I don’t I don’t think we get to cultivate love and compassion this year. You’ll have to hang about for next year for that one. That one’s a bit further down the track. Okay? So probably this year, we’re gonna be doing things around the first three points.
The love and compassion part comes a bit later when you’re Ultimately, the aim of Dharma practice is to completely undermine our deeply held conviction that we’re somehow or other separate and independent, and on the basis of doing some of these other things beforehand, getting our ethics under control, being more mindful, developing an incredibly expansive form of love and compassion, then we can finally undermine this silly hallucination that we’re somehow or other separate from others. That seems to be the Buddha’s key point. If you go and read the Buddha’s teachings, that seemed to be what he worked out in his enlightenment experience, somehow or other we fool ourselves that we’re separate and independent, and hence we get ourselves into deep strife and all of our suffering comes from that. I think that’s what I’ve learned from him anyway. Perhaps we’ll stop there, so thank you very much.
I hope you’re all going to come next week. Certainly the centre is very, very excited about this course. One of the things which Buddha House is really serious about is offering Buddhadharma to a whole range of different beings’ minds, and certainly introductory programmes like this one are ones that the centre’s had various experiments with, and when Elaine, who’s the program coordinator for the centre, came across this call she convinced some of us that this was going to be a really good idea, so the more some of us booked it, the more we thought this was going to be really, really good. Hope that you’ll at least hang in for the first module and see how it goes for you see whether or not something happens for you. Have a little experiment, I guess that’s what it’s about here, so you’ll get an opportunity to raise your concerns in the discussions, and there’ll be chance to re tweak the format and and so on, so we look forward to everyone participating and getting a lot out of it.
Thanks very much. So those people who have made up their mind that they don’t, that it’d be really good if you could hand in your stuff, and those people who didn’t, who somehow or other missed out on getting some booklets because there wasn’t enough, can they hang about, and anyone else who’s got any other questions about things, if they can hang about then we’ll be here. Probably if people wanted a cup of tea or coffee, someone will crank the the teapot up out the back.