Do we love our fellow human beings?
Each of us is born into a truly astonishing and frightening amount of hatred. Emerging from the warmth of the womb, we take in from our first breaths an insidious pollution. The ubiquitous, toxic hatred into which we are born is millennia old yet newly refreshed, newly created, newly enforced, and newly heaped up high upon the same ancient, toxic junk pile every single day, every moment. It is as invisible and as pervasive and as normal to us as the air we breathe. We might find that we wouldn’t even recognize the world or ourselves if we no longer hated others
One who has far more than enough to live and to satisfy one’s material and spiritual needs may not consider oneself to be hating a fellow human being who is forced to choose which one of their children will have to die because there is not enough food to sustain everyone in the family.
What is the purpose of life?
All believe that the purpose of life is to be happy. From the moment of birth, every human being wants happiness and does not want suffering. Neither social conditioning nor education nor ideology affects this. Therefore, it is important to discover what will bring about the greatest degree of happiness.
For a start, it is possible to divide every kind of happiness and suffering into two main categories: mental and physical. Of the two, the mind exerts the greatest influence on most of us. Unless we are gravely ill or deprived of basic necessities, our physical condition plays a secondary role in life. Hence, we should devote our most serious efforts to bringing about mental peace.
The greatest degree of inner tranquility comes from the development of love and compassion.
The more we care for the happiness of others, the greater our own sense of well-being becomes. Cultivating a close, warm-hearted feeling for others puts the mind at ease. This gives us the strength to cope with any obstacles we encounter. It is the ultimate source of success in life.
We can strive gradually to become more compassionate, we can develop both genuine sympathy for others' suffering and the will to help remove their pain. As a result, our own serenity and inner strength will increase.
The need for love lies at the very foundation of human existence. It results from the profound interdependence we all share with one another. Some believe that, while love and compassion are marvelous and good, they are not really very relevant. Our world, they say, is not a place where such beliefs have much influence or power. They claim that anger and hatred are so much a part of human nature that humanity will always be dominated by them. This is in agreeable.
We humans have existed in our present form for about 125,000 years. If during this time the human mind had been primarily controlled by anger and hatred, our population would have decreased. But today, despite all our wars, we find that the human population is greater than ever. This clearly indicates that love and compassion predominate in the world.
True compassion is not just an emotional response but a firm commitment founded on reason. Therefore, a truly compassionate attitude towards others does not change even if they behave negatively Of course, developing this kind of compassion is not at all easy! As a start, consider the following facts:
Whether people are beautiful and friendly or unattractive and disruptive, ultimately they are human beings, just like one's self. Like one's self, they want happiness and do not want suffering.
Now, when we recognize that all beings are equal in both their desire for happiness and their right to obtain it, we automatically feel empathy and closeness for them. Through accustoming our mind to this sense of universal altruism, we develop a feeling of responsibility for others: the wish to help them actively overcome their problems. All terms are within our power, given patience and time, to develop this kind of compassion. We should begin by removing the greatest hindrances to compassion: anger and hatred.
As we all know, these are extremely powerful emotions and they can overwhelm our entire mind. Nevertheless, they can be controlled and replaced by an equally forceful energy that stems from compassion, reason and patience. Merely thinking about compassion and reason and patience will not be enough to develop them. We must wait for difficulties to arise and then attempt to practice them.
And who creates such opportunities? Not our friends, of course, but our enemies. They are the ones who give us the most trouble. So if we truly wish to learn, we should consider enemies to be our best teachers. For a person who cherishes compassion and love, the practice of tolerance is essential, and for that, an enemy is indispensable.
So we should feel grateful to our enemies, for it is they who can best help us develop a tranquil mind. Also, it is often the case in both personal and public life, that with a change in circumstances, enemies become friends. So anger and hatred are our real enemies. These are the forces we most need to confront and defeat, not the temporary enemies who appear intermittently throughout life.
Individual happiness can contribute in a profound and effective way to the overall improvement of our entire human community. Because we all share an identical need for love, it is possible to feel that anybody we meet, in whatever circumstances, is a brother or sister. It is foolish to dwell on external differences, because our basic natures are the same. At every level of society, familial, tribal, national and international the key to a happier and more successful world is the growth of compassion. All that is necessary for each of us is to develop our good human qualities.
