The 4 Immeasurables
Category: Buddhist Path | Mind Trainer Articles | Recent Meditation Posts
Exploring the social emotions of positive change
We’re all looking for happiness in this life, but I’m not sure that we’re always looking in the right place. We may think that happiness can be found through acquiring possessions and power, or political change, or other worldly things. While it’s true that some of these may bring a measure of contentment, they never can produce the true satisfaction that comes from a good and happy heart.
Meditation plays an extremely important role in unlocking the door to true happiness because it leads us to knowing and expanding our hearts. As we practice, the heart opens and the knots that had, until now, caught us up in all kinds of frustrations and dissatisfactions are untied. We are able, finally, to experience the goodness that has always been there.
We assume that meditation is a kind of turning inward, and it is, but actually that’s only half the story. We are not separate entities, disconnected from the mundane and able to solve all of our problems without relating to others. We are part of this moving, flowing thing that is the world of humans and other living beings. So the other half of the job we do on the spiritual path has to do with transforming our relationship with the world, people, and other living, feeling beings who, just like ourselves, want happiness and wish to be free from suffering.
The Buddha taught many different forms of meditation, beginning with the practice of turning inward and developing stillness, the method we call calm-abiding or mindfulness. Buddha also gave great importance to meditation techniques that focus on our way of relating to the world and help us develop what we might call warm, social, and positive emotions. One very useful practice that helps us cultivate this warmth and openness to the world is found in what we call the four immeasurable meditations, or simply the four immeasurables: lovingkindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity.
May all beings have happiness and the causes of happiness.
May they be free from suffering and the causes of suffering.
May they be inseparable from the happiness that is beyond suffering.
May they rest in the great state of evenness that is beyond any partiality, desire, or aversion.
As we focus on cultivating an open heart, it’s important to understand what is meant by the terms lovingkindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity. While this order is the one most commonly found in teachings about the four immeasurables, perhaps there’s an alternative sequence which makes even more sense in terms of actually developing that good heart. In this sequence, we place equanimity, the fourth quality in the list, at the beginning.
Equanimity: the first social emotion
Equanimity means balance—it in no way refers to apathy or indifference. It is not about turning away from the world with an “I don’t care” kind of attitude. How hardhearted and opposed to opening the heart that would be! Rather, equanimity is developing a breadth and spaciousness in our relationship with the world so that we can really start to bring those lovely, warm emotions of love and compassion to the fore. Until now, our understanding of love and compassion has been very selective and biased, as in, “I like her; I don’t like him.” True equanimity, in contrast, is perfectly inclusive.
Where does it come from? To begin with, equanimity comes from having an easiness, an unflusteredness about our own thoughts and emotions. Until now, our minds have been busy categorizing experiences, feelings, thoughts, and sensations as: “I like this, I don’t like that; I want this, I don’t want that.” We are always at odds, and the world is difficult for us because we divide it up in this way. To make friends with the world, we’ve got to start by making friends with our own emotions. This takes a little time.
If you already know something about practicing simple attentiveness or meditation, that’s what you’re going to do. If you are not yet familiar with it, take a moment to simply allow whatever thoughts and feelings are naturally present to arise. But this time, instead of anxiously categorizing them and becoming involved in a chain of emotional reactions, simply let the feeling, thought, or whatever arises come and go. Don’t push it away out of fear; don’t grab it and try to change it into something else. By allowing it to appear and disappear of its own accord, your mind already feels more expansive.
The mind has no dimensions, of course, but we are so used to living in a shrunken world defined by our prejudices and reactions that we don’t recognize how wonderfully spacious the mind truly is. By simply sitting and not reacting, we can connect with this spaciousness. Once we’re able to do this (to some extent) with our thoughts and feelings in our practice on the cushion or on the chair, we can bring it into our relationships.
Allow thoughts of your friends and enemies (as you’ve labeled them up until now) arise in your mind. And just like with the thoughts that appear when you’re meditating, deliberately refrain from reacting. Don’t compulsively grasp at them with the usual concepts, such as “these are the people I like; these are the people who make me feel secure,” or “those are the people who threaten or challenge me, who I really have to protect myself from.” Instead, just let the thoughts of all of these people come and go. As you practice, you’ll notice that a warmth arises along with a spacious mind—it’s the warmth of a kind of fearlessness. There’s nothing to fear from any of those people, just as there’s nothing to fear from your thoughts and emotions.
Eventually, you can start to bring the spaciousness in meditation into your interactions with others. Pause, take some time with them, and just let them be. It may sound incredibly simplistic or banal, but you’d be surprised how seldom we have the confidence and spaciousness of mind to let people simply be so that we can attend to them where they are and connect with how they’re feeling, what they’re saying, and what they need.
This is what equanimity brings into our way of relating to the world. A good analogy for it is that we’re throwing a party and this time we’ve invited everybody—we’re confident that we have plenty of room for one and all. This magnanimous, inclusive feeling makes us feel happy! We can invite everybody to our party! Now that equanimity has begun to develop, let’s move it forward.
Lovingkindness: the second social emotion
The second immeasurable quality, or social emotion, as I like to call them, is love or lovingkindness. In our tradition of teachings that come from the Buddha, love is not about making somebody an object to satisfy our desires, wants, and insecurity; rather love is the wish that others might enjoy what I want for myself: happiness and the cause of happiness. And good-heartedness is the cause of happiness.
One may think that so-and-so would be happy if he conquered his enemies; another would be happy if she had all the power or possessions in the world. But it wouldn’t be true. True happiness, as we know from looking deep into ourselves, actually comes from a good heart, a heart that is contented and full of warmth and wisdom. That’s what we mean when we say, “May all beings have happiness and the cause of happiness,” which is a poetic way of expressing this social emotion, the immeasurable meditation of lovingkindness.
How should we understand immeasurable lovingkindness and put it into practice? Firstly, immeasurable means exactly that. No one is left out, no one is excluded. We all love somebody—Dean Martin sang that everybody loves somebody sometime. That’s good in itself, but we want to go further—we want to love everybody all the time. And to do this, we draw from equanimity. Grounded in the spaciousness that we’ve been talking about, our goal is to invite all beings into our lovingkindness.
Some people find this a big reach at first, so you can approach it in a developmental way. For instance, think of somebody who is or was very close to you, someone who put you first and privileged your needs, perhaps even above their own. For some, this will be a parent; for others, it might be a friend or a relative. Focusing on this relationship allows you to recognize your dependence on others, your indebtedness towards them. By choosing someone with whom you have a personal and intimate connection, there’s little risk that the wish “may all beings have happiness and the cause of happiness” will degenerate into a pious recitation that you don’t really feel deep inside. Naturally, there arises a genuine sense of, “I want things to be good for you. You wanted it for me, now I want you to be happy too. I want you to be able to cultivate the cause of happiness—a good heart—so that your happiness will naturally continue.”
Whether you’re imagining that person or they’re right in front of you, you send this wish out from the heart. And here’s the thing: we want happiness for them, yet we feel happiness as we wish this. It gives us the courage to bring more people into the radius of our good intentions. Once we’ve focused on someone near and dear to us, we can include other people, family members or friends, and try it on them. “May you have happiness and the cause of happiness.” The heart opens wider. Then we continue our practice with the people in our town or city, and expand it to include animals as well.
Next, we might include some difficult people, because now we’re starting to sense that somehow we are connected with everyone. Having developed some equanimity, we recognize that the people we think of as difficult today may well be our friends or benefactors in other circumstances. Things turn around in life; nothing is fixed, nothing is permanent. The spaciousness from equanimity and the warmth from lovingkindness lead us to feel love or, at the least, a kind of positivity towards difficult people. This is really an opening of the heart, as if a little knot in our heart had untied itself. From here, really, it’s just a hop, skip, and a jump to extending the same wish towards many beings and, finally, to the whole world.
We started our lovingkindness practice by focusing on a particular person who has loved and was kind to us so that it wouldn’t become lip service. Sure, we can all agree with the idea “may everybody have happiness”; it’s easy enough to say. But as we work on developing warmth, we have to pay attention and open the heart properly so that we’re really engaged. Our warmth comes from the heart rather than the head. This progressive way of cultivating lovingkindness brings our wish down to the heart level. And if we can do it on the cushion, we can do it in everyday life.
Compassion: the third social emotion
Why not begin here? Because compassion is difficult. Its meaning is expressed in the aspirational phrase, “May all beings be free from suffering and the causes of suffering.” Compassion is more difficult than lovingkindness because while I am excited and inspired by love and happiness, I’m frightened of suffering. In my usual neurotic state, I’m not necessarily concerned with other people’s happiness, but I’m not fearful about it either. Suffering, on the other hand, I’m afraid of. Maybe I’ll be contaminated if I concern myself with somebody else’s suffering; I might catch it. That’s nonsense of course, but even so, there’s a tendency to resist looking into the face of another’s suffering. I want to protect myself; my heart is a little too tight for this wish.
That’s why we begin with equanimity and lovingkindness. Equanimity gives us the breadth, and lovingkindness gives us the positivity, confidence, and joy that will sustain us in going just that bit further in opening the heart so we can develop compassion. We can take this radical step because we’re drawing on the balance of equanimity and the joy of lovingkindness.
People often have powerful feelings when they hear about suffering. They may get fired up, want to change a given situation, and eliminate what they perceive as the cause of suffering. But this desire often comes to grief because they aren’t supported by the positivity of lovingkindness. Instead, what drives them is anger about the injustice or the difficulty because their mind hasn’t developed strength through equanimity and joy, and resilience through lovingkindness. This is why the immeasurable quality of lovingkindness usually precedes compassion.
How do we develop the social emotion of compassion? The practice is similar to the progressive approach we took with lovingkindness: we start with the intimacy of close relationships and gradually widen the circle and include others. The wish may begin with a parent, another close relative, or a good friend—someone with whom you have a deep connection. This time you consider the difficulties that person is facing or will face: the difficulties of life and death, actually. When you think in this way about this person with whom you have shared so much and have such gratitude toward, the heartfelt wish that they be free from the suffering they’re experiencing now or will face in the future arises spontaneously.
You are also wishing that they be free from the causes of suffering. One main cause is selfishness—the very opposite of a good heart—which invariably results in dissatisfaction and problems. As you practice with the phrase, “May they be free from suffering and the causes of suffering,” your desire is that they will know freedom from suffering now and in the future. When your heart can express this wish in an authentic and powerful way for even one person, compassion is developing within you.
The next phase is the same as before. Bring other people into this, maybe family, maybe friends, and think again of your connection and how indebted you are to them for all the kindness and goodness they’ve shown you, then radiate the wish that they be free from suffering and causes of suffering. Continue by expanding the scope and include a larger group of people, maybe the inhabitants of a town or city, in your practice.
Now you can focus on the difficult people, those you may think of as “the enemy.” You remind yourself that until now you’ve bumped up against the wrong side of that person, but there must be other sides because we’ve all got so many sides. And one of that person’s sides is hurting; it’s afflicted by suffering just like you are. If you can respond to that side—which I think leads deeper into what the person is really experiencing—compassion will arise, even for someone you might consider obstructive or an adversary. At this point you’re very close to being able to include all beings in the radius of your compassion.
How is compassion different from sentimentality? It’s important to discern the difference. Sentimentality might express things that sound compassionate, as in, “Oh, I’m so upset about those people’s suffering,” and so on. But who are you really concerned with? None other than yourself: “Me and my fine feelings. I’m such a wonderfully sympathetic person.” In sentimentality you are both the performer and the audience, and you are really digging your performance. Others are just props. Don’t confuse this with compassion—it’s anything but. Sometimes compassionate people don’t mouth conventional pieties; sometimes they’re actually rather rough and rugged. They probably don’t have time to waste because they’re really more concerned with responding directly to the problems people have.
Sympathetic joy: the fourth social emotion
And that brings us to the fourth in this sequence of immeasurable qualities: sympathetic joy. Joy in this context, as expressed by the line “May they be inseparable from the happiness that is beyond suffering” is the ability to rejoice when others do find happiness and freedom from suffering, just like the heart wishes where we voiced our lovingkindness and compassion in short verses. And we really mean it.
Likewise, when we think of somebody who has beauty, we should think that it’s really wonderful. “May they have more beauty!” Or—and this may surprise you—with somebody who’s wealthy, think, “How fabulous, may they enjoy even more!” What’s going on here? What’s going on is you are expanding your heart. A small, narrow heart sees everything as a zero sum game. “She’s beautiful. I’m not. She stole that.” “He’s wealthy. I’m not. He stole it.” The narrow heart has been corrupted by jealousy and the inability to feel joy in others’ good fortune.
We’re not talking here about assets acquired through evil-doing or selfishness; we’re talking about the natural flow of things, where people do good things and good situations arise. That’s what we’re rejoicing in, and to be able to rejoice in others’ good fortune makes us more open and joyful. The opposite reaction—jealousy or a feeling of being diminished by others’ happiness—is really so corrupting. This is why we also have this meditation of rejoicing in others’ joy. It makes us extraordinarily good and inspiring people to be around. And through practicing the fourth immeasurable, we grow and expand our boundaries. The limitations we typically place on ourselves in terms of the world and how we relate to others are dissolved by sympathetic joy. It’s a really wonderful quality to develop.
I’ve described equanimity, lovingkindness, compassion, and joy as a sequence, as if one gives rise to the next, but really, they’re a wheel. Each one pushes the others forward. The more joy we have, the more equanimity we have because there’s more spaciousness in our mind and in our way of dealing with people. And so on. We should cultivate and treasure all four of these wonderful social emotions—the four immeasurable qualities—together and each in its own right.
