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Welcome to the imperfect Buddhist, where we discuss mindfulness and incorporating Zen Buddhism into modern life. My name is Matthew Hawk Mahoney and today's episode is titled Buddhism and Love.

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Thank you for stopping in and listening. Whether this is your first episode or I don't know what episode I'm on, maybe your 50th. I really appreciate you sticking with me and stopping in. It's been a while since I've shared with you. It's amazing how the days blend together. When I'm working from home, it seems like weeks can go by, months. And even the last couple years seems like they've gone by very fast. And I was looking at...

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episodes and realized, wow, I haven't talked with you in a while, so I wanted to change that.

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Love and Buddhism. I had a friend recently when we were talking about Buddhism bring up the idea that some Buddhists don't believe in relationships as far as sexual, physical relationships or marriage. I think I've heard that from other people before. When we're talking about love though, we're talking more about the concept of seeing yourself in someone else, seeing unity. I quote,

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When you love someone, you have to offer the best you have. The best thing we can offer another person is our true presence. Thich Nhat Hanh. It's being present with somebody, seeking to understand, and eventually even seeing your true identity, which is the presence that witnesses, realizing that's in that other person. You recognize your oneness. Please know that I'm not there yet. This is the imperfect Buddhist. I didn't say I'm completely at this place yet.

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But I have had visions or insight moments where I've felt that connectedness, oneness, and had moved from my head of thinking about this concept of oneness and actually experiencing it.

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Love and our culture. How does this topic or concept of love relate to our culture? Love is a word often used in titles for Netflix shows, like Love is Blind. It's used a lot in songs, song lyrics. People say, hey, I love ice cream or I love pizza. I think a lot of people don't have a very deep definition of what love means.

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We have a culture around love, which is this commercialized version. We have sayings about love, love your neighbor, or I love that pizza, but what does this really mean?

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I've been married for almost... Oh my God, don't tell my wife I'm forgetting our anniversary, but I wanna say we've been married for six or seven years. At the time when we were dating, I was reading this book called The Road Less Traveled. It had a pretty profound impact on my life and the way that I look at reality. When I met Amanda, we both read that book together, and it has a really great definition of love. And so I'm gonna read that for you. M. Scott Peck, the author, defines love as...

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The will to extend oneself for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth. Actually, that was my first real definition of love. It gave new meaning to the word love. Before that, love was something that was thrown around in songs or in pop culture or something you'd say in a sentence, but it didn't really have any real meaning.

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My own journey with the concept of love has been evolving quite a bit lately. I recently started the book A Course in Miracles, which is definitely not in Zen or Buddhist tradition, but it has a lot of powerful things to say about love, about human experience and what it means to be connected with other people. The author claims that they...

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channeled this work and it seems to be written from the viewpoint of Jesus. I know that is enough to make most people's eyes roll and typically would make my eyes roll, but I gave it a try because somebody that I really respect in the mindfulness teachings mentioned it and said this is a really powerful book and make up your own mind. So I did and I have gotten a lot out of it, especially around the concept of love and action in

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love's role in life. Through reading it I am starting to recognize love as an experience and a phenomenon rather than just a thought or an action. That there is this energy of love that we can experience. We can also be the transmitter of love. This is all sounding new agey but all that means is that we choose loving action. We choose to see people as ourselves and treat them accordingly.

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quote from A Course in Miracles, teach only love for that is what you are.

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The idea in A Course in Miracles is that there is only love, everything else is an illusion and a fiction created in the minds of men and women and that awakening is coming home to that reality that there is only love. In Buddhist texts, the Dhammapada says, hatred does not cease by hatred, but only by love. This is the eternal rule.

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I want to talk a little bit about the reality of applying some of these concepts in my own life. A lot of my practice comes up in work. That makes sense, right? I spend a lot of my time other than sleeping or at home at work. There's a person that, personality-wise, I actually, I don't really have much of a problem with them, but it seems that they really are not a fan of me. From the beginning, I remember my second day at this job. It's a remote job, but I had flown in to the location and had...

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Just met everybody and I think it was like day two and I remember walking into the shared office space with a team and this person gave me this very, kind of like they're looking right through me, glaring. As time went on it became very apparent that this person just didn't like me, eventually resulting in me talking with my boss and saying, hey, do you think this person has it out for me? And he said, yeah, they do. It's not me projecting anymore. It's very obvious that this person doesn't like me.

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I've had different reactions to this. There's been times where I felt very defensive. My boss would bring up to me something that this person had come to them with telling on me or finding a reason to point out a mistake that I made. I've did the defensive thing where I got brought up and I started going into being defensive and trying to point out this person's flaws and all that. Coming at it like this didn't feel good. At the end of the day, after

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Going through the dramas of complaining to other people, feeling offended, or maybe even in some ways trying to suck up or be nicer to this person that doesn't like me. Trying to like, maybe influence this opinion they have of me. It just didn't feel good. It didn't feel right. Reading A Course in Miracles, it was starting to influence me to start to look at other people in a new way, including this person, from the perspective of, okay, I've made the mistake also where I just decided somebody was bad or negative, never even speaking to them.

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So after spinning my wheels with all of the traditional routes, complaining, trying to coerce the situation, I started applying this idea of... I guess put it the simple way, treating other people the way I want to be treated. I would hope in a situation where I was misguided in my assumptions about someone, or projecting a lot on somebody else, I would hope that they would be able and willing to forgive me and to recognize the pain that I was in.

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It's changed the dynamic between us, not necessarily that it's changed this person's mind about me, but it's changed the dynamic within myself where it really doesn't bother me much anymore. I'm doing what I can, doing my best, trying to treat the people around me with love, including this person.

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Going back to that concept of acting for my own or another person's own spiritual growth in that moment where this person is projecting onto me or treating me unfairly, what is the best thing for my own and this other person's spiritual growth?

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Not really being that offended or hurt by the projections that this person is pushing out because that would only strengthen the illusion in themselves and myself. I get offended or I start to want to change a course, the situation, it's strengthening that illusion, which has no reality.

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Another breakthrough that's come from this embracing of love as a guide for my actions and thoughts is jealousy, especially in romantic relationships.

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It started all the way back to when I was like really a little kid. I remember being worried that my mom or my dad were going to cheat on each other. I'd ask them, are you cheating on dad or are you cheating on mom? And then as the years went by, my parents got a divorce and I remember being jealous of my mom's time when she got remarried. I suddenly just felt like I wasn't getting the same attention. Got into my first relationship, one of those little teenage fights where you break up for a weekend.

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And during one of these weekend breakups, she went on a date with another guy, ended up making out with him, who knows what happened. I'm questioning her for months about what really happened. It got ingrained at a young age, these patterns of jealousy, suspicion, and fear. In my marriage now, there are moments where I start to go down that path of imaginin...

Buddhism & Love

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