Burgs on the role of Metta

Our need for Metta (Loving Kindness)

Many people are asking why I have decided to start offering retreats teaching exclusively the meditations on Loving Kindness and Appreciative joy, when before it had only been incorporated into the main body of the meditation retreats.

We are living now in a time of great challenge and many of us are finding it hard to find peace and serenity in our daily lives. The process of purification that helps us to get to the state where we are un perturbed by such challenges and at peace with our lives as they are is a gradual one that we work towards over time.

While we work to this end we need immediate antidotes to the difficulties we face. We are in an age now where anger frustration and ill will are every bit as prevalent as greed and attachment. In fact we might even say that it is the aversion that appears in us that is causing more immediate suffering than the greed that we need to let go over time. The natural instinct of human kindness and affection is being suffocated in so many of us simply because we feel over whelmed by life. It has become hard enough to have to secure our own survival let alone have time for love and good will towards others. And so we are driven into ever more selfish patterns with less and less regard for others.

At this time we are facing such a rapid degeneration in the quality of human consciousness despite all the bold claims that we are heading into a spiritual age. Both of these things are true and we need to stop and reflect on how we will make real spiritual progress towards meaningful peace and happiness.
We are intelligent beings who swiftly grasp high spiritual principles but we have forgotten how to love unconditionally and remain unjudgemental. We rate our progress towards liberation in terms of how much we have come to understand and not by the emerging qualities we express.

Never is any quality more important than the ability to feel and express pure unconditional love, for it IS the very remedy to the agitation and aversion that plagues us and keeps our minds from resting peacefully.

We are coming toward the end of our Buddha Gotama's dispensation. Genuine teachers who can expound the complete path out of suffering a rare indeed and hard to find. Soon they will all be gone. Our next Buddha will be the last in this world system and he will teach the path to liberation through Loving Kindness , Compassion and Appreciative Joy.

We are lay people seeking peace here and now and not yet fully engaged in the quest for enlightenment. This means that we will have to endure the degeneration of our world system and its re emergence. As Wisdom was the signature of the past Buddha's dispensation, Loving kindness is the very signature of the way to enlightenment that we will follow in the coming age.
We will need to deeply establish ourselves in Loving kindness and come to understand what love truly is.

It is for this reason that I feel the time has come to make the meditations on Loving Kindness, Compassion, Appreciative Joy and Gratitude a significant part of the practice I teach from now on , for these very practices will open the door to our higher attainments and enlightenment over time.

Never has there been a greater need for many of us to become established in a powerful feelings of goodwill and loving kindness. It is our group efforts that will help to roll back the fear and aggression that are driving so many of us. I invite all of you to consider seriously taking the time out to learn the foundation practices of Loving kindness and Appreciative Joy and make them a genuine part of your life as soon as you can.