The below passage is a transcription of an interview with Jack Kornfield from 1994. Jack Kornfield trained as a Buddhist monk in Thailand, India, and Burma. He holds a Ph.D. in clinical psychology, and is considered to be one of the key teachers to introduce Buddhist mindfulness practice to the West.
True awakening is discovering a greater capacity to love, for compassion, for balance....
The near enemy to love is attachment. You can probably sense the difference in your life when you love someone and want them to be the way they are, and it turns into attachment. There’s a grasping, “they’re different, they’re separate,” and you need to possess them.
The near enemy to compassion is pity. “Oh, that poor person is suffering,” as if we ourselves didn’t, whereas true compassion is the shared heart of our joys and our sorrows.
And the near enemy to balance or spiritual equanimity is indifference. It masquerades as spirituality. “It doesn’t matter, easy come easy go, this marriage doesn’t work out, I’ll try another. These children… I can have more children.” And so it is a not caring that is fear.
The awakened spiritual potential is an opening of the heart and the mind in the midst of all things. It’s not a fear, but rather a discovery of this great heart of the Buddha that we each contain; this great human capacity for presence and freedom of spirit, in the midst of any circumstance. And that’s why we revere the greatest of sages and teachers. Not because they left the world, but because they sat in the midst of it, lived in the midst with such great love and freedom.
a few more poems found
5 years ago
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