Today we will begin a very different kind of meditation. Now that you are at least starting to get the hang of calming your mind and concentrating, we can move on to move complex types of meditation. The next four techniques I will teach you in class are collectively known in Buddhist practice as the divine abodes. They share the same basic goal: to develop your emotions in such a way that they can facilitate your becoming a better person.
Just as it seems odd to Western ears to say that desires are something you can control, it might sound strange to talk about developing emotions. In the West, we tend to think of emotions as simply something we are born with. Someone might say, "I have always had a bad temper" as a way of explaining why they were yelling at you earlier. But this is only an excuse if we also agree that one can not alter the underlying emotions. Buddhism does not accept this. A Buddhist will say that one can alter the emotions one has, though it takes practice. In the end, your emotional reactions are no different from your physical abilities - with training and practice, you can alter them. This is what the divine abodes are all about.
This is one way that Buddhism can really complement other belief systems like Christianity. Christians teach that you should love your neighbor as you do yourself, but love is an emotion and it does not necessarily follow from your intellectual knowledge of the need to love others. What these kinds of Buddhist techniques offer is a specific training regimen to develop the sorts of emotions that many ethical traditions teach are vital.
The bottom line is that you can learn to develop positive emotions. If you don't believe thousands of years of Buddhist tradition, you can believe the findings of modern science on this. There are two lines of evidence I want to discuss just briefly. The first is a brain scan study done by researchers at the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 2008. Basically, they studied the way the brains of Buddhist monks who have practiced meditation for many years function. What they discovered is that the monk's neural circuits controlling feelings of compassion and empathy were rewired in such a way that they could experience extremely high levels of compassion for others. The original study can be found here:
http://www.plosone.org/article/fetchArticle.action?articleURI=info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0001897
but a U. Wisconsin press release summarizes the implications this way:
"...the study was the first to use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to indicate that positive emotions such as loving-kindness and compassion can be learned in the same way as playing a musical instrument or being proficient in a sport. The scans revealed that brain circuits used to detect emotions and feelings were dramatically changed in subjects who had extensive experience practicing compassion meditation. The research suggests that individuals — from children who may engage in bullying to people prone to recurring depression — and society in general could benefit from such meditative practices, says study director Richard Davidson, professor of psychiatry and psychology at UW-Madison and an expert on imaging the effects of meditation..."
But how can this work? The second line of evidence has to do with a possible mechanism for this effect - the so called "mirror neurons". These are neurons in animal brains which activate when the animal is doing an action and also when it watches someone else doing the same action. So if you watch someone do an action, your brain is literally doing the same action, just typically below the level of consciousness. Sometimes, if the mirroring is especially strong, you might see a watcher actually begin to move in the same way as the person being watched. There's a really good example of this in the movie A Christmas Story (a movie you all must watch if you haven't yet): when little Ralphie finally gets his Red Ryder carbine-action, two hundred shot Range Model air rifle with a compass in the stock and a thing which tells time and he loads it for the first time, his dad is so involved in watching him that he can't help but move his hands in the air as if he were loading the gun himself. Or consider a bunch of guys watching a soccer game where someone get kneed hard in the crotch - every one of the watchers will involuntarily say "Oh!" and sometimes even bend forward as if the knee had been applied to them. This is the work of their mirror neurons. These neurons are thought to be critical to a number of other functions, including learning and empathy. If by watching another person suffer, I literally suffer in a small way myself, this helps me understand what they are going through and makes it much more likely I will want to help them. Some people have extremely well-developed mirror responses and are extremely empathetic, while others have less developed responses (or responses which are selective, being much weaker for certain people or actions). This could very well be the biological difference between people who don't seem to care about others and those who do. In any event, it seems quite possible that, when you engage in the divine abodes, you are activating your mirror neurons. You are basically trying to feel emotions based on thoughts of other people, which is giving your mirror neurons a workout. And, as the Wisconsin study shows, you get better at this with practice, just as you get better at playing a musical instrument or executing a spinning heel kick with practice. Once you allow that we can do this, it's simple, really...
Ok, so it seems that we can cultivate emotions. But why should we? Well, we have already talked a lot about how important it is to be calm and rational so you could direct your actions with reason. Developing this ability is one of the main purposes of concentrative meditation. But that alone is not enough if your goal is to become a better person, since it's undeniable that emotions will have an influence on your behavior, however rational you are. This can be a problem, since lack of emotion or the wrong emotion can get in the way of ethical action. For example, your intellect might admit that everyone is equal in an ethical sense, but still you are emotionally unmoved by suffering you see on TV. Or you might know you should treat that homeless guy well, but be repulsed by his smell or fear of what he might do. Here, the emotions get in the way of carrying out what your reason is telling you should be done. The bottom line is that you are more likely to behave ethically if you can somehow get your emotions in line with your reason. It's important to keep in mind here what I said at the very beginning: you can view Buddhism as a kind of self improvement program. It's not about just generating theoretical knowledge, but changing the way you actually live your life. Therefore, if your emotional machinery in getting in the way of translating your knowledge into action, you need to fix that machinery.
Many ethical traditions, including Christianity, have taught that the key to being ethical is to treat other people as you would treat yourself. This makes perfect sense, primarily because you truly love yourself and you can understand all your sufferings and joys. So you will tend to treat yourself in the best possible way. A large part of the reason we don't treat others as we do ourselves is because we just can't get inside their heads - our mirroring system is not very strong, if you will. We love them theoretically, but there is no emotional "push" behind it. We admit intellectually that they are suffering, but it does not move us to act on that knowledge. Wouldn't being an ethical person become so much easier if we could get ourselves to 1) Truly care for the well-being of others, 2) empathize with their suffering, and 3) appreciate their joy? If we could learn to feel this way about everyone equally, then being ethical would be as easy as being nice to ourselves. And this is exactly what the divine abodes are designed to do: teach you to feel more 1) loving kindness, 2) compassion, 3) appreciative joy (joy in good that others experience) and 4) equanimity (feeling the same for all people equally).
Right, so let's dive in and start our first experience with loving kindness meditation. First, you need to have three people in mind: a good friend, a neutral person, and a difficult person. Each time you meditate you should vary these particular people, since the point is to learn to feel these emotions for anyone. The good friend should not be anyone you feel sexual or romantic feelings towards, as this complicates things. The neutral person is anyone you encounter who you really don't give much thought to at all - the janitor in your building, the guy at the front desk of Fike, etc. The difficult person should not be someone whom you hate, just someone you find unpleasant or annoying.
Now we are going to spend 5 minutes thinking about each of the following: 1) yourself, 2) your friend, 3) the neutral person and 4) the difficult person. As you begin to meditate, first spend a few breaths thinking about the advantages of love and kindness over anger and other negative emotions. Wouldn't the world be a much better place if, every time someone began to feel anger, that emotion were replaced with kindness? Once you have set the tone this way, start to think about yourself. You want to feel loving kindness towards yourself. Precisely what you wish for yourself does not matter much, but you want to keep your wishes fairly general. For example, you should not wish "I hope I ace that chemistry test tomorrow" since this will tend to encourage monkey mind. Here is an example of some very general wishes you can try at first, and then modify later if you like:
May I be well
May I be happy
May my mind be at peace
May I be free from anger
May I learn to be a good person
You spend 5 minutes thinking these thoughts about yourself, then you do the same for your friend, the neutral person, and finally the difficult person. For each thought, try to genuinely feel that you want these things. It can help to visualize the face of the person you are thinking about as you radiate love and kindness towards them. YOu can also visualize them smiling, which has much the same effect as smiling yourself. The basic idea is to start where it's easiest (yourself) and then as you relax and focus, work your way up to more challenging people (difficult person).
Remember: this is very different from concentrative meditation. People often find it very hard at first, but be patient and keep trying - your efforts will be rewarded...