Todayand#8217;s FBA Dharmabyte, and#8220;Positive Changeand#8221; is brought to us by Sangharakshita himself, founder of the Triratna Buddhist Order and Community.
In Buddhist practice, the traditional method of choice for effecting positive change in oneand#8217;s life is meditation. Here Sangharakshita takes a closer look, focussing on the and#8216;superconscious statesand#8217; (characterised in turn by integration, inspiration, permeation, and radiation), the practice of developing universal friendliness, and the distinction between calm and Insight.
From the talk and#8220;A Method of Personal Developmentand#8221; given in 1976 as part of the series Buddhism for Today and Tomorrow.
[music] Dharma Bites is brought to you by Free Buddhist Audio, the Dharma for real life. Our work is funded entirely by donations from our generous listeners. If you would like to help us keep this free, come and join us at freebuddhistaudio.com/community. Thank you and happy listening. [music] I've said that meditation is the method of personal development, but this is not enough. In a sense, there's no such thing as meditation. You can't just practice meditation. You can't just meditate. There's a number of specific methods. And practicing meditation means, in effect, having recourse to one or another of these or through several of these methods. And Buddhism, we find, is very rich in methods of meditation. Some of these methods are common to all schools. Others are the exclusive property as it were of certain traditions. Some methods are meant for people of a particular kind of temperament. Others are meant for those wishing to develop particular qualities or particular aspects of themselves, or to overcome a particular weakness. I'll describe very briefly one particular method by way of illustration. It's a method with which some of you will undoubtedly be familiar, but it may be completely new to others who haven't, perhaps so far, taken any practical interest in the subject of meditation. The method is what we call in Pali, metah, bhavana. Metah means simply friendliness, but in a very positive, a very powerful sense, such that the word doesn't quite possess in English, metah, or friendliness. And bhavana is making to be, to be, bringing into existence, or in other words, developing. So we can translate this as the development of universal friendliness. And we may say that undoubtedly it's one of the most important and effective methods of personal development. It's meant especially for those wishing to attain the higher levels of consciousness through the overcoming of hatred and the developing of friendliness. And like all the other methods of meditation, it reminds us of one supremely important fact, which is that we can change. That consciousness can be restructured, can be redeveloped. That hatred, in this particular instance, can be changed into love. And this is indeed, we may say, one of the strong points of Buddhism. It doesn't merely exhort you to love your neighbor. It's very easy just to say that. But it shows you further exactly how this is to be done. Moral exhortations are not enough. We need practical help. If we get only the moral exhortations and no practical help, then we feel simply frustrated and resentful. And we may even start wondering if such a thing as personal development is possible at all. Usually, we practice the metabhavana in five successive stages. We first of all develop friendliness towards our own self, because that's where it starts. If you're not happy with yourself, if you're not at ease with yourself, if you don't like yourself, and many people nowadays, unfortunately, don't like themselves, you can't like other people. Your so-called liking of other people mustn't be what Nietzsche called your bad love of yourself, where we should mention your disliking of yourself. So feel friendly towards your own self first. Be on good terms with yourself. If you want to use the word, even love yourself. That's where it all starts. Charity really does begin at home, and home is right here with you. So that's what we do first. We develop good will, friendliness towards our own self. And then we extend it outwards. We extend it to a near-end dear friend, someone we know quite well, someone with whom we're on very close, personal terms. Someone around our own age, someone of the same sex, because the feeling of friendliness or love is not an erotic feeling, but something quite distinct from that. And someone who is still alive, if we think of someone who died recently then, we may feel quite sad and find difficulty in developing the feeling of friendliness. So a near-end dear friend, then a neutral person, someone we know quite well by sight, perhaps a meta number of times, but with no particular feeling towards them, we neither lack them nor dislike them. We try to extend the same feeling that we felt towards our own self next to the near-end dear friend, now to this neutral person, and then fourthly, even to someone who we actively dislike or even hate. When, by the time we come to this fourth stage, we shall usually find, with a little practice, we've got up such a momentum of good will, of friendliness, that we find it quite easy just to feel quite warm towards that person whom usually we don't get on well with at all. All our feeling of hatred and antagonism and enmity just dissolves. And we just feel like letting bygones be bygones, and making a completely fresh start with that person. So that very often, next time we meet him or her, we feel completely differently, and we even behave differently, and a new chapter in our relationship with them begins. Then we go a little further. We think of all these four people simultaneously, self-friend, neutral enemy. We develop the same love, the same goodwill, the same friendliness towards all four. And then in ever-wisinging circles, all the people in the building where we are sitting, all the people in the locality, all the people in the town, county, country, continent, that all the world. If we like, we can think of all our friends in different parts of the world, one by one. Basically we're taking them off our metallist, and we can even think of our living being. We can think of animals, we can think of birds. We can think perhaps of all the worlds. We can think of all the universes. Some of them must be inhabited surely, so we are told. British tradition certainly tells us this. So we'll let our metall expand even through the furthest corners of the universe. And by the time we've gone through this practice, and it takes about 50 minutes, once we get into it, then we certainly do feel very much expanded. We certainly do feel that goodwill, that friendliness has been developed in our own heart. And at least for the time being, that hatred has been abolished, that hatred has been transformed into love. So this is just one very simple, very well-known, very popular example of a Buddhist meditation method, which actually does work. And which thousands and even millions of people in the course of centuries have found for themselves does actually work. Which many, many people today even do find does actually work. I hope you enjoyed the talk. Please come and help us keep this free at freebuddhistaudio.com/community. And thank you. [MUSIC] [BLANK_AUDIO]
