Page 74 - The Buddha‘s Noble Eightfold Path

exercises, as some of you know to your cost!) you cannot be

aware of them.

We can say that love, in the sense in which we are using the term
at present, means awareness of the being of another person. If,
then, you do not know the other person how can you speak

affectionately to them? It just isn't possible. We like to think, of
course, that we have love for people, that we are affectionate

and so on, but this is very rarely so. We usually see other people
in terms of our own emotional reactions to them. We react
emotionally to them in a certain way, and then we attribute that

emotional reaction to them as a quality of them. If for instance
people do what we would like them to do, then we say that they

are good, and kind, and helpful, and so on. Thus we are not really
communicating with that particular person. What really happens,
most of the time, is that we are communicating, or trying to

communicate, or pretending to communicate, with our own
mental projections.

This is especially so in the case of those who are, allegedly, near
and dear to us. Parents and children, brothers and sisters,

husbands and wives, very rarely know one another. In fact, they
hardly ever do. They might have lived together for twenty, or

thirty, or forty years, but they do not know one another. They
know their own reactions to one another, and those reactions
they attribute to the person concerned. They think, therefore,

that they know them; but they do not really know them at all.
They know only their own projected mental and emotional states.

This is a very sobering thought. There used to be a saying, 'It is a
wise father that knows his own child‘.

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