What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
Samantabhadra/Kuntuzangpo In my previous post , I ended with this: "The absence of fear is the beginning of love." Briefly, and this will be brief: love is not sentiment, nor is it simpering, cloying "I wuv you" emotionality. Love is directly realizing fundamental Being. Each recognizing it in the Other and finding no-self/no-other. There is no "how" to this. Oh, certainly, there are practices like tong-len, meditating on the Beatitudes in the New Testament, reciting prayers and a myriad techniques for training thinking and perhaps developing reflexes to respond with a degree of calm instead of apprehension; but these are only momentary. Is there a switch to a continuous response to events that is only loving? Personally, I am not so sure in one context; in another, is there anything other than love at work? In what could be called the Immediate Context, it often seems that maintaining a continuous, compassionate response to (or better, b...