Good morning. Well, yesterday afternoon, our shuso Carol Paul gave a wonderful talk. The subject was on love, and very inspiring. And at the end, she asked me if I had anything to say. And I said, well, you know, so much to say. I said, we assign meanings to words. And the word love has got a lot of assignments. It can mean anything you want it to mean, almost. So I decided that I would continue her talk as my talk with that question.

[01:11]

And so today I'm going to talk about – I've written down some notes. The subject of my talk is thoughts on love to ponder. I'm not going to tell you about what it's all about, but I'm going to give us some interesting thoughts. I've thought about this a lot, and I've given talks on this myself. And this often comes up when somebody in the audience says, how come we never talk about love in Buddhism? And we always answer, that's all we ever talk about. So you can see what a broad subject this is. It's all about, it's all about love, actually.

[02:14]

But everyone has a different idea about what is love. Mostly our ideas about love are about self-interest. Really? How come nobody loves me? or stuff like that. And the end of my talk will be, how do we deal with the anger and resentments and frustrations in our hearts given today's world? So that's the beginning and the end. And I'm going to talk about the middle. So there are many kinds of love, categories.

[03:18]

And there's three that are maybe main categories. Instinctive love. emotional love and conscious love. Mostly people are interested in instinctive love and emotional love, mostly emotional. So when we talk about love, that's what we think of usually, emotional love. Conscious love is the most difficult. because it's not about me. Instinctive love is biological. Touching and relating and having sex in children and family and so forth.

[04:27]

Emotional love, of course, accompanies all of that and gets us into all kinds of problems and trouble. So, I would say there are higher forms of love and lower forms of love. I won't say that they're not forms of love, but they're not on a very high level because they're mostly about our self. Our self-satisfaction. Those are the lower forms of love. Higher forms of love are not about me, but they include me. So I'm going to just give us a little list of lower forms, and then I'll give us a little list of higher forms, what we consider higher forms.

[05:32]

Self-love, the extreme of self-love is narcissism. But it's love that's really all about me and disguised as about the other person. Sensual love can go either way. It can be a higher form of love or a lower form of love, depending on our degrees of satisfaction. Selfish love, of course, is just all about me and using the other person for our own satisfaction. And delusional love is just not knowing anything about it.

[06:37]

It's just like, you know, going off emotionally in various directions, trying to find something to satisfy us. and not really knowing what we're doing. And then there's the love which demands a reward. I love you, and how come you don't love me? And then there's emotional and instinctive, which I talked about a little bit. And then there's the love-hate duality, In order for the love to be satisfying, it has to include hate. And so we have battered women and battered men and, you know, difficulty that way. And then the wish to be loved but not to need to love.

[07:40]

One-sided. And then one-sided and seductive love. needing to pull someone in and captivate them in order to satisfy ourself, which is never satisfactory. And then there's the infatuation. You know, I've often said that we feel this person is the only person I could ever love. And then to realize that in any one of, if you go around the block, you can probably find somebody that you could love. So there's indiscriminate love, which is finding just the right person and then realizing it's not the right person. And then the next one is the right person, but it's not the right person.

[08:45]

And you just keep going on and on. It's like looking for a teacher. You know, there are people who go around looking for a teacher, and then they practice for a while and say, no, this is not There's something wrong with this person. Then they go to the next teacher. There's something wrong with, can never settle. Not realizing that it's not about the teacher. It's about ourself. In the same way with a partner. Oh, this is the wrong partner. And you just go from partner to partner. And it's never satisfying because it's about us. It's not about the partner. So what are the higher forms of love? We talk about this all the time. And the imponderable ponderable that drives our practice is called emptiness, shunya.

[09:53]

the highest form of love is shunya or emptiness. There are several names, designations for shunya. Someone calls it vastness or whatever. But so what is emptiness? What is the meaning of emptiness? Nobody knows. But the meaning of emptiness, there are 20 designations for the meaning of emptiness in the Dharma, ending with emptiness of emptiness. But basically, what we're concerned with in practice as the meaning of emptiness is interdependence. Emptiness means interdependence, basically. And the highest form of love is interdependence, realizing that everything belongs to everything.

[10:56]

There is no special thing. That's emptiness. There's no special thing. Everything is a part of everything else, and everything is always changing and moving on in different forms. We're all performing and reforming and inter-reforming and becoming each other and becoming stones and sky and birds and plants. To be born as a human is very rare. So, love is what holds the universe together. It's much, much more deep, much deeper than me personally. It's impersonal, but it's personal at the same time, both personal and impersonal.

[12:04]

It's called shunya. It's also called karuna, which is sympathy. You know, there are four For explanations of love in Buddhism, they're both personal and impersonal, but they're not egotistical. But the reason You know, you don't see love as one of the important aspects of Buddhism when you read the literature, because love, historically, in Buddhism, love means sex.

[13:09]

That's the meaning of love directly in Buddhism, sex, or seduction, or things like that. but we have different explanations, you know, in the West. But it doesn't mean that love is not expressed. It's expressed as the four Brahma Mayaras. Loving kindness, or loving, or love, you know, we say loving kindness, that's the way it's been translated, but it's love and kindness. Not the same thing. Love stands by itself, and kindness stands by itself. You can put them together, it's okay. But love standing by itself is the first one.

[14:12]

But it means selflessness. It doesn't mean possessiveness. It means selflessness. Because the conclusion of Buddhism is selflessness. So the second one is karuna, which is compassion. Compassion means suffering, basically, although we use it to mean other things. Passion to me, it means sex, and it means high energy feeling to do something.

[15:17]

Ka-ru-na. Ka, ru, na, three vowels. I like to teach people to spell by putting words together. So, I'm sorry. And so it's your sympathy toward people. It's your identification. Love is identification with others. And then there is sympathetic joy. In other words, you're happy with the successes of other people, even if they supersede you in some way.

[16:23]

And so it precludes envy and jealousy and all of those kind of detrimental feelings that really cause a lot of suffering. So instead of suffering, because somebody else is successful, that makes us happy. And other people's success. So that's a very high form of love because you're always promoting other people and helping other people, basically. It's like helping people to be successful. And then the fourth one is equanimity. Equanimity being the balanced state. You don't get heavy on one side or another side.

[17:35]

You're always at the center. This is also called mindfulness. Mindfulness is the center of equanimity. It's the fulcrum on which all the other emotions, thoughts, and feelings find their balance. So that's why it's so important. So you don't get carried away by infatuation. You don't get carried away by desire. You don't get carried away by self-interest because you're always balancing it on the scale. and staying in the center mindfully. So that's a form of love. So another higher form of love, of course, is selflessness.

[18:50]

Less self. selflessness, in which you are included, you include yourself, but you don't stand out in some way as selfish. Suzuki Roshi, this was one of Suzuki Roshi's main teachings, was don't be selfish. So we're always giving everything, not only giving things away, but giving up, letting go. Compassion is a great selflessness. And because we're all connected, to actually to realize our interconnectedness, our emptiness, is the best gift that we have.

[19:58]

Dana, it's called Dana. Giving up is also giving up, giving away, or helping people all the time. Because the less we have, you know, the less we have and the less we are, the more we can see. So the wisest people are those who have nothing. Poor people can see everybody else actually pretty easily. I mean, it's possible, but this is intentional. Intentional giving up, which makes the sage pure or which makes the sage happy. But it makes delusional people unhappy. To be poor and delusional, that makes people very unhappy.

[21:01]

But to be poor and wise makes people happy. So we call this conscious love. Conscious love is really hard. because it negates our self-centeredness. So then there's, of course, universal love, which is indiscriminate. You're not discriminating, it's just because you're not trying to love people, but because you're open, you're a vehicle for love. which means that you allow love to flow through you. And that's your mode. That's our mode. And so it's not hard, although you get a lot of flack, which is hard, but that's your burden.

[22:07]

The burden is actually to take all the flack from being open and loving Indiscriminately. Yes. Well, people, you know, like, how do you, it's not people are throwing stuff at you. That's not what I mean. It's a little misleading, maybe. It means that you're facing this world of hate and anger and frustration. So you have to deal with that without giving that back. That's what I mean. Yes, yes. Feeling is one aspect, but it's beyond feeling. It's really beyond feeling.

[23:13]

It's just what you do. That's, you know, some people are just always angry. That's just what they do. They shoot people, right? And other people are just, their motive is no matter what, they're just expressing it. It's beyond feeling. So, but which brings up the non-duality of love and hate. which is the highest form because it's love beyond love and hate. It's at a level which You can't do anything else. But, you know, we live in the world of duality, so everything has its opposite.

[24:17]

Whatever you say, the opposite is also true. When you're in the world of opposites, if you operate, and we do, we're all the time operating in the world of opposites, this is right and that's wrong, this is true and that's false, and I can prove this, blah, blah, blah, but actually to go beyond that, to unify love and hate and all opposites. That's true love, the highest form. So harmony, well, actually, including your enemy. This is Jesus, right? Love your enemy. It's not Christianity, but it's Jesus. So far. So, big mind is love.

[25:18]

Suzuki Roshi always talking about big mind. Sixth Ancestor saying, essence of mind. Never leave your essence of mind. So, essence of mind is pure love. Big mind is pure love. Pure meaning without an opposite. It's the transcendence of duality. And harmony, harmony is like wherever you go, you create harmony because of who you are. So Suzuki Roshi used to talk about, there's no need to try to do anything. When you sit zazen, and then you go out into the world, you just be who you are. And without trying to do anything, who you are creates harmony.

[26:20]

wherever you are. But you may think, well, no, it doesn't. You have to work a little harder. It brings us back to, well, you have to work a little harder and use Azen. Those are some of the pure love, those aspects of pure love. Purity means non-duality. It means that you are not reacting to your opposite, which is the hardest thing in the world to do. People say, if you go to Japan, He'll be asked, what do you do? I'm a Zen student. Oh, very difficult. That's why.

[27:24]

It's not difficult because it's hard to cross your legs or sit up straighter. It's hard to keep your practice pure by not reacting in a dualistic way. So, which brings me to the end, like, how do we deal with the anger and resentments and frustrations in our hearts, given today's world? But today's world is not any different than yesterday's world. It's just, it's closer. Everything is closer. And so, it's all in the same house. Things used to happen in Europe and Africa and who cares, right? We're up here, we're in America. But now, boom. It's all, we're all sitting in the same house, getting the same flack, getting the same problems worldwide.

[28:25]

And it's really hard. So big question is, how do we deal with that without retaliating because we, I mean, I feel I want to retaliate, but I don't. Consciously, it would not be correct for me to do that or good for anybody. So how do we, in our daily life, respond without getting caught by reaction. So this is practice. How do we respond without getting caught by reacting and have the proper response? So I want to open up to any questions you might have that I can deal with, hopefully.

[29:37]

So someone comes to us and presents us with something to react to, something that upsets us. I hear you're saying you don't withdraw, you don't do nothing. So when you're in that state of ready to react, what's your next move? The next move could be to take a step back. and be patient. You know, reacting is like jumping on the subject, but to step back and consider. And sometimes we think, well, if I do that, time will pass and the other person will get an advantage or something like that. You know, to maintain composure is our practice. in all circumstances to maintain composure, meaning not to get caught by our reactions.

[30:47]

But it seems that beyond love and hate is engaged. Yeah, engaged. And so stepping back is a process of engagement. Can you explain that? Yes, stepping back is a process of engagement. It gives you a chance to consider a response without reacting. Sometimes you have to react. There's no formula. You know, sometimes we have to react. Sometimes we have to hit somebody, rarely. That could happen, yes. You know, if you see somebody, we used to use this example. Somebody's going to kidnap a little girl, right? Or something like that. And you see that happening. Well, what do you do? You don't sit back and, well, what do I do about this? You react, right? So there's circumstances in which you have to react. But in most circumstances, to be able to step back is retreat.

[31:54]

Retreat is part of the battle. It's not going away. It's stepping back and considering. So consideration is, that's where you have the opportunity to come forth from your side. When you react, you're not doing that. When you react, you are becoming a, giving the other person the lead. So how do you take the lead? by stepping back and considering and then responding. Yeah, most of the time. Oh, yeah. Hi, Sue. You're behind the post. Hi. Yeah, yeah, you should sit over there next to that handsome guy. I think sometimes I have a view that I can access a broader view beyond reaction, reactivity.

[33:08]

There is an idea I heard, and I'm not real close to it at the moment, but I'd like to hear you talk about that, you know, like you feel injured or I feel injured or aggrieved. Yes. There's a place where that doesn't exist. Yeah, that's where we have the opportunity to enjoy our breath, to come back to our breath and just let everything go and breathe. And then it's, you know, what happens in Zazen when you get attacked by your pain? What do you do? It's exactly the same. How did I get into this? I'm never going to do this again.

[34:14]

How do you respond to that? If you react and feel hurt, you're lost. Right. So just let go and breathe and let it take it in and let it And then you can not be driven by your reaction to whatever it is that hurt you. See, this is where our practice really helps us. If we don't abandon our practice and then take some other route, you rely on your practice. When you get a lot of pain, as sitting does then, as soon as you react to it, you're lost. You just let it be and you come back to your breath and you calm down.

[35:17]

And who is it that feels the pain? Who is it that feels the love? What part of you feels the love? The emotion, the feelings? So what, yeah. You know, it's important when somebody insults us, that's important. I'm not saying it's not important, but what's most important is not to react. What you do is more important than what happens to you. Yes, you don't let circumstances control you. That's why it's hard.

[36:21]

Practice is hard. You don't let circumstances control you. Can you do that thing you say when you tell the Japanese you're a Zen student? Can you say what they say? Difficult. Yes. What about just being with whatever is happening, even if it's... Yes. Yes. Yeah, being with what's happening. Instead of stepping back, instead of letting go, what's happening in you is maybe not stepping back. Well, stepping back is just a figure of speech. But it's a doing. Yeah. I'm going to do something, whatever's happening with me. Yeah, I remember Suzuki Roshi said, count to 10 before you do anything. While you're counting, That's what's happening instead of. Yeah, do something.

[37:27]

Yeah, do something. It's okay. Well, not doing is also doing. Yeah, that's doing. Just being with is doing. Yes, you can't not do. To me, that's an important distinction from letting go, from not doing something else. There's a subtlety to it that's important to me. Yeah, well, do what you can. Or don't do what you can. Or do what you can't. Yes, Ron? What I'm saying is it's all slowed down in slow motion, but actually things happen very quickly.

[38:28]

In order to explain it, we slow it down. really the very thing that's unpacked by the Four Foundations of Mindfulness. Being with the Four Foundations of Mindfulness, they break it down very minutely into To me, being with, does that mean you think about something?

[39:32]

You feel something? Whatever it is, you're doing something that involves body and mind. And the approach of mindfulness in its fullness, as laid out by the Buddha, which is our practice, is giving you a tool set by which you can be with. The way it gives being presented to the media is as if you can just be with something and unite with something and not make any, not articulate or distinguish it for yourself. And I don't think that's what the Buddha meant. He said moment by moment, being aware. As long as being aware is doing something, Yeah, as I said, we're always doing something.

[40:37]

Yeah. Not doing is also doing. But, yeah. Mark? Yes, love amongst ourselves here. Yes. Our practice seems literally to cool things down. We're in silence. Yes, cool love is called nirvana. Warm love is connection. The balance between warm and cool is important. So we say to have a cool head and warm feet.

[41:47]

That's the balance. Cool head and warm feet. Warm feet means warm heart, basically. So I think we relate to each other very warm heartedly. Some people will say, no, I don't experience that. But that's because we're not warm-hearted ourselves. If we're warm-hearted ourselves, truly warm-hearted ourselves, we will receive warm-heartedness from others. That's the way it works. But also, we do have eye contact, but not during satsang or kinhand. But when we're not doing that, we have eye contact. And, you know, basically in our monastic practice, every time we meet somebody, we bow. And I do that here, but not everybody does because they haven't experienced that as part of their life.

[42:52]

But if you experience that as part of your life, in a monastic life, you don't have to do anything. You don't have to think up something to say or whatever. You just greet each other from a very deep place, hopefully. So, yeah, it's a good question. Cool head, meaning don't get too excited. and warm heart, meaning it's okay to be excited. And talking about excitement, time to go.

[43:36]

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