METTA

"When we speak of meditation on love, this does not mean
taking love as an object, but rather seeking to transform our
whole state of mind into that state of love or compassion."

Both of these remind me of something I was reading last
night in Julius Evola's "The Doctrine Of Awakening: The
Attainment of Self-Mastery According to The Earliest
Buddhist Texts" Inner Traditions, translated form Italian
by H.E. Musson (and many thanks on whomever
recommended this book). From the chapter 'The
Four Jhanas: The 'Irradiant Contemplations'
(brahmaviharabhavana) Evola writes - or rather quotes:

Here are the formulae that are given by the canon for
the four irradiant contemplations: "The ascetic dwells
with his spirit pervaded by love (metta) and irradiates
one direction, a second, a third, a fourth, so across and
upward and downward: identifying himself with all
things everywhere, he irradiates the whole world with
spirit pervaded by love, with ample, profound, unlimited
mind, free of hate and rancor." The formula is repeated
three more times, except for the term, love, which is
replaced in turn by compassion (karuna), sympathetic
joy (mudita) and lastly equinimity, immutability or
stability (upekkha). Through love, the ascetic feels
himself in all beings, noble or common, happy and
unhappy, both of this world and every other world;
he feels their destiny as though it wee his own he
takes upon himself the contingency of their life; he
feels with their feeling or suffering (compassion) but
then he irradiates joy, as if the darkness in each bring
had dissolved, as if the feeling he irradiates were
beneficial to the beings and were sustaining, clarifying
and liberating them. Then follows the last irradiation,
that of immutability or stability; the ascetic, still
developing universal consciousness, is as if he willed
the "being" of each being. He aims at infusing in every
creature that same calm, that same quality of stability
and of equanimity that he has developed in himself,
by projecting in them the quality of "being," that same
unshakability or security that he has achieved by
completing this process of universalization...
To set free one's heart by unfolding a love that turns to
compassion, a compassion that turns to joy, a joy that
turns to unchangeability, to impassible clarity and
unshakable detachment, is the aim of this fourfold
contemplations. To achieve it entirely, that is to say
to dissolve all trace of finite and unquiet subjectivity
is, according to Buddhism, to have achieved the
condition necessary for a state of union with the
theistic god, with Brahma - 'brahma-shayata.'

Ramon Sender