The Real Reason The World Is So Cruel. (It’s Not Politics, Says The Buddha)

The real reason the world is so cruel, it's not politics, says the Buddha. Some people say that the drive for survival explains everything. But if that were the case, there wouldn't be people wanting to die. And why do some people want to die? Because they feel that the avenues for happiness are all closed. This means that survival is good only as long as we feel that it can lead to happiness. The drive for happiness is what explains a lot of human behavior. The Buddha was special in discovering that the drive for happiness doesn't have to be selfish, doesn't have to be harmful. It is possible to find a happiness that harms no one, a happiness that lasts. He respected his own desire for happiness and through that, he was able to develop qualities of wisdom, purity, compassion. And he respected other people's desire for happiness too. When we extend thoughts of goodwill to others, we're not saying, as some people say, that we're basically accepting them. Actually, we're respecting their desire for happiness. Now, this doesn't necessarily mean we respect the way they're looking for happiness. After all, a lot of people are looking for happiness in ways that are harmful to themselves or to other people or both. But the basic desire there is something we're gonna respect. We start within, looking for a happiness that doesn't harm people, realizing that if our happiness harms other people, one, they're not gonna like it and they'll do what they can to destroy that happiness. And two, even if they're weak and can't destroy our happiness, still, the simple fact that we're doing things that are unskillful will lead to our own pain and suffering down the line. So, we're respecting both the desire for happiness and the principle of karma. That's what genuine goodwill means. Think about goodwill for yourself. We live for happiness. There's no way we can survive without it. So, let's look for happiness in a way that's responsible. The Buddha lists three ways that are responsible. Generosity, virtue, and meditation. Learning how to turn within and finding the resources within our body and minds, our many minds, to see what we can develop that would lead to that happiness. Ajaan Lee talks about how human beings have so many good potentials within them that go undeveloped. So, let's see what we can develop out of the breath. You can breathe in short, out short, in long, out long, in short, out long, in long, out short, heavy, light, deep, shallow, fast, slow, all kinds of ways of breathing. Explore this elementary property, this potential you have in the body. You do that by paying a lot of attention. This is a lot of what respect is. You're paying attention to things, not just sloughing them off. For most people, the breath doesn't have much potential. It's there, coming in, going out. And as long as it keeps on coming in, going out on its own, you can turn your attention to other things. But what happens when you give it your full attention, i.e., all around? Think of the breath coming in and bathing the whole body. It's not so much that you're watching the breath. You're letting the body be bathed in the breath. You're feeling the breath, wherever it can be felt, all too often. The breath doesn't get much room in the body because we're using the breath energies in the body to help us think. But now, we can let the thoughts fall away and maintain only enough thinking to be aware of the whole body breathing in, the whole body breathing out. Let the breath have the whole body and try to be as sensitive as you can, as attentive as you can, because the needs of the body will change. For a while, long breathing will feel good. After a while, it begins to feel tiring. So, let the breath grow shorter. Keep looking for the other ways in which the breath needs of the body may change. As the breath gets more comfortable and there's a sense that the breathing fills the whole body, it begins to calm down. Your awareness of the present moment comes more to the fore. Again, be alert to that sense of just bare awareness watching the breath. It's not totally bare because you're giving it tasks to do. But try to make it as simple as possible. The more simple you make your awareness, the more mental activities you begin to see. After all, there's not just the breath and the awareness. There are thoughts about the breath, perceptions about the breath. There's a sutta where the Buddha talks about how Ven, Sariputta, his foremost student in discernment, could see all kinds of mental activities going on even as the mind settled into very deep stages of absorption. So, there are things to observe here. You want to see how you're putting the state of body and mind together by the way you breathe, by the way you talk to yourself, by the perceptions you hold in mind, and the feelings you focus on. Be careful as you focus on the feelings because if you generate a feeling of ease and then leave the breath and just focus on the ease, that's going to last for a little while and then start to blur out. Sometimes, you hear the warning that if you get into concentration, you'll get so absorbed in pleasure that you won't want to go further on in insight. But actually, if you do your concentration right, you have to learn the right attitude toward the pleasure. It's there. You let it do its work. But it's not your focal point. The focal topic is the breath. So, show some respect for your breath. See what it can do. Show respect for what's going on in the mind. We live in a world where disrespect is so rampant. And look what happens. People don't respect one another's happiness. And so, it becomes easy to kill other people, easy to force them to starve. You even hear people saying we have too many redundant mouths in the world. Maybe it would be good to have some depopulation. People are living too long. Defund the health system. It's all out of disrespect. If we bring an attitude of respect to our own happiness, it makes us more sensitive to how we should bring an attitude of respect toward other people's happiness too. In this way, we can live together. So, what we're doing here is not just finding some peace inside, but also creating an example that we can then bring out into the world. One of the things we want to know when we're wishing for other beings to be happy is what does it mean? What do they have to do? After all, your wish on its own is not going to be enough. The Buddha says that it's through their skillful actions that they'll find happiness. That's one of the reasons why he says that if you really care about your happiness, you not only refrain from harming other people, but you also don't get them to do harm. And you try to discourage them from doing harm. But how well do you know what it means not to do harm? You learn that from developing your sensitivities inside so that you can be clearer and clearer on where you've been causing harm in subtle ways and what exactly it means to find true happiness. The Buddha lists one of the forms of suffering as not getting what you want. He goes down the list of things that people want. They're subject to aging, and they'd rather be free from aging. They're subject to illness and death, and they'd rather be free from illness and death. They're subject to sorrow, lamentation, pain, distress, and despair. And they'd rather be of those things as well. But then, you look at his own quest. The simple fact of wanting these things is not the problem, he showed. The problem lies in hoping that they will go away just through our wanting. He tried another approach. He searched for a method. Is there a path of practice that can take you past these things? Is there a course of action? He found that there was. So, the desire for the end of aging, etc., is to be encouraged if it gets you to practice in line with that path, that course of action. He also showed that if you want to get past pain, distress, despair, you have to look for the deathless, and you have to act in ways that will lead to the deathless. That's how you find true happiness. When you've found that happiness within yourself, you're in a much better position to help other people find it within themselves too. Otherwise, it's guesswork. You listen to what the Buddha had to say. It sounds reasonable, but you don't really know. It's when you really know, through experience, that's when you can really be helpful. Because you can see clearly where people are causing needless affliction to themselves and to others. So, a large part of having goodwill for others lies in having goodwill for ourselves. This is why the commentaries recommend that you start with goodwill for yourself. Not only because it's easier to feel goodwill for yourself than it is for a lot of other people, but also because you're going to have to find out within yourself what it means to be truly happy and what has to be done to be truly happy. Then your views on happiness will have some authority. So, this process of meditating that we're doing right here, it's not selfish. It's showing respect inside and out. In that way, it's a gift to ourselves and a gift to the world around us. Every evening before we meditate, we have a chant on the sublime attitudes, universal goodwill, compassion, empathetic joy, and equanimity. Because we do it every day, it's all too easy for us to simply mouth the words without really thinking about what we're saying even though it's translated into English. So, it's good to stop and think. One, why do we have the chant? And two, are we getting the most out of it? The chant is there to remind us of our motivation for being here. We're looking for a solid, reliable happiness. Not only that, we're looking for happiness in a way that doesn't harm anybody, which means that we have to think about the happiness of others. So, primarily, we're doing it for ourselves. Because if we can have ill will for anybody, that means we're probably going to behave in an unskillful way toward that person. And that becomes our kama. It's a drain on our resources. The Buddha talks about goodwill and the other sublime attitudes as being the practitioner's wealth. And it's an interesting kind of wealth. It's not the kind where you have to go out and do something to get it from somebody else. It's something you can produce from within. It's as if you had your own printing press. And you could print as much money as you wanted. And the more you print, the wealthier you are. The... So, why is our account so small? Why do we not see goodwill as wealth? There's a strong tendency to keep score. Someone else said this to me. Someone else said that to Things you don't like, that's keeping garbage. It's like those pack rats that pick up garbage and stash it away, stash it away. They treat it like wealth, but it's not wealth at all. It's just garbage. And why clutter up your mind with garbage? You can produce abundant goodwill, abundant genuine wealth. Think of all the images the Buddha has for the wealth of goodwill. The whole earth. You want your goodwill to be large like the whole earth. A puny little man comes along and wants to make the earth be without earth. He digs here and spits there and urinates here, thinking be without earth, be without earth. But the earth is so much bigger. You have look at other people's misbehavior as like that pitiful little man trying to make the earth be without earth. You want your goodwill to be that much larger, that much more abundant. Make your goodwill like the river Ganges. Someone could come with a torch and try to burn the river away, but would never succeed. The water just puts out the flame. Goodwill can be like space. People can try to draw pictures on space, but there's nothing there for the pictures to hang on to. You want your attitude to be like that. Something that nobody can draw pictures on. No matter what they do, you don't keep it in mind. And in particular, you don't keep tally as to who owes what to you. So make your goodwill large. You can be as wealthy as you want. The Buddha talks about how, if it rained gold coins, we still wouldn't have enough for our sensual desires. But with goodwill, we can create huge amounts of a different kind of wealth, and it can always be more than enough. Make that your attitude. If people misbehave toward you, you want to overwhelm them with goodwill. After all, just look at this world. People are so poor in goodwill. With the least little bit of disagreement, people draw lines and get all upset and want to attack the other side. For what? We keep battling, battling, battling, then we die. We have nothing to show for it except a lot of bad karma. But goodwill raises the level of the mind. It's not innate. You start out having goodwill for some people. The normal human attitude is that you have goodwill for some but not for everyone. But with the sublime attitudes the Brahmaviharas, you're trying to raise the level of your mind to a Brahma level. It's the Brahmas who have goodwill for everyone, with extra left over. If you can learn how to think in those terms, you become a Brahma inside. So ask yourself, what's keeping you from generating as much wealth as you want? What attitudes are getting in the way? And remind yourself, it is heatful of you to be generous with your goodwill. As the Buddha said, all skillful qualities start with heatfulness, are rooted in heatfulness and goodwill is one of those qualities. Sometimes we're told that we need only get in touch with our innate goodwill and allow it to bloom. But you look at little kids behaving and it's not as if somebody told them that they had to be partial in their goodwill. When you first try teaching goodwill to children, there are some who will say, no, I can't do that. How can I have goodwill for that person? That person did this or that mean thing. You have to remind them, okay, the goodwill is not so much for them. It's for you, which means that universal goodwill is an attitude that has to be cultivated. It has to be developed. You have to think your way to goodwill. They talk about a cheetah of goodwill, the word cheetah means both heart and mind. The main emphasis in goodwill, of course, is with the heart, but it requires some of your head as well. When you think of somebody for whom you have trouble generating goodwill, try to ask yourself, why are you so stingy with your goodwill? What's the obstacle? After all, what does goodwill mean? It means may that person be happy. How is the person going to be happy? Through his or her actions. So basically you're wishing if this person is behaving in an unskillful way, may he or she see the error of his or her ways and be willing to change, willing to become more skillful. That's an attitude you can have for everybody. Then you can ask yourself, is there anything I can do to help that person be more skillful? Rather than tallying up all the bad things that person did in the past, you're looking at him or her as someone with potential, the potential to change for the better. So, make it your challenge. Is there anything you can do to help that person become more skillful? To want to become more skillful, you probably know the folktale of the sun and the wind. They got into a discussion one day and then into an argument. Who was stronger? Who had more power? The wind said, I'll show you that I'm stronger. See that man down there on earth walking down that road with a blanket around him? I can blow that blanket away. You can't do that. So, the wind blew and blew and blew. And of course, the man just clutched the blanket tighter and tighter and tighter. The wind couldn't blow it away. Then the sun said, okay, let me try. The sun just beamed. The man feeling the warmth took the blanket off of his own accord. The lesson, of course, being that if you try to force your ideas of what's right and wrong on other people, they're just going to hold even more tightly to what they've been doing all along. But if you figure out some way to make them want to change, they'll be happy to do it. So, goodwill requires more than just an attitude of the heart. It requires some thinking. This is why the Buddha gives those images, the earth, the river Ganges, space, and talks about goodwill as wealth. They're perceptions to shape your thinking. Once you generate goodwill, then you try to protect it, as with all wealth, because there will be people who misbehave and you can't let that erode your goodwill away. Think of the example of the mother protecting her child. The poem says, just as a mother would protect her child, her only child, so you should try to protect your goodwill. Sometimes that passage is mistranslated as, you should cherish all beings as a mother would cherish her child. But the word cherish doesn't appear in the poem at all. The word is protect. And it's not that you're protecting beings. You're protecting your goodwill so that no matter what happens, even if you have to die, you're not going to give up your goodwill. The Buddha gives a related image in the simile of the bandits who are trying to cut you up into little pieces with a two-handled saw. He says that if you let any ill will arise in your mind toward those bandits, you're not following the Dhamma. You're not following his teachings. You have to have goodwill for them even as you're dying. Because after all, if you die with ill will, you're going to die with a vengeful attitude, wanting to get back at those bandits. That's going to pull you down. Again, it's a case where a lack of goodwill is bad for you. So it's not a question of other people deserving or not deserving your goodwill. We talk about deserving when we have limited resources and are trying to parcel them out. This person deserves that much. That person deserves this much. But here, your goodwill is supposed to be unlimited. You give unlimited goodwill, infinite goodwill, and then you give more infinite goodwill. It's like one of those weird math problems where there are levels of infinity. You can give infinite goodwill, then you can give more infinite goodwill the next day, and more infinite goodwill the next. There doesn't have to be any limit. When you have that much, you don't have to worry about who deserves and who doesn't deserve. You just give it to everybody all around. So learn how to be generous with your goodwill. The more generous you are, then the more you get, the more you have. Don't approach goodwill with a shopkeeper's mind. One who has to tally things up and do the math for fear of being shortchanged and running out of money. You should be engaging in the math of infinities. You don't need to keep tally of that. Just keep producing. And as the Buddha said, when you give abundantly, you're going to receive abundantly as well. You may not receive goodwill from other beings, but there's an inner sense of well-being that you create within your own mind, and you want that to be abundant. And it's something you can do. If there's anything in the mind that resists the idea, you've got to question it, grill it. Don't let it have any force, because it's just going to make you poor. You have to ask yourself, why do you choose to be poor when you can be wealthy? So keep that image in mind. Goodwill is your wealth. As I said, it's like having your own money press where you can print as much money as you like. And unlike the money of the world, the value doesn't get reduced when there's more of it. The math of goodwill is not like the math of poverty. It's the math of infinite wealth.