loving-kindness verses hatred

As I explained a couple of blogs ago, the meditator works on shedding greed, hatred and delusion. Hatred is amongst those the most toxic. We all know that the hater is more hurt by hate then the hated. You hate left wing politics? Does left winged politics care? So who's left hurt? You or left winged politics? The same counts for everything else; from persons to rocks, they are not in the least harmed by your hatred. You, on the other hand, are heavily affected by your own hatred. It influences your blood pressure and your heart beats, your mood and your actions.

An old Buddhist way of fighting hatred is the practise of loving-kindness in meditation and in daily life.
Loving-kindness is a kind of cool love. It is less passionate then love, more leaning towards kindness, but still a little bit more committed then just kindness.

Meditation on loving-kindness is better called: contemplation as it is not focused on creating gaps between thoughts. On the contrary, we use our ability to think and to imagine to the full in this exercise.

we begin, in loving-kindness contemplation, with imagining ourselves full of light. We then send this light to ourselves. That's right, we are the first subject of our loving-kindness. Self-love is taken to an extreme level in meditation. The meditator knows that without self-love loving-kindness towards others is not possible. Thus we eliminate self-hatred and replace it with loving-kindness towards our selves, at least for the duration of the meditation. Once that is done we move our attention to whomever else is in the room with us and send them our loving-kindness. Then we move our attention to everyone in the building, in the neighbourhood, in the town we're in, in short we widen the circle step by step. So far so good, it is really not very difficult to do.
It starts getting interesting when we enter the outer circles of our exercise; when we begin sending loving-kindness to our enemies. We try, at least for the duration of the meditation, to replace our feelings of hatred with loving-kindness. This has an enormous impact on our own well-being, especially when done on a regular basis.

After our enemies we can zoom out further, to all people in the world, to all people dead and alive, to all animals, to the whole universe.... etc., etc. We can also begin the contemplation on the outer skirts of our imagination and move inwards towards our self.

Try it, it is most spectacular.

Mu; the absence of something