A compassionate heart still feels anger, greed, jealousy, and other such emotions. But it accepts them for what they are with equanimity, and cultivates the strength of mind to let them arise and pass without identifying with or acting upon them.
Interpretation
Compassion involves acknowledging negative emotions without being controlled by them.
In this quote, Stephen Batchelor emphasizes that a compassionate heart is aware of negative emotions like anger, greed, and jealousy. Rather than suppressing these feelings or allowing them to dictate actions, a person with compassion learns to observe these emotions with equanimity, creating a space to understand and eventually let them go. This cultivated mindset fosters a more profound emotional resilience and the ability to approach life with a balanced perspective.
In practice
During a meditation workshop, one could quote this to highlight the importance of observing emotions without attachment.
This deep agnosticism is more than the refusal of conventional agnosticism to take a stand on whether God exists or whether the mind survives bodily death. It is the willingness to embrace the fundamental bewilderment of a finite, fallible creature as the basis for leading a life that no longer clings to the superficial consolations of certainty.
I reject karma and rebirth not only because I find them unintelligible, but because I believe they obscure and distort what the Buddha was trying to say. Rather than offering the balm of consolation, the Buddha encouraged us to peer deep and unflinchingly into the heart of the bewildering and painful experience that life can so often be.
Exotic names, robes, insignia of office, titles - the trappings of religion - confuse as much as they help. They endorse the assumption of the existence of an elite whose explicit commitment grants them implicit extraordinariness.
Consciousness is an emergent, contingent, and impermanent phenomenon. It has no magical capacity to break free from the field of events out of which it springs.
The individuation of dharma practice occurs whenever priority is given to the resolution of a personal existential dilemma over the need to conform to the doctrines of a Buddhist orthodoxy. Individuation is a process of recovering personal authority through freeing ourselves from the constraints of collectively held belief systems.
The problem with certainty is that it is static; it can do little but endlessly reassert itself. Uncertainty, by contrast, is full of unknowns, possibilities, and risks.
Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.
I do not know an instance of a major mathematical advance initiated by a man past fifty
When you've wised up enough, there is a very clear conclusion that you have to reach after a while, which is, at the end of the day, it is really impossible for one person to make a difference.
An action comitted in anger is an action doomed to failure.
Before speaking, consult your inner-truth barometer, and resist the temptation to tell people only what they want to hear.
Gratitude creates the most wonderful feeling. It can resolve disputes. It can strengthen friendships. And it makes us better men and women.
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