Goodwill Is Respect
October 07, 2024

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. So 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 mean we respect the way they’re looking for happiness because 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 going to 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 going to 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 speaks 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, 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. Here 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 this 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 to 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 talks about one of the forms of suffering as being 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 free 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—it’s hoping that they will go away just through our wanting.

He tried another way. 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. 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.