Why We Meditate by Daniel Goleman & Tsoknyi Rinpoche

Author:Daniel Goleman & Tsoknyi Rinpoche
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria Books
Published: 2022-12-06T00:00:00+00:00

The Underlying Nature

The innate love and compassion that is at the core of our nature is like a sun contained in a shuttered house. It is always shining and radiating its natural warmth, but the house that contains it is shuttered quite tightly. The shutters represent our obscurations, such as self-centeredness, ego fixation, extreme attachment, bias, and aversion. Although the shutters block a lot of the light and warmth of the sun, they don’t block all of it. Slivers of light and warmth escape through the cracks. These slivers are like the feelings and thoughts of love and compassion that we do have; the tenderness we have for our family and friends, our pets, the romantic love we can feel, and so on. Part of the practice is to come to understand and trust our innate nature of love and compassion, and another part of the practice is to work with removing the shutters of obscurations so that nature of love can shine and radiate freely to all beings.

Before I dive deeper into exploring the nature of love and compassion, let’s look back at essence love. In the previous chapter we discussed essence love as a basic okayness, a natural well-being we are born with but which often gets covered up by layers of stress, self-judgment, and various emotional blockages. We hinted that essence love is the ground or seed of healthy expression love. The healthy way of expressing compassion or training in it is based on essence love.

Essence love helps minimize or reduce possible side effects of compassion, like getting depressed by others’ suffering, or developing hatred toward perpetrators. We can get depressed because seeing suffering can trigger feelings of hollowness inside us. With essence love, we can channel our empathy and compassion into action and love, without the hollowness or the destructive energy of hatred. Without essence love, we can also become possessive and obsessed, or repeatedly get caught up in unhealthy, codependent relationships. Basically, our innate love and compassion can manifest in very obscured and limited ways. We can become biased and even deeply confused. Once we have healthy and grounded essence love, then love and compassion radiate naturally, with less baggage and fewer stories, less triggering of our wounds.

A key goal here is to be able to have love and compassion not only for those close to our hearts but also for our enemies. To achieve that we first need a foundation in essence love. Otherwise true compassion is on shaky ground. For example, a habitual pattern might boost our love and compassion, like being partial to a particular kind of dog, but this would be biased. Without the underlying warmth of essence love, our feelings and triggers turn into biased love and biased compassion. This is why essence love is so crucial as the ground for healthy love and compassion.

In brief, healthy love is with essence love, while unhealthy love lacks that foundation. This is delicate. I’m not trying to pass judgment on people for having “unhealthy” love and compassion.

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