During the 2020 fires in southern Oregon, I bought an air purifier. I set it up, turned it on, and felt better. It ran for months. When I finally opened it to change the filter, the plastic wrap was still on. There was one small tear, and under the tear a black dot — the only place air had ever passed through. Everything else was pristine.
That’s how a lot of us practice. We sit, faithfully, for years. The machine is running and we can hear it. Something is happening. Not much changes; the same reactivity keeps returning. Still, the hum is convincing.
Practice under these conditions works. You sit and you get a little calmer. Something loosens. You leave the cushion with more room than you had — a little bit of air moved through the filter.
Maybe that’s why we don’t think to check. The relief is proof enough. We have that little hum of evidence, every morning, that the thing is doing what it’s supposed to do. So we don’t go looking for what else it might be capable of, because as far as we can tell it’s already working.
The partial working is what keeps the plastic on. Years can pass like this.
In the Majjhima Nikaya, the Buddha says:
If this is, that comes to be;
from the arising of this, that arises;
if this is not, that does not come to be;
from the stopping of this, that is stopped.
Things appear when their conditions are present, and they fall away when those conditions fall away. Nothing arrives on its own. Nothing sits outside the conditions that give rise to it, waiting to be summoned.
Sit still and watch it happen. A sound in the next room, a flicker of pleasantness, and there’s wanting. You didn’t decide to want. Conditions came together and wanting arose, the way a flame arises when there is fuel and air and heat. Then the sound stops, or the pleasantness turns, and sometimes the wanting is simply gone. What it was standing on is no longer there.
It is like this the whole way down. Every state you have ever been in stood on conditions.
Once you see that, nothing looks fixed anymore. Every difficulty you have, every quality you long for, is conditions coming together and coming apart. It is happening right now. It has never once stopped.
If nothing is fixed, nothing is stuck. Everything answers to conditions.
Your heart is like a garden.
Say you want to grow tulips. So you look up a gardening manual, and here’s what it tells you:
Start with a healthy bulb. Plant it in the fall, six to eight inches down, pointy side up, and leave it there through the frost. Not spring — the bulb needs twelve or fourteen weeks in the cold and the dark before it will do anything at all. The bulb wants well-drained soil and a sunny spot. Water it once when you plant it, then leave it alone unless the ground goes dry. When the shoots come up, feed them lightly. And put a fence around them, or the rabbits and the deer will take them the week before they bloom.
Do all of that and you’ll get vibrant tulips.
But there is one thing you will never do, and that is make a tulip grow. Because a tulip grows by an act of grace.
You plant the bulb. You work the soil. You bring all the conditions together. And then the tulip does what the tulip does.
Wouldn’t it be nice to have a manual for the garden that is your heart?
You have one. Again and again, the Buddha tells us what conditions to establish, what to abandon, and what to cultivate.
How many of us sit down to practice metta (also known as friendliness or loving-kindness) and try to force it? You say the metta phrases (May I/you/all be happy, peaceful, free from suffering, and so on) and wait for something to happen. And what happens is nothing, or something worse than nothing — a dryness, a kind of grinding.
So you bear down harder. You try to feel it, or even to be the person who would feel it, someone warm and boundless and good, and the harder you press the further away it goes, until after twenty minutes you get up off the cushion feeling like a fraud.
That is an attempt to make a tulip grow. But all you can do is bring the conditions together.
So what are the conditions for metta?
Start with good friends and wise attention. Sit with people who are full of metta and something in you starts to move in that direction. The people around you shape what you take to be normal, what you notice, what you let yourself want. Spend your evenings with someone who is generous with people and you will find yourself being generous without deciding to. Spend them with someone who is always keeping score and you’ll find yourself keeping score.
And wise attention: looking at anger in terms of what feeds it and what allows it to fall away, rather than simply following its story. Anger arrives and you can attend to the anger — what they said, what you should have said, what you’ll say next time. Or you can attend to what it’s standing on: tired, hungry, the third time this week, the story you have been telling yourself about them since March. The first follows the content. The second looks for the conditions.
Then, on the cushion, you start with someone easy — not the person who betrayed you, not all beings in the ten directions, but the friend whose face already softens something in you the moment you think of them. There’s no shame in beginning there.
You bring that friend to mind, and you stay there. You let yourself actually see them, what’s good in them, what makes them easy to love. And when the mind drifts off you bring it back, and when it drifts somewhere colder, into the case you have been quietly building against someone for years, you notice what you’re doing and you stop.
You say the phrases slowly enough that they mean something. You hold the face until it goes blurry, and then you find it again. You stay with the one person. When the warmth is there and steady, only then do you widen. If it doesn’t hold, you come back to the friend and start over.
You do all that ardently, the way a gardener gets right down in the dirt, on hands and knees, weeding, shoveling, tending.
But there is one thing you will never do, and that is make metta grow. Metta grows by an act of grace.
As for the air purifier: I took the filter out, removed the plastic, and put it back in the machine. It didn’t sound any different. Same hum. Nothing about the room announced that anything had changed. It was just that the air was moving through, finally, all of it, the way air moves through a filter when nothing is in the way.
The post You Can’t Force a Loving Heart to Grow appeared first on Lion’s Roar.
Recent Comments