“In the Buddhist tradition,” the Dalai Lama writes, “compassion and love are seen as two aspects of same thing: compassion is the wish for another being to be free from suffering; love is wanting them to have happiness.”
In the West we confuse love with sex and attachments to things like chocolate eclairs, in other words, what we think gives us pleasure or should do so. Our orientation is always me me me me...
When we say to someone we "love you" it usually means that the other person is making us feel wonderful in some way and fulfilling a need in our life that we had. It is no wonder that divorced people are in the majority in America.
What we don't appreciate or understand is that love, or even kindness and compassion, are experiences inside ourselves already. We are born with those feelings, we do not have to manufacture them. We have been bamboozled by Capitalistic strenuous advertising that we are living with constant lack and unhappiness and will only be happy if we posses external things. Companies selling stuff are the last to want us to know that happiness is already within our reach, all we need to do is an about turn, turn our back to the TV and close our eyes for 20 min a days and see what happens, what we might see. And we may find a well of good feelings welling up in us for no reason, without cause, because it was always there only we were too blind to see, focussed on keeping up with the Joneses.
Even the Dalai Lama and spiritual experiences are being bastardized and exploited by the advertisers. Sex has stopped selling so now if you buy the right car you will travel to nirvana.
Kindness is natural, fear and violence are not, they are products of our incessant thinking about what can make us happier, selfish narcissistic greed.
Alas it is in fact only the act of giving that can make us happy. So you can see how in a relationship if you do not see the other as special, a spiritual being and not just use them up for your own needs, then a give and take can start to occur, where you wake up in the morning and think about what your partner could use to be happy and proceed to do that. Instead we think it would make us "suckers" to behave that way. In school if you are a good student you are called a "browner". Everything in our society is geared for a me existence, and an abhorrence of any other way of relating. We live unhappily hiding our natural love and compassion, and stupidly pursuing money that will not stop us from dying anyway.
The Dalai Lama knows this and so he is always seen laughing and smiling, he gets the cosmic joke.
In the West we confuse love with sex and attachments to things like chocolate eclairs, in other words, what we think gives us pleasure or should do so. Our orientation is always me me me me...
When we say to someone we "love you" it usually means that the other person is making us feel wonderful in some way and fulfilling a need in our life that we had. It is no wonder that divorced people are in the majority in America.
What we don't appreciate or understand is that love, or even kindness and compassion, are experiences inside ourselves already. We are born with those feelings, we do not have to manufacture them. We have been bamboozled by Capitalistic strenuous advertising that we are living with constant lack and unhappiness and will only be happy if we posses external things. Companies selling stuff are the last to want us to know that happiness is already within our reach, all we need to do is an about turn, turn our back to the TV and close our eyes for 20 min a days and see what happens, what we might see. And we may find a well of good feelings welling up in us for no reason, without cause, because it was always there only we were too blind to see, focussed on keeping up with the Joneses.
Even the Dalai Lama and spiritual experiences are being bastardized and exploited by the advertisers. Sex has stopped selling so now if you buy the right car you will travel to nirvana.
Kindness is natural, fear and violence are not, they are products of our incessant thinking about what can make us happier, selfish narcissistic greed.
Alas it is in fact only the act of giving that can make us happy. So you can see how in a relationship if you do not see the other as special, a spiritual being and not just use them up for your own needs, then a give and take can start to occur, where you wake up in the morning and think about what your partner could use to be happy and proceed to do that. Instead we think it would make us "suckers" to behave that way. In school if you are a good student you are called a "browner". Everything in our society is geared for a me existence, and an abhorrence of any other way of relating. We live unhappily hiding our natural love and compassion, and stupidly pursuing money that will not stop us from dying anyway.
The Dalai Lama knows this and so he is always seen laughing and smiling, he gets the cosmic joke.
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