Posts Tagged ‘emptiness’
The Way of Love
The fundamental cause of human suffering is alienation: alienation from the self, from others and from spirit. Love and compassion transform suffering into bliss.
“Before we can generate compassion and love, it is important to have a clear understanding of what we understand compassion and love to be. In simple terms, compassion and love can be defined as positive thoughts and feelings that give rise to such essential things in life as hope, courage, determination and inner strength. In the Buddhist tradition, compassion and love are seen as two aspects of the same thing: compassion is the wish for another being to be free from suffering; love is wanting them to have happiness.
Self-centeredness inhibits our love for others, and we are all afflicted by it to one degree or another.” (The Dalai Lama, Buddhadharma, Summer 2010, p. 25). As Santideva, an eminent 8th century Buddhist scholar, wrote:
“Cherishing the self is the cause of all suffering. Cherishing others is the source of all happiness.”
Suffering
The Sanskrit word for suffering is dukkha. The root word Kha means sky, or space. The prefix du means unhealthy. So dukkha, suffering, is a condition in which our relationship to space is unhealthy. We suffer when we feel disconnected and alone. An experience of emotional trauma may cause us to retreat into a “fortress self.”
We unconsciously imprison ourselves in a state of psychic “solitary confinement.” This condition perpetuates endless suffering.
Bliss
The Sanskrit word for bliss is sukha. This connotes a healthy relationship to space. We are open. We feel related to others. We are connected to our own embodied selves, to others and to spirit.
The key to the transformation of suffering into bliss is to open our hearts. “Through hardness and selfishness the heart grows rigid. This rigidity leads to separation from all others. Egotism isolates people.” (The I Ching, Wilhelm/Baynes edition, p. 228).
Opening the heart leads to love and compassion. Compassion means participation in the suffering of others. Passion, in Latin, refers to both suffering and affection. Participation in the suffering of others is a form of love. An openness to suffering is a prerequisite for complete, unconditional love.
Compassion and Openness
Compassion in Sanskrit is Bodhicitta : literally, the mind of Enlightenment. In Tibetan Buddhism, relative bodhicitta connotes compassion. Absolute bodhicitta refers to the wisdom of emptiness, or openness. All phenomena are seen as being virtual, “like a dream, like an illusion.” From this standpoint, the apparent boundaries between self and others dissolve. The reality of our interdependence, our interrelatedness with all other sentient beings, comes fully alive. We become fully alive, both the subject and the object of all encompassing, nonreferential love.
The Way of Love
“If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.
Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways. For now we see through a glass darkly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.
So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.”
The Holy Bible, English Standard Version. 1 Corinthians 13
A Buddhist Perspective on Healing: Wisdom and Compassion
My immersion in Tibetan Buddhism has influenced my perspective on the healing process. The central tenets of Tibetan Buddhism are wisdom and compassion.
Wisdom in Healing
From a conventional point of view, phenomena are incontrovertibly how they appear. At this level, healing in psychotherapy includes the kinds of work that I have described in previous blogs and radio shows. It is essential to bring dissociated feelings and memories into conscious awareness. Doing so in the context of a caring psychotherapy relationship allows the “working through,” the integration and the release of these emotions. Mourning is central to this process: mourning for both what was wounding and for what was lacking in the patient’s early life.
Another key component of the healing process is working on the patient’s “shadow” side. Trauma propagates through identification with the aggressor. It is a painful, but vital, step to recognize one’s own propensity to hurt others.
From an ultimate point of view, all phenomena are inherently “empty.” I am not qualified to discuss the Buddha’s teachings. So, for our purposes, let me just say that healing is facilitated by the cultivation of the awareness that all of our perceptions, all of our experiences, are like a mirage, like an illusion. We all construct our own “psychic reality.”
This realization is very powerful. It gives us the freedom to construe the past from multiple vantage points. We can achieve release from an identity as a perennial victim of circumstances. We can develop the capacity for what Carolyn Myss has called “symbolic sight.” We can learn to “learn from our experience” (Wilfred Bion). We can develop the potential to do things differently, to experience transformation.
Viewing life as an open field, rather than as a constellation of solid figures, liberates us from fixity, from the unconscious compulsion to repeat the past.
Compassion In Healing
Compassion for others is the antidote for narcissism. Narcissism is the root of all suffering. When we fixate on an “I,” we experience ourselves as fundamentally disconnected, constricted, anxious and depressed. When we cultivate our compassion for others, we feel alive, related and infused with life energy.
Wisdom and compassion are inseparable, like the two wings of a bird. In conjunction with one another, they liberate us from suffering, allowing our spirits to take flight. The darkness of our delusions is dispelled. The radiance of our innate nature shines forth unimpeded. We are free.