Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. When Ven Jampa Gendun reads aloud from Carlos Castaneda’s Journey to Ixtlan — a lone dog barking at dusk, a man begging death to release him from a life that is merely hot and dull and uncomfortable — the passage becomes the emotional centre of this 47-minute session on what genuine refuge-taking requires. He builds toward it by first examining mindfulness of breathing as a remedy for what he calls the “obsessed mind,” one compelled to react to every arising thought. The two causes for refuge follow: confronting pervasive existential anxiety and developing conviction that the path can address it; compassion for all beings is the Mahāyāna third. The session then argues from Śāntideva’s Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life that bodily self-identification is purely habitual conditioning and the sense of “I” can therefore be deliberately expanded to encompass all sentient beings.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 05 3 PA 1989 10 21.mp3
UUID: 5d2ed09c-76e0-4603-bbe8-f9feb6852a2a
Teacher: Ven Jampa Gendun
Collection: Three Principal Aspects of the Path 1988-1990 (Ven Jampa Gendun)
Date: 1989-10-21
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 47.0 minutes
Words: ~5,624
React to a, for example, an animal. This is what they deserve. This is where this hostility, this anger that I’m showing them. Even though in fact we’re creating that very enemy, ourself. Also, fact of self and others is brought into question.
Using others at their expense for the sake of our own well-being is unjustifiable, you know, ontologically unjustifiable, let’s just say, from the point of view of the nature of being, the way things actually exist. It’s unjustifiable since neither self nor others ultimately exist. If neither self nor others ultimately exist, if there’s no owner of others, to bring myself happiness at their expense, creating suffering for others, or seemingly creating happiness for myself. If I didn’t grasp for myself in the first place, there would be no owner of the suffering, and it becomes foolish to persist in creating more and more suffering. I’m creating more and more suffering in the world by using others to bring myself happiness.
There’s no particular owner of suffering. There’s still suffering which needs to be eliminated. And in fact, I’m not even gaining the happiness. I’m seeking from it. Why do I not see that my future attainment of Buddhahood, as well as glory, renown, happiness in this very life, all come completely from cherishing beings.
So this completes the discussion of equalizing ourselves with others from the point of view of the conventional and the ultimate. The next week we’ll begin the analysis, the examination of the disadvantages of self-cherishing and the advantages of cherishing others. So I’ll stop there. The method for mindfulness of breathing, you can use the counting and the noting. And developing the determination that immediately upon becoming aware that your mind has wandered or has been distracted from the breath, that you bring it back here without indulging, acknowledging.
And whatever thoughts, we can begin to distinguish between thoughts and thinking, can’t we? There’s a difference between it. Thoughts are quite uncontrollable in a way, Constant churning. In a rough sea, all the stuff that seaweed that keeps floating to the top. And we don’t have to pay particularly much attention to you know the various types of seaweed or the various types of debris that get churned up.
We can simply acknowledge them and neither repress them nor indulge in them. The thinking is quite another matter. You know we have great respect for intellect for our thinking process. So it’s not that we’re trying to in any way denigrate the thinking process, we should be able to have a choice. That is to say, when we want to make use of our thinking process, think something out, make some plans for whatever reason, then we can we can use it clearly and precisely and effectively.
But at other times thinking can be actually pathological. Most people can’t stop thinking. This thing, this dialogue just keeps on going, going, going, going. They either try to run away with it or they could get completely caught up in it, either through memory or fantasy. So we can develop the ability, the skill of being able to simply acknowledge thoughts, emotions, feelings, and not having to react.
You know this is what I’ve been mentioning over and over again. This is what Muni-ji, the founder of Buddha House, mentioned over and over again what he calls an obsessed mind. An obsessed mind. The mind which has no choice, it is forced to react. A thought arises, a feeling arises, an emotion arises, and it’s forced into taking some position, some stand with respect to that thought, that feeling, that emotion.
It’s either going to seek to prolong, to develop that thought, that emotion, that feeling, or somehow push it aside. I don’t want to deal with it. I don’t want to feel that way. I don’t want that. I don’t want this issue to be brought up at this particular moment.
In some way you’re going, there’s going to be some reaction. So this is an obsessed mind. Either way, but it’s not free. It doesn’t have choice. It’s not calm.
It’s not peace. So if we can simply develop the ability to acknowledge without reacting, then we’re no longer obsessed. Our mind is free. We can make use of the mind. It becomes a tool.
We can use it more effectively. Learning how our mind operates, we can operate it more effectively. So in this simple practice of mindfulness and breathing, can develop the ability to free our mind from this obsessive quality of always having to react. Not only in our thought patterns and sitting in meditation, but also when people push our buttons, for example, we don’t have to react. We can begin to create some space and perspective.
Just a little bit of perspective can go a long way in helping us to make a choice in how we want to react or if in fact we want to react at all. You know if the response is pretty much a matter of reflex, then whatever habitual patterns whether they’re skillful or unskillful are automatically going to be set in play. Know, it’s a program that’s just put in the computer and it prints it out, whatever it is. It reads it out. But if we can just create some space, then we think, well, perhaps you know, anger hasn’t been a particularly skillful reactive pattern in the past.
I would rather not a situation in which, you know, somebody’s pushing my button. You begin to see yourself tense up. All the signs and conditions necessary for anger for this program to be inserted in the computer and be read out are there and you become aware of it. But you have some space, you have the ability, and you have the freedom to make some choice. And you can apply an antidote.
And one of the simplest antidotes is simply to acknowledge that we can apply the antidote of disadvantages of anger. It’s always been unproductive. It’s always unskillful. It never helps myself. It never hurts the other person.
It only hurts myself. There’s something we can do. Gives us some choice, some ability. We’re no longer victims to our own compulsive habit patterns of our mind and neurotic reactive patterns. What is your mindfulness of dignity?
There are two causes for going for refuge. By refuge we can say taking a particular direction through our body, speech and mind. The person is generally translated as fear. Perhaps it’s more appropriate to call it anxiety. Rather than the fear of some particular suffering, rather than seeking protection from an instance of some pain, some difficulty that we may conceive of.
Just the complete underlying theme of a type of existence bounded by ego, of a dissatisfactory quality of being caught up in these erratic compulsive patterns without choice, without freedom. The feeling of unmanageability, the uncontrollable factors of our lives. Things are quite out of control. We can never get on top of them. And even those instances when we do, it’s very short lived.
It’s a feeling, there’s an underground deep notion of an anxiety permeating most of our existence, permeating most of our egocentric egocentric existence. And one of the most simple, but one of the most poignant moving descriptions I’ve had about my feelings, about how I conceive of this this quality of anxiety. This is a short passage from a book about Don Juan by Carlos Castaneda, Journey to Ixtlan. And it’s quite a simple passage, I think it really touches the mood of, you know, I love my life. My feeling, the quality of my anxiety about my life.
You know, Don Juan was a Yaqui Indian. By all appearances, he was illicit, ignorant, poor, poverty struck, dirty. Here is just a Yaqui Indian living in the desert of probably Mexico. And Carlos was a PhD graduate student from UCLA in anthropology studying Don Juan. But Don Juan was a man of wisdom.
And here is this young PhD graduate student talking to this man of wisdom. Evening is just approaching. The sun is just going down. They’re out on the desert. It’s a very bleak landscape.
They’re on a plateau. The dark the light is fading. And in the distance to the south, there’s the barking of a of a lone dog. It’s very quiet. Perhaps just a hiss of the wind.
And Don Juan speaks to Carlos Castaneda. He paused. The silence around us was frightening. The wind hissed softly and then I heard the distance of a barking lone dog. Listen to that barking, Don Juan went on.
This is the way my beloved Earth is helping me now to bring this last point to you. That barking is the saddest thing one can hear. We were quiet for a moment. The barking of that lone dog was so sad. The stillness around us so intense that I experienced a numbing anguish.
It made me think of my own life, my sadness, my not knowing what to do, where to go. That dog’s barking is the nocturnal voice of a man, Don Juan said. It comes from a house in the valley towards the south. A man is shouting through his dog since they are companion slaves for life. His sadness, his boredom.
He’s begging his death to come and release him from the dull and dreary chains of life. Don Juan’s words had caught a most disturbing note in me. I felt he was speaking directly to me. That barking and the loathing that it creates speaks of the feelings of men, he went on. Men for whom an entire life was like a Sunday afternoon.
An afternoon which was not altogether miserable, but rather hot and dull and uncomfortable. They sweated and fussed a great deal. They didn’t know where to go or what to do. That afternoon left them only with the memory of petty annoyances and tedium. And then suddenly it was over.
It was already night. I think it’s the quality of anxiety. It’s not particularly miserable. We’re not particularly depressed, not particularly in pain. It’s the feeling of uneasiness, Not quite sure what to do or where to go with our lives or what to make of our lives or in fact whether we have to make something of our lives.
Uneasiness this quality which permeates most of our existence. So this is the quality of anxiety, one of the two reasons for going for refuge. And the second is conviction. Conviction in that the object of your refuge is somehow going to be able to protect you from this anxiety, to alleviate this sense of uneasiness, this dissatisfaction. This quality of aimlessness perhaps, or not quite knowing where to go or what to do with your life.
That somehow this quality, this mood of your life can be somehow transcended in some kind of meaningful, fulfilling, authentic way of experiencing your existence can be developed. So this, we have to have conviction that the objects that we’re making use of, that the direction we’re taking has this potential, this possibility. Otherwise it’s fiction, it’s a deception, it’s of no use. We’re actually creating more problems for ourselves than we’re solving. Because if we take a type of refuge, if we make use of types of methods or take certain directions which in fact aren’t leading to the satisfaction, to the alleviation of our problems, And not only are our problems not going to be alleviated, but we’re going to overlook real solutions, real methods by which we can deal with them most effectively.
And we’re going to be ignoring and obstructing, know, getting in touch with real moments of wisdom, real possibilities of sanity. So we have to have these two qualities. We have to get in touch, confront our feelings of anxiety, and develop some kind of conviction in the refuge, whatever it might be. And as I’ve said over and over again, the idea of refuge or the direction is not something new, it’s not an Eastern idea. We all have been going for refuge our entire lives in one thing or another, whether it’s in other people, in our jobs, in money, possession, material, objects, sex, drugs, alcohol, something, some kind of method.
So has in fact your particular method been alleviating, helping to ease the tension, just anxiety? It’s not the particular moment of pain or suffering. You know if you’re lonely, you get a boyfriend. Okay, the pain goes away. You took refuge in that boyfriend.
But the underlying feeling of insecurity and anxiety still remains even when you’re with that boyfriend. So it’s not these particular instances of pain and suffering that we’re talking about which need alleviating when we’re talking about a spiritual refuge. We can take refuge in material possessions. If we’re hungry we can eat food. That’s a perfect method to deal with the pain of hunger.
So we don’t need a spiritual effort to deal with these particular instances, but the pervasive anxiety, the underlying tension which permeates our existence. And so this is the quality of a refuge that matters. This is what we have to check up and confront. If our particular direction, the methods that we make use of are dealing with, Or are they simply removing the superficial temporal difficulties that we happen to be in at that particular moment. And still the underlying quality, the tone of our existence does not change in the least.
This idea of conviction. You know the Rinpoche, Khensur Rinpoche was giving a talk Monday morning. We were talking about the fact that the law of cause and effect. The law of cause and effect. That from certain types of causes, certain types of effects will arise.
You know, we can understand this from our everyday experience. You know, the person that you want to be five years from now, can you imagine the type of person, what qualities? What would you like to be feeling? What qualities are the state of mind? Now we could all give some ideas.
You know, are you creating those causes in your everyday life to some degree? Now if you don’t create the causes, there can be no effect. In fact, if you create the causes have a similarity in type to their effect. You know, we’ve talked about this when we talked about rebirth. If we don’t create the causes for the type of person we want to be five years from now, we’re never going to be that person, no matter how much we may wish it.
So this is like a type of conviction. Conviction in the simple process of cause and effect. That by coming to understand what types of causes will bring about the type of person I want to be and having the conviction and expressing those convictions in your actual behavior through your body, speech, mind. This is a real refuge, a real direction, something in which we can really deal with the deep seated roots of our problems. It’s not dealing on a superficial level.
Spiritual practices are going, you know, they can indirectly deal with our superficial difficulties, but dealing with the root of our problems as a byproduct, we’re going to be happier people temporally. But ultimately we can become the type of person that we want to be, whatever that might be. So is our particular direction, is our particular direction, Or more precisely, are the causes that we’re creating every day in our lives acting as the causes of the type of person that we want to be, the type of happiness that we would like to achieve in the future, the types and states of mind, emotional qualities of our existence that we want to experience five years, ten years, twenty years in the future. Within the great vehicle, you know that’s the two causes for going for refuge within the general refuge, the general direction. Anxiety, confronting the the high degree of unmanageability of your existence and dissatisfactory quality.
Having conviction in that this type of refuge can actually take you, can bring about the results that you’re looking for, that you want to attain. These are the two qualities of a refuge and why we should go for refuge. But there’s a third quality which is particular to the great vehicle. That’s the quality of compassion. The quality of compassion.
And that’s what we’re talking about tonight. We’re going to talk about cherishing others, the advantages of cherishing others and the disadvantages of self-cherishing. You know it becomes very obvious when you’re put in a position where people come to you and maybe some sort of they look to you for some kind of support, for some sort of guidance. How very inadequate. You know, the fact that you have certain capacities, certain abilities.
But how inadequate they are to really fulfill the ultimate needs of people, to really help them in a very substantial way. It’s not to say that we can’t help others. That’s for sure we can. We have an obligation to help others. But you become aware because much of the difference between being able to do first aid and being able to perform a heart transplant, something like that.
There’s a quantum leap. So one goes out of compassion. One realizes you have to develop your skills, your abilities, your wisdom, your energy, and even your own compassion, your willingness to put yourself out for the welfare of another person. And so you put yourself more and more in the practice. You go for refuge, you take this particular direction out of compassion.
So this becomes another factor in why we go for refuge. From our own side, our feelings of anxiety, having conviction that this way will work, understanding, coming to understand that what is to be cultivated, what is to be adopted, what is going to take us in a particular direction that we want to go. You know, coming to a conscious understanding of what type of person you want to be. You know, coming to a clear, you know, rather than going about this business of life rather haphazardly, determining what qualities do you want to possess in the future. And then if that’s the qualities, what are the causes?
And if you know the causes, then you know putting forth the energy to create those causes. And if it becomes necessary to develop your skills, then the compassion becomes a force for going for refuge. You know, I have to develop myself. I have to develop my skills. I have to train myself.
And then we put ourselves more and more into the practice. We go for refuge to the Buddha, the Dharma, the Sangha. The Buddha, you know, our own wisdom, own sanity, trying to understand what type of person we want to come become, what is going to achieve that, what is going to take us in the other direction. The quality of going for refuge to our compassion, to our love. And this energy, inexhaustible energy within ourselves, the sparks of enlightenment that we all possess.
And the Dharma, the actual methods, the causes, and the pointing to what is to be adopted and what is to be rejected, if that’s the type of person, having determined what type of person you want to become. And then the spiritual community of those like-minded individuals who have made a choice. And they too want to grow. They too are going for refuge, trying to go beyond their own anxiety, have some conviction in this particular direction, and out of compassion are seeking to develop themselves. To the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha, I go for refuge until I am enlightened through the merit I in practicing the Dharma, may I attain Buddhahood for the sake of all beings.
To the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha, I go for refuge until I am enlightened. Through the merit I create by talking about the Dharma, may I attain Buddhahood for the sake of all beings. To the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha, I go for refuge until I am enlightened. Through the merit I create in practicing the Dharma, may I attain, Buddhahood for the sake of all beings.
So we’re talking about the second of the two major methods for developing the awakening heart, opening our heart to others. in dependence upon the foundation, the impetus of the determination to be free, to go beyond our dissatisfactory compulsive patterns, to begin to emerge out of those, to go beyond the boundaries of the fantasy world of ego. To begin to go beyond our self acknowledged limits and become begin to exercise, to develop, to become actualize everything that we can become, to be all that we can be, the determination to be free. With in dependence upon that we begin to see that others are in the exact same position as ourselves. And everything that holds true for ourselves holds true for others in the same way.
We begin to open ourselves to others. And the two major methods for doing this are sevenfold cause and effect method and equalizing and exchanging self for others. And we’re looking at the second of these two equalizing and exchanging self for others. We begin by meditating on the equality, the essential sameness of self and others. Throughout this explanation, I hope I hope we can You know, the idea of awakening our heart to others is not based on emotion, it’s based on wisdom.
Otherwise, it’s going to come and go according to how the object relates with us. But if it’s based within sound reasoning, sound understanding, and the actual situation, the existential fact of our being, If it’s grounded on that foundation, that solid rock, then we can really build something very fine, very wonderful, rather than building a mere edifice dedicated to our own self glorification of our ego. What loving wonderful people we are. So through all of this, we have to begin to understand that we aren’t opening ourselves to others simply out of a romantic notion. Simply because it makes for a good poetry perhaps.
It in fact touches our heart very deeply. You know, we can begin to approach it from the basis of reasoning, our experience and intuition. But love is an expression of wisdom, understanding other people, understanding yourself. Wisdom is an expression of love, the feeling quality of wisdom. So we begin by understanding the essential sameness of ourselves and others.
You know, just as one wants happiness and doesn’t want to suffer, to that same degree, in that exact same way, all others want happiness, don’t want to suffer. No difference. We all want the same thing. So, you know, we’re we’re trying to begin to identify, you know, to identify with all these equal beings. And we begin to take their suffering seriously rather than relating to it as if it didn’t exist.
As if it you know, as if it’s quite easy to do. I mean, it’s quite a natural thing to do, to objectify people, to make them into unfeeling objects. I think it’s difficult. I mean, I lived in India for quite a number of years. And all the suffering, all the pain that the physical.
You know, in the West there’s more mental pain, more mental suffering than physical. You don’t see the pain. It’s not as readily apparent. It’s still there, that’s for sure. Perhaps even more so.
But in the east, there’s less mental pain. It’s more physical. It’s very apparent, readily seen with your eye. You can’t get away from it. The beggars, mangled lepers on the street.
It becomes difficult not to become callous, indifferent, not to begin to imagine, well they don’t really hurt so much. You can become immune to suffering in a way. I mean, you don’t think this out loud to yourself, as it were. But this is the attitude you find yourself developing, as if they don’t feel pain as much as I would in the same situation. So we have to begin to break down that quality of objectifying people, devaluing them.
And we can begin to do this by understanding the equality of self in others. They’re just like myself. No difference. To the same degree I want happiness, they want happiness. To the same degree that I don’t want the slightest suffering likewise.
They don’t want the slightest suffering. They may be able to put up with it. You know, people can develop a tolerance, but they don’t want it. You know, even if you can tolerate pain, you still don’t want it. So, you know, beginning to identify with these equal beings and beginning to take their suffering seriously, you know, just as I do my own suffering.
In the same way that, you know, since, you know, I’m used to identifying with all the various parts of my body, you know, my foot, my arm, my head. I take their pain seriously, Whether the pain occurs in my foot, my head, my arm, I take that pain seriously because it’s part of a same whole. And identify with that whole. Therefore, I take the I take the pain of each of its parts seriously. You know, okay, we can object.
You know, we have to be realistic even when approaching something as effective as development of love and compassion. You know, we can object that this is unrealistic. You know, simply that that I don’t feel the pain of others. Now I feel the pain of my foot, feel the pain of my hand, my arm, but I actually don’t feel the pain. So how am I I cannot automatically respond to the pain of others as I do my foot and my hand and my arm.
Śāntideva, you know, is the source for this the main source for this particular tradition to exchange himself for others. A guide to the bodhisattva’s way of life. So he takes up this argument. But about the we feel it’s appropriate to alleviate the suffering of the hand, the foot, the head because we have our habitual identification with the body, with our bodily senses. in dependence upon this habitual identification with the bodily senses as ours.
This is my hand, therefore it’s my pain. This is my foot, therefore it’s my pain. This is my head, therefore if there’s an ache up there, it’s my headache. So it’s my. This is habitual identification as my to these various parts.
And therefore we assume this pain through the process of habitual identification. And we respond automatically to alleviate it through the process of habitual identification. The Buddha said that suffering alone exists. None who suffers. The deed there is, but no doer thereof.
nirvana is, but no one seeking it. The path there is, but no one who travels it. You know, when we’re in a very, you know, in the heat of a very emotional experience, or for example, under adrenaline, we cannot feel types of sensations, types of pain, which ordinarily would be extremely excruciating, which we wouldn’t be able to bear. You know, this happens a great deal in sports, for example. You know, boxers.
You know, in the heat of competition sports, adrenaline, you can be going under, be experiencing a sensation of great pain, but you don’t feel a thing because you’re not identifying as my, my pain at this particular moment. There’s a temporarily not identifying as my or our pain. So this shows that the sensations Simply, you know, the habituation, our habitual identification with sensation can be modified through training, through various circumstances. That what was my pain before can be seen as, can be unidentified with and no longer experience this pain. This is, you know, they have clinics where they deal with chronic pain for various people who have back problems and things like this.
And this is one of the methods that they work with. They begin to dis identify, begin to distance themselves from the pain as if this pain weren’t really theirs. They’re working with this factor that we habitually identify with the pain and it becomes we appropriate it. And by identifying it becomes our pain and becomes unbearable. So we can reverse this process and seek to dis identify ourselves from a particular sensation and thereby dis identify ourselves with pain.
So the fact that, you know, that I presently don’t see your pain or your pain as my pain is simply a matter of habitual identification. It’s not objective, you know, existing within the reality of the situation, that your pain cannot become my pain, in fact. So we can, you know, adversely to this process of distancing ourselves from pain, we can gradually accustom ourselves to identify with others’ pain, you know, other beings. And we can actually feel their pain. We can actually feel, you know, we’re talking about the equality of self and others.
We can actually feel, you know, underlying feel, the equality of self and others. It doesn’t have to be an intellectual interpretation supposition. We can feel it. We can actually bring ourselves to feel that your pain and my pain are equal, the feeling of the equality of self and others. Śāntideva, you know, he’s talking about this in in A Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life.
He’s expressing the idea of the arbitrariness of our self identification and hence our the possibility that we can expand our sense of self identification. That what we identify as my is arbitrary. Just simply through accustoming since childhood. And we can begin to purposely expand this sense, this territory of self, this what we identify as my or our. Although the basis is quite impersonal, through constant familiarity I have come to regard the drops of sperm and blood of others as I.
So in the same way, why should I be unable to regard the bodies of others as I? Hence, it is not difficult to see that my body is also that of others. So, you know, when we were we did not begin as as children to identify with our bodies instinctively, you know, automatically. We had to learn to do it and become accustomed to it through the process of ego identification with our body. And this wasn’t an instinctive automatic response.
You know, the You know, we in dependence upon the ovum of our mother, the semen of our father, the union of these two, a consciousness finds a place to reside in the womb. This combination of these three elements within the womb. You know, if you were to find some semen and ovum on your bed sheet, you know, this would be rather a repellent. You wouldn’t might be to some people, this might be rather repulsive. But we’ve identified with this what is grown out of this semen and ovum as I, and we’ve cherished it.
And now we can’t do without it. Out of this, what was probably what might be, you know, to some a repellent substance, we have habituated, accustomed ourselves to calling this I. You know, this ego definition takes a long time. You know, conditioning, the process of going, you know, as you grow up, as the infant develops. But this conditioning process occurs in, you know, in very many ways.
For example, soldiers, athletes, various citizens of nations, various practitioners of different religions, proponents of ideologies, believers and whatnot, in various spiritual paths. They can become reconditioned to identify more powerfully with the group than they do with their own individual self. This can be shown by the fact that many people are willing to give up their lives for their nation. Willing to even this reconditioning process of identification, of re identification, can even overpower the supposedly self preservation instinct. You know, we can we can soldiers give up their lives in battle.
People give up their lives for their nation. People become martyrs for their faith. So this is all these various possibilities of cultural reconditioning. So the point to be made here, why cannot we through the conditioning of opening our hearts to others, identify, expand our sense of self identification to include others such that others become us, become a part of us. You know, to include all beings as the other limbs of a single body of life.
Just as we have identified all the various limbs of our body, our arms, our legs, our head as part of the body of I, we can actually recondition through the process of the awakening heart to identify all sentient beings as parts, as limbs of the body of life, of humanity, of all sentient beings. There’s no reason why we can’t do this since it can be done on a very mundane level with soldiers, with religious organizations. In the same way as the hands and so forth are regarded as limbs of the body. Likewise, why are embodied creatures not regarded as limbs of life? Through acquaintance has the thought of I arisen toward this impersonal body.
So in a similar way, why should it not arise toward other living beings? So it’s not unrealistic. But it’s even very compelling, compellingly practical that we should develop a natural instinctive powerful altruism towards other sentient beings, towards all living beings. There is nothing artificial.