Metta and insight
Lovingkindness practice — both in our meditation and in daily life — can play a major part in the development of wisdom, or insight. I’m quite sure that you’ve already learned some useful things about relating to yourself and others while you’ve been learning this beautiful practice.
We can learn, for example, that emotions are something that we can cultivate, and not just things that happen to us. This can be a major insight for many people. We can learn that whether someone is our enemy largely depends on how we relate to them. We can learn that how others relate to us is conditioned by how we relate to them. We can learn that how we relate to others depends on how we relate to ourselves. We can learn that how we relate to people in our thoughts conditions how we relate to them in real life.
Dissolving the boundaries between self and other
The practice of metta can fundamentally alter our attitudes and understandings about our relationship with the world. Here’s an example: have you ever had the experience of having an argument with someone, but entirely in the privacy of your own head? I’m sure you’re familiar with that experience.
But have you ever wondered who it is that you’re arguing with? Most of us never get that far in our analysis of ourselves, but let’s do it now. It’s obviously not the actual other person that you’re arguing with, since they’re probably not present, and even if they are then it’s not the external version of them that you’re having the argument with.
If you think about it, you can only reach the conclusion that it’s yourself that you are arguing with. One part of your mind (which you identify as yourself) and another part of your mind (which manifests as an internal representation of your enemy) are locked in a fight. The “real” enemy isn’t involved at all. (It’s interesting to ask who, if anyone, wins these arguments, but I’ll leave you to figure that out for yourselves).
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