Loving Your Enemy -- Credo XX

I have been reading the late Lama Dilgo Khyentse's The Heart of Compassion and came across this passage. It shows an affinity with Jung's theories of projection, giving them an underlying spiritual dimension. I thought that this would be of interest to some of you who are helping others not to carry the burden of resentments, anger, jealousy, etc., towards others! It provides, at least for me, a logical relief, especially as each individual seems to have an independent agenda with the Powers-that-be! In some ways it almost seems that "to love your enemy" is to be grateful for the opportunity to see the other as wearing the mask of one's own projection and thus by mirroring help one to become more conscious of one's own unconscious Shadow. This works collectively as well. Hope you agree!
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"Experiences of things as pleasant or unpleasant are not functions intrinsically belonging to the objects you perceive. They arise only in the mind.

"Take as an example the process of perceiving visual form. The object is a particular form in the outer world, the organ that senses it is the eye, and that which perceives the image and categorizes it is consciousness. If you see a beautiful person, a dear relative, or a sacred statue, you feel glad. If you see something ugly, or some ill-intentioned person come to ridicule or attack you, you feel upset, anxious, or angry. All these perceptions arise in the mind itself. They are triggered by the object perceived, but they do not themselves exist in that object, nor do they originate anywhere else outside the mind.

"Generally, mind is the slave of its own biased perceptions. Dividing everything into pleasant or unpleasant, it constantly tries to experience what is pleasant and get rid of what is not—blind to the fact that this is not the way to achieve happiness and avoid suffering. Blind ignorance drives the mind constantly to generate feelings of like and dislike. You engage in endless ordinary worldly activities with no more durability than drawings on water. Preoccupied entirely by these distractions, you exhaust your life and squander this precious human existence with all the freedoms and advantages that you now enjoy.

"The mind thus contrives everything, so the only thing to do is to master the mind. As Tilopa taught Naropa:

It is not what you perceive that binds you,
It is your clinging to it that binds you.
Cut through your clinging, Naropa!"

—from The Heart of Compassion: The Thirty-Seven Verses on the Practice of a Bodhisattva, Dilgo Khyentse (Shambhala, 2007), pp. 138-9.

lovingly,
ao