Introduction
Video
Transcript
So this is the Catching fire section, and, so far in the course we’ve learned how to start creating these little sparks of metta, find that felt sense in the body, and looked at some ways to use intentions more skilfully, make those sparks more easily.
Following the fire analogy, we’ll now focus on helping these initial sparks catch and grow into something stable, hat you can tend to and nourish into a big warm campfire.
Rather than trying to continue generating the felt sense actively, we’re moving more towards a receptive mode; providing supportive conditions in awareness for that felt sense to take hold, , like ensuring your tinder is dry and firewood spaced to allow airflow.
We’ve already been doing this a bit: in section 2 I mentioned these two types of intention: actively creating the sparks of metta, and listening to that felt sense in the body. In this section we’re turning more towards how to listen, how to resonate with, become attuned to the metta; what are the supportive conditions that we can create, within which that felt sense of metta can spread and grow?
Of course that distinction between the two processes of creating the felt sense, creating sparks, on the one hand, and nourishing them into greater stability on the other, isn’t always so clear-cut. Sometimes it is, but often you’ll need to be organically moving back and forward between them, and sometimes they blend seamlessly into each other, or are happening both together, or sort of inseparably. That’s ok; I’m separating them out cleanly as two separate sub-skills just for the sake of making that progression more systematic, more understandable, and more practicable. If you understand that distinction you can be more intentional about the mode you’re choosing to practise in, how much time to spend doing one or the other, and more conscious of where you need to be working at any given time. But I’m aware that you may find it to be a more organic and gradual progression than I sometimes suggest when speaking about it as a clear binary.
But in this section we’re going to be talking about the latter mode; finding these supportive conditions.
I keep using this phrase ‘supportive conditions’, to highlight something about how we’re practising, which is that metta is like a fire, in that it wants to grow. You just need to set up the right conditions, and a single spark can end up burning down half of Australia. This is as opposed to, for example, a balloon.You need to act on a balloon in a very directed, continuous, uphill, effortful kind of way to inflate it because a balloon will never inflate by itself, if left to its own devices. Metta isn’t like that - it doesn’t have to be pushed - it wants to spread; it’s more like a fire than like a balloon. You just have to create the right conditions in the mind. So, what are those conditions?