Dissolving the enemies of love. Zoom, 2026
Dissolving the enemies of love
James Low, 6th Sept 2020.
Prepared by Stuart Zinski and Barbara Terris from the Zoom talk.
Read the edited text here.
From the book The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse by Charlie Mackesy.
Some excerpts:
…The field of love means the field of inclusion. May all beings be happy. May everything be seen as it is, as an aspect from the Buddha mind. This inclusion comes under attack from enemies or forces which act against the whole, which act against the seamless integrity of every aspect of what is occurring…
… The enemies of love are any positions which are exclusive. Love is the universal embrace. In mahayana buddhism we say that love is wanting all beings to be well and happy. Kindness or compassion is wanting them to be free of suffering. The basis of exclusivity is forgetfulness of the ground. When the ground is not attended to, when we are momentarily distracted into the delusion that there are truly separate existing entities, then confusion begins.
… Don’t try to make things better. It is your effort that makes it worse. You’re not the doctor. You’re not the medicine. You are the poison. That’s what we have to see. Samsara is a sign of excessive effort: the effort of maintaining a delusion…
… In brief, the enemies of love are any positions which are exclusive and the basis of exclusivity is forgetfulness of the ground. Love is the universal embrace. In mahayana buddhism we say love is wanting all beings to be well and happy, and kindness or compassion is wanting them to be free of suffering…
…This allows us to gradually ease our way out of the heaviness of being this body, of being this personality, of being this person with our history and our likes and dislikes, until we are just a wave of energy interacting moment by moment. When we see that everything arises from the same ground, we see that there is no real basis for discrimination, for separating self and other, good and bad…
There is no boundary to love. That is to say, we are aware of everything we encounter. We don’t have a selective attention; we can even welcome our limitations. I can even give a warm welcome to my disinterest in football! We are as we are, not trying to be other than how we are, yet not being limited inside this formation of how we are…
So this is how we can proceed day by day, until one day we turn into a rainbow…
You can watch the video recording here.