It is a big step, to see all different sentient beings as lovable and to do this necessitates the understanding of rebirth. You can have some good results without an understanding of rebirth, but it is not going to have the same impact if you started really looking at sentient beings and thinking that you have had very close, very protective and very caring relationships with them multiple times since beginningless time.

If you only look at them as who they are in this life, then of course the appearance of an inherently existent jerk is quite strong, and you do not think of them as a karmic bubble. If you only think of this life, there is no karma, we are just born by accident as who we are and then die, we go out of existence. If you really think of people as being products of karma, then they cannot be any kind of inherently existent personality or person. They are just a manifestation of whatever karmic seeds that happen to ripen at that time, and whatever karmic seeds are ripening during their whole lifetime that influence their habitual actions, their attitudes, where they grow up, and what they are conditioned to in this lifetime. Thinking this way gives you a much broader view, and it is quite helpful in terms of understanding that sentient beings are not inherently existent with some kind of solid personality.

It is only because sentient beings are empty of inherent existence that they can be in different forms and different relationships with us in different lifetimes and even in different situations in this lifetime. Seeing this reinforces that they are not some kind of concrete personality, which we had in all sorts of relationships. It goes back and forth that way. It helps, especially if you have a problem with some people in this life, to think that whoever they are, they have not always been this kind of people in this life but have been all sorts of other people in their previous lives. I might be having a problem with them in this life, but in previous lives, we were very close. In future lives, we are going to be very close. That helps us broaden our minds and gives us some space for us to think about having a different relationship with somebody because we know this person is not who they appear to be at that particular moment in this life. What we are labelling “this person” is the general “I” that is labelled in dependence upon the “I”s in all the different lifetimes. It gives us some room of not feeling cornered and trapped with the same kind of negative attitude towards somebody. Similarly, we do not feel cornered and trapped by the same attachment and feelings of obligation and expectations because all these relationships are changing all the time.

“365 Gems of Wisdom” e-book is out now!