Bodhicitta
Imagine that feeling when the love of your life enters the room—your heart beats faster, your breathing changes, your face gets warmer, and you can't wait for them to notice and address you. If only we could bottle this emotion, this feeling and sell it . . .
Oh, but how many have already tried? So many products have been invented and sold with a promise to get the consumer so close if not right to that high feeling.
We have the ability to voluntarily recreate this feeling within ourselves. That special someone does not make this happen for us. We trigger this emotion ourselves, conditioned to do so when we think about or look at the person for whom we feel it. We can train ourselves to feel this way toward others and experience this wonderful joy more often—it just takes practice.
Imagine feeling this way toward all members of your family, each one making you feel great love and joy! Try feeling this way for all of your friends, appreciating all of their qualities and accepting all of their mistakes—even when they're exceptionally disagreeable.
Now imagine getting this joyful when you see other members of your neighborhood and greater community, each of them inspiring the same feeling of love and joy. Extend that outward to the strangers you pass on the street, in the stores, and everywhere.
Then, develop it with every animal you see. As you look into their eyes try to sense brotherhood and sisterhood as fellow citizens of this planet. Try to love them deeply and desire that they feel intense happiness!
Finally, when you direct this feeling toward your enemies you find that they no longer exist—there are no enemies anywhere. You love all beings equally and to the full extent of who they are—like a mother loving her only child.
What follows from such an exercise or daily practice like this is joy. It is powerful. However, it is still dependent on the person or creature to whom you direct it. Now, try to develop a love for love itself. Rejoice when you see others sharing loving moments with you or toward anyone else. Rejoice when you hear the laughter of children, and more so when you hear adults laughing (who need to so badly).
Your heart begins to take on a new depth and it radiates love and joy. Your love becomes more expansive and you can feel it flowing through every cell of your body. Over time and after much practice the mind starts to lose its boundaries between self and other.
At this stage of love a great wisdom arises. It sees all the positive and negative words and deeds of the other with gentle acceptance, realizing that they lack this elixir your heart has imbibed. Just as a doctor has great compassion and love for their patient, your understanding and insight softens you. It compels you to help them overcome the delusions of their selfishness and you long to guide them to your state of mind.
Like a delicious food you want to share or a sunset you want to paint for others to see, this kind of joy is unbound and never selfishly kept. It is great compassion.
Your love for all beings wishes them to have neverending happiness. When they experience suffering your compassion is instantaneous. You can't bear to see them in pain or discomfort. Their freedom becomes your personal responsibility.
Such wisdom combined with compassion makes one very valuable, a rarity among humans. Even though you focus less on your own happiness and more on others, your own happiness continues to increase!
Eventually, what dawns is the realization that the best way to help others is to dedicate yourself fully to the completion of your own evolution and become completely one with the fundamental unity of being. This is the pinnacle of love, compassion, wisdom, and joy found by most of the avatars of the world's spiritual traditions. This is called Bodhicitta. It is within us all if we only choose to follow such a path of transformation.
