[darkangel91]

This is something I heard while meditating a few months ago. I asked for guidance beforehand, and at one point during the meditation, I heard the Goddess say a very simple, but profound statement:

"The man of total compassion has no enemies, and needs no friends."

Once I had finished my meditation, I began to think about everything, and interpreted this statement. I recognized it immediately as partially metaphorical. Hatred, or fear (which is equivalent - hatred or anger is an attempt to push something else away, fear is an attempt to move oneself away from something else - both are attempts at separation) projects an image of one's own fear onto another thing. You are not really hating the thing - you are hating an image that you have created yourself and projected onto it.

The man of total compassion has no enemies - this means that he recognizes fear or hate is an illusion, that they are illusions conjured by his own mind, and he refuses to conjure them - to conjure enemies for himself. Also even if someone else hates him, it is not really him, but an illusion of their own making, that they are hating. Either way, he has no enemies.

As for needs no friends - this does not mean has or wants no friends. He may do both. But he does not need them, in the sense of grasping attachment - he does not FEAR being without them. He is free to love or desire without the fear of loss or anger at loss which usually accompanies these feelings and causes them to become grasping - to become forms of what the Buddhists call attachment.

The man of total compassion has no enemies. This means also that he has no metaphorical enemies - he does not fear or hate any ideas or states of being - in fact (total compassion) he loves them, and all people too. He will not fear a negative state or trait, but rather accept it and in so doing weaken its power.

There is an order, I realized, to the way that fear - the root of imperfections, as I now know - arises. It begins with fear of a thing (an entity, a state, etc). Then arises fear of the fear itself. Then fear of the self, for having the fear. (Fear and anger being equivalent here, remember.) It is like me - fear of effort (laziness), fear of the fear of effort (desiring to push away the laziness), fear of the self (resentment and guilt for being so imperfect as to be lazy). The antidote is in the sentence. The man of total compassion. Karuna or maitri. Love.

Love is the anti-force to fear and hate, the force which counteracts, contradicts, and destroys them. Love pulls things to oneself, rather than pushing them away as hate does - and its companion, desire, pulls oneself to things instead of pushing oneself away from them as fear does. Desire however is sort of ambivalent, and may be at the root of all of them (one can say that fear is desire to move towards the state of moving away from something).

Love, however - love can conquer both of the other forces. But this must be true love - a love or compassion based in itself, in an appreciation of the thing, not in fear. The love that is born in fear is not love, it is another fear which must, through true love, be exorcised, purified into true love in its own right.

What I have learned from this is that whenever I have a negative reaction to something - a fear, a moving or pushing away - I must examine this, recognize the three aspects of the fear (fear of object, fear of fear, fear of self), and then use Love to neutralize them, in reverse order - neutralize the fear of self through love of self. Neutralize the fear of fear through love of fear. Neutralize the fear of object through love of object.

These may get progressively easier, or progressively harder, but one should do all three - honestly they may not be a sequence, but rather perhaps a unified trinity. There may be more than three things here - there can be many reactions and counterreactions to emotional stimuli occurring very quickly. And then of course there is also the various forms of grasping - the forms of desire rooted in fear - and perhaps forms of love rooted in fear too. Much to learn, but it is a start.

I thought I'd share that all with you. :)