Explore
Gaia Soulmates
 Advertising keeps Gaia free! Interested in sponsoring us?

Do you try to love unconditionally?

Posted on Feb 1st, 2009 by ~C4Chaos : (hyper)linker ~C4Chaos
This is in Response to the Questions and Reflections for February 01, 2009:

trying to love unconditionally is still conditional.
Access_public Access: Public 5 Comments Print views (942)  
Tagged with: QaR, love, unconditional love
Albert : ~
11 minutes later
Albert said

Exactly!:):)

~C4Chaos : (hyper)linker
12 minutes later
~C4Chaos said

if i’m going to be bluntly honest, i would rather say that i’m trying to love as much as i can :)

Meenakshi : Connection
about 6 hours later
Meenakshi said

yes! But it’s true to how we approach love as humans.

Albert : ~
about 11 hours later
Albert said

its a very compley question.
 
President Obama -as we all -will soon be confronted with it.
Here is what Ralph Nader, Buddhist Student, author AmericanThinker.com wrote, remembering Wilbers and Trungpas statements about idiot compassion. I agree. Though lots more needs to be adressed and lived! Very, very concretely..in the real world…:):)
 
Idiot Compassion
 


“….The most intriguing and brilliant analyst of the world history of spiritual practice and the melding of East and West today is undoubtedly Ken Wilber.  Wilber`s insight into Buddhism in general and compassion in particular is unmatched in the West.  ( Read A Brief History of Everything, for instance.) In One Taste, Wilber responds to a student’s question about compassion with an illuminating view: 



“[Most] confusion… in spiritual circles ….comes from confusing compassion with idiot compassion.” 




This term was first used by Chogyam Trungpa, a Tibetan Rinpoche who helped bring Buddhism to the West in the 70`s.  Wilber continues:


“Idiot compassion” thinks it is being kind, but it’s really being cruel.  If you have an alcoholic friend and you know that one more drink might kill him, and yet he begs you for a drink, does real compassion say that you should give it to him?  After all, to be kind you should give him what he wants, right?  Giving him the drink would therefore show compassion, yes?  No. Absolutely not.

“Real compassion includes wisdom and so it makes judgments of care and concern; it says some things are good, and some things are bad, and I will choose to act only on those things that are informed by wisdom and care.”




Of course, here Wilber illuminates the missing ingredient in liberal “compassion.”  The world, viewed through the liberal’s gray colored, politically-correct glasses, makes no discerning judgments, or at least incorrect ones.  Hence, we get addle-brained protesters picketing to save the lives of serial killers on death row or human shields willing to give up their lives to protect suicide bomber cults and Islamic terrorists.   Since all killing is bad, it must be bad to kill Islamic terrorists or convicted murderers.  This idiot view, foregoes the greater good and lapses into solipsism…”
 

Mushin : We-full
6 days later
Mushin said

Unconditional love is for people who sit in meditation all day and have servants. These most likely are the people with “idiot compassion” that Wilber and the Rinpoche speak about. They are usually not informed by wisdom and enlightened care but just by ordinary understanding and a sometimes caring heart. They don’t have the altitude the Wilber’s of this world can then “tough love”, and get away with just plain abuse (like in the Gafni case for instance).

For those of us who are not lofty, who feel just love and hate and joy and pain and all of that, unconditional love may be what we aspire to in words, but really, we don’t try - because we know we fail. So we just love, and leave the “unconditional” to the heroes and heroines…

You have to be a Gaia member to post comments.
Login or Join now!