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Michael John Smith

Love

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I think, love is about giving, it's just another word for giving. We want to give everything to someone we really love. We find ourselves giving them most of our time - they always seem to be in our thoughts. We also want to share everything we find enjoyable or interesting with them, including our innermost secrets. This love, or giving, is really opening our hearts to someone we feel we can give to. Ideally our heart should be big enough to want to give to everyone because actually they all need it - this is what we really mean by blind love. If we are looking for someone special to favor with our love we must look for a person we know we can continue giving love too - someone compatible with us in much more than just one way. We should not go around seeking people to give a little to for a short time and then taking our love away again and breaking hearts.

Like I said love is about giving not taking - we shouldn't be so interested all the time in what we will get out of it - true happiness comes out of giving not taking and this includes love. When we find that we are no longer able to give anything in a relationship, then and only then is it time to think about opting out of it.

 

Thus, when we give some money to a beggar we don't even know, this is love but it's not very much love. If we inquire about his health, give money continuously and include him in our practice this is greater, deeper love. Love must be cultivated, step-by-step - first loving those you are close to, then those you are neutral about and finally those you don't like or consider your enemies.

 

Please, what are your thoughts on the question of love?

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Of course this is true because the six perfections are an expression of the four immeasurables and the other way around. When we have love (to wish that sentient beings possess both the causes and the results of happiness), compassion (to wish that sentient beings be free from the causes and effects of suffering), joy (to wish that sentient beings never be apart from happiness) and

equanimity (to wish that sentient beings be free from attachment and aversion),we already have the six perfections of generosity, morality, patience, energy, perseverance, meditation and wisdom. To practice one set is to practice the other - they are two aspects of bodhicitta.

 

So when we give away our possessions, body and merit with perfect morality, patience, perseverance, meditation and wisdom present we are expressing our love, compassion. joy and equanimity to all sentient beings - bodhicitta is present and we possess the perfectly compassionate and wise mind of the Buddha.

 

So, starting with a meditation on the meaning of love, we can reach some kind of understanding of the meaning of bodhicitta, or the wish for enlightenment for all sentient beings.

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Michael, my thoughts on love are this, when I look closely at my feeling love, it's because I've extended my sense of self to cover them too and I just want to give them everything they need, make them happy, help them as if they were myself.

 

I get so much joy when I meditate because I see my thinking like this, so when I equalize self and others, ohhh, there's just so much bliss, especially when I think of the pain in the world my love and joy go out of control, more bliss than my body can handle, this mind training truly transforms sorrow into joy, fear into fearlessness, this body into a bodhisattva's body, this speech into a bodhisattva's speech, this mind into a bodhisattva's mind, and the world into a pure land.

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