The Juggling Metaphor

 In his book Conquest of Mind, Eknath Easwaran has used a very colorful and apt metaphor to describe how people can transform their emotions about things: namely that of juggling. Easwaran notes his early fascination for juggling, remarking on how each time he was able to extend his skill with juggling and keep challenging himself to do things he wouldn't normally do. He uses this analogy to talk about how we juggle likes and dislikes. He notes:

This kind of juggling begins not with eggs and eggplants but with likes and dislikes. This is only for the adventuresome, but it makes an excellent test of spiritual awareness. Can you change your likes at will? When it benefits someone else, can you turn a dislike into a like? If you can, you have really made progress. (p.48)

Although Eawaran doesn't quite put it in this way, I would suggest that the metaphor of "juggling likes and dislikes" might be like a continual "re-imagining" of a disciplined life, where a person learns to extend their likes to embrace dislikes. Just as I orient myself in a forgiving and gentle way toward my likes, so I learn to extend this orientation or even redirect it along the lines of what I resist or dislike, given what I have experienced among my likes.

One time a year or so ago, I had asked a monastic at the meditation center where I practice how a person can be loving and kind toward everyone in a crowded room. Which person, I asked, do you choose to be kind to? The monastic mentioned that we can start with the people we feel most attached or interested in, and then develop the aspiration and the heart from the deep relationships with those people. To go back to the analogy of "extension", there is a sense that the more people can practice with things they like, the more they can extend to that which they dislike. While this is one way of looking at it, however, it it hard to make that jump, because it's easy to become attached to one's likes.
 
Another analogy that I have heard is that of daring oneself, which is something that we do when we eat things like hot peppers. Even though hot peppers are painful to eat, we end up loving the challenge because we can see where we are based on our ability to take the intensity of the pepper.  When I orient toward the food as a kind of challenge to myself rather than as a succulent flavor, my attitude might change to a more observing disposition: I am not trying to judge the food or whatever it is as "good" or "bad", "pleasant" and "unpleasant", so much as I am observing dispassionately my reactions, without a trace of judgment. This, I feel, is a perhaps more realistic way of looking at why feelings of like might extend to dislikes. It is also a much more forgiving attitude, where I am able to see all my reactions equally by deciding not to reject some and seek others.

Easwaran, Eknath (1998, 2010). Conquest of Mind. Tomales, CA: Niligri Press