Loving-Kindness Isn’t About Morality

The “great commandments” from Jesus are: 1. Love your neighbor as yourself. 2. Love God with all your heart, mind and soul. (He says that summarizes all the law and the prophets, too.)

Personally, I think of them as the “great observations.” If you don’t love yourself, you can’t love your neighbor. And whatever you love wholeheartedly…that’s your God.

Adam, the first paragraph is fine. The next is unnessessary and almost incorrect. Buddha did not die for my sins. Jesus did.

I honestly believe that he had consumed (intentionally or not) some form of MDMA or equivalent love-inducing psychotropic. It is known that many moulds can contain mind altering chemicals.

So, Gautama was probably sitting under a tree eating some stale flat bread when – WHAM!
His whole world was rocked!

The mythology surrounding Siddhartha hides the truth of a troubled person and a troubling religion. Siddhartha was a wealthy, handsome prince who left his wife and child because he was having an extisential crisis. He hung out with some hippies and he had the dominating feel good philosophy and he became the earliest version of instagram famous. He says he found that if you sit still you can release certain neurotransmitters that change how you perceive the world.

But what he did was find a way to violently subjugate a natural product of our own self awareness; suffering. Yes violently. Meditation is self inflicted violence and subjugation of our natural self. Siddhartha did not love himself, he hated being human, he wasted to escape his humanity. Buddhism is an escape, a more gentle opioid but an opioid none the less. It is hedonistic at its core. It claims that it’s end goal will lead to 24/7 bliss! No one could survive that!

Buddhism is also a farmers religion. It can only exist with a surplus of food so that a few people can spend hours a day sitting and staring at walls. Don’t you think governments use it to pacify it’s people? Do you think it was a coincidence that Siddhartha was a prince? Do you think it is a coincidence that corporations are so quick to incorporate it into the workplace?

Nature does not distinguish between pain and suffering, only lawyers and humans do. And nature does not care about love, it cares about survival and reproducing. You said loving is far better than being angry. Is it better or does it FEEL better?

Buddhism has left the Far East in a mess, just as all the gurus before and after Siddhartha have.

And please do not assume anything about my background and experience regarding Buddhism.

The practice of loving kindness is simple enough. Find someone or something you can love unreservedly (the Christian God is usually bad for this, since most people are terrified of him and hate him, though they will not admit it. After all, if you displease him, he will have you tortured for eternity.)

The easiest, most direct path to God (or Enlightenment, Reality, Truth – whatever you want to call it) is to love the guru. “God” is usually too abstract for most – or too terrifying – but God as Human – Jesus for example, is not. This is why God incarnates in humans, as God-ordained gurus (versus the frauds + charlatans), to appear in a form that humans can relate to.

There are two paths to God – bhakti (love) or gnana (knowledge). Gnana eventually leads to bhakti.

BTW, saw a great movie about Pope Francis, by Wim Wenders. He is clearly someone who is on the bhakti path.

Herman –

“Love means to love that which is unlovable; or it is no virtue at all.”

Chesterton is a goldmine of insight. On loving your neighbor:

We make our friends; we make our enemies; but God makes our next-door neighbour. Hence he comes to us clad in all the careless terrors of nature; he is as strange as the stars, as reckless and indifferent as the rain. He is Man, the most terrible of the beasts. That is why the old religions and the old scriptural language showed so sharp a wisdom when they spoke, not of one’s duty towards humanity, but one’s duty towards one’s neighbour. The duty towards humanity may often take the form of some choice which is personal or even pleasurable. That duty may be a hobby; it may even be a dissipation. We may work in the East End because we are peculiarly fitted to work in the East End, or because we think we are; we may fight for the cause of international peace because we are very fond of fighting. The most monstrous martyrdom, the most repulsive experience, may be the result of choice or a kind of taste. We may be so made as to be particularly fond of lunatics or specially interested in leprosy. We may love negroes because they are black or German Socialists because they are pedantic. But we have to love our neighbour because he is there– a much more alarming reason for a much more serious operation. He is the sample of humanity which is actually given us. Precisely because he may be anybody he is everybody. He is a symbol because he is an accident.

From the same essay, on the family:

Now, exactly as this principle applies to the empire, to the nation within the empire, to the city within the nation, to the street within the city, so it applies to the home within the street. The institution of the family is to be commended for precisely the same reasons that the institution of the nation, or the institution of the city, are in this matter to be commended. It is a good thing for a man to live in a family for the same reason that it is a good thing for a man to be besieged in a city. It is a good thing for a man to live in a family in the same sense that it is a beautiful and delightful thing for a man to be snowed up in a street. They all force him to realize that life is not a thing from outside, but a thing from inside. Above all, they all insist upon the fact that life, if it be a truly stimulating and fascinating life, is a thing which, of its nature, exists in spite of ourselves. The modern writers who have suggested, in a more or less open manner, that the family is a bad institution, have generally confined themselves to suggesting, with much sharpness, bitterness, or pathos, that perhaps the family is not always very congenial. Of course the family is a good institution because it is uncongenial. It is wholesome precisely because it contains so many divergencies and varieties. It is, as the sentimentalists say, like a little kingdom, and, like most other little kingdoms, is generally in a state of something resembling anarchy. It is exactly because our brother George is not interested in our religious difficulties, but is interested in the Trocadero Restaurant, that the family has some of the bracing qualities of the commonwealth. It is precisely because our uncle Henry does not approve of the theatrical ambitions of our sister Sarah that the family is like humanity. The men and women who, for good reasons and bad, revolt against the family, are, for good reasons and bad, simply revolting against mankind. Aunt Elizabeth is unreasonable, like mankind. Papa is excitable, like mankind Our youngest brother is mischievous, like mankind. Grandpapa is stupid, like the world; he is old, like the world.

What we’re seeing in our time (and what was already well advanced in Chesterton’s day) is people running from Christianity — but they can never succeed, because it casts a 2,000 year shadow. It’s in our blood. We could destroy our civilization trying, and it would come out unscathed.

It’s easy to “love humanity” because you get to choose which parts to love; it’s harder to love your neighbor or your brother. I went to a Baptist church recently and they they had a visiting pastor, who gave a Powerpoint presentation on expanding the church. Dickens had these people’s number with Mrs Jellyby: they’re all about traveling to Africa and rubbing elbows with political bigwigs, while family of their own congregation are suffering unheeded and unministered to.

Ian:

Isn’t the description you have of loving-kindness a transactional one? “it feels really great and gets you a long way”, “you are loving because it is a far better way to live than being angry, hateful and scared”?

Synoia:

Buddhism tends to adapt to the needs of the society it exists in, like all religions. See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_at_War

Would an individual enslaved by the unjust empire prefer you loved them and your neighbors, including those at the top responsible for their needless suffering or do you think they might be perfectly fine with you using pure hatred to remove the immediate problem?

At best this love is powerful nonsense is only useful when what is required to solve our problems is simple tinkering and tweaking. When you need a revolution hate is a foolish emotion to avoid. It is of course understandable given what a powerful tool hate can be and what a dangerous weapon when used wrongly. But our foes possess greater power, greater resources, greater numbers (even if many of those numbers are simply passively going along with the status quo).

What is morally justifiable by a powerless minority is not the same as what is morally justifiable by the state or any other powerful organizing principle. Again, dangerous sentiment used wrongly, but foolish to discard, voluntarily forcing yet more weakness upon yourself.

But remember, morally justifiable is not synonymous with good. It is regrettable that we have reached such a point. We must recognize that no matter what we do, we are responsible for unacceptable levels of violence and suffering. The question is will we do what is easiest, what feels good, maybe what allows us to sleep comfortably in the ignorant abstractions or will we be willing to sacrifice potentially everything we are to stop the machine?