Thoughts of Goodwill

Close your eyes and focus on your breath. Watch it coming in; watch it going out. Then spread thoughts of goodwill. Goodwill is a wish for happiness: your own happiness and the happiness of others. The happiness of others is involved in yours because if your happiness depends on their suffering, it’s not going to last. You want a happiness that’s reliable? You have to take other people’s happiness into consideration as well. So try to spread your goodwill around.

The Buddha calls this a brahmavihara. It’s an attitude of a brahma, which is a high level of deva. For them, goodwill is universal. For us human beings, it takes practice, it takes effort to make it universal because we tend to be naturally partial. People who’ve been good to us, we naturally feel goodwill for them. People who’ve been bad to us, or to the people we love, we can often feel ill will—wanting to see them suffer.

But if you want to see somebody suffer, then it’s likely that you’re going to be doing unskillful things toward that person. That then becomes your karma. So again, for your own protection, for your own happiness, you want to think about the happiness of others.

This, in psychology, is called a principle of a healthy ego. We’re sometimes told that an ego is a bad thing, but not always. If the ego seriously wants to be happy, then it has to think. And when it thinks, it can see that it’s true: If your happiness depends on other people’s suffering, it’s not going to be reliable.

So you try to extend goodwill to everybody. Extend it first to people who you find it easy to extend it to. Tell yourself, “May they be happy; may they understand the causes for true happiness and be willing and able to act on them.” After all, your wish for their happiness on its own won’t be enough to make them happy. They have to create the causes themselves. So you’re just expressing the wish that they would come to their senses if they’ve been acting in an unskillful way, and you’ll be happy to help them if you can.

Then extend goodwill to people who are more difficult. You keep reminding yourself, you’re not wishing them to be just happy as they are. If they’re behaving in unskillful ways, you want them to behave in skillful ways. And again, if you can help them in that direction, you’re happy. If you can’t help them in that direction, and they’re not willing, well, you just have to leave that up to equanimity—that the world is not a place where you can have everybody acting in line with the way you want them to.

Sometimes you can ask yourself, do you have any resistance to wishing goodwill to some people? And the mind may say, “Yes.” You’d like to see them suffer a little bit first because of their bad actions. But what kind of goal is going to be accomplished by that?

There are so many people who are suffering, and yet they don’t see the connection between their actions and their suffering. They tend to blame it on others. So what you want is for them to spontaneously come to their senses and change their ways. Nothing is achieved by wishing other people ill.

So we’re trying to take this quality that, in human beings, is partial and trying to make it impartial. We’re trying to make it universal, so that we’re able to extend it to everybody. When you can do that, they’re safe from you, and you’re safe as well: safe from your own defilements.

So goodwill is an important expression of merit. In fact, the Buddha said of all the various ways of making merit—which essentially come down to doing good in the world—developing thoughts of goodwill is number one. Because when those thoughts come out in your words, your deeds, and your thoughts—ty become a gift to yourself and to the people around you. And it’s free. You can just generate as much goodwill as you want. You want to make this your independent source of well-being inside.

If your goodness depends on other people’s goodness, you’re living in the wrong world. You’re living in a very dangerous world, because there are a lot of people who would be all too happy to see you dead or to see you suffer. You can’t let those attitudes affect you. You have to have this independent source inside. Then you can generate it as much as you want.

So. Why let yourself be poor in goodwill? It’s a form of wealth where you’re in charge of the economy, and you can make it an economy of infinite goodwill. That’s how you lift the level of your mind.