『Love Everybody?』のカバーアート

Love Everybody?

Love Everybody?

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Hari OmThe most common response to “Love Everybody” that I hear is: That’s great…but everybody? I mean…you can’t love everybody. As a thought, I agree. There is no way I can love everybody in my thoughts, because thoughts are not the source of love. Thoughts are not where love lives, or where it originates, or where love can flourish. The nature of a thought is one that is maleable, penetrable, fickle, and very conditional. This could not be the source of love. It can be a place of reverence for love. Of adoration of love. Thoughts can be the altar, or even the temple of love, though more often, thoughts act as the gate to the temple. (We can adorn the gate, but we would not worship there.) But love as an idea, well, that certainly pervades our thoughts. We use the word often, and in many ways. Great! I LOVE the idea of love. I love a lot of things in my mind. I love pizza. I love punk shows. I love road trips. I love those hilarious videos of cats smacking dogs. I LOVE a lot of things in my thinking mind. Having space where love can flourish is a wonderful thing, and not to be taken for granted. The more places, no matter how temporary, that we can find love, the better we all are for it. This said, the love that is required to follow the teachings of Love Everybody is not a thinking type of love. It is a love of understanding and of stepping outside of any judgments I carry. That can be really difficult for a thoughtful person. A person who identifies strongly with their own mind, and their thoughts, and their extraordinary abilities to find (or create) reason in an otherwise unreasonable world will most likely struggle greatly with this teaching and practice, at first. I know I still struggle with what it could look like to love my enemy. What could it look like to love in the face of disgust, terror, and even hatred? Yep, there it is, that most taboo word in the world of self-help spirituality. Hate. Oh my, it is juicy and tempting, isn’t it? To be brought into hatred. There are billions of dollars spent on investing in your very human experience of hatred, which influences your worldview and thoughts. There are people whose whole ass job it is to make you hate, and to teach you to enjoy it. And yet, when we bring hate up in polite spiritual company, the “feel-your-feelings” crowd splits like a crowd at the last concert I stagedove at. Feel all your feelings but the ones you are not supposed to have is the lesson there. Well, we have them. We have big fearful emotions that are fed by and in turn feed big hateful thoughts and feelings. So how can both Love Everybody and Hate anybody? Good question, glad I asked. Stop thinking about it. Stop overanalyzing who is deserving of love and when and how, because inevitably, you are only collecting irrefutable evidence for the times you didn’t feel the love you needed to feel and justifying them as you didn’t deserve to be loved. This is the foundation of conditional love, perhaps. What is unacceptable about you, and how can you find it in others? Okay, that is part of it. The next part is, what if you didn’t know a thing? What happens in the moments you either do not know about the worst things a person has done in their life, or you can, through great effort, ignore those things, and you are tasked with caring for them? I addressed this in the sit this morning, but honestly don’t know if it was before or after I got the microphone turned on, so I will offer an example here. You are driving along when you witness a vehicle swerve to avoid hitting a deer and go off the road, slamming into a couple of small trees before coming to an abrupt stop with significant damage. You pull over and see that the person driving is hurt and struggling for breath. You can open the door and help them to find a more relaxed posture without a steering wheel in their throat with relative ease. Do you interview this person to ask what their politics are, their history of behaviors in personal relationships, and what their preferred diet is? Not likely. You would most likely do what you could to provide what is needed to relieve as much suffering as you can. Why? Because you want to relieve what suffering you can in the world, knowing that the less suffering in the world, the less you will suffer. This is the recognition that my wellness and your wellness are inextricably linked. They are not codependent upon one another for validation, which is what the world of conditional love insists; instead, they are interdependent upon one another because of their inherently linked nature. This is a small invitation into a big understanding of an even bigger love. Wendell Berry offers some word on what love in absence could look like. For An Absence Wendell Berry When I cannot be with you I will send my love (so much is allowed to human lovers) to watch over you in the dark — a winged small presence who never sleeps, however long the night. Perhaps it cannot ...
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