Last week, as part of the Dharma talk, I mentioned one of my favorite expressions of the Dalai Lama,

which is that he says, my religion is kindness.

And he's not so interested in whether people are Buddhist or whether they're in anything ist, which I like.

But he really describes the whole expression of the holy life, as if internally we're touching an inner sense of presence and freedom,

the expression will be kindness in some form.

And that the real hope for peace on earth is that that inner sense of presence is really becomes more and more a living experience.

And there's a natural quality of harmonizing with others when that's there.

So I'd like to talk about what's called the meta or loving kindness.

And the Buddha described this as one of the divine abodes and the abodes are homes.

And a divine home, this is what's so powerful about that expression, is not a somewhere else place we try to get to.

The divine abodes are actually the most awake and true and deep expression of who we are.

So this practice of presence is to come home to this natural loving kindness that is who we are when we're not lost in our reactivity.

If you're not caught in fear, because fear is kind of the ground of the reactivity,

you will naturally be kind.

Fear keeps us caught in feeling in some way separate and apart from.

We're in a kind of story about a self that's threatened.

And it obscures this realization of belonging, of really being part of this web and really cherishing all the life that's here.

There are a few different in the poly script and the language of the Buddha.

There's a few different descriptions of loving kindness, of meta that are really sweet and shine a light a bit.

And one is like a gentle rain that absolutely falls unconditionally on everything.

We all know about conditional love.

I mean, every one of us has had experiences of seeing in another being a sense of feeling a connection and seeing goodness or feeling ourselves really opened up,

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