Unbiased Heart

Buddhists always talk about compassion…about cultivating
compassion. But compassionate feelings many times feel at
odds with our likes and dislikes. How to cultivate compassion
when it’s mixed up with conflicting emotions? Here’s a
possible contemplation.

We can love without liking…anyone. We can understand that
underneath the attributes that we dislike about a person, that
person has the same properties of life that we do…the same
issues, struggles, and fundamental disappointment.

The ability to love….to love other people, to love what we do…
is one of our greatest treasures. Love always projects outward
and is infinite in nature. Likes and dislikes hover around
the self-observing reference point called “me”….and are it’s
sustenance.

Unbiased love is the reason why there is art, music, culture at all…
unbiased love is why the soldier throws himself on the
hand grenade to save his friends…it’s how strangers treat each other
after an earthquake or other natural disaster…it is an intuitive and
natural function of human existence.


To cultivate unbiased love, we have to look at things differently
than we are used to. We can realize that we don’t have to like in
order to love….that we can be critical, yet have sympathy because
we all work in the same direction….that feeling superior, (or inferior),
or any self judgment, for that matter,is just the creative action
of likes and dislikes.

Jesus threw the money lenders out of the Temple….does that mean
He didn’t love them?

It’s unbiased love that paints stripes on the tigers and causes them
to nurture their cubs.

Unbiased love is natural selection…it’s “tough love”….
it’s even cosmically romantic:

“When our hands are alone,
they open like faces:
there is no shore to their opening.” Bill Knott

Unbiased love is opening of the heart. It’s going into experience
where the film of likes and dislikes is not strong enough to cloud
our vision….where our interest points outwards, to
look, and from that, to see what is really there…and to act
accordingly.