Goodwill in an Imperfect World

We live in an imperfect world, but if we wait for the world to be perfect before we can practice, we’ll never get to practice. So learn to deal with the imperfections. Never let them get to you, because you’ve got work to do inside.

For example, thoughts of goodwill: These are not just nice, pink clouds we’re sending out. Pink clouds have a way of evaporating when things get hot. Goodwill is actually a matter of determining your intention, so that when you deal with other people, you’ve got to have their well-being in mind, realizing that true happiness has to come from within. That means that other people’s true happiness doesn’t have to conflict with yours, and yours doesn’t have to conflict with theirs. So make sure that you don’t do anything that would get in the way of their finding true happiness inside.

This doesn’t mean that you say, “May you be happy doing whatever you’re doing.” If they’re doing unskillful things, we hope that they’ll learn how to stop, and that we’ll be willing to help them in that direction. But don’t think of it as help. We’re doing this for our own sake, because we don’t want to have the wounds of bad kamma on our conscience. The things we do, the things we say, the things we think, we want to be skillful, and it’s a lot easier to be skillful when you can think thoughts of goodwill. And again, we’re not doing this because people are good, or because people even deserve our goodwill. We’re doing this simply because the best way for us to negotiate this world is not to wish anybody any harm.

Then, when we look back at our actions and realize that we inadvertently did cause harm but that it wasn’t because of our bad intentions, then it’s a lot easier to learn lessons from those mistakes. If you knew you were doing something unskillful when you went in, it’s very easy to put up defenses and to make excuses—and then you never learn.

So, cultivate thoughts of goodwill every day, every day. We’re working on perfections in our mind. We are not working to perfect the world.

The other thing to remember is that the more we can work to develop good qualities inside us, the more we have to offer things to the world. The world becomes a better place that way, because we’re straightening out things issuing from the source we’re responsible for. Other people may not be very responsible about their inner source, but you can’t make other people responsible. You can make yourself responsible. This is where a lot of the dignity of human life comes in.

There was a famous German poet, Schiller, who made a distinction between acts done with grace and acts done with dignity. Acts done with grace are the good things you do when the mind feels one hundred percent behind them: You’re happy to do them and they come easily. Acts done with dignity are things where you know the right thing to do, it’s going to be hard, and you may not even want to do it, but you end up talking yourself into doing it anyhow. Ideally, we want to live in a world where we can act with grace, and failing that, we try to maintain our dignity. This is what goodwill is for.