Balanced Existence

Metta Bhavana is a Buddhist meditation practice known as the development of universal loving-kindness. It belongs to a set of meditations called brahma-viharas, which roughly means ‘abode of the gods’. As such metta meditation is considered to help us experience positive and enjoyable mental states similar to the mental states of the beings in the Buddhist god-realm.

I think we tend to mistake the clouds for the sky. That is, I think we mistake our thoughts, our emotions, feelings and behavioral patterns as being “I”. As I see it (ha!) such things are not “I”. They are dependent upon external causal factors beyond any one person’s control. Thoughts, emotions and even behavioral patterns come and they just as quickly go. These things are to what I fundamentally am as clouds are to the sky.

Call what I metaphorically describe as the sky consciousness. Call it whatever you like. Words are just limited symbolic labels and not the thing itself. Whatever it is it feels like my irreducible fundamental being. Trying to describe it is like trying to describe the sky. We describe the sky by talking about the things in the sky like clouds and stars.