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Brahmavihāras: Appreciative Joy (5 of 5)

So now we come to the fifth and final talk on muditā^[1]. I like to call it rejoicing, or rejoicement, sympathetic joy, or appreciative joy. With all these brahmavihāras^[2]—with all these four divine abodes of loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity—I think it's very useful and important to see them as an expression, a manifestation, or a consequence of inner freedom.

A metaphor for inner freedom is an open heart. The doors of the heart are open. If there's a lock on the door, then the heart's not open. In some ways, that protects us from the sufferings of others and the difficulties of the world; we don't take it in, we keep everything away. But it's at a tremendous cost, because any way in which the doors of the heart are locked, it also locks us away from our capacity for joy and happiness, for love and kindness.

If those doors can be wide open, what we discover is that, yes, we will take in and experience the suffering of the world, but it'll just flow right through. It's almost as if the heart is just a door, and to have that door wide open, everything goes through in a wonderful way. We do experience the suffering of the world more acutely, but with a door open, we don't suffer because of it. We're not a victim of what's happening in the world, but we do experience it. The very ability to experience the suffering of the world more is the very way of being that allows us to experience joy and happiness more. It's just a symptom of the open door.

With the door wide open and experiencing suffering, we can have compassion. But if we experience the joys of the world, we can feel joy and delight. In Buddhism, this is very important because our natural capacity for being ethical, being virtuous, and living a good life is very much connected to our capacity to be happy. The happier we are in this deep Dharmic way—a deep appreciation that is not because we won the lottery, but because we're really settled and at home and not in conflict with ourselves—the more natural it is to live an ethical life. It becomes natural to live a life that's wholesome and supportive of the world.

So, rather than thinking of cultivating happiness and well-being as a selfish thing to do, it's really a vehicle in Buddhism for living a selfless life, a life that's beneficial for the world and supportive of others. Cultivating happiness for oneself can be seen as part of the path to living for the welfare and happiness of others. It's also the path to greater and greater freedom.

Muditā is seen as a practice that's freeing. It frees us from having a closed heart, from envy, and from being jealous^[3]. There's a certain kind of freedom from fear that comes with sympathetic joy, with appreciative joy, because this ability to live with an open heart means the heart is not closed in any way. It's not closing down or locking itself up in the way that envy, jealousy, fear, or discontent might feel. This movement towards freedom, as we develop more and more of this sympathetic joy, means something keeps opening in us. Joy is an opening. It's like oil on the hinges of the door; it just keeps opening and opening, and it's more and more freeing.

This is important because, in Buddhism, freedom is the reference point for how we live our lives. It's a reference point for how we keep growing and developing, how we expand. We're expanding freedom out into further and further dimensions of the heart, the mind, the body, and how we live. But we have to have some feel, a real feeling for what it's like in the heart, the mind, or the inner life for there to be freedom—for there to be an absence of clinging, an absence of contraction. We begin getting that feeling, getting that sense, and experientially knowing for oneself, "Oh, this is what it is." At first, it might be like the door opens a little bit, but now we know that the door can be opened. We didn't even know it was a door before because it was always closed. And then we start seeing, "Oh, this is a door. It's open. Let's see what we can do to open it more and more and more."

The brahmavihāras are all ways that we can keep opening. With sympathetic joy, appreciative joy, and rejoicement, we do it not blindly, naively, or sentimentally, but maturely and powerfully as a way toward greater and greater freedom. The more inner freedom we have, the more we'll rejoice, delight, and appreciate what should be appreciated. And the more we delight and appreciate what can be appreciated, the more we'll become free. There is this wonderful reciprocity or mutuality of these two movements.

To go through a day and appreciate—not because it's a duty or an obligation, not because we have to be sentimental or put on rose-colored glasses—we discover there's a lot to appreciate without the rose-colored glasses. There are lots of things. We can appreciate that it's a new morning. We can appreciate the fact that we have electricity. We can appreciate the fact that we have candles when there's no electricity. In a collection of year-end photographs we gathered together to give to a relative, there's a picture of my younger son doing his homework in candlelight. It's such a beautiful and delightful picture to see. There's probably half a dozen candles around him as he's working on his homework during the power outages that have happened. Things are more delightful and appreciable than we many, many times give ourselves credit for.

Can you appreciate others? Other people really thrive on appreciation. Appreciate them realistically, but in doing so, can you become freer? When you don't appreciate, when you're grumpy or critical of others, can you recognize as mindfulness practitioners how you are not free? What is closed in you? What is the movement that is more toward contraction and being closed, instead of opening and expansion?

As muditā becomes stronger and stronger, the freedom of muditā is expressed or discovered in what's called breaking down the barriers. Barriers are the ways in which we have walls between ourselves and other people. If someone is our enemy, we might have big walls, but breaking down the walls means we are able to appreciate them as well. It is not to deny they're difficult, not to condone how they are, or to be naive about taking care of ourselves with them, but everyone is more than just the ways they're difficult. To break down the barriers is to have this broad, open ability to love, to experience joy and appreciation for everyone that you encounter. There are no limits. There are no barriers between one category of people and another. You don't just appreciate your family or your friends; you appreciate the people who are neutral in your life, the people you pass on the street that you vaguely know, and you appreciate the people who are difficult in your life.

In classic Buddhist language, you find some sympathetic joy and appreciation even for your enemies. They're still called your enemies for good reason, perhaps, because you have to be careful around them, but still to open up is such a good thing to do. What you probably will find is that for some of the difficult people in your life, some of your enemies, some people with whom there's hostility, sometimes hostility lessens^[4] when we are no longer hostile. When we are no longer defensive, we can actually open our hearts and appreciate other people as well.

This movement towards freedom, breaking down the barriers, and having this open door to the whole world is the direction of Buddhist practice through greater and greater freedom. As we become fully free, we become a force of love, kindness, and goodwill for the world. What a great thing to do, especially on this day of the 25th of December. Joy to the world. To become the bringer of joy to the world, to be inspired to really be a force of good and joy for the welfare and happiness of all.

I want to finally read a passage that I read recently. It says that when a person becomes free, liberated, and emancipated, and it comes to the destruction of suffering, the end of their own suffering, this person then naturally, without even intending it, creates love and respect, conduces to social cohesion, to non-dispute, to concord, and to unity. May our capacity for appreciation and joy in the joy of others be for concord^[5], for unity, for social cohesion, for respect, and for love. And may that be how we go forward into this coming year. Thank you all.