Your love and compassion towards your friends is in many cases actually attachment.

Your love and compassion towards your friends is in many cases actually attachment. This feeling is not based on the realization that all beings have an equal right to be happy and to overcome suffering. Instead, it is based on the idea that something is ‘mine’, ‘my friend’ or something good for ‘me’. That is attachment.

Thus, when the person’s attitude towards you changes, your feeling of closeness immediately disappears. With the other way, you develop some kind of concern irrespective, of the other person’s attitude to you, simply because that person is a fellow human being and has every right to overcome suffering.

Whether that person remains neutral to you or even becomes your enemy, your concern should remain.

~H.H. Dalai Lama XIV

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