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lying hither and you, a tiny fruit fly wove its way through the steam rising off the porcelain and chrome jungle canopy of dirty plates, glass and silverware as I scrubbed away in the sink. For a moment the living speck of a creature wavered in front of me and flew dangerously close to the flow and splash of hot water as I worked. I moved my hand and gently pushed the little fruit-fanatic aside, away from danger; and in that moment of attentive regard I found that I loved that little fly as I loved my devil of a cat, as a teacher and as a friend. In that very moment a profound and surprising happiness washed over my heart, just like the hot water envelloped the dishes. I had met a bodhisattva of loving-kindness and compassion in the most unexpected of places, and its name was drosophila. Why should I love a fly? Love in the Western sense has been refracted through countless coloured lenses of all sizes and creeds, and often carries with it a certain sense of propriety. Romantic love, familial love, platonic love, sexual love, religious love, selfless love a myriad of emotional flavours at your disposal, all of which are important in our cultures and civilities. But which is enjoyed by the wise and, most important, how? This question, and its answer, has grown more pertinent as the home-grown threats of terror and child abuse continue to be highlighted by our media. Our common understanding and skilful expression of the love we have for our brothers, sisters and fellow creatures in this world has grown effluent, in an acute societal sense, and many of us simply do not know how to delight in each other. Thus we often dont make the effort to connect with our neighbours for fear of being identified as a potential threat that is all it seemingly takes these days. Just recently on Reddit, a popular news aggregate website, a commentator wrote of his recent trip to Quebec and how surprised he was when a little boy ran past him to the front of a crowd to watch a parade and an older man, certainly a stranger to the child, looked down at the boy, smiled and patted his head before returning his attention to the street spectacular. When the writer reflected on how citizens of his own city might have responded, he was understandably troubled by the hostility he suspected might happen. To me, this points to a need to make clear what we really mean when we say we love and to understand its skilful expression in practice and in life.
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Metta Mirror on the Wall, Who is the Flyest One of All?

Metta, or compassionate loving-kindness, not only holds the key to our quandary but is itself a door to deep insights and to a blissful congruency with life. So how does one practise metta in a skilful way? The Upakkilesa Sutta nudges us in the right direction when Anuruddha responds to the Buddhas question regarding how he lives his life: I maintain bodily acts of loving-kindness towards these venerable ones both openly and privately; I maintain verbal acts of loving-kindness towards them both openly and privately; I maintain mental acts of loving-kindness towards them both openly and privately. I consider: Why should I not set aside what I wish to and do what these venerable ones wish to do? Then I set aside what I wish to do and do what these venerable ones wish to do. We are different in body, venerable sir, but one in mind.

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Of course, loving-kindness and compassion are all well and good when one deals with venerable bhikkhus and bhikkhunis journeying on the path to Enlightenment. To be fair, though, arent we all on the Path? Yet we are all deluded in some fashion or another, acting like we know where and what we are and exactly what we are doing despite our meager sliver of perceptual pie some more than others, some less, but all of us deceived. Some do not even know they are on the Path, but we all seek contentment and truth some timidly, others with fury and fear and others still with wisdom and discernment. No matter what amusement park mirror distortions we may perceive, however, we are, all of us, Buddhas. But what of those who are troublemakers and fearmongers? There was once client of mine whom we shall call Harold. He was profoundly troubled. He was demanding, paranoid, greedy and filled with a tremendous rage and anger that lurked beneath a surface of composure. I was charged with the task of installing and configuring his new server and software so that he could use it for his business. There were numerous times when I found myself being screamed at by this red-faced, possibly violent war veteran, eyes bulging with fury, who was so drunk with his own rage that his ability to comprehend was all but absent. Wild accusations would fly about sabotage and misdeeds, no amount of effort was sacred! At those times, when I was mindful enough to practise compassion and metta skilfully, I found him to be a rare and treasured teacher of patience, compassion and wisdom my very own wrathful bodhisattva who taught me how to turn manure into fertilizer and then into blooming flowers. Like the fly, he was buzzing this way and that, afraid and confused by the world, in my case the virtual world; and more than anything, he needed someone to simply care about his well-being and to empathize
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with him. Harold, it turns out, was a true-to-life rendition of the old story of the anger-eating demon. And when I fed him compassion instead of malice, metta instead of ill will, his fevered rages would subside. In his regained composure, paranoid accusations forgotten, he would apologize and we would speak a while about his stressful situation and painful divorce. I am not sure if I were a systems administrator or a psychotherapist. To this day, even after all his tantrums and spitting anger, he still occasionally calls me for advice if he feels he cannot trust someones technical opinion. Anyone and anything can be a precious and profound teacher, but first we must be willing to be receptive to that possibility in each moment. What is flying but the art of falling? The key of metta must be applied to the right door in the right way in order to open up and discover its truths, and this can be a challenge. What has helped me, in my own practice and understanding, is, first, to remember that others suffer as acutely as we do and to be aware of that fact and, second to keep in mind a behind thought of the nature of our perceptions, which is to quote a famous saying that All is Mind. What I mean by this is that all we know, perceive, speculate, sense, experience and otherwise hold our attention on is, in very direct terms, ourselves. The Harold I know and love is represented in my own mind as a complex and living symbol that is as best as my brain can perceive and make sense of, a collage, an amalgamation of fragments from my own psyche and sense data. Thus to have metta and compassion for Harold or the fly is synonymous and mutually interdependent with having metta and compassion for myself. To hate and malign Harold is also to do so to myself. We must not mistake the menu for the meal, else we may end up still hungry and unsure what to eat! Interestingly, modern neuroscience has found a subset of neurons in the brain called mirror neurons. They still have many secrets to reveal, but they are currently thought to be responsible for empathy and other relative awarenesses. When a person views another performing an action, these neurons will fire a certain pattern, which is also fired in the same way when the observer performs the same action alone. Indeed, there is even a type of mirror neuronal synaesthesia (mixing of the senses) whereby the synaesthetic person cannot comfortably view a violent movie because they literally experience the painful moments portrayed by the actors in the film. These relational understandings point to the source of our trouble in dealing with difficult people and situations, as well as its solution. It is not who or what we relate to that is the problem but how we relate that is critical. In meditation my most insightful moments have come when my mind was calm and concentrated on the even flux of my breath. But this did not come until the breath itself was regarded with compassion and loving-kindness, prompting
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the beautiful breath to arise and point and light the way, and with it came profound lessons on the nature of mind. Practice makes perfect, and I would encourage those who are interested in cultivating loving-kindness to take up a daily metta meditation practice in which one sits comfortably in concentration and holds in mind a person that one feels an unconditional sense of love towards. When you get the gist of the process, what it feels like and what you are aiming for, you can shift to a tiered approach and cultivate your metta practice further. Start with regarding yourself with loving-kindness, as one must learn to love oneself before one knows how to love another. When you are ready to move on, shift your attention to a kind friend, and then to a neutral person, and then to a difficult person. Take your time, and dont rush this process. Have metta for your metta! Once you are comfortable with your progress, shift your attention to regarding all four with loving-kindness equally, as equanimity is an important balancing factor, and then eventually the whole universe. If you would like further instruction on this practice, I recommend Matthieu Ricards wonderful book Happiness: A Guide to Developing Lifes Most Important Skill. Keep practising, and hopefully you will soon find your own illuminating experience flying hither and you on the wings of metta.
Sean Lyons is a White Hat Hacker, helping companies design and secure computer networks. He is a lay student of Zen, Thai Forest and Tibetan Buddhism.

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