The idea that ordinary people can love one another, including those they have never met as well as those they meet day after day, is a pleasant piece of sentimentalism. It sounds well when solemnly uttered by ministers of religion before their respectful congregations or when published as advice by professional psychologists. But where are the individuals who succeed in following it? If we look at history or at the cities and villages we already know, we find that the only form where something like it is discovered is that of organized philanthropy. This is excellent, this is commendable, but still it is not strictly love. Most ordinary people cannot get closer than this to the full sympathetic identification with another person which love really is. Only saints can achieve complete empathy; only they are capable of washing the leper's sores. For all others the idea is vague and unreal, although convenient to use in talk at Christmas time.
Karamazov, a character in one of Dostoevski's Russian novels, drily said, "One can love one's neighbour in an abstract way occasionally perhaps, even from afar, but in close contact, almost never. . . . It is precisely the neighbour, the one who is physically close to us, whom one cannot possibly love. At best one can love those who are far away."
Now this may be a little exaggerated but it does speak openly of the difficulty many people experience in their attitude towards those with whom they are in daily contact. It is still more difficult if they are forced to live with unscrupulous or unliked people. Then it will be all they can do to numb their revulsions.
But ordinary people have to come to terms with their associates or have at least to take care not to show their dislike. They must particularly learn to endure others who are different from themselves in habits, leaving aside the case of those who are thoroughly repulsive to them. Unless they do achieve this capacity, there is no hope for the human race, which must otherwise go on fighting and warring until, with the frightful weapons now coming into its hands, it destroys itself.
Such tolerance is still only the first station on the route to that active goodwill which the more idealistic persons who take the Quest seriously must try to achieve eventually. Many of them find it hard to reach even this first halt. They are sensitive, they are often heterodox, and they cannot warm up to those whose ideas, habits, mannerisms, or orthodoxies irritate them. The Quester who does not eat meat, for instance, may not enjoy sitting down at table with those who delight in it. If he has the fortunate circumstances to do as he likes, he need not do so. But most are not so free. He may put up with the meat-laden table and its diners with bad grace or good grace, but put up with them he must. Or take another case, that of having perforce to associate with someone who indulges in frequent sniffles when such a personal habit is felt to be most repulsive. Again if he is a Quester and if he is free to do as he likes and to avoid the other person, he is entitled to do so. But suppose he is not free? Instead of straining himself in the futile task of trying to love unlovable people, it is better to learn how to give them enough goodwill to tolerate them. This is within his capacity. If he has to live with them, or associate with them, he must try to put up with them, which means trying to put himself in their place. And that is a most desirable spiritual exercise, an advanced stepping-stone toward love itself. The practice of goodwill helps the practiser by creating good karma and shaping a good character. The thought of it, habitual and sustained, helps those who touch, or move within, his orbit. The profound meditation upon it repays him with blissful feelings and mystical harmony. If a man can be nothing else, let him be kind to others. Each time he does this he goes out of his own little ego. He comes a little closer to expressing the spiritual self dwelling hidden in his heart.
-- Notebooks Category 6: Emotions and Ethics > Chapter 2 : Re-Educate Feelings > # 108
