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True Happiness 13 - Practice 3 on the Four Immeasurable Minds & The Fifth Mindfulness Training
“True love” in the Four Immeasurable Minds—loving kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity—are “the four energies of love” that need to be “cultivated” in order to “live fully in love, twenty-four hours a day.” Without “mindfulness and skillfulness,” love easily falls into “attachment, possessiveness, and authoritarianism,” causing “both the one who loves and the one who is loved to suffer.” We need to have the “courage and honesty” to ask each other: “Does my love make you suffer? Is there possessiveness, authoritarianism, or attachment in it?” so that we can “protect love from tragedy and suffering,” and free ourselves from the two extremes of “attachment and aversion.”
There are “five categories” to contemplate when prostrating:
- “oneself,”
- “loved ones,”
- “very close ones,”
- “strangers,”
-
“those we dislike.”
In the “five prostrations,” the first prostration is to “respectfully bow to all ancestors, forebears, and both paternal and maternal lineages”; the second is to “return and respectfully bow to the Buddha and ancestral teachers, those who have transmitted the lamp and continued the flame, the spiritual family”; the third is to “return to our original spiritual roots”; the fourth is to “respectfully bow to our blood and spiritual family, our loved ones”; the fifth is to “open our heart to send the energy of understanding and compassion to those who have made us suffer.” In each prostration, “open your heart and body” to receive “the source of loving, peaceful, and stable energy,” and then “transmit” it to “parents, siblings, friends,” and even to “invaders, the selfish, and the cruel.”
“Prostrating, or touching the earth, is to touch the whole universe”; “the one who bows and the one who is bowed to both share the nature of emptiness and stillness.” When “we bow down,” “we are no longer a separate self,” “we become one with Mother Earth and with all Buddhas,” at the same time “erasing the self, merging into a great harmony” in order to “transform the suffering of our ancestral line” and to nourish “loving kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity” with every “present breath.”