by Bernat Font
Bernat will teach the 6 week online seminar series Not Your Typical Course on Mettā starting on 8 November
What sets us apart from other animals? This is one of those perennial questions for humanity, and it tends to invite self-aggrandizing answers. But here’s a less flattering answer: unlike other animals, we don’t know how we’re supposed to live. A squirrel knows what it must do as a squirrel: what to eat, where to live and hide, how to rear its young... It knows what it is to lead a good squirrel life. We don’t. We ask ourselves that question, and the answers we come up with range from party-going consumerism to the ascetic life of a monastic. We haven’t got a clue.
We’re the only species that stands on this surface called Earth looking baffled, scratching its head, crying out, “So what am I meant to do here? Hello?!” This makes us not only a confused species, but a burdened one. For it weighs on us to have to figure out not just how to go about our lives, as all animals do, but what that life should be about in the first place. Instead of the pride of Homo sapiens, we should have the humility of a Homo confusus or Homo perplexus. Faced with that rather unfair burden, we blunder through existence trying things willy-nilly, or else we surrender to the authority of a charismatic teacher, political leader, family figure, or the prevailing social narrative—anything that can just tell us what we’re meant to do.
This is what Gotama did for the first three decades of his life. What made him leave his palace and venture into the forested unknown, eventually becoming ‘the Buddha’, was not just seeing a sick person, an old person and a corpse, but also a renunciant: the embodiment of an alternative. Life can be lived otherwise. The dharma is an answer to the question of what to do with this unscripted human life, one rooted in recognising our fundamental vulnerability.
I recall a similar moment in my early years of practising Buddhism, as a teenager: coming back from some evening event at a dharma centre, I looked around on the bus and began to see faces drenched in tiredness and worries. As I imagined the suffering in their lives, I was overtaken by an oceanic feeling, which I now understand to be what Buddhists call saṃvega: a disquieting mixture of awe, horror and motivational urge. Saṃvega refers to being stirred by aesthetically unpleasing existential truths, such as impermanence and pain.
We’ve all had experiences of this kind at one point or another. No matter how cruel and unempathetic we may sometimes be, love and compassion aren’t things we must create from scratch, for we already have them. To me, the practice of mettā starts by finding them—not generating them—through softening, through connecting to a quiet well-being whose boundaries we gradually blur. For if the individual part of this well-being is enjoyment, the relational part is love (mettā).
But what is this thing called mettā? It took me years of practice to separate it from British politeness, as I found my way to it, disentangling the dharma from the Anglo-American cultural sensibilities through which I had learned it. For mettā is not primarily about ‘being nice’, but about liberating ourselves from aversion, hostility and hatred. It can but doesn’t need to feel fluffy and tree-hugging: it can also feel direct and matter-of-fact, or clear, or spacious; it can resemble the crispness of a cloudless winter day.
While ‘feeling’ isn’t all there is to mettā, it’s an important part of it, despite Buddhist modernism’s inclination to downplay it—because, apparently, emotions aren’t enlightened enough. Another crucial aspect is ‘perception’ (saññā). As the promotional video for my course said, craving sees its object as ‘desirable’, aversion sees it as ‘ugly’, and mettā as ‘beautiful in its own right’, and when directed towards people, it sees them as ‘deeply human’. Mettā remembers that humanity which consists partly in being confused about what to do with life, knowing little more than that we prefer being well to suffering, that we yearn for meaning and connection... and are often clumsy in our pursuit of these.
Yet, how easily all this recedes from our field of perception and we no longer see living beings—suffering beings—but conveniences or obstacles on our way to what we want. How easily we respond to glimpses of compassion with emotional overwhelm or with cynicism and disconnection. To cultivate mettā is to re-centre the simple intention that others be well, not because they benefit me but because they are full beings, with a right to flourish. To see something precious and not desire to own it, but simply wish for it to exist and develop. To me, the feeling part of mettā is about feeling into that intention, more than about being flooded by universal love.
I’m constantly finding my way (back) to mettā, to exercising my freedom not to harm, my freedom to be a good friend in life—as a son, a partner, a customer, a teacher or a passerby. These are all answers to the open-ended question of our humanity. Precisely because we don’t know how we’re supposed to lead our lives, we can make a choice, and we can make that choice aversion-free.