How to Expand Love

Widening the Circle of Loving Relationships

By: His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Jeffrey Hopkins - translator Ph.D. Ph.D., Jeffrey Hopkins - editor Ph.D. Ph.D.

Narrated by: Jeffrey Hopkins Ph.D. Ph.D.

Love and compassion are beneficial both for you and for others.

Through your kindness toward others, your mind and heart will open to peace.

Expanding peace to the larger community around you will bring unity, harmony, and cooperation.

Expanding peace further still to nations and then to the world will bring mutual trust, mutual respect, sincere communication, and finally successful joint efforts to solve the world's problems.

All this is possible once you learn

HOW TO EXPAND LOVE

With this illuminating and instructive handbook, His Holiness the Dalai Lama, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, offers sensible, everyday guidelines for transforming self-centered energy into outwardly directed compassion. Drawing on exercises and techniques established in Tibetan monasteries more than a thousand years ago, the Dalai Lama describes a seven-step, self-directed program to help us open our hearts and minds to the experience of unlimited love, transforming every relationship in our lives -- and guiding us ever closer to wisdom and enlightenment.©2005 His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Jeffrey Hopkins, Ph.D.; (P)2005 Simon and Schuster Inc. All rights reserved.

What is love? how do we love?

This book gives a different perspective on how we think of love friends, neutral beings and enemies. I like the perspective in this book, it reinforces my belief of living in peace and sharing loving kindness to self and others.

Masterpiece

Any additional comments?

This is the Dalai Lama's masterpiece. I find he rambles a lot in other books, but this one is pure meat and potatoes (not a very Buddhist analogy, I know). This book, on the other hand, is so targeted and structured that it condenses the essence of the Buddhist path the same way Je Tsongkhapa did with Lamrim. With a better title like "Awaken Your Buddha Nature" it would be popular. As it stands, it seems to be a lost treasure.

For the privileged only

Any additional comments?

As most books by His Holiness the Dalai Lama, this addresses exclusively the privileged. It also contains the statement that all suffering is self-inflicted. This is an outrageous insult of a great number of human beings who suffer due to the misdeeds of others.
If I would not know that this book is written by His Holiness the Dalai Lama, who is the reincarnation of the previous Dalai Lama (and so on), I would be tempted to think this book is the sorry effort of a privileged person of average intelligence and about average capacity for compassion.

Too Much Reliance on Belief in Reincarnation

Many of the meditations require that you believe in reincarnation in order to work. Given that I don't believe in that, they're useless to me.

Also, the narrator was irritatingly slow, I had to increase the speed to 1.4-1.5 in order for it to sound normal.