Loving the World
I am grateful to have just attended a public event with Hameed Ali (aka A. H. Almaas), the wonderful teacher and founder of the Diamond Approach, whose practices and writings have profoundly impacted my life. Hameed spoke for an hour on the topic of the inner beloved and the potential for us to cultivate an unbreakable love within ourselves and the world.
Following the talk, someone asked how to love the world when human beings continue to speak and act from a place of separation and power rather than curiosity and interconnectedness. How do we love a world that seems so unloving?
Hameed offered the metaphor of a sick human body that may be struggling at the level of organ and function. Yet if we get clearer about the deeper levels of existence—about the substrate underlying the manifest world—we begin to sense something inherently balanced, whole, and unharmed.
We recognize that while the world may feel dense and chaotic, and our human actions (at least those reported in the news) are sponsored by fear and hatred, these expressions are not aligned with our essence, our true nature.
The problems in the world do not mean that the world is bad; they point to a forgetting, a distortion, a loss of connection—and there is a very real impact. To love the world is not to shrug off or accept hatred but to recognize that it’s not who we are—not who any of us are.
Knowing this does not solve our problems and make everything fine.Yet for me, it reminds me that, indeed, I am in love with the world. I am in love with its existence.
Moments of hopelessness occur because of what I love. Profound grief arises because of profound love. Making room for grief causes love to arise. And the love can be the guide for the next thing to do. And there's goodness in that, regardless of outcome.
I recently traveled across the country for a training. It was a lot of movement and a lot of places.
I decided to notice every interaction I had with another person. Every single one was good. Every single stranger on the plane, in the store—wherever I went—was kind. Every peer in the workshop was like a friend.
Not most people. All of them. The friendliness of metta or loving-kindness was literally unavoidable. When I paid attention, it was so obvious. And so good.
It was fun to track this “data” and include it in my perception of the world. It was enlivening to pay attention to goodness and recognize how normal it is in the world.
In the words of poet Naomi Shihab Nye: This can still happen anywhere. Not everything is lost.
And in the words of Jon Kabat-Zinn: If you are breathing, there is so much more right within you than wrong.
As a molecular biologist, I imagine JKZ was not messing around with these words. This is not a fluffy, toxic-positivity kind of teaching. He had a radical and intimate understanding regarding the profound and intricate details of this statement.
He knew that if a person was breathing, an unfathomable set of mechanisms must orchestrate miraculously and harmoniously all at once for life to continue. He knew that if a single inhale was happening, so much good, by the laws of physical science, must be occurring at that moment. And I think that not only did he know this, but he could sense it. He could sense the good.
This is our practice. This is the training of the heart.
We sit with ourselves and we open to life as it is—our immediate experience—and we dissolve the tendency to block out goodness and wonder. We awaken to goodness and wonder.
