Noah Levine - The Heart of the Revolution: The Buddhas Radical Teachings of Forgiveness, Compassion, and Kindness

T he Heart of the Revolution contains one of the most powerful and liberating messages in the world: wherever you are, your heart can be free. Nelson Mandela showed this when he walked with amazing dignity and compassion out of twenty-seven years of prison to become president of South Africa.

You too can free your heart. You need not be trapped by your past. Individually and collectively, our hearts can be released from the sufferings of our history. I have seen this over and over again on retreats, as meditators honorably face the pain of their history with courage, healing compassion, and forgiveness, and learn to move on. I have seen this in prisons and hospices and AA meetings, and among former victims and former combatants for peace in countries around the world.

The sufferings of our families and community and the world are built on lieslies of fear and addiction, of racism, of trauma and hate. But they are not the end of the story. There is also a release from these lies.

When my teacher Maha Ghosananda, whose whole family was killed in the Cambodian genocide, gave teachings to twenty-five thousand traumatized survivors in their refugee camp, I wondered what he could say to those who had lost so much. He took his seat with dignity and chanted the Buddhas words over and over:

Hatred never ceases by hatred

But by love alone is healed.

This is the ancient and eternal law.

Soon all twenty-five thousand refugees were chanting with him, faces covered in tears, giving voice to a truth even greater than their sorrows.

Forgiveness, compassion, and freedom to live your own life are available to you. These are your birthright. As Noah explains in these pages, There is no one who is unable to love.

But how to do so? This is the real gift of this book. In it, Noah offers the Buddhas wise and systematic practices to quiet your mind and heal and liberate your heart.

Through these teachings, as you learn how to live wisely in the present and to liberate your fears of the past and future, you will develop confidence in the power of mindfulness. You will learn how to touch the struggles of your life with compassion, and develop faith that you can overcome confusion, self-hatred, and despair. You will learn the revolutionary freedom and happiness that come when you tell the truth and step out of deception, both your own and others.

And you will learn how to bring your clarity and compassion to a world that so desperately needs them.

This book is a gift to those who read its words.

Take them to heart, try them, and transform your life.

May you do so and be blessed.

Jack Kornfield
Spirit Rock Meditation Center
2011

WELCOME TO THE REVOLUTION

T he Buddha was a revolutionary, a radical advocate for personal and social transformation. He rejected the religious norms of his time and renounced all forms of greed, hatred, and delusion. He dedicated his life to going against the stream, to the subversive path of an outlaw transient. He wasnt afraid to speak out against the ignorance in this worlds political, social, and religious structures, but he did so from a place of love and kindness, from an enlightened compassion that extended to all living beings. The Buddhas teachings are not a philosophy or a religion; they are a call to action, an invitation to revolution.

I have always looked up to those who thought and lived outside the norms. Growing up, I had a sense that there was something very wrong with this world. Punk rock pointed out to me that many of the norms and laws of this land were constructs of a puritanical and corrupt religious nation. Until I found the practices and teachings of the Buddha, I was stuck in the conundrum of seeing some of the problems but having no solution.

I have had a lifelong fascination with outlaw culture. When I was a kid, bikers, Black Panthers, lowriders, gangsters, and punx were my heroes. Outlaw bikers wear a patch on their jackets that has 1% printed within a diamond shape. That emblem signifies that theythe 1%ersstand apart from law-abiding citizens. The tradition originated in the 1950s as a result of the famous 1947 biker riot in Hollister, California, which was later dramatized in the movie The Wild One with Marlon Brando. Reporting on the riot, a journalist trying to defend the masses of motorcycle enthusiasts wrote a story about how 99 percent of the people in this world who ride motorcycles are law-abiding citizens. He said that it is only the remaining 1 percent who give the rest a bad name, living outside the law. Of course, the outlaw bikers took this as a compliment and ran with it. They rebelled against the mindless, mainstream conventionality of the fifties and were proud of it.

The Buddha is reported to have said that he thought only a handful of people in each generationthe spiritual 1%erswould be willing to do the hard work of training the heart and mind through meditation, ethical behavior, and unconditional love for all sentient beings. His message was radical. Like the outlaw bikers of the fifties, he bucked the conventions and norms of his day. His practice was hard, but the insights and happiness it promised were new and potentially world-shattering.

With 6.8 billion people in this world, only a handful could very easily mean somewhere around 1 percent, or 68 million people. Do you suppose there are 68 million people in this world who are walking a spiritual path with heart? I dont know. But what I do know is that it is rare for Buddhists, Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, atheists, agnostics, scientists, or whatever to be open-hearted, to be free from ill will, resentment, and ignorance. It makes sense that the path of love and compassion, of kindness and appreciation, is tread only by the 1 percent of this world who have had the good fortune to find the willingness to reject the false teachings of religion and have turned inward to find the truth for themselves.

When I first heard the radical Buddhist teachings on loving-kindness, compassion, and forgiveness, I was incredibly skeptical. Coming from a background of drugs and violence, I saw those heart-qualities as undesirable and perhaps even unsafe. In the circles I ran in, compassion was seen as equivalent to weakness and would make you vulnerable to harm and abuse. I learned early on that this world was full of pain and seemed to lack much kindness. In reaction to the pain in my life, I began to close my heart and to harden myself against all forms of love. So it was with great hesitance that I experimented with Buddhist practices of kindness and compassion. In the beginning I dont think forgiveness was even in my vocabulary. The only reason I opened myself to these meditation practices, often called heart practices, at all was because I had tremendous faith in the practice of mindfulness (paying attention to the present moment), in the Buddha, and in my teachers, who assured me that it was safe to love again.

As I looked into these heart practices, I heard things like Love is your true nature and The heart has a natural tendency toward compassion. Now, I had already been meditating for some time, examining my inner world through mindfulness, and I didnt see any of the love and compassion of which these teachers spoke. When I looked into my heart and mind, I saw only fear, anger, hatred, judgment, more fear, and a lot of lustful cravings. When I sat quietly, paying attention to my breath, my attention was repeatedly drawn into fantasies of vengeful destruction or pornographic sex. One moment I was bashing in my stepfathers head with a Louisville Slugger; the next I was in a threesome with Madonna and Traci Lords. I was pretty sure that such sludge was all that was in there. Mindfulness helped me deal with my inner confusionit allowed me to ignore my mind at times and not take it so personally at othersbut it didnt seem to be magically creating a loving heart out of my inner critic/terrorist/pervert/tough guy.