God's Grandeur by Gerard Manley Hopkins and Read by Stanley Kunits in 1999

Pied Beauty by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Gerard Manley Hopkins: Our Life in Poetry Seminar on the life of Hopkins

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Two wonderful recitations by Richard Burton of Manley's poems The Leaden Echo and The Golden Echo.

THE LEADEN ECHO

How to keep--is there any any, is there none such, nowhere known some, bow or brooch or braid or brace, lace, latch or catch or key to keep
Back beauty, keep it, beauty, beauty, beauty, . . . from vanishing away?
O is there no frowning of these wrinkles, ranked wrinkles deep,
Down? no waving off of these most mournful messengers, still messengers, sad and stealing messengers of grey?
No there's none, there's none, O no there's none,
Nor can you long be, what you now are, called fair,
Do what you may do, what, do what you may,
And wisdom is early to despair:
Be beginning; since, no, nothing can be done
To keep at bay
Age and age's evils, hoar hair,
Ruck and wrinkle, drooping, dying, death's worst, winding sheets, tombs and worms and tumbling to decay;
So be beginning, be beginning to despair.
O there's none; no no no there's none:
Be beginning to despair, to despair,
Despair, despair, despair, despair.

THE GOLDEN ECHO

Spare!
There is one, yes I have one (Hush there!);
Only not within seeing of the sun,
Not within the singeing of the strong sun,
Tall sun's tingeing, or treacherous the tainting of the earth's air.
Somewhere elsewhere there is ah well where! one,
One. Yes I can tell such a key, I do know such a place,
Where whatever's prized and passes of us, everything that's fresh and fast flying of us, seems to us sweet of us and swiftly away with, done away with, undone,
Undone, done with, soon done with, and yet dearly and dangerously sweet
Of us, the wimpled-water-dimpled, not-by-morning-matched face,
The flower of beauty, fleece of beauty, too too apt to, ah! to fleet,
Never fleets more, fastened with the tenderest truth
To its own best being and its loveliness of youth: it is an ever-lastingness of, O it is an all youth!
Come then, your ways and airs and looks, locks, maiden gear, gallantry and gaiety and grace,
Winning ways, airs innocent, maiden manners, sweet looks, loose locks, long locks, lovelocks, gaygear, going gallant, girlgrace--
Resign them, sign them, seal them, send them, motion them with breath,
And with sighs soaring, soaring sighs deliver
Them; beauty-in-the-ghost, deliver it, early now, long before death
Give beauty back, beauty, beauty, beauty, back to God, beauty's self and beauty's giver.
See; not a hair is, not an eyelash, not the least lash lost; every hair
Is, hair of the head, numbered.
Nay, what we had lighthanded left in surly the mere mould
Will have waked and have waxed and have walked with the wind what while we slept,
This side, that side hurling a heavyheaded hundredfold
What while we, while we slumbered.
O then, weary then why should we tread? O why are we so haggard at the heart, so care-coiled, care-killed, so fagged, so fashed, so cogged, so cumbered,
When the thing we freely forfeit is kept with fonder a care,
Fonder a care kept than we could have kept it, kept
Far with fonder a care (and we, we should have lost it) finer, fonder
A care kept. Where kept? Do but tell us where kept, where.--
Yonder.--What high as that! We follow, now we follow.--
Yonder, yes yonder, yonder,
Yonder.

Lady Hestor Stanhope: Great English Nutters

Quite a story here. Worth the read if you are in some way connected with a Stanhope.

read more

The Day of Gifts by Paul Claudel

Still illegal in 76 countries.

Acomprehensive study of global lesbian, bisexual and gay rights, seen by 
The Independent on Sunday, reveals the brutal – and, in many instances, fatal – price people pay around the globe for their sexuality. The research, which was conducted by the charity network the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association (ILGA), shows that 76 countries still prosecute people on the grounds of their sexual orientation – seven of which punish same-sex acts with death.


Read more


http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/politics/more-than-70-countries-make-being-gay-a-crime-2040850.html

The Cult of the Self and it's Implications.

Welcome to the Asylum


A well articulated analysis of society's current state of decline and it's causes. The pressing question is "Can we turn this around?" Is there any possibility to interrupt this cycle and pull out of the suicide dive we find ourselves in?

Welcome To The Asylum by Chris Hedges
When civilizations start to die they go insane. Let the ice sheets in the Arctic melt. Let the temperatures rise. Let the air, soil and water be poisoned. Let the forests die. Let the seas be emptied of life. Let one useless war after another be waged. Let the masses be thrust into extreme poverty and left without jobs while the elites, drunk on hedonism, accumulate vast fortunes through exploitation, speculation, fraud and theft. Reality, at the end, gets unplugged. We live in an age when news consists of Snooki’s pregnancy, Hulk Hogan’s sex tape and Kim Kardashian’s denial that she is the naked woman cooking eggs in a photo circulating on the Internet. Politicians, including presidents, appear on late night comedy shows to do gags and they campaign on issues such as creating a moon colony. “[A]t times when the page is turning,” Louis-Ferdinand Celine wrote in “Castle to Castle,” “when History brings all the nuts together, opens its Epic Dance Halls! hats and heads in the whirlwind! Panties overboard!”
The quest by a bankrupt elite in the final days of empire to accumulate greater and greater wealth, as Karl Marx observed, is modern society’s version of primitive fetishism. This quest, as there is less and less to exploit, leads to mounting repression, increased human suffering, a collapse of infrastructure and, finally, collective death. It is the self-deluded, those on Wall Street or among the political elite, those who entertain and inform us, those who lack the capacity to question the lusts that will ensure our self-annihilation, who are held up as exemplars of intelligence, success and progress. The World Health Organization calculates that one in four people in the United States suffers from chronic anxiety, a mood disorder or depression—which seems to me to be a normal reaction to our march toward collective suicide. Welcome to the asylum.
When the most basic elements that sustain life are reduced to a cash product, life has no intrinsic value. The extinguishing of “primitive” societies, those that were defined by animism and mysticism, those that celebrated ambiguity and mystery, those that respected the centrality of the human imagination, removed the only ideological counterweight to a self-devouring capitalist ideology. Those who held on to pre-modern beliefs, such as Native Americans, who structured themselves around a communal life and self-sacrifice rather than hoarding and wage exploitation, could not be accommodated within the ethic of capitalist exploitation, the cult of the self and the lust for imperial expansion. The prosaic was pitted against the allegorical. And as we race toward the collapse of the planet’s ecosystem we must restore this older vision of life if we are to survive.
The war on the Native Americans, like the wars waged by colonialists around the globe, was waged to eradicate not only a people but a competing ethic. The older form of human community was antithetical and hostile to capitalism, the primacy of the technological state and the demands of empire. This struggle between belief systems was not lost on Marx. “The Ethnological Notebooks of Karl Marx” is a series of observations derived from Marx’s reading of works by historians and anthropologists. He took notes about the traditions, practices, social structure, economic systems and beliefs of numerous indigenous cultures targeted for destruction. Marx noted arcane details about the formation of Native American society, but also that “lands [were] owned by the tribes in common, while tenement-houses [were] owned jointly by their occupants.” He wrote of the Aztecs, “Commune tenure of lands; Life in large households composed of a number of related families.” He went on, “… reasons for believing they practiced communism in living in the household.” Native Americans, especially the Iroquois, provided the governing model for the union of the American colonies, and also proved vital to Marx and Engel’s vision of communism.

To read the entire article (one more page) follow this link:
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/welcome_to_the_asylum_20120430//

All Men Can Be Heros

Bliss Is A By-product

Most of what we are told about awakening sounds like a sales pitch for enlightenment. In a sales pitch, we are told only the most positive aspects; we may even be told things that are not actually true. In the sales pitch for awakening, we are told that enlightenment is all about love and ecstasy, compassion and union, and a host of other positive experiences. It is often shrouded in fantastic stories, so we come to believe that awakening has to do with miracles and mystical powers. One of the most common sales pitches includes describing enlightenment as an experience of bliss. As a result, people think, “When I spiritually awaken, when I have union with God, I will enter into a state of constant ecstasy.” This is, of course, a deep misunderstanding of what awakening is.

There may be bliss with awakening, because it is actually a by-product of awakening, but it is not awakening itself. As long as we are chasing the byproducts of awakening, we will miss the real thing. This is a problem, because many spiritual practices attempt to reproduce the by-products of awakening without giving rise to the awakening itself. We can learn certain meditative techniques—chanting mantras or singing bhajans, for example—and certain positive experiences will be produced. The human consciousness is tremendously pliable, and by taking part in certain spiritual practices, techniques, and disciplines, you can indeed produce many of the by-products of awakening—states of bliss, openness, and so on. But what often happens is that you end up with only the byproducts of awakening, without the awakening itself.

It is important that we know what awakening is not, so that we no longer chase the by-products of awakening. We must give up the pursuit of positive emotional states through spiritual practice. The path of awakening is not about positive emotions. On the contrary, enlightenment may not be easy or positive at all. It is not easy to have our illusions crushed. It is not easy to let go of long-held perceptions. We may experience great resistance to seeing through even those illusions that cause us a great amount of pain.

This is something many people don’t know they’re signing up for when they start on a quest for spiritual awakening. As a teacher, one of the things that I find out about students relatively early on is whether they are interested in the real thing—do they really want the truth, or do they actually just want to feel better? Because the process of finding the truth may not be a process by which we feel increasingly better and better. It may be a process by which we look at things honestly, sincerely, truthfully, and that may or may not be an easy thing to do. ▼

From The End of Your World, © 2009 by Adyashanti. Reprinted with permission from Sounds True.

I Save The World By Loving Her by Annelinda Metzner

I save the world by loving Her                          
I save the world by loving Her.
April in Sandy Mush, the new green apple leaves,
so soft, each flutters a different way at the slightest breeze;
the butterfly, fresh out of the cocoon,
careening downhill, already a crackerjack
at navigating with her iridescent wings;
the blackberry blossoms, full of themselves,
wide open to the hungry and meticulous bees.
The air is filled with buzzing things, delirious with the sun’s warmth.
Even a cloud floating high seems to smile with delight.
It is true, I know, someone crouches somewhere in a room,
cut off from the world,
fervently praying that the next gunshot, the knock at the door
does not come his way.
I know somewhere, a mother walks miles for a jug of water
diverted from her village to sluice the mines.
I know the world will end, or so they say.
But Gaia exhorts me, “Look at me!  Take notice!
For you I have perched these roses on their stems,
for you I bring the striped grasshopper  to set beside you,
and the wild turkey walks, stately, through the woods.
Are you listening yet?   For you, four wide-eyed deer 
come to gaze at your body while you sleep.”
I cannot ignore her, I cannot turn away.
It is my job to love Her, and She is vast,
and long, and wide, and huge;
I save the world by loving Her, and in this way, She saves me.

Annelinde Metzner,  Hawkscry  April 13, 2012
Annelinde Metzner

 Poetry of the Natural World: In Love with the Rooted Earth  
  Poetry of the World's Peoples: Isn't It All of Us? 

    Poetry and Music by Annelinde:   ANNELINDE'S WORLD                                                                                                                                                       

Zen Basics (From Tricycle Wisdom Collection)

Harada Sekkei Roshi is a teacher in the Soto Zen tradition and abbot of Hosshinji monastery, in Fukui Prefecture, Japan. This past May, his student Keiko Kando spoke with him about the meaning and function of Zen. Harada Roshi’s book of dharma talks, The Essence of Zen, is to be reprinted by Wisdom Publications next February. This interview was translated from the Japanese by Heiko Narrog.

What do people search for in life? People are looking for liberation from their fears, worries, and anxieties; that is, for freedom from the bonds of birth, old age, sickness, and death. Even in our times—where mankind has developed this amazing modern civilization with scientific wonders—people still continue to lead their lives trying to figure out solutions to these fundamental matters.

What kind of solution does Buddhism offer? Buddhism has taught the dharma (the law, or the truth) by speaking about the theory of conditional causation. This means that since everything comes to life and ceases through causation, everything is without a center and nothing has real substance. Therefore, everything changes constantly (that is, everything is impermanent) and is without beginning and without end (that is, everything is without self). One cannot recognize any form in things. However, ordinary people mistakenly think that there is some real substance in things. As they cling to this delusion and run after it, various afflictions arise. These afflictions are ultimately all related to birth, old age, sickness, and death (the four sufferings).

Shakyamuni Buddha taught that all material things are subject to laws. Birth, old age, sickness, and death are laws in themselves, and not problems that have to be solved through the power of human beings or through some other power. On the contrary, giving oneself over to birth, old age, sickness, and death as they come is the way to liberation. There is no “good” and “bad” in laws. Only through the intervention of people’s views does this notion of “good” and “bad” arise.

What is Zen, then? In the Soto sect, it is taught that Zen itself is enlightenment. Zen is everything in daily life. There are people who think that sitting is the best way of practicing Zen and that everything else is secondary, but this is a grave mistake. Zen is becoming one with all truths. It is easy to be misled by the word “zazen” [Zen sitting meditation] and think that it refers to some special practice, but this is not the case. If the goal of all religious practice in the world is to become one with the truth, then this is all Zen. Ultimately, there is no way to peace of mind outside of Zen.

Why, then, is the form of zazen necessary? To answer this question, let us consider the example of Eihei Dogen, the founder of the Soto sect. It took Dogen Zenji an enormous amount of hardship and effort at Mount Tiantong in China under Master Rujing before he attained liberation. In his book Shobogenzo (Treasury of the True Dharma Eye), Dogen Zenji endeavored to explain the essence of the Buddha-dharma as exhaustively and in as much detail as possible. Basically, however, he taught with a lot of repetition how to become familiar with oneself.

I will explain the book title word by word. Sho (true) means something that eternally doesn’t change. Ho (law of the dharma) is everything that appears before our eyes, that reaches our ears, and that is touched by our hands. Gen (eye) means literally the eye and simultaneously connotes the function of all six of our sense organs (eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, mind). An eyeball doesn’t judge anything as beautiful or ugly, it just reflects. Our ears, noses, and tongues are the same. All things arise as causes through the function of our ears, eyes, noses, tongues, and bodies, and the tool that makes judgments such as “I like it” or “I don’t like it” is called “mind” or “consciousness.” Zo (treasury) means that all our functions—suffering as suffering, fear as fear, distress as distress—are already liberated. All these taken together, Shobogenzo, means that we ourselves are the eye that sees everything truly as it is. The fastest way to affirm that we ourselves are the Treasury of the True Dharma Eye is to face a wall, cross our legs, and do zazen.

What methods are there in zazen? When one sits zazen, pain in the legs and various delusive thoughts arise. I therefore teach three methods: susokukan (counting the breath),zuisokukan (following the breath), and koan kufu (working with a koan). These are only temporary expedients for the sake of zazen, like a stick used to walk, and not ends in and of themselves. Susokukan is the Zen of silently counting “one, two, three . . .” until ten, and then returning to “one” again. Zuisokukan is the Zen of viewing one’s breath, becoming one with every out-breath and in-breath. And finally, koan kufu is the Zen of thinking about a problem to exhaustion, becoming one with problem consciousness, grinding down consciousness through consciousness. One can choose one of these three “sticks” and sit single-mindedly with it. This is zazen.

If you do this, can you indeed attain liberation from fear, worries, and anxieties, and freedom from the bonds of birth, old age, sickness, and death? The priest Wumen once wrote, “A hundred flowers blossom in spring, the moon shines in autumn, there is a fresh breeze in summer, and there is snow in winter. If your mind isn’t occupied with trivial matters, every time is a good time.” In this poem, everyday mind is described in terms of snow, the moon, and flowers. A world is expressed that doesn’t belong to intellect or to non-intellect, and where human thinking is of no use. There are flowers of delusion and flowers of enlightenment, flowers of exhilaration, anger, sadness, and joy.

The samadhi [nondual consciousness] of all these activities is like hundreds of flowers in full bloom; there is nothing to search for outside oneself. As the poem “A fresh breeze chases away the bright moon; the bright moon chases away the fresh breeze” expresses, the mind has stopped seeking. It has freed itself of the silliness of letting the precious gem held in one’s own hand slip away while longingly gazing at the moon far away in the sky. As the expression “If heart and mind are wiped out, fire itself becomes cool” tells us, there is nothing as refreshing as to forget oneself.

Wumen’s closing words mean “at that time a human being can truly be a human being, nothing to be worried about.” However, as Master Zhaozhou told his disciples, “There is no better thing than no thing.” That is, no matter how wonderful something is, there is nothing more wonderful than no thing. These words very accurately express the ultimate point of practice and the austere and impermanent beauty of human life.

Image: Harada Sekkei Roshi, 2007, Courtesy of Hosshin-Ji, Fukui Prefecture, Japan

American Experience: Walt Whitman

From Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman

Love Among The Ruins: Robert Browning

A masterful recitation of the classic love poem

Awaken Me:Morgan Kalani

There are no obstacles; only opportunities

Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo was born Diane Perry during the Blitz, in 1943, the daughter of an East End charlady and a fishmonger. She decided she was a Buddhist in 1961, at the age of eighteen, traveled by sea to India in search of a teacher, and met her root guru, the eighth Khamtrul Rinpoche, on her twenty-first birthday. She became the second Western woman to be ordained as a Tibetan Buddhist nun three weeks later. At thirty-three, with her lama’s blessing, Tenzin Palmo took up residence in a six-by-six-foot cave, 13,200 feet up in the Himalayan valley of Lahaul, and lived there for twelve years. Since then, she has given her uniquely practical teachings around the world in an effort to raise awareness and funds for the Dongyu Gatsal Ling Nunnery, in Himachel Pradesh, India, which she founded in 2000.

Lucy Powell interviewed the sixty-six-year-old nun while she was in London this year, giving her final teaching tour before retiring to India.

Your example is at once inspirational—that a Westerner, and a woman, could meditate in solitary retreat for such a prolonged period—and dispiriting: unless we can sit in a Himalayan cave for over a decade, we won’t make any real progress on the path. Certainly we have to do the work. This is true. It is really very impressive how many excuses we can invent for why we aren’t sitting. This idea we have that when things are perfect, then we’ll start practicing—things will never be perfect. This is samsara!

I remember once I was in the cave getting all depressed because the snows would melt in the spring and water would run down the back wall, making everything wet. Finally, I thought, “But didn’t the Buddha tell us it was this way? What is the first noble truth, after all? What do we expect? Why make such a big fuss when we suffer?” After that, I didn’t have any trouble.

Call something an obstacle, it is an obstacle. Call it an opportunity, it is an opportunity. Nothing is extraneous to the spiritual life. This is very important to understand.

So why retreat? Retreat is, in a way, a quick fix. I often think of the nuns of Mother Teresa’s order: they’re not picking up the dead and dying all day long—half the day is spent in prayer. If one is everlastingly giving out without breathing in, one becomes stressed and burned out.

Twelve years is an extremely long fix. Each of us has something to do in this lifetime; we have to find out what it is and do it. Retreat is what I was born to do. I was extremely happy in the cave and very grateful to be there. It was a rare opportunity.

Did you experience periods of doubt or fear? I find talking about my time in the cave extremely boring; it was a lifetime ago. But, no, nothing made me worried or afraid. Hundreds of thousands of hermits through the ages have done exactly the same thing, and ninety-nine percent of them were fine. You’re very busy doing your practices— you’re not twiddling your thumbs all day—and you get into a state of mind where you accept that whatever is happening is happening. Even the most awful things that happen, if you’re centered, you’ll be O.K. If not, the most trivial thing will send you off. It has nothing to do with the experience or the circumstance: it is the attitude that’s important. We have to stop clinging to the conditioned path and learn to be open to the unconditioned path.

How do we develop that attitude of openness? This is the question. Our fundamental problems are our ignorance and ego-grasping. We grasp at our identity as being our personality, memories, opinions, judgments, hopes, fears, chattering away—all revolving around this me me me me. And we believe that that self is actually a solid, unchanging entity that sets us apart from all the other entities out there. This creates the idea of an unchanging permanent self at the center of our being, which we have to satisfy and protect. This is an illusion. “Who am I?” is thus the central question of Buddhism. Do you see?

Most of the time, what we do is work to try to protect this false me, mine, I. We think the ego is our best friend. It isn’t. It doesn’t care if we are happy or unhappy. In fact, ego is very happy to be unhappy. And we must be conscious of not using the spiritual path as another conduit for the ego—a bigger, better, more spiritual me.

There are practices we can use against this egocherishing. In the company of very sick people who are suffering, one can visualize that one is taking in their fear and pain, in the form of dark light or smoke, pulling out sickness and negative karmas, and directing them toward the little black pearl of our self-concern. And it will start to disappear, because, really, the very last thing the ego wants is other people’s problems.

If we do experience pain or suffering ourselves, we can use it. We’re conditioned to resist pain. We think of it as a solid block we have to push away, but it’s not. It’s like a melody, and behind the cacophony there is tremendous spaciousness.

What do we do when thoughts arise in meditation? The thoughts are not the problem. Thoughts are the nature of the mind. The problem is that we identify with them.

How do we learn to dis-identify with them? Practice.

What of emotions like anger? The Buddha said that it’s greed, not anger, that keeps us on the wheel. Nobody’s chaining us down: we’re clinging on with both hands. Many people come to me saying that they want to eradicate anger; it’s not difficult to see that anger makes us suffer. But very rarely do people ask me how to be rid of desire.

We have to cultivate contentment with what we have. We really don’t need much. When you know this, the mind settles down. Cultivate generosity. Delight in giving. Learn to live lightly. In this way, we can begin to transform what is negative into what is positive. This is how we start to grow up.

Can you explain a bit about the difference between love and attachment?Attachment is the very opposite of love. Love says, “I want you to be happy.” Attachment says, “I want you to make me happy.”

Do you detect a rising spiritual consciousness in the West? What I see is that modern society is based on what Buddha called the three poisons—greed and aversion arising from [delusion, which is] a very strong sense of self. That’s what our society encourages, believing that the more greedy and self-assertive we are, the happier we will be. So the very path to suffering is now being touted as the path to happiness. Naturally, people are very confused.

Nonetheless, I feel that people in the West have an advantage. Having so much material prosperity, they have already experienced everything our society tells us will give happiness. If they have any sense at all, they can see that it does not bring happiness. At most, it gives pleasure, which is very short-term; genuine happiness must lie elsewhere. If you’ve never had those things, you can still imagine that they would give the kind of satisfaction their promoters assure us they do. But as the Buddha said, desire is like salty water—the more you drink, the thirstier you become.

So why are we still drinking? The crux of the matter is laziness. Even when we know what we should be doing, we choose what seems to be the easier path. We’re gods acting like monkeys. We’re standing in our own light: we don’t see who we really are.

But how do we step out of our own light, step onto the unconditioned path, and realize our limitless potential? Our mind is a treasure. But it’s very absorbent, so we must also be very discriminating in what we hear, read, and see. And in the spiritual life, our fence is our ethics. If we know we are living ethically to the best of our ability, the mind will become peaceful. We will attract the same kinds of people we really are. If we have a mind full of defilements, we will attract that to us. Therefore we have to purify our mental state, because whatever is within we will project out. You bring people toward you by your work and by karma. You have to be ready, when someone of a higher level is in front of you, to meet them. You do this by connecting to your source.

But if the Buddha were here, all he could encourage you to do would be to practice. Nobody else can do our work for us—it’s up to us to do it or not. Swimming upstream toward the source takes effort and determination. Sorry, there is no quick fix. But in the end it is the only thing that’s worthwhile. The key is practice. But don’t put it on the shrine: take the key, open the door, and walk out of the prison. There are no obstacles.

Photos © Sarah Lee

Beauty like a river; William Stanhope

Trust is the hardest thing
Believing that with enough
Silence, enough stillness
Our earthly tethers will
Slacken their hold just enough
To let the soul breathe

 Like a chained dog (testing,
A thousand times, the limits
Of its freedom)
Suddenly, by sheer Grace
No longer feeling the familiar
Chokehold in a last frenzied
Thrust away from every
Crushing thing

And there suspended mid air
In that brilliant moment
Beauty like a river
Flows all around and was
Never absent
Freedom like a wave
Sweeps every barren place
Anointing darkness with light
And a profusion of flowers

Hawkscry April 9, 2012
(This is the forst poem written in Dogwood Cottage)

What Love Is: Ayya Khema

Most people are under the impression that they can think out their lives. But that's a misconception. We are subject to our emotions and think in ways based on our emotions. So it's extremely important to do something about our emotions. In the same way as the Buddha gave us the Four Supreme Efforts for the mind, he also outlined the Four Emotions for the heart. The Four Supreme Efforts for the mind are (1) not to let an unwholesome thought arise which has not yet arisen, (2) not to let an unwholesome thought continue which has already arisen, (3) to make a wholesome thought arise which has not yet arisen, (4) to make a wholesome thought continue which has already arisen. The Four Emotions—lovingkindness (metta), compassion (karuna), joy with others (mudita), and equanimity (upekkha)—are called the "divine abodes." When we have perfected these four, we have heaven on earth, paradise in our own heart.

I think everybody knows that above us is the sky and not heaven. We have heaven and hell within us and can experience this quite easily. So even without having complete concentration in meditation and profound insights, the Four Divine Abidings, or Supreme Emotions, enable us to live on a level of truth and lovingness, security, and certainty, which gives life a totally different quality. When we are able to arouse love in our hearts without any cause, just because love is the heart's quality, we feel secure. It is impossible to buy security, even though many people would like to do so. Insurance companies have the largest buildings because people try to buy security. But when we create certainty within, through a loving heart, we feel assured that our reactions and feelings are not going to be detrimental to our own or other people's happiness. Many fears will vanish.

Metta—the first of the Supreme Emotions—is usually translated as "loving kindness." But loving-kindness doesn't have the same impact in English that the word love has, which carries a lot of meaning for us. We have many ideas about love. The most profound thought we have about love, which is propagated in novels, movies, and billboards, is the idea that love exists between two people who are utterly compatible, usually young and pretty, and who for some odd reason have a chemical attraction toward each other—none of which can last. Most people find out during the course of their lifetime that this is a myth, that it doesn't work that way. Most people then think it's their own fault or the other person's fault or the fault of both, and they try a new relationship. After the third, fourth, or fifth try, they might know better; but a lot of people are still trying. That's usually what's called love in our society.

In reality, love is a quality of our heart. The heart has no other function. If we were aware that we all contain love within us, and that we can foster and develop it, we would certainly give that far more attention than we do. In all developed societies there are institutions to foster the expansion of the mind, from the age of three until death. But we don't have any institutions to develop the heart, so we have to do it ourselves. Most people are either waiting for or relating to the one person who makes it possible for them to feel love at last. But that kind of love is beset with fear, and fear is part of hate. What we hate is the idea that this special person may die, walk away, have other feelings and thoughts—in other words, the fear that love may end, because we believe that love is situated strictly in that one person. Since there are six billion people on this planet, this is rather absurd. Yet most people think that our love-ability is dependent upon one person and having that one person near us. That creates the fear of loss, and love beset by fear cannot be pure. We create a dependency upon that person, and on his or her ideas and emotions. There is no freedom in that, no freedom to love.

If we see quite clearly that love is a quality that we all have, then we can start developing that ability. Any skill that we have, we have developed through practice. If we've learned to type, we've had to practice. We can practice love and eventually we'll have that skill. Love has nothing to do with finding somebody who is worth loving, or checking out people to see whether they are truly lovable. If we investigate ourselves honestly enough, we find that we're not all that lovable either, so why do we expect somebody else to be totally lovable? It has nothing to do with the qualities of the other person, or whether he or she wants to be loved, is going to love us back, or needs love. Everyone needs love. Because we know our own faults, when somebody loves us we think, Oh, that's great, this person loves me and doesn't even know I have all these problems. We're looking for somebody to love us to support a certain image of ourselves. If we can't find anybody, we feel bereft. People even get depressed or search for escape routes. These are wrong ways of going at it.

On the spiritual path, there's nothing to get, and everything to get rid of. Obviously, the first thing to let go of is trying to "get" love, and instead to give it. That's the secret of the spiritual path. One has to give oneself wholeheartedly. Whatever we do half heartedly, brings halfhearted results. How can we give ourselves? By not holding back. By not wanting for ourselves. If we want to be loved, we are looking for a support system. If we want to love, we are looking for spiritual growth. Disliking others is far too easy. Anybody can do it and justify it because, of course, people are often not very bright and don't act the way we'd like them to act. Disliking makes grooves in the heart, and it becomes easier and easier to fall into these grooves. We not only dislike others, but also ourselves. If one likes or loves oneself, it's easier to love others, which is why we always start loving-kindness meditations with the focus on ourselves. That's not egocentricity. If we don't like ourselves because we have faults, or have made mistakes, we will transfer that dislike to others and judge them accordingly. We are not here to be judge and jury. First of all, we don't even have the qualifications. It's also a very unsatisfactory job, doesn't pay, and just makes people unhappy.

People often feel that it's necessary to be that way to protect themselves. But what do we need to protect ourselves from? We have to protect our bodies from injury. Do we have to protect ourselves from love? We are all in this together, living on this planet at the same time, breathing the same air. We all have the same limbs, thoughts, and emotions. The idea that we are separate beings is an illusion. If we practice meditation diligently with perseverance, then one day we'll get over this illusion of separation. Meditation makes it possible to see the totality of all manifestation. There is one creation and we are all part of it. What can we be afraid of? We are afraid to love ourselves, afraid to love creation, afraid to love others because we know negative things about ourselves. Knowing that we do things wrong, that we have unhappy or unwholesome thoughts, is no reason not to love. A mother who loves her children doesn't stop loving them when they act silly or unpleasant. Small children have hundreds of unwholesome thoughts a day and give voice to them quite loudly. We have them too, but we do not express them all.

So, if a mother can love a child who is making difficulties for her, why can't we love ourselves? Loving oneself and knowing oneself are not the same thing. Love is the warmth of the heart, the connectedness, the protection, the caring, the concern, the embrace that comes from acceptance and understanding for oneself. Having practiced that, we are in a much better position to practice love toward others. They are just as unlovable as we are, and they have just as many unwholesome thoughts. But that doesn't matter. We are not judge and jury. When we realize that we can actually love ourselves, there is a feeling of being at ease. We don't constantly have to become or pretend, or strive to be somebody. We can just be. It's nice to just be, and not be "somebody." Love makes that possible. By the same token, when we relate to other people, we can let them just be and love them. We all have daily opportunities to practice this. It's a skill, like any other.

Image: Seated Buddha, India, Gandhara, 3rd or 4th century. Courtesy Yale University Art Gallery.

Born in Berlin of Jewish parents in 1923, Ayya Khema escaped Nazi Germany in 1938 with a transport of 200 children to Glasgow. She joined her parents two years later in Shanghai, where, with the outbreak of war, the family was put into a Japanese POW camp, in which her father died. Four years after her camp was liberated, Ayya Khema emigrated to the United States, where she married and had two children. While traveling in Asia from 1960 to 1964, she learned meditation and in 1975, began to teach. Three years later she established Wat Buddha Dhamma, a forest monastery in the Theravada tradition near Sydney, Australia. In 1979 she was ordained as a Buddhist nun in Sri Lanka. She is currently the spiritual director of BuddhaHaus in Oy-Mittleberg, Germany, which she established. She has written numerous books in English and German, including Being Nobody, Going Nowhere (Wisdom Publications) and When the Iron Eagle Flies (Penguin Books).