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Do you want to improve your mind? Would you take direct action to feel and live better? If so, then practice a simple, though challenging, process: intend and send loving kindness to the people you most dislike.
Wishing harm for someone is a reflection of the pain and anger within oneself. Until we address the strife in us, we cannot find our personal power.
Wishing someone good is an expression of personal power that transforms without as it heals within.
It may appear as if intending evil is the same as intending good, only the opposite value. That is not so. These intentions are not symmetrical polar opposites. Consider a key difference between them:
Intending harm for someone is prospective and causal. Malicious intent seeks to create an effect in the world that is negative for someone. Curses, vows of revenge, and harmful wishes aim at future states of the intended recipient.
Intending good for someone is conspective and intelligible. Loving intent seeks to perceive a state of reality already occurring. Loving kindness and compassion act in the present.
The difference between prospective and conspective intentions is the difference between wanting to change the world such that it becomes more like oneself and striving to transform oneself in order to see the good in the world as it is. Prospective curses try to revise the world, conspective compassion reinterprets the world.
Hating one’s enemies is an insistence on self-preservation. One’s anger and hurt become the central principles of one’s consciousness.
Loving one’s enemies is a practice of self-transformation. One’s consciousness is expanded by perceiving the world that is beyond one’s personal sphere of influence, which includes inherent good that we had not earlier recognized.
Try it out sincerely and find for yourself how conspective loving kindness changes you and the world. Picture someone whom you really do not like. Stronger, you know that person to be a danger and a fear to what you love most. That is quite an enemy.
The technique, which is also the challenge, is to accept the fact that by their very existence that person has a part to play in reality as it is. The moment that we start telling reality how it has to be in order to fit our desires, we descend into fantasy further divorcing us from the truth. The further our thoughts are from reality the more susceptible we are to inner and outer strife.
Take a concrete example that is on the minds of many around the world as I write this: Donald Trump, President of the United States of America in infected with the corona virus. That fact prompts some folks to imagine and hope for a negative outcome for him; that he gets sicker.
If you have twinges of that negative intention I urge you to reflect and seek a reinterpretation of your world view. Just as our physical selves produce anti-bodies to disable threatening pathogens, so also our spiritual selves produce grace-bodies to dissolve disabling illusions and feelings.
Here is a way that you may strengthen your spiritual immune system. Invoke the following triad of assertions:
I hope that Donald Trump is touched by my loving kindness being comfortable, safe, and on the road to a healthy recovery.
I hope that the people for whom I care feel my loving kindness for their health and safety.
I hope that my loving kindness is strong enough to bring out the inherent good in the world and myself.
Speak these three assertions with sincerity and feeling three times each day: morning, mid day, and evening. Notice how you feel when saying these. You do not need to do anything to change how you feel, just keep up with the process of voicing these intentions with as much sincerity as you can give. Also notice that the statements are structured from the remote external (and possibly counter-intuitive for you) to the inner self. Continue this process for at least three days, though I recommend doing so much longer, such as long as Trump’s illness persists.
Why do I pick the controversial case of this President? Precisely because Donald Trump does not deserve our compassion. He does not deserve our compassion partly because he has shown systematic contempt for other people’s illnesses and disabilities in public. Mocking pitilessness in word and action for people who are sick, wounded, and disabled is part of his normal repertoire. Donald Trump performs exactly as a school yard bully taunting and tormenting others who have weaknesses, disabilities, differences, names and ethnicities that the dense hateful mind so enjoys twisting in order to inflict hurt. Sadly, many of Trump’s faithful delight in his cruelty as is always the case with the willful audience for whom the school yard bully performs. It is a source of collective shame that such a man is the leader of our nation.
Well, if I believe that then why in the world do I prescribe not hating Trump and even giving him the blessing of loving kindness? The reason is precisely because he is so clearly the antithesis of compassion. By his words and actions Donald Trump provides a clear baseline for indecency. Rejecting his sadistic character is an intentional movement away from the evil and into the light of good. Send your loving kindness to the man for his physical, mental, and moral disease because doing so is the opposite of what he does for others.
Maybe you believe that President Trump is a great man. Given what you believe to be true you may be right. Still I implore you to make greatness your ideal. Greatness does not participate in the mockery of the illness and tragedies of others. You may think that I am wrong about Trump but you know that I am right about the meaness of being cruel no matter who does it.
The awesome power of loving kindness is that it is undeserved. You do not give it because you are morally or socially obligated to do so. You give loving kindness when its quality is so strong in you that you have a surplus to share, especially for those who least warrant it. Listen, opportunities like this do not come along every day. Seize this moment and you will experience the power of free and full self-transformation.
I sincerely hope that Donald Trump’s health suceeds against the corona virus. I earnestly pray that the light of compassion enters his heart so that he may come to care for others.
Believe that there is good even where it seems the least likely.
Believe in the power of loving kindness to transform deceptive interpretations of reality.
Believe that practicing loving kindness for yourself, those around you, and for your enemies is more powerful than blustering antics the school yard bully.
Don’t believe me. Try it with sincerity and see for yourself how the world changes around you as you act on your view of the world. The sun rises gradually across the whole.
Image Acknowledgments
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Klearchos Kapoutsis
https://search.creativecommons.org/photos/37f3d6a5-2c2f-41d4-9654-9933c450d7ad
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zeekslider
https://search.creativecommons.org/photos/d2f1805b-f910-48ae-8ff7-5820723b7361
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https://simpsons.fandom.com/wiki/Nelson_Muntz
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Terry Tan De Hao
https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1498972385535-427d93dadf44
The Massachusetts State motto contains the phrase “peace only under liberty.” The liberty to seek final peace is being sought in court by Roger Klinger, a Massachusetts physician with prostate cancer. The cancer has not responded to treatment and is diagnosed as terminal. Klinger wants the option to deal with that terminal condition on his own terms, by taking a fatal dose of medications prescribed for that purpose. Massachusetts law prohibits its citizens from ending their own lives.
Five US states have laws allowing physician assisted suicide; Oregon, Washington, Vermont, Montana, and California. The first such US law was Oregon’s Death with Dignity Act which allows terminally-ill people to end their lives through the voluntary self-administration of lethal medications, expressly prescribed by a physician for that purpose. Oregonians enacted that law in 1997 though initiative petition. Twenty years later the Oregon experience provides a model for the nation as other states deliberate similar liberties. The Oregon Department of Public Health publishes an annual report on the Act. The reports are very instructive. For instance, since 1988 1,127 Oregonians have ended their lives using the law. The majority of those chose to die at home. Only 64% who are prescribed lethal drugs under the law actually use them.
The political and moral issues of physician assisted suicide are complex. The Oregon experience with the law and its practice stands as a guide for the nation. But after all, Oregon’s state motto is “Fly on one’s own wings.”
Klinger focused his proclivity to helping people by becoming a facilitator for a Cape Cod Death Cafe. That event and those like it around the globe provide opportunities to discuss issues related to mortality. Death Café Corvallis is such a venue now in it’s third year.
Peace and best fortune to Dr. Klinger and all people facing terminal illness.
Conversations on topics such as in this post are common at Death Café Corvallis. You are welcome to participate. Information at Death Cafe Corvallis.
Atul Gawande is a surgeon and writer for New Yorker magazine. His 2014 book, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters at the End, is the basis of a Frontline program, Being Mortal, that will air on PBS tonight.
The book and program sound fascinating and will likely make for lively Death Café Corvallis conversation.
Jon Dorbolo 