The third emotion is kindness. What we call Karuna. There is a story of Lord Gautam Buddh in which someone comes to him and spits on Buddh’s face not saying a word. Buddh peacefully, silently, cleaned his face and asked him, “Is there anything you would like to say?” And at that time Anand his disciple said, “He spit at your face, give us the permission to fix him! How dare he do something like this!” To which Buddh replied, “Anand, he does not have the language. His language is very limited to express. This poor man can’t express in words so he is expressing in action, so you don’t need to do anything.” And the next day he came and was at the lotus feet of Buddh asking for forgiveness without words, he just came and bowed at his lotus feet crying. Again Buddh said to Anand, “You see? Again he doesn’t have words, he is expressing it through tears.” To have that feeling of emotion, that someone spits at us and we do not react like an echo point. Like in the mountains, all around are mountains, we make one sound and the same sound comes back. So if someone does something to us and we just react to this, we do not respond, then we are an echo point. We do not offer anything in response. Whatever the other does, we just react to that without any of our own substance.
As things happen in life and we remind ourselves of kindness, we grow in these emotions. We could say, “I do not want to take other people’s shit”, so whoever says something to us, we just throw it back right away. It’s true, we should not take emotions and create blockages in our system. We can use the cathartic practices to immediately take those emotions and toxins out of the body and at the same time having the understanding that this poor person doesn’t know what he is doing. And with maturity, we can forgive the person. Not telling him, but feeling it inside. Through this we grow more and more emotions of kindness.
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