hilitehead

“In the same way, then turn your attention towards the person you dislike and ask yourself, ‘On what grounds do I feel such negative emotions towards this person?’ Again, this may be because he or she has done certain things towards you. But then ask yourself whether that person is likely to remain your enemy all his life. And then, if you take into account the question of many lifetimes, you will realize that the individual may have been very close to you in a past life, so his status as your enemy is merely short term. You begin to see that there are no justifiable grounds for having such extreme hatred and anger towards that person.

Finally, consider the individual in the middle, to whom you feel totally indifferent. If you raise the same kind of questions again, you will realize that the person may have very little relevance to your present life but may have been important to you in other lives in the past; and even in this lifetime, he may become important to you at some future point. So this type of visualization helps to level out the extreme fluctuating emotions that you feel towards others, and to establish a stable basis on which you can build a more balanced sense of closeness. If we think along these lines, and question our emotions from various angles, then we come to appreciate that the extreme emotions that we tend to feel towards others, and the behaviors they generate, are perhaps unwise.”