Here’s the thing, everything you experience is your consciousness. When you see or hear another person or any object, what you’re experiencing is a representation.
Again, what you’re experiencing is yourself; your consciousness. This the heart of all of the “I am everything” spiritual forms. You have never known anything directly except yourself and you never will.
This is one reason why most spiritual systems emphasize positive emotions towards even difficult people and situations. “Love thy enemy” is about loving yourself, and it is intensely protective. When the Buddha said that a monk being sawed in half by bandits should feel love towards the bandits, that wasn’t to protect the bandits (who in Buddhist metaphysics, will get theirs eventually due to karma), it’s because if you’re feeling love, you don’t feel much in the way of fear: the two emotions are opposed.
(Relatedly, if you get rid of background fear and tension, what happens is you start feeling love all the time, though the feel is somewhat different from romantic love: it is not needy (this is not theoretical, I’ve experienced it, though I don’t live there right now.)
With something like Metta you start by sending out love to people you already love, move to neutral people and then move to people you hate. It’s the last step which is most important, though it is last for a reason: it’s hard.
What stops most people is the fear that if they don’t hate those who are dangerous or immoral, they won’t protect themselves or be considered part of the tribe. The key to dealing with this is having standards: not needing emotions to tell you when someone is acting badly. IF you don’t have those standards, then you can indeed get into trouble, and this is a problem in some spiritual communities, especially when people try to act as if they have attainments they don’t have and suppress negative emotions. You aren’t suppressing if you do loving-kindness or other emotion correctly: if you have the attainment, the emotions either don’t come up or they come up briefly.
Loving-kindness, compassion and so on are also useful because when something negative does happen, or does come up from your memory, the positive emotion is protective. Traumatic formations reduce over time, negative conditioning and fears reduce and if something new bad happens you are far less likely to wind up with a new trauma.
There are a lot of benefits to other people from being around someone who is constantly loving, but the Buddha and many other spiritual teachers didn’t suggest love just because of that: they did so because being loving is good for the person who is loving.
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