THE AWAKENED HEART (Bodhicitta)
Equanimity
**** UNDER CONSTRUCTION ****
Updated November 23rd, 2011
FRIENDS & STRANGERS:
Even our relationships with people that we consider friends are not always satisfactory. In many ways we have more problems with our friends and family than we do with people we classify as enemies. This is partially due to the fact that we tend to avoid our enemies, whereas we deal with our friends and family almost continuously. We often have arguments with them or we accidently hurt their feelings or they accidently hurt ours and therefore it is really impossible to have constant satisfaction from our relationship with others, even if they are our friends or those closest to us.
Secondly, friends can distract us from things that are important out of a desire for our company or out of a desire to be entertained. For example, a friend might call us up and ask us out while we are trying to study for an exam. They will use all sorts of devices to get us to leave our studying behind and spend time with them. They might also try to get us to lie, or steal, or cheat in order to help them to get something that they want by saying that we should do it out of friendship. In this way, they have harmed us in a worse way than our enemy would.
Also, even people that we normally categorize as friends can occasionally make us angry by obstructing our goals and desires, which means that for that short amount of time, they have become an enemy.
We also only know those aspects of our friends, or even our spouses, parents, siblings and children, that they are willing to share with us, so that there is a certain point at which our spouses, relatives, and friends are still strangers to us.
Strangers:
Even the friends and enemies that we have today were strangers at one time in our life.
Also, there are people who were our friends and enemies in our youth, who we have lost touch with, and, as a result, they are now strangers to us.
All of this means that, just as friends and enemies have been strangers to us or can become strangers in the future, every stranger that we meet, has the possibility of becoming our enemy or our friend at any given moment.
Because of these ideas, feeling bias towards one being as opposed to another is not well founded. The categorization of friend, enemy, or stranger, is temporary and dependent on many factors, including our own desires and goals. As a result, it is wiser to feel equally towards everyone and to recognize that, at any instant, another being can assume any of the roles of enemy, friend, or stranger. The role itself is really a designation that exists within our own mind and not with the person themselves.
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