Goodwill

Close your eyes and think thoughts of goodwill. Goodwill is a wish for happiness—your happiness, the happiness of others. True happiness. Because it is possible to find a happiness that doesn’t disappoint, that doesn’t change. It just has to be found inside.

The good news, of course, is that your true happiness doesn’t have to conflict with anyone else’s true happiness. If we each looked inside ourselves for the resources, with the wish we could find that happiness, the world would be a much better place. There’d be no conflict among people.

We take it for granted that there’s a lot of conflict, there’s a lot of back and forth. A lot of harm gets done as you go through the day, as people go through the day. But the Buddha is saying it is possible to find a happiness that doesn’t harm anybody.

So we want to look inside for that. But first we want to make sure that we’re careful about our attitude toward other people: what we do, say, and think about them. We want to have goodwill, wish for their true happiness, too, regardless of what they’ve been doing—regardless of whether we like them or not.

The Buddha’s not saying you have to like everybody, but he does recommend that you wish everybody well, because if there’s anybody out there you’d like to see suffer, it’s going to be hard to behave skillfully around that person.

So stop and think about it. Is there anybody that you cannot sincerely wish goodwill for? Then ask yourself why. What would be gained by seeing that person suffer? What part of your own mind wants to see them suffer? Is that a part of your mind that you want to encourage? And even if they suffered, as you might say, their “just desserts,” would they change? Most people don’t change.

So the desire is for everybody, of their own free will, to see—if they’ve been behaving unskillfully—that they want to stop, want to find a way to find true happiness for themselves. Anything you want to do to encourage that is good.

Try to cultivate this attitude toward everybody you meet: “May this person be truly happy.” See what that calls up in your mind. If there’s any resistance, you have to learn how to reason with it. In this way, you straighten out the committee inside your mind. We have lots of different opinions inside, lots of different ideas about what we should do and shouldn’t do. Sometimes they’re in agreement, sometimes they’re not. Part of the training of the mind is to learn to get everybody in agreement that you want to behave in a skillful way. That’d be for your own good and the good of others, now and on into the future. And an attitude of goodwill for everyone is a good way to start.