The Challenge of Making Goodwill Limitless

“Try to make your goodwill limitless — or as the Buddha say, immeasurable. Take this as a challenge. When you spread thoughts of goodwill, test to see where the limits are. Don’t just pretend that your goodwill is immeasurable. Everyone’s goodwill starts out with limits. What are the limits of yours? After spreading goodwill to people you already feel it for — your friends, your family — start spreading it to people for whom you don’t spontaneously feel it.

Does your heart object when you try spreading goodwill to people you dislike? Stop and ask it: Why? What would you gain from seeing them suffer? Look at the little voice inside that resents their happiness. Is that a voice you want to identify with? Can you drop that attitude? This is where the practice of developing goodwill really makes a difference in the mind: When it forces you to challenge any smallness or narrowness in your heart.

If you think of goodwill as a billowing pink cloud of cotton candy covering the world in all directions, what you’re really doing is covering up your actual attitudes, which is of no help at all in gaining insight into the mind.

Goodwill is meant as a challenge, as a way of searching out and working through your small-hearted attitudes one by one so that you can examine them, uproot them, and really let them go. Only when you work through the particulars like this can goodwill become more and more limitless.”

from “The Sublime Attitudes” by Thanissaro Bhikkhu

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