What's So Scary About Peace, Love and Understanding?
A close friend recently shared with me this excerpt of a Brain Pickings review of Thich Nhat Hanh's book How to Love. I found it very moving, so I've chosen to share it with you. You can find my musings about it below:
"At the heart of Nhat Hanh’s teachings is the idea that “understanding is love’s other name” — that to love another means to fully understand his or her suffering. (“Suffering” sounds rather dramatic, but in Buddhism, it refers to any source of profound dissatisfaction — be it physical or psycho-emotional or spiritual.) Understanding, after all, is what everybody needs — but even if we grasp this on a theoretical level, we habitually get too caught in the smallness of our fixations to be able to offer such expansive understanding. He illustrates this mismatch of scales with an apt metaphor:
"If you pour a handful of salt into a cup of water, the water becomes undrinkable. But if you pour the salt into a river, people can continue to draw the water to cook, wash, and drink. The river is immense, and it has the capacity to receive, embrace, and transform. When our hearts are small, our understanding and compassion are limited, and we suffer. We can’t accept or tolerate others and their shortcomings, and we demand that they change. But when our hearts expand, these same things don’t make us suffer anymore. We have a lot of understanding and compassion and can embrace others. We accept others as they are, and then they have a chance to transform."
"The question then becomes how to grow our own hearts, which begins with a commitment to understand and bear witness to our own suffering:
When we feed and support our own happiness, we are nourishing our ability to love. That’s why to love means to learn the art of nourishing our happiness.
Understanding someone’s suffering is the best gift you can give another person. Understanding is love’s other name. If you don’t understand, you can’t love.""
It's scary to talk about peace, love and understanding in a time when it's cool to marginalize and despise those with whom we disagree. These days, almost everyone seems to have someone or a group that it's okay for them to hate or fear. I understand where that's coming from. The world is scary and unpredictable, and the future doesn't look bright. If we project our current patterns into the future, it looks downright terrifying. That seems to me to be a clarion call to all of us to transform the way we do things, and that is why I love what Thich Nhat Hanh offers us here. It is a path towards a transformation that begins with us.
I really want to flag two aspects of this. On the one hand, our capacity to love transforms us. On the other hand, it allows others to transform.
On the first point, Lauren Rosenfeld beautifully explains, "Sometimes we stubbornly refuse to understand because we believe that understanding is a zero-sum game: if I reach out to understand you, I must give up a part of my self that I am clinging to as if it were a raft on turbulent river of life. But, in reaching out to understand, what I truly give up is self certainty, which is ego driven and illusory. I let go of the raft of self certainty and find that the flow of the river of life will carry me and you together. Understanding is infinitely expansive and illuminating -- and in this way -- as [Thich Nhat Hanh] explains -- it is equivalent to love: it casts light on our true nature, our interconnectedness, our infinite and infinitely expansive being."
The truth is, opening up to a world full of diverse perspectives takes courage. In realizing we don't have the only right way of seeing the world, we become able to grasp everything a little more lightly. Primarily, this releases us from the suffering inherent in trying to control the flow of life. It also allows us to open up to our own selves because that desire to destroy what we don't like, instead of embracing and understanding it, is easily turned against our own selves. Finally, when we let go of the idea of clinging to right or wrong ways to do things, we become able to grow and evolve. Life becomes a process of potentially continual improvement, and we create the space for ongoing transformation.
If we can learn to love and understand ourselves, we can also learn to love and understand others, and the effect is the same. By understanding and loving others, we permit them to change. We can best understand this by considering the opposite strategy: If we hate someone for the way we see them, their natural reaction is to defend that way of being, to try to justify it, and that can only lead to deeper entrenchment. Even if they decide to change, they wouldn't want us to know and may resist their evolution as a matter of principle. No one wants to give credit to someone who has treated them poorly. If, on the other hand, we want to see someone change, the best thing we can do is to love them, wish the best for them, and understand what's important to them. Only when one feels safe and held can one bring their best self to the table.
So, we come full circle. It seems nearly impossible to learn to love our various enemies, but it is essential to create a better world. We can't force the world to change around us, so the place to start is within.
Sigh. It sounds like a lot of work, but I can't think of anything more important in the world today.