On Being With Christa Tippett is supported in part by the Fetzer Institute, helping build the

Spiritual Foundation for a loving world. Fetzer's sharing spiritual heritage report asks,

how will we hold on to ancient wisdom traditions while applying them creatively in today's time?

Learn more at Fetzer.org.

It's a piece of deep psychological acuity carried in our religious traditions that each of us

is defined as much by who our enemies are and how we treat them as by who and what we love.

Yet love of enemies right now feels as quaint and impractical as countercultural and

surely counterproductive as at any time in my life. So this hour we are revisiting an on-being

classic conversation with two American Buddhist leaders, Robert Thurman and Sharon Salzburg.

Across a half century conversation and friendship, they've investigated the rich and pragmatic

mind science behind this virtue and practice. How to transmute the very real, very consequential and

consuming energy that anger and hatred are as much as their emotions? And why love, in fact,

is the most rational and pragmatic of stances towards our enemies and thus we must retrain

the well-worn grooves in our psyches which tell us that love is weak and vengeance is strong.

The word love is so loaded and our fear of course is that it means something very passive and

complacent and I'm going to let people hurt me and I'm going to let them oppress other people

and it would be a dormat and it's very hard to see love as a force as a power rather than

as weakness but that is its reality. The hopeful thing for some people who like their anger,

some people do like their anger, that energy of strong, powerful energy can be written in a different

way and can be used to heal yourself. I'm Christa Tippett and this is on-being.

Robert Thurman was the first American to be ordained at Tibetan Buddhist monk by the Dalai Lama.

Sharon Salzburg is one of the original circle of young Americans who traveled to India in the 1960s

...