Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Venerable Kaye Miner explores how the Buddhist meditation on equalizing oneself with others can transform our relationships by breaking down the rigid categories of friend, enemy, and stranger. In this 52-minute dialogue session, she addresses a common objection that the practice feels artificial, then moves through concrete examples: the workplace where competition forces us into conflict; family gatherings where old hurts resurface; and chance encounters with strangers where a single gesture can trigger judgment. The core insight is that our distinctions arise from two distorted mental states—attachment to friends, which is inherently unstable, and hatred toward enemies, which rests on a false view of the self as fixed and independently existing. She examines how love differs from attachment in that it can hold both positive and negative qualities without swinging between extremes. The discussion broadens to deeper questions: how ignorance and the ego create the conditions for attachment, why Western and Eastern approaches each offer unique strengths in understanding mind, and how ethics serves as a practical safeguard while wisdom ripens. The closing point is that genuine transformation requires repeated examination of how we regard ourselves and others, a process that spans lifetimes. Aimed at practitioners with some familiarity with Buddhist concepts.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 2011 01 16.mp3
UUID: d80626a0-1769-4533-a689-fe841b68fbe4
Teacher: Ven Kaye Miner
Collection: Mindfulness with a Heart (Ven Kaye Miner)
Date: 2011-01-16
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 52.2 minutes
Words: ~3,995
In a meditation, say on equalizing self with others, and really just if there’s any issue with that sort of meditation to do with any aspect. It’s working. This type of meditation, I mean, it can appear a little artificial, like it’s a contrived device placed on our relationships with others and doesn’t really reflect, you know, the actual way we interact with others. We could have any particular issue with this. I think one of the fundamental things with this type of meditation working is that we come to an understanding that it is a valid or an authentic way of looking at our relationships with others.
And in being useful, it means that we can use it as like a structure or framework for balancing our relationships so that we’re not going to an extreme. Does anyone else have this type of impression in this meditation? I think it’s very—I’m not working at the moment, and therefore, I don’t seem to have anyone to dislike. But I found that the most difficult area is in a workplace where you have bosses and, you know, people in a sort of a hierarchy. And I think anyone would, of course, take my hat off because it’s very, very difficult.
Do you find them? Anyone else find that as well? Yeah, I think it’s true, especially in the work environment. It’s quite often very competitive and you’ve got to fit into a structure and there’s often—there are pressures on a person to perform in a certain way or to, I don’t know, make friends with certain people and so on. And being competitive, you really—yeah. You may be forced to push other people out or do things you wouldn’t necessarily like to do.
It is very competitive. The ethics, you know, I’ve known people that had to fire people, and it’s really—it’s caused a deep concern, and they’ve had to do it, and they’ve had to do it in perhaps a brutal way. Well, I mean, that must affect your psyche. Absolutely. The work—in our work, we can be forced into those situations where we make enemies of other people, when we don’t want to.
And they can resent that. And then we may resent our own action and be unhappy with ourselves over it. And that does create a little bit of agitation and regret downstream. And then we can feel offended that people have had to treat us in that way, because they’re in that work environment and they’re competitive, and for them to get ahead they may have had to make an enemy of us, and so on. And then we will tend to take that personally, and then we may feel cheated by that person, and put that person—who maybe they’re a friend to begin with—they become an enemy.
Even when intellectually we resist that. We don’t want to do that, but we may start treating them as an enemy or someone we don’t like. But the work environment is full of opportunities to lose our equanimity. But this process is very interesting. What about outside the work environment?
In a family situation it happens as well with family, friends. Is it true? You know, we’re often thinking about these issues. How other people react to us, taking personally what other people say or do. And then, especially if they say something negative, then even the family members can be enemies.
Family members can be friends. Parents can be friends or enemies depending on what happened last week or ten years ago and so on. Is it true also that we often don’t think about someone, so we don’t really reflect on whether they’re a friend or enemy? Occasionally a thought will come up and at that point we realize, Oh, I’m taking that person as an enemy, and so on. We remember things from the past.
My interaction with her was colored by my memories of our childhood. You know, what I knew of her and what she knew of me as children. This is very interesting and I think this is such a common experience. Especially with Christmas when it comes around and then having to move back into the family situation and relate to siblings and parents and there’s a lot of pressures there. There are a lot of issues that are deep below the surface. And as John mentions, we tend to gloss across the surface.
We don’t want to go too deep because we don’t want to have an argument in the middle of the Christmas dinner, and then that becomes the issue for next Christmas dinner, and so on. That’s true. Even strangers—they just need to make one remark, and we can take offense, and they become an enemy. Even we see someone in the street, we look at the way they hold themselves, and, you know, we think, oh, I don’t like that person. And then that can be part of the process whereby we’re taking that stranger and putting them straight into the enemy category without really much basis. But it’s true—in the media that we’re subjected to all the time, there are all these opinions all the time.
Yeah. There was an incident where I’d been to the toilet, and I was washing my hands, and this girl came out. And she was—she flicked water and it went all over me, all down the front.
And I looked at her, and she was completely unaware. And I thought sorry for her because she probably hadn’t even noticed me there, and she certainly didn’t know that she’d flicked water on me. I took the towel, and I thought then, if only you could stop and think. And it comes across as negative for the person perceiving it, but really the cumulative effect of the negativity—this is very true, isn’t it? It just takes a slight action.
Someone takes a seat on a bus or stands on our toe or things are happening all the time and we react. It’s interesting how we react. We often judge very quickly without—we don’t give people much benefit of the doubt. Now that’s a very interesting observation. We often get just absorbed with these very small groups, and our entire life tends to be focused on just juggling these two groups of friends and enemies, one to the other, taking them one to the other, back again, or justifying why they are friends or enemy.
A lot of energy goes into this. Another question there is, are we getting any value for the energy we put into this? What benefit is there for us? Interesting strategy, just to manage those that we don’t get on well with. Actually, we talk about enemies and friends—the enemies really are—we can describe them in many ways, like those we don’t get on with.
Enemy might be a bit of a strong term. Although when we get down to it, it’s just someone we dislike and we tend to keep distance from. I felt, from all these people who are now talking to, you know, these strangers that they would never have come in contact with—they’re all now working together on something. And I thought how inspiring that was to see how we can change and that friend, enemy, stranger thing can change so quickly.
Something forced us to. And in wars and all those times, that’s the only positive thing that happens. It’s so powerful to see the humanity really. We might label all this. You know, these people I know and like, and these ones I don’t like.
And then there’s this vast in between, but I really found that inspiring. Yeah. That’s—it’s excellent, actually. Previously, they were strangers, but once we see the need, that they’re in need, through something—you know, they’re not responsible for directly, the flood—and we really have sympathy for their situation. And when people are interviewed that have actually gone out and helped them, they’re, you know, they’re so happy that they’re engaging in something to help others.
It’s a very interesting process. I think often with those that we put in the enemy category, we tend to think that they’re responsible for their situation. They’re responsible for the harm that we perceive they’ve given to us. And so we really do blame them. You know, it’s not as if we see how they react to us as being blameless.
Whereas, like, in a flood, we tend to say, oh, they’re blameless. So therefore, oh, we really want to help them. Part of the meditation on the enemy is to understand just how the enemy is not really responsible for how they have reacted to us. But getting to that point really does—again, it takes some contemplation. It’s good to manage the situation.
We don’t like someone at work. Okay. We keep speaking to them, because we have to. We work with that person or those people. So we need to be able to interact.
It’s hard to get from the point of being able to interact and speaking with them to liking them. That’s not easy. And in a sense, what is it that’s stopping us from liking them? That’s one of the deeper issues. Very true.
Although, is it the case that with the enemy, we don’t often give them the benefit of the doubt? We can be quite hard on those that we put into the enemy category and as if, you know, they’re really bad. They’re really—you know, at a fundamental level, they’re really bad. And just this attitude towards the enemy is very important because it really does upset us. And it’s something that we retain.
If we really go back even to when we were kids, you know, five years old, we probably still, if we really examined it, there’s still maybe levels of resentment we’ve retained from primary school towards certain people. It’s very interesting, this process of how we look at the enemy. Still, even—we need to examine. Is there a person that lacks any positive feature? Can we find someone on the planet that has no good qualities whatsoever?
Or would that be excusing it? Yeah. Exactly. That’s our first reaction there. If we don’t see them as bad, does that mean we’re forgiving their unforgivable actions or whatever?
Still, what is this element of hatred, of dislike of the enemy? It’s internal. It’s internal, isn’t it? It’s protective. It seems to be protective.
That’s an absolutely central element—like and dislike and just what role it plays in the meditation on equanimity and how the like or dislike influences us in the process. Also, the like and the dislike in the beginning of conceiving someone to be an enemy, what role it plays at that point is really useful. Also in anger—does like or dislike play a role in the generation of anger towards another or impatience towards another? Why I bring this up is that actually we think very quickly, and things happen very quickly in relation to how we judge others. And often, we’re not aware.
It’s almost subliminal. You know, we see something and almost without thinking, we maybe categorize them as an enemy or a friend. But the role of like and dislike is really important, I think, in this process. There’s a distinction there, isn’t there, between a person and their behavior? With the power.
Because, see, power is quite an ugly tool, isn’t it? It changes people once they get power. And so Hitler might have been, what, just a mild Austrian man with a hobby on the side. If I was a predator or prey—if I was a gazelle or something—how am I going to have compassion for all those nasty things with teeth and paws that want to eat me?
This is difficult to even imagine. Oh, it’s—I don’t know. Generating compassion is enlightened self-interest because compassion is one of the most positive, maybe the most positive mental state that we can generate. We need to generate it, and it’s very beneficial for ourselves. A side product of that is it’s good for others, that really being compassionate towards others is good for them, and it would stop us from harming other beings. But also true, from a Buddhist perspective, all the insects and the animals, the fish, and so on, all of these are potential human beings.
So we try to minimize our harm of those beings because from the point of view of reincarnation, they were a human being in the past. Now that idea takes a while to get one’s head around. And often, anyway, even though we intellectually may understand it, to really act as if, you know, we fully believe it is not easy. No. You’re dealing with a very deep level.
Yeah. And, actually, because—that’s functioning. The way we hold other people to exist is functioning at a deep level. And our emotions tend to be acting on a very superficial level, and we’re engaging them at a very superficial level. So, you know, to think when we’re getting angry with another person that oh, this person is an illusory person.
They don’t, you know, they don’t really exist in the way I think they exist—that isn’t necessarily going to harm the anger, counter the anger, although gradually it will. But because the anger is so strong and our wisdom of how that person actually exists is so weak, that wisdom doesn’t counteract the anger or the hatred or the resentment and so on. So that’s why we engage in ethics, because ethics—which would stop us from acting to harm someone—is like a stopgap measure for eventually understanding the actual way we exist and other beings exist. Yeah. So it’s—Yes.
The root of the problem is the way we look at the world and the way we fundamentally look at ourselves. And because we tend to think of ourselves as being, you know, existing from our own side, being fixed and—Well, with that as the underlying attitude that we have towards ourselves, we tend to regard anyone that says things that are harmful to us or acts verbally or physically or mentally in a harmful way towards us—we tend to become offended by that. Isn’t that what gets offended? It is. Well, that’s right.
The way we view ourselves, which is, in a sense, the ego, the view of the self. That’s the root problem. If we don’t have that, then, you know, whatever people say to us, it just doesn’t make a difference. If we had—in a sense, if we had no ego—then people could abuse us and harm us, stab us, kill us. We wouldn’t take any offense whatsoever.
Absolutely. It’s really to clearly see what is going on, and if we clearly see the way we conceive of ourselves, this way of holding ourselves to truly exist and so on disappears instantly. So at present, it looks as if the idea of selflessness is taking away something that is actually there. So do we really want that? But yeah.
But we need to examine. It’s really because our thought about ourself is so strong, so deep and subtle and habitual that it’s not something that we can give up overnight. What we need to do is just gradually observe the ways that we look at ourselves, the thought of I, and how anger and so forth, the emotions, the negative emotions actually are grounded in the thought of I. And then very gradually just examine. And this whole process may take a number of lifetimes. It’s not something that we’re going to instantly understand.
Do you think it’s perhaps more difficult for Westerners to grasp this? To be honest, I don’t think there’s any basic difference. There is a sort of a cultural—perhaps a cultural difference between the West and the East, but the West, you know, has many strengths, you know, such as the technology, the intellect in the west. The ability for the western mind to, you know, understand the material nature of our existence. It’s astonishing. And it’s interesting in the West now that now these issues of what the person is, what the brain is, and so on are becoming more and more discussed.
And the entire scientific view of what the individual is is throwing a lot of light into this area, which is very, very useful and very helpful. The eastern approach has been, especially within, say, Buddhism, Hinduism, been focused on the mind, understanding what the mind is as distinct from what the brain is. But studying the brain will lead to the mind, and it will be a, I think, a very, very useful way of approaching the whole nature of existence. In the East they didn’t worry too much about the brain. It seemed to be like an organ within the body as useful as the heart and the lungs and so forth.
And they spent—for instance, within Buddhism, a lot of energy went into understanding the mind through introspection and meditation. And now these things are coming up more and more in the West as, you know, strategies and theories for assisting the individual. Yep. Yeah. There is an element of that, I think.
Yeah. But still, the West is full of potential, and there are many wonderful things that are happening in the West. There’s many areas. Oh absolutely. I think there’s cultural stereotypes there as well, you know, to think of the East as being more contemplative, more trained, and so forth.
That’s not necessarily the case. It’s just human nature, and we just have cultural streams, you know, like in the West and Middle East, subcontinent, Far East, the Americas, and so on. It’s just different cultural streams. And as we go further back even into the, you know, the time of the Buddha and before that even, we can see that there’s a lot of mixing of culture and ideas, and there’s nothing in a sense unique to any one particular culture. But what we’re looking for here is just ways that benefit the individual, and what strategies benefit? What philosophy benefits?
What gives us a degree of peace? What leads us to a deeper understanding? So that quest exists in every culture. And to that extent, we can learn a lot from prior cultures and how they’ve dealt with these issues and what strategies they found. But I would say that Western culture at present has many very positive elements to it.
Oh, yes. Oh, very much. And it’s often what the strength of the West is, you know, to be able, you know, to really investigate these issues. The subtle physical reality around us and to really understand it correctly. It’s amazing.
I mean, the western culture, you know, deserves a pat on the back for the amount of—you know, for the great insights it has into these areas. Also how now the West is moving closer in some respects to eastern philosophy and to see how they do correspond. But there are many, many good things happening. And the west will develop its own view of Buddhism as well. It will take from Buddhism what it finds useful.
That’s fine. That’s what has happened in the past with China, with Tibet, various other societies in the past. It’s just a matter—it’s really, you know, fundamentally what you find benefit with, you retain, and you look at more closely. And this process, we can see in history, we can see in the past. A very, very good point.
We have friends, and we want to maintain our friends. But as we change and they change, it can be very difficult to do that. And how do we balance this? And also it takes up—in the present, it takes up a lot of our energy. Maintaining our friends, ringing them, emailing them, putting up a Facebook account and whatever.
Making sure we ring them often enough, sending them a card, and so on. All of this time and energy. We, you know, we put aside that time and that energy to maintain our friends. Actually it’s very good. We need to have friends.
They’re a great benefit to us. But true, it takes a lot of energy. We need to know—we need to understand the process of what a friend is and how we retain friends. There is a distortion there with friend and enemy, and that’s really through the ego.
You said you like the qualities. Yeah. It’s probably coming from attachment. We tend to be attached to our friends, and the element of attachment distorts how we look at them because the attachment is only looking at their positive qualities. And because it’s one-sided, it’s not very stable. And the attachment will tend to transform into hatred.
Because when that person says something we don’t like, then we’ll tend to move from just seeing their positive qualities to just seeing their negative qualities. And we tend to wobble between these two. We just see the positive in that person or the negative. But love sees both, so the love is superior because love can tolerate the negative and the positive. Really, if we can generate love to other beings without limitation, then that protects us from the extremes of attachment and hatred that follows from attachment.
But true, there is a distortion at present in the way we regard our friends. If we don’t love our friends, then they’re in danger of becoming our enemies. They will become our enemies because the attachment is inherently unstable. Oh, it’s similar in that it’s going to an extreme. It’s an extreme view.
Yeah. That’s right. But, again, we often lose sight of this, and we don’t understand the attachment. And often we have a mixture of attachment and love, for instance, to other beings. And the attachment we have is what causes the problem—it’s not the love.
And so this is why within Buddhism attachment is often regarded as the primary enemy and the primary mental attitude to be eliminated, not the ignorance, because it’s the attachment that is really throwing us one way and then another in our relationship with others. And it’s like the primary distortion that causes us unhappiness. Is it the righteous attachment? It is—ignorance. Ignorance of self.
The attachment can only arise on that basis. But again, these are deeper issues, but it’s of great importance to look at the deeper issues and at the same time deal with the more superficial through ethics. But, of course, we have to come back to this again and again. Even the practice of ethics, which sounds easy, is incredibly difficult. It’s difficult because our habits, our distorting habits are so strong.
Okay. We might end the discussion there. Anyway, we can pick up on this next Sunday as well. And it’s good just to reflect on this during the week and see how we go. So, yeah, I wish to thank everyone for coming, and have a nice week.