Awareness in Buddhist Meditation

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all beings without distinction of race and creed, even those who appear
to oppose us on variety of grounds, often more emotional than
reasonable. These states are truly dispassionate and sublime over
the feelings of attachment and aversion, which are experienced not
only in the human heart and in those less fortunate beings struggling
upwards on their path of evolution, but even in some spheres
of light and bliss, the heavens of those who reap the fruits of their
earlier good deeds. We call them the spheres of light (deva-loka),
because we (here below!) experience still so much of darkness in our
partial understanding. But, even their light and bliss are far from
enlightenment and emancipation. And thus, these boundless states
of lofty living are compared to life in the Brahma-lokas, where the
senses of material satisfaction have been transcended, and where the
mind dwells in spheres of abstraction and of formless beauty with
glimpses of truth.
For, just as the ‘brahmas’ are gods of the highest spheres beyond
experience of the senses, where the mind dwells in regions of
form (rūpa-loka), such as logic, joy, adequacy and one-pointedness
(vitakka-vicāra, pīti, sukha, ekaggatā), and in formless spheres
(arūpa-loka), where abstract thought dwells on the infinity of space
and consciousness, on the no-thingness of all and the imperceptibility
of perception—so these sacred virtues are considered as divine
dwellings (brahma-vihāra) of the mind, because they are not
found in human emotions. Love (mettā) is not charity; compassion
(karuṇā) is not pity; sympathy (muditā) is not sentiment; equanimity
(upekkhā) is not resignation or evenness in temper. It is of
these four lofty virtues that we shall speak, or dwell on them in
meditation which is contemplation rather than concentration, and
which through insight can lead to deliverance. These four ‘divine’
virtues are also called ‘immeasurable’ (appamaññā) because they
bring about happiness and tranquillity beyond thought and reason
in various degrees of mental absorption (jhāna). They replace the
desires of the senses by abstract thoughts of good-will, beauty and