Hi Rita and Gary,
I wish you the very best with your friendship that started on the Barque: Thomas Moore forum on Ning. Moore's tweet today focuses on friendliness: a topic that he often stresses in his writing and talks. I hope you'll continue to contribute to the Barque: Thomas Moore Network.
All the best,
Deborah
Hi Deborah! Thank you for your post. I’ve read the tweet. I still miss some English vocabulary, so I searched on the web for a good meaning for friendliness and I found this one here, at http://www.wisdomcommons.org/virtues/56-friendliness : “Friendliness is being open toward other people, taking the risk of inviting them into relationship with you. It means being curious, warm and inviting toward people you don't know well and letting yourself be vulnerable and interdependent with people you do.”
ReplyDeleteReflecting about this, I think to deepen friendliness, we need to be our own friends, feel confortable with what we are, with our feelings and intuitions, so we may, also, accept the others, and let our own behaviour with others reflect what’s going on with us.
Then, I found, on the same website, this awesome Buddha meditation:
The practice of friendliness
Would finally lead to gentleness of character,
Positive state of mind,
Inner peace,
Freedom from conceit,
Absence of anger,
Inner joy
and eventually
Freedom from birth and death.
Buddha
From Kuddhakapatha
So, as Thomas Moore said on the tweet, “friendliness is deeper and more important than it appears” :)
Thank you Rita for sharing these enriching contributions. I think they deserve to be read more than once and I will come back to them. Friendliness, loving kindness and compassion are strong Buddhist values, as are agape and forgiveness in the Christian tradition. If we follow the teachings, our world will be a friendlier place for all. I agree with Thomas Moore.
ReplyDeleteHi Deborah! I’m glad you enjoyed the ideas of my last comment.
ReplyDeleteThank you for mentioning the concepts of the Christian tradition. I like the idea, that each spiritual tradition has its own concepts related to friendship and/or friendliness. I think it may enrich and deepen our own concepts that, most of the time, are strongly connected with the culture we live and grow in.
For instance, for me, forgiveness is a complex subject, and sometimes I find myself reflecting about it, although, in the end, it seems that forgiveness comes from the heart, always difficult to define…
Curiously, I’ve been reading about the Medicine Buddha, and I would like to share this text, which I find interesting. It’s about forgiveness, from a Buddhist perspective:
“Forgiveness in this sense does not mean that out of my exalted or greater goodness and/or superior wisdom, I magnanimously forgive the person whom I imagine to be responsible for my anger, hatred and/or resentment. It means rather that I recognize that regardless of what another may do to me, my anger or hatred – and the harm that it can do to me physically, emotionally, and mentally – is my own. It comes from nowhere else but my own mind, the character of which has been formed by my own actions, both negative and positive. Recognizing this truth and making the appropriate mental adjustments is the basis of reviving mental, emotional, and physical health, which in turn becomes the basis of true reconciliation with others.” This is an excerpt of the Introduction of the Medicine Buddha Teachings, by Khenchen Thrangu Rinpoche, Snow Lion Publications.
Thank you for sharing this Rita. It dovetails nicely with the important Buddhist text, The Dhammapada. The first verse may be translated, "All things are in the mind." We are responsible for our reactions which may include anger, hatred or resentment. An external trigger is not responsible. Equanimity contributes to mental, emotional and physical health.
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