The following talk was given at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California.

Please visit our website at adiodharma.org.

Before we even begin Dharma practice, we have a lot of love, tremendous depth of care.

And Sanga member was speaking about generosity.

She talked about, I think it was her very young nephew who loves cheese, yogurt, and blueberries,

just eating it ravenously, delightedly, and then all mashed up together,

and then very proudly presents that mash-up to his aunt, you know.

And because she's trying to be a good aunt, gratefully takes it.

Right? But that is deep impulses evident from very early on and they don't go away.

And then you start practicing and the love grows. And yeah, it's hard.

Practice is hard.

But there is only love and that which has not yet been loved.

And the practice begins to free up a lot of energy, a lot of energy, a lot of understanding

of insight and the face of insight is love, its manifestation in our lives is primarily love.

And we start to care more deeply about so much.

The circle of empathy widens begins to include the nameless and the named.

Those will never meet those not yet born.

And the love begins to animate our life, our action in the world,

how we relate to one another, how we vote, how we engage.

But as the line in the song goes, there's a thin line between love and heat.

And our moral commitments, what we care about, our love gets yoked together with rage and the urge to punish. And the question is like how does that happen?

How do love and hate become entangled?

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