today’s insight and wisdom, courtesy of one whose words i follow closely:
It is difficult to generate compassion to those that harm us or those we don’t know. If it were easy we would have been enlightened long ago. Here are some contemplations that might help:
Reflect on how the other person in question is basically “just like you”. Like you they want happiness and do not want suffering. In fact, you can even visualize them as “just another you”. Because in fact… they are (since we are all very much interconnected and interdependent and empty of any lasting, independent “self”).
Call to mind the kindest action that the person in question has ever done. Now call to mind the most unkind action you have ever committed. Now, while recalling the most kind action this other person committed, forgive them for their present actions (which are causing difficulties). Now, since you have forgiven them, forgive yourself for the most unkind action that you have committed.
A personal favorite:
Imagine the person on their deathbed. They ask for your forgiveness as their dying wish, so that they might die a peaceful death and become a Buddha. Their only obstacle to Buddhahood is your compassion and loving-kindness towards them. Ironically, if you can open your heart and mind and generate immeasurable love for that person, it is a cause for enlightenment, they will become a Buddha and therefore will no longer cause you difficulties.
By the same token, the person on their deathbed is you and the only obstacle preventing you from realization of Buddhahood is your failure to generate bodhicitta towards others. Reflect again and again on how this next exhalation could be your last. The only thing ensuring the persistence of samsaric suffering is your inability to generate love for another sentient being. If you can realize the “emptiness” of these enemies it becomes the cause of enlightenment.
it is a tender and compassionate thing, to engage this manner of activity. i make a point of it simply because it is the only way i know to handle what would otherwise be intense, on-going suffering.
the process of understanding and embracing others as ‘all’, and of embracing as well that i am of, part, and included in it… it often brings something of an ache. a good ache, but an ache nonetheless. hard to describe but to say it is the tugging of a wish that all were one rather than separated by this looping swirl that is samsara.
i take time at intervals to review and remember the people i know or have known, and to send for each of them such thoughts of embrace. also, to consider the many i but encounter and never know beyond a moment, and speak wishes to the universe for them.
is it strange to be one who murmurs such things as i drive down the road, upon seeing an ambulance, or a stranger who frowns, or a merry family cavorting in the park? perhaps. but it gives a sense of comfort to think that maybe, in some small way, such words and aspirations lend to the ultimate end of all suffering.
maybe it is not a bad thing to hold such ‘arrogance’ as to wish this.