When I was a Buddhist, I adored the way they found compassion for all sentient life. Let’s face it, it isn’t easy. While it’s easy to love your children, your siblings, your best friend, it is quite another thing to love your enemies, or those people diametrically opposed to what you consider “right” or “ethical.”

As an example, if I were to ask people what they thought of Donald Trump, there would be these extreme views. A lot of people would hate him, a lot of people would love him – but few would actually find compassion for him. I, myself, fall into a bucket here. When his name comes up in conversation, I feel this anxiety, this anger. For me, he represents all the things materialistic and cruel. If I stay in this state of mind, then I start to color my world in anxiety and anger.

I found that if I were to sit in a spiritual practice, my mind eases. My spirit lifts. In that state, when I look at the world, it is as a passing wave. My anxieties and my anger has melted away. Since it is possible to shift the mind, and reframe my world, I began to think back to the old days when I was a Buddhist.

Now, I have heard it said that it isn’t possible to love all people the same. That we can have love those close to us in a deep way, but the best we can do with others is to love them in a dispassionate way. Yet, with Buddhism, all beings are loved in the same way they love their mother. For the modern world, the “mother” could be substituted for anyone you have a strong love for.

Buddhists follow this reasoning:

• Reincarnation is a reality
• At each point of death, I reincarnated
• I’ve incarnated, perhaps billions of times
• As such, there’s a good chance that I’ve been a mother/friend/sibling to all people in my life, and they have been the same to me
• Therefore, I should consider my “enemy” as a past life friend/mother/sibling, etc.

The Need For Meditation

Reason alone can not make this real. For the Buddhist they would perform a regular meditation on this topic. They might visualize three types of people before them: someone they are neutral towards, someone they have strong affinity with, and someone they dislike. They would mentally ponder the possibilities of the person they are neutral towards, shifting into someone they love. Then as someone they dislike. Similarly they would visualize the person they love and ask “is there anything that would make our relationship neutral? Could they become someone I dislike?” Finally, “could the person I dislike ever become someone I’m neutral with? Someone I love?”

That last one there, is a tough one. Could the negative person we dislike, become someone we’re neutral towards? When people tell me it’s impossible, I think of George Bush. When he was president, there were protests in the streets. People hung his figure in effigy. He was hated by many. But given enough time, those same people became neutral towards his name. In the age of Trump, I’ve seen people who once hated Bush, as cheering him on, or finding compassion with him as he is on camera fumbling with an umbrella.

Now that all those possibilities are mentally recognized in meditation, the meditation continues with those three people. Instead of just three people, they become rows. Behind each of them is a line of people, and those represent all the neutral people, people we love, people we dislike. These are people in this lifetime and in many lifetimes. The realization is that there is an ever changing nature to how we view others.

Finally, if we can understand that those we are neutral towards, those we love and those we dislike, will naturally shift, then we can understand the possibility to adjust it ourselves. At one point in the past (in this lifetime or another), each person has been someone we were neutral with, or someone we loved. It stands to reason then, that we could rethink our views of others, so that all beings were once a person we loved.

How Meditation Works

A meditation like this isn’t magic, it’s rehabituation. Our actions are often not consciously controlled. Something occurs and we react. Some believe that we react to things irrationally. That we attach the look of a person, the smell of a person, the scene we experience; we attach that to a past experience that is emotionally charged and carry the same reaction into a different situation, often illogically. This is the base human experience.

However, by meditating upon something like this meditation on equanimity, one can modify these reactions. We rehabituate our actions. When the loud, authoritarian voice in the room is booming, we don’t react, we begin to see the present moment. The mind considers an openness to the situation that is here now. The person or personality type that we normally have a reaction towards, becomes someone that was once our friend.

Contemplation

In Eckankar we have contemplation. It is very similar to meditation, but perhaps less formal. It’s a free range thought process, where we walk through our thoughts and feelings on a topic, while in a space of spiritual attunement. Attuned to the Mahanta, or to the Sugmad, we detach from the clouds of human experience and see the light more clearly. That light that manifests each of us. We are all here for a reason. We might begin to understand the Karmic relations and why we experience the person we dislike. Do we have any of those traits in our own thoughts and actions?

Our contemplations are perhaps, a form of meditation. We are readjusting our nature to align with a new driven course.

As long as the concept of human love is at the helm, our course will always be the true one.