I often feel as though if people could just understand that kind of love, there would be such a shift in the priorities of the world.
Most people 'take' and 'search' for love, and 'desire to be given love', because people feel it is 'exceptional', 'beyond our imagination' and other such things.
They hold every scrap and squeeze every drop of juice out of it. We can blame media, we can blame society, we can blame anything, but truthfully, the cause of the world's lovelessness and the cause of the world's suffering doesn't, at the basic level, come from anywhere else except the mind itself.
sure, we can be deceived. But that's out of ignorance.
If I believe that I am wholly accountable for my actions, what power can a deceiver have over me that I am not willing to annul?
We hear people say 'he made me feel that way', but in truth, only I can allow myself to feel a certain way because I hold it close and I desire it or want it or have an attachment to it, or my perception is flawed.
I realized that when I let go of being attached (in the, 'I want for myself' kind of way) that all love becomes something totally different.
This is touching on a philosophy, but no less it has been proved to me as a truth; that we perceive in our thoughts, we make a judgement, we then have an 'outlook' on something, we then focus on that outlook and it becomes a perspective, then we attach an emotion or a desire to it, then we form solutions or 'outlets' to that desire and there becomes a motive, and the motive causes us to act, and after we act we attach a future expectation to our actions, and the cycle continues.
When a person hits me, I perceive their hostility, I make a judgement that that hostility isn't warranted (often without thinking about their views), then my outlook is that they are in the wrong, when I focus on it, my perspective becomes 'they are wrong, I am right' (there is no true understanding in that), then I attach an emotion to it which is usually disgust, fear, outrage or anger, my solution to get rid of that anger, fear or outrage (because they are unpleasant emotions that humans have trouble experiencing) is to hit back, to run away, or to scream 'look what he just did', then I expect some sort of outcome to what I have done, though we can never know what will happen.
But if a person hits me and I perceive nothing, just that this is something that happens, that this person is acting upon me out of emotion, out of their own perspectives and outlooks, and that I am not part of their perspectives, or their emotions, I can act differently. I don't form an outlook because there is not truly anything solid to form an outlook about. My perspective is simply 'they hit me'. I will usually wonder 'why'? So I can ask 'why have you hit me?' Then I can hear their view, why they have decided to hit me out of their anger. What perspective or judgement it is that causes this. When they get the emotion out, I know that the outcome is simply that 'they have got their emotion out'. And I can say 'Do you feel better now?' That is compassion.
Particularly in the metaphorical sense of hitting (outcrys, outbursts, blame, arguments) and particularly in relationships, I would like to adopt this kind of thinking.
So that instead of being offended by someone, be it a friend, a stranger, or a partner, I can simply allow them to have their emotions and make up their own minds as to what they think they need to do, and allow them to do it, without reaction, without hostility.
This way, I don't burden myself with anger, but I am actually 'compassionate' to people who are my 'adversarys'. Or, 'I love my enemies'.