Spiritual Attunement through Meditation
Oct 23, 2026 · 23 min · 10 segments
Spiritual Attunement Through Meditation. Episode #147: Be Guided By Love. Today I’ll be sharing information from A Little Book of Love by philosopher and author Jacob Needleman, published in 1996…
Mr. Needleman tells us that the Buddhist tradition urges its followers to regard all human beings as individuals striving for enlightenment.
Although the ethics of Buddhism touches all aspects of life, the physical, personal, and familial, yet at the same time, the Buddhist is urged to treat others primarily as yearning, consciously or not, toward the inner freedom of nirvana, and to regard the suffering of all beings as due fundamentally to their deep ignorance of the true nature of the self.
While loving and caring for one's own, one's mate or son or daughter or mother or father, the Buddhist seeks to see others as fundamentally in need of metaphysical help.
No doubt such an ideal of caring for others both as individuals with physical and emotional needs and as individuals in need of self-understanding was practiced most intensively among the community of pupils of the teaching, the community known as the Sangha.
To practice such dual love requires that a man or woman understand this dual aspect of human life within him or herself.
Within oneself are both the desires that are a part of having a body and a social self and the strivings that are evidence of the Buddha or the awakened nature within.
Those most acutely aware of this whole aspect of human life are the men and women who, in the deeper sense of the term, form the assembly of seekers, those who have entered the stream of the inner search.
Yet Buddhism calls men and women to regard all beings as, in some profound sense, seekers of the truth.
How did the members of the earliest Buddhist community strive to work with each other? What kind of care for the other was set as an ideal for these individuals who were living and searching together? with all the emotional demands and contradictions that inevitably test close human relationships, the glorious ideal of impersonal love for all beings, how was it brought to bear on the feelings and reactions of people who were not distant strangers, unknown neighbors, but people who rubbed against each other every day? It is very possible that it is in such a context throughout the world, wherever spiritual communities arise, that the practice of intermediate love is born and developed and then passes up to a point into the larger world of men and women in their ordinary lives together.
Mr. Needleman tells us that the Buddhist tradition urges its followers to regard all human beings as individuals striving for enlightenment.
Although the ethics of Buddhism touches all aspects of life, the physical, personal, and familial, yet at the same time, the Buddhist is urged to treat others primarily as yearning, consciously or not, toward the inner freedom of nirvana, and to regard the suffering of all beings as due fundamentally to their deep ignorance of the true nature of the self.
While loving and caring for one's own, one's mate or son or daughter or mother or father, the Buddhist seeks to see others as fundamentally in need of metaphysical help.
No doubt such an ideal of caring for others both as individuals with physical and emotional needs and as individuals in need of self-understanding was practiced most intensively among the community of pupils of the teaching, the community known as the Sangha.
To practice such dual love requires that a man or woman understand this dual aspect of human life within him or herself.
Within oneself are both the desires that are a part of having a body and a social self and the strivings that are evidence of the Buddha or the awakened nature within.
Those most acutely aware of this whole aspect of human life are the men and women who, in the deeper sense of the term, form the assembly of seekers, those who have entered the stream of the inner search.
Yet Buddhism calls men and women to regard all beings as, in some profound sense, seekers of the truth.
How did the members of the earliest Buddhist community strive to work with each other? What kind of care for the other was set as an ideal for these individuals who were living and searching together? with all the emotional demands and contradictions that inevitably test close human relationships, the glorious ideal of impersonal love for all beings, how was it brought to bear on the feelings and reactions of people who were not distant strangers, unknown neighbors, but people who rubbed against each other every day? It is very possible that it is in such a context throughout the world, wherever spiritual communities arise, that the practice of intermediate love is born and developed and then passes up to a point into the larger world of men and women in their ordinary lives together.
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