It was wonderful to begin together our exploration of the Brahma Viharas.  I hope you have found your way to Joan Sutherland, Roshi’s talks (on the Cloud Dragon website, under Talks, look for Brahma Viharas), and will have listened to or read the first two talks by early this week so you’ll have time to let things percolate, enter your dream and creative lives and bring musings for you.

A couple of thoughts about what might be helpful.

1.  Joan’s pointer about seeing these as gates we can choose to walk through is very helpful.  These gates are present for us from the beginning, unconditionally. And we have agency.  You do actually have the ability to discover that the gate is not only made of the seemingly solid obstacles that you often focus on, but is actually made of the space within and through every particular circumstance.  What is it like when you notice that?

2.  I heard a great conversation on the “Hidden Brain” podcast yesterday, June 1 on NPR.  It was an account of someone’s research into subtraction as an alternative to our habitual pent towards adding, adding, adding more as an attempted solution to our discomfort; and the impediments to subtraction. I highly recommend it.

 Of course, this connected for me right away with our kind of practice. In keeping company with these Four Immeasurables, Heavenly Abodes, Boundless  States, you can see right away (even in their names) the subtractive nature of them. So I hope you’ll enjoy being with them not as another thing to take on, but as an invitation to release obstacles, measurements, positions, boundaries. To come into intimate relationship with what is, in its largeness and its particularity.

In this next session, we’ll first touch on Mudita, sympathetic joy (near enemy: intoxication) and Upekkha, Equanimity (near enemy: indifference, apathy)

Then, for June 13, we’ll circle back to Equanimity a bit but then keep company with Karuna, compassion (near enemy: despair, overwhelm).

And for June 20, we’ll take up Metta, loving kindness (near enemy: possessiveness) and further explore the healing power of these practices in our time.

A koan that comes up for me in connection with the first one, Sympathetic Joy, is this one:

Cuckoos   poem by Dana Gioia

Koan:
For whom do you bathe and make yourself beautiful?
The cry of the cuckoo is calling you home.
Hundreds of flowers fall, yet the voice isn’t stilled,
even deep in jumbled mountains, it’s calling clearly. 
– Dongshan

Cuckoos, by Dana Gioia
I heard them only once. Climbing in the mountains
I stopped to rest a moment on a ledge
and listen to the river distantly below—
when suddenly they began to call to each other
back and forth from trees across the valley,
invisible in pinetops but bright and clear
like the ring of crystal against crystal.
I didn’t move but lay there wondering
what they were like, amazed that folklore
had made their cry an omen of betrayal.

So now, reading how the Chinese took their call
to mean Pu ju kuei, pu ju kuei—
Come home again, you must come home again—
I understand at last what they were telling me
not then, back in that high, green valley,
but here this evening in the memory of it
returned by these birds that I have never seen.