Just as compassion is the wish that all sentient beings be free of suffering, loving-kindness is the wish that all may enjoy happiness. As with compassion, when cultivating loving-kindness it is important to start by taking a specific individual as a focus of our meditation, and we then extend the scope of our concern further and further, to eventually encompass and embrace all sentient beings. Again, we begin by taking a neutral person, a person who inspires no strong feelings in us, as our object of meditation. We then extend this meditation to individual friends and family members and, ultimately, our particular enemies.
We must use a real individual as the focus of our meditation, and then enhance our compassion and loving-kindness toward that person so that we can really experience compassion and loving-kindness toward others. We work on one person at a time.
Tags: lovingkindness
Once we are able to combine a feeling of empathy for others with a profound understanding of the suffering they experience, we become able to generate genuine compassion for them. We must work at this continually.
Dalai Lama XIVTags: compassion
It is only natural that difficulties arise if we must fight day by day in order to survive while another human being, equal to us, is effortlessly living a luxurious life. This is an unhealthy situation; as a result, even the wealthy — the billionaires and millionaires — remain in constant anxiety.
Dalai Lama XIVInitially, the positive emotions derived from cultivating our higher natures may be weak, but we can enhance them through constant familiarity, making our experiences of happiness and inner contentment far more powerful than a life abandoned to purely impulsive emotions.
Dalai Lama XIVIn order to lead a meaningful life, you need to cherish others, pay attention to human values and try to cultivate inner peace.
Dalai Lama XIVTags: meaning-of-life inner-peace human-values dalai-lama
The practice of cultivating altruism has a beneficial effect not only from the religious point of view but also from the mundane point of view, not only for long term spiritual development but even in terms of immediate rewards.
Dalai Lama XIVTags: altruism spiritual-development
If you shift your focus from yourself to others, extend your concern to others, and cultivate the thought of caring for the well being of others, then this will have the immediate effect of opening up your life and helping you to reach out.
Dalai Lama XIVTags: helping-others caring-for-others
Cultivate the understanding that the self is not really an independently existing entity, and begin to view self instead in terms of it's dependent relation to others. Although it is difficult to say that merely reflecting on this will produce a profound spiritual realization, it will at least have some effect. Your mind will be more open. Something will begin to change within you. Therefore, even in the immediate term there is definitely a positive and beneficial effect in reversing these two attitudes and moving from self-centeredness to other-centeredness, from belief in self existence to belief in dependent origination.
Dalai Lama XIVTags: self self-centeredness dependant-origination other-centeredness spiritual-realization
My earnest request is that you practice love and kindness whether you believe in a religion or not.
Dalai Lama XIVHe told me that while he was in a Chinese Communist gulag for almost eighteen years, he faced danger on a few occasions. I thought he was referencing a threat to his own life. But when I asked, "What danger?" he answered, "Losing compassion toward the Chinese.
Dalai Lama XIVTags: compassion
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