences of practicing these
techniques. In the section on metta meditation, I came to that very
question about the bandits. The answer I had given was indeed
considered the correct one for the intensive practice of metta.
Of course, in different life situations many different courses
of action might be appropriate. But the point here is that metta
does not mean that we denigrate ourselves in any situation in order
to uphold other people's happiness. Authentic intimacy is not
brought about by denying our own desire to be happy in unhappy
deference to others, nor by denying others in narcissistic
deference to ourselves. Metta means equality, oneness, wholeness.
To truly walk the Middle Way of the Buddha, to avoid the extremes
of addiction and self-hatred, we must walk in friendship with
ourselves as well as with all beings.
When we have insight into our inner world and what brings us
happiness, then wordlessly, intuitively, we understand others. As
though there were no longer a barrier defining the boundaries of
our caring, we can feel close to others' experience of life. We see
that when we are angry, there is an element of pain in the anger
that is not different from the pain that others feel when they are
angry. When we feel love there is a distinct and special joy in
that feeling. We come to know that this is the nature of love
itself, and that other beings filled with love experience of this
same joy.
In practicing metta we do not have to make a certain feeling
happen. In fact, during the practice we see that we feel
differently at different times. Any momentary emotional tone is far
less relevant than considerable power of intention we harness as we
say these phrases. As we repeat, "May I be happy; may all beings be
happy," we are planting seeds by forming this powerful intention in
the mind. The seed will bear fruit in its own time.
When I was practicing metta intensively in Burma, at times when
I repeated the metta phrases, I would picture myself in a wide open
field planting seeds. Doing metta we plant the seeds of love,
knowing that nature will take its course and in time those seeds
will bear fruit. Some seeds will come to fruition quickly, some
slowly, but our work is simply to plant the seeds. Every time we
form the intention in the mind for our own happiness or for the
happiness of others, we are doing our work; we are channeling the
powerful energies of our own minds. Beyond that, we can trust the
laws of nature to continually support the flowering of our love. As
Pablo Neruda says:
Perhaps the earth can teach us, as when everything seems dead in
winter and later proves to be alive.
When we started our retreat center, Insight Meditation Society,
in 1975, many of us there decided to do a self-retreat for a month
to inaugurate the center. I planned to do metta for the entire
month. This was before I'd been to Burma, and it would be my first
opportunity to do intensive and systematic metta meditation. I had
heard how it was done in extended practice, and I planned to follow
that schedule. So the first week I spent directing lovingkindness
towards myself. I felt absolutely nothing. It was the dreariest,
most boring week I had known in some time. I sat there saying, "May
I be happy, may I be peaceful," over and over again with no obvious
result.
Then, as it happened, someone we knew in the community had a
problem, and a few of us had to leave the retreat suddenly. I felt
even worse, thinking, "Not only did I spend this week doing metta
and getting nothing from it, but I also never even got beyond
directing metta towards myself. So on top of everything else, I was
really selfish."
I was in a frenzy getting ready to leave. As I was hurriedly
getting everything together in my bathroom, I dropped a jar. It
shattered all over the floor. I still remember my immediate
response: "You are really a klutz, but I love you." And then I
thought, "Wow! Look at that. Something did happen in this week of
practice."
So the intention is enough. We form the intention in our mind
for our happiness and the happiness of all. This is different from
struggling to fabricate a certain feeling, to create it out of our
will, to make it happen. We just settle back and plant the seeds
without worrying about the immediate result. That is our work. If
we do our work, then manifold benefits will surely come.
Fortunately, the Buddha was characteristically precise about
what those benefits include. He said that the intimacy and caring
that fill our hearts as the force of lovingkindness develops will
bring eleven particular advantages:
1) You will sleep easily. 2) You will wake easily. 3) You will
have pleasant dreams. 4) People will love you. 5) Devas [celestial
beings] and animals will love you. 6) Devas will protect you. 7)
External dangers [poisons, weapons, and fire] will not harm you. 8)
Your face will be radiant. 9) Your mind will be serene. 10) You
will die unconfused. 11) You will be reborn in happy realms.
People doing formal metta practice often memorize these eleven
benefits and recite them to themselves regularly. Reminding
ourselves of the fruit of our intention and effort can bring a lot
of faith and rapture, sustaining us through those inevitable times
when it seems as if the practice is not "getting anywhere." When we
consider each of these benefits, we can see more fully how metta
revolutionizes our lives.
When we steep our hearts in lovingkindness, we are able to sleep
easily, to awaken easily, and to have pleasant dreams. To have
self-respect in life, to walk through this life with grace and
confidence, means having a commitment to nonharming and to loving
care. If we do not have these things, we can neither rest nor be at
peace; we are always fighting against ourselves. The feelings we
create by harming are painful both for ourselves and for others.
Thus harming leads to guilt, tension, and complexity. Sleeping
easily, waking easily, But living a clear and simple life, free
from resentment, fear, and guilt, extends into our sleeping,
dreaming and waking.
The next benefit the Buddha pointed out is that if we practice
metta we will receive in return the love of others. This is not a
heartless calculating motivation, but rather a recognition that the
energy we extend in this world draws to it that same kind of
energy. If we extend the force of love, love returns to us. The
American psychologist William James once said, "My experience is
what I agree to attend to. Only those items I notice shape my
mind." Perhaps this is partially how this law works -- opening to
the energy of love within us, we can notice it more specifically
around us.
It happens on other levels as well. If we are committed in our
lives to the force of lovingkindness, then people know that they
can trust us. They know we will not deceive them; we will not harm
them. By being a beacon of trustworthiness in this world, we become
a safe haven for others and a good friend.
The next set of benefits the Buddha points out promises that if
we practice metta we will be protected. Devas, and other invisible
beings, are classically taught as part of the Buddhist cosmology,
but we don't have to believe in the intervention of invisible
forces in order to comprehend how the practice of metta protects
us. This assertion does not mean being protected in the sense that
nothing bad will ever happen to us, because clearly the
vicissitudes of life are completely outside our control. Pleasure
and pain, gain and loss, praise and blame, and fame and ill repute
will revolve throughout our lives. But nevertheless we can be
protected by the nature of how we receive, how we hold that which
our karma brings us.
Albert Einstein said, "The splitting of the atom has changed
everything except for how we think." How we think, how we look at
our lives, is all-important, and the degree of love we manifest
determines the degree of spaciousness and freedom we can bring to
life's events.
Imagine taking a very small glass of water and putting into it a
teaspoon of salt. Because of the small size of the container, the
teaspoon of salt is going to have a big impact upon the water.
However, if you approach a much larger body of water, such as a
lake, and put into it that same teaspoonful of salt, it will not
have the same intensity of impact, because of the vastness and
openness of the vessel receiving it. Even when the salt remains the
same, the spaciousness of the vessel receiving it changes
everything.
We spend a lot of our lives looking for a feeling of safety or
protection; we try to alter the amount of salt that comes our way.
Ironically, the salt is the very thing that we cannot do anything
about, as life changes and offers us repeated ups and downs. Our
true work is to create a container so immense that any amount of
salt, even a truckload, can come into it without affecting our
capacity to receive it. No situation, even an extreme one, then can
mandate a particular reaction.
Once I had a meditation student who had been a child in
Nazi-occupied Europe. She recounted an instance when she was around
ten years old when a German soldier held a gun to her chest -- a
situation that would readily arouse terror. Yet she related feeling
no fear at all, thinking, "You may be able to kill my body, but you
can't kill me." What a spacious reaction! It is in this way that
lovingkindness opens the vastness of mind in us, which is
ultimately our greatest protection.
Another benefit of cultivating of metta is that one's face
becomes very clear and shining. This means that an unfeigned inner
beauty shines forth. We know in life situations how mind affects
matter, how if we are enraged about something, it shows in our
face. If somebody is full of hatred, it shows in the way they
stand, the way they move, the way their jaw is set. It is not very
attractive. No amount of make-up, jewelry, or embellishments bring
beauty to a sullen, disgruntled, angry face. In just the same way,
when someones mind is filled with the rapture of lovingkindness or
compassion, it is beautiful to see the expression of light, of
radiance, on their face and bearing.
With the practice of metta one also has a serene mind. The
feeling of lovingkindness generates great peace. This is the mind
that can say, "You are really a klutz, but I love you." It is a
feeling endowed with acceptance, patience, and spaciousness. This
great peace allows union with all of life, because we are not
relying on changing circumstances for our happiness.
The peace of metta offers the kind of happiness that gives us
the ability to concentrate. Serenity is the most important
ingredient in being able to be present or being able to concentrate
the mind. Concentration is an act of cherishing a chosen object. If
we have no serenity, the mind will be scattered, and we will not be
able to gather in the energy that is being lost to distraction.
When we can concentrate, all of this energy is returned to us. This
is the potency that heals us.
If we practice metta, another major benefit is that we will die
unconfused. Our habitual ways of thinking, acting, and relating to
life tend to be the ones that are strongest at the time of death as
well. If we spend a lifetime feeling separate, apart, cultivating
anger, giving way to frustration, to fear, to desire, that will
likely be the mental-emotional environment within which we face our
death. But if we have lived our life in a way that honors our
connectedness, reflects our oneness, and cultivates caring and
giving, that is likely to be how we will die.
The last specific benefit the Buddha spoke of was being reborn
in happy realms as a result of filling our hearts with
lovingkindness. The potential for rebirth again and again in
various realms of pleasure or pain is part of the Buddhist
worldview. For someone who subscribes to this vision of life,
rebirth in a realm where one can attain liberation is most
important. For those who don't subscribe to this vision, the
benefits of metta can surely be seen to come to us in this
lifetime.
Metta is the priceless treasure that enlivens us and brings us
into intimacy with ourselves and others. It is the force of love
that will lead beyond fragmentation, loneliness and fear. The late
Hindu guru Neem Karoli Baba often said, "Don't throw anyone out of
your heart." One of the most powerful healings (and greatest
adventures) of our lifetime can come about as we learn to live by
this dictum.
Sharon Salzberg
Excerpted from "Loving-kindness: The Revolutionary Art of
Happiness" by Sharon Salzberg, 1995, Shambala Publications.