Heart-warming love is slightly different from regular love. Regular love is wanting someone to have happiness and the causes of happiness. Heart-warming love is seeing them as lovable and wanting them to have happiness and the causes of happiness. It is a kind of love that you need to cultivate to really see somebody as lovable, or worthy of your affection. And to remember that love is not this thing that they sing about on the radio, with “I can’t live without you and I’m going to die if you’re not a part of my life…”. Everybody else is fine without that person; it is seeing people as worthy of love simply because they exist and because at some time or another in our previous lifetimes they had been very kind to us.

It brings a feeling of a certain kind of closeness and familiarity. Normally when we see people we keep them at arm’s length, especially with the way the world is becoming now with everybody in this country armed to the teeth. The armed people are suspicious that everybody else is going to be a terrorist. Those of us who do not carry guns are afraid of all the people who carry guns. I am more afraid of them than I am of terrorists, to tell you the truth.

We do not want to go through our whole lives being suspicious and guarded by other sentient beings. That is no way to live. If you are going to get shot, you might as well at least have a kind attitude towards the person. The attitude of suspicion does not protect you from anything. It just makes you unhappy and miserable. If we can have a feeling of closeness with others, it cuts apart all this alienation: “Everything is so globalised. How do I fit in? I do not know anybody and who are these people anyway?” It overcomes all the prejudice of putting people into narrow groups and saying we do not want them in the country or in my group. We start to realise that everybody wants happiness as we do, and everybody wants to be free of suffering as we do. There is no difference. They all have been kind to us. They are certainly worthy of having happiness and its causes. They are worthy of our kind attitude towards them. This is especially important now when you really think of what is going on in society.

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