Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Using the image of a Zen gardener who works weeds back into the soil as fertilizer rather than discarding them, Ven Jampa Gendun reframes the five hindrances to meditation — desire, hatred, sloth and torpor, anxiety, and doubt — as raw material for self-knowledge rather than evidence of failure. In this 45-minute session from a series on the Three Principal Aspects of the Path, he illustrates the point with the Dalai Lama’s remark that the Chinese did Tibet a great favor by forcing Tibetans to develop courage and resilience, and with the observation that struggling Hatha Yoga students often become the best teachers. He then leads a brief mindfulness-of-breathing practice using noting and counting techniques, before turning to what taking refuge actually means — not in money, relationships, or status, but in one’s own mind as the true source of both happiness and suffering. The session closes setting up the coming exploration of love and compassion.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 09 3 PA 1998 05 13.mp3
UUID: 08fffc0c-f1c1-4f25-8947-aeee8ce03331
Teacher: Ven Jampa Gendun
Collection: Three Principal Aspects of the Path 1988-1990 (Ven Jampa Gendun)
Date: 1998-05-13
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.3 minutes
Words: ~5,615
Can you hear me? No? Okay. We’ve been talking about the five hindrances to meditation. The five main types of negative emotions which usually arise, which are predominant.
Usually, most of our lives, most of our waking moments, but they become very obvious when we sit down and try to meditate, we try to direct our minds, when we try to produce some sort of specifically skillful state. In many ways, we talk about meditation, we’re talking about the uninterrupted production of skillful states. We have some skillful state that we wish to cultivate, to generate. So we use a technique, a method. It might be love, it might be wisdom, compassion.
And we use the various techniques in order to generate specifically. It’s like putting ingredients together to make us a type of cake. There are specific ingredients we can put together to produce a specific state of mind. We try to hold that mind, that particular state, as long as we can. So our mind becomes habituated to it.
In Tibetan, the word for meditation is gom. Gom simply means to get used to or to habituate, to become familiar with. So begin to familiarize ourselves with specific skillful states of mind. In this process, there are many obstacles which arise. The main five obstacles are termed the five hindrances.
The five hindrances to meditation. There’s desire, hatred, sloth and torpor, anxiety and worry, doubt and indecisiveness. So these are the five main hindrances. But in a way we’re talking about our whole attitude toward meditation in general. If we keep in mind that we’re not so much trying to become perfect meditators, that we’re not trying to have good meditations, but that we’re trying to work with our mind.
We’re trying to solve our problems. Essentially that’s why we’re meditating in order to solve problems, not to create more problems for ourselves. We have enough difficulties without adding new sources, new methods of inflicting some difficulty in ourselves by thinking, Oh, I can’t meditate. I can’t do this. I should be meditating better.
I should be meditating more. I can’t meditate. There’s something wrong with me specifically. Everybody else probably can, but not me. So we don’t need any more of that.
So meditation should be solving our problems in some way. That’s its purpose. So it becomes a learning process. Very much Buddhism is simply involved in learning about ourselves. So in our meditation, even if we never get around to the meditation as we had preconceived, and then we had some meditation plan, well, first I’m going to meditate on mindfulness of breathing, then I’m going to meditate on selflessness, and then I’m going to meditate on generation of compassion.
And you realize that you’re having many hindrances, that many obstacles are beginning to arise, many difficulties. So this even in itself is not an obstacle to meditation. It’s not an obstacle to learning about ourselves. It’s simply an obstacle to fulfilling your preconceived plan perhaps. But we shouldn’t hold so tightly to our preconceived ideas of how things should go.
If we sit down with the idea, I’m going to learn about myself in some way, I’m going to try to gain some insight in the way my mind is operating. This is essentially what we’re trying to do. We’re learning about our minds, about ourselves. So in this sense, we very much learn from challenges, from obstacles. In a way, these are our best teachers, difficult situations.
And it’s no different when it comes to meditation. Mankind progresses for the same reason that the amoeba evolves, from irritation. There was never any flower of human achievement but some great sorrow lay at its root. So our enemies teach us patience. Painful situations teach us courage.
So it’s from obstacles that we really grow. Painful situations. From the five hindrances we can develop, we can learn how to develop, how to cultivate a balanced mind in the face of all these difficulties, in the face of desire, hatred, sloth and torpor, indecisiveness, doubt, anxiety and worry. So we can work with these. It’s actually a method of growth.
It’s not that something that they are an obstacle to our growth Because they can become a source of growth if we’re willing to see them as that, as a way of beginning to work with our mind, working through these problems, these hindrances. In a way of it becomes a transforming process. Actually, it’s quite for example in Hatha Yoga. I had a very good Hatha Yoga teacher many years back. And she said the best the students who make the best teachers are those who have the greatest difficulty learning.
You know, have the worst bodies to begin with, you might say. Because they go through the painful experience of having to stretch their muscles, stretch their cartilages. So they know when they get the exact correct position, this tactile sensation, this bodily sensation, they’re very aware of all the pains involved in the movement of the body. So they’re very aware of when they’re in the correct position. But someone who is naturally very flexible, very limber, they have a very difficult time becoming aware of when their body is in the correct position.
Haven’t developed this tactile, this bodily awareness. And these people usually, the people who have the most difficult time, usually become the most agile in Hatha Yoga and they also make the best teachers. So in this way also they can identify with the difficulties of their students much more, much better. They know what’s going through the agony that their students are going through. They can identify, You know, I went through the same thing myself.
And therefore they can through this identifying and empathy they become better teachers. So in a way, in some ways we can look on our difficulties in general and specifically in our meditations as being a real source of learning, a real challenge of growth. A Zen gardener, for example, they have a saying that when they’re gardening in their flowers or their vegetables, they don’t just chop the weed and throw it away. Chop it and bend it over. They push it under the ground.
So they appreciate their weeds as fertilizer for their flowers, for their vegetables. Know, they might not desire weeds as the end product, but they serve a purpose. They appreciate them. They don’t simply throw them away as if they’re of no use. And likewise, the obstacles in our meditation and life in general, we can begin to We don’t perhaps want them as an end, but we can appreciate them when they naturally arise as they represent a challenge and as a source of growth and help us develop our mind, become more skillful.
And likewise, in having met challenges for ourselves, can appreciate when others are having difficulty also. So in this way, the difficulty our own difficulties become a method for developing compassion for others. I know the Dalai Lama, he once said He often says that we have to thank the Chinese. You know, I’m not sure Probably most of you are aware of situation in Tibet, I don’t know. Since nineteen fifty nine when the Chinese invaded, the communist Chinese invaded Tibet in nineteen fifty one and there was sort of an uneasy coexistence till nineteen fifty nine until the Tibetan people couldn’t stand the oppression of the communist Chinese and they revolted.
And subsequent to that, they had to flee with about the Dalai Lama with a hundred thousand refugees into India mainly. And that’s where they live now. And during since nineteen fifty nine perhaps one million Tibetans were killed. It’s not very well known by the world since the since China does not allow freedom of press and very few journalists were able to know of the situation which was going on in Tibet. But still the Dalai Lama said, We owe the Chinese a great favor.
They are probably our greatest friends because through them we learned how to be strong. We learned how to develop courage through the difficulties. I think and he said of himself, I think I was becoming a little bit soft in my castle in my palace in Lhasa, in the capital of Tibet. Now I’ve become much stronger and I’m a better person for it. In a way the Chinese have done us a great favor.
So this takes a great deal of perspective. It’s not an easy attitude to develop, but it’s quite helpful in our life in meeting situations that rather than letting them get us down, seeing them as obstacles to our happiness, seeing them, appreciating them as a source of growth, as a source of learning. So likewise, when we sit down to meditate, some hindrance is going to arise. One of these five hindrances that I just mentioned most likely. Now, if it doesn’t happen, that’s okay.
Don’t worry about it. Maybe you have a good meditation, I hope. That would be nice. It’s probably more enjoyable in the long run. But, you know, we can sort of set aside our meditation schedule, a preconceived plan that we had set up, and we can say, Okay, now I feel this worry.
Now let’s find out what this worry is about. I’ve got this anger. I feel this I wish I had more. Let’s work with that. That’s what’s happening in your mind at that present time.
And so this represents a really valuable moment to really work with your present state of mind. Learn about yourself. If you’re lazy, you can become an expert on lazy mind. Become the world famous Institute of Lazy Mindedness or something like that. How many people know really what a lazy mind is like?
They never looked at it. They go to sleep. That’s one of the terrible things about lazy mind is we’re too lazy to find out anything about it. We can’t be bothered. So, you know, if there’s some awareness and some feeling that, Well, there’s something to learn here, there’s a challenge, then any of these particular hindrances or in general any situation can become a source of insight into your own mind, learning about yourself.
And this is what growth is all about learning about yourself and applying it in your everyday life, these new skills and these new insights that you begin to pick up along the way. So when we sometimes we say, Oh, I can’t stand this. I can’t stand myself. This garbage mind of mine. I’m probably the worst thing that ever happened since Adolf Hitler or something like that.
Sometimes we get in that particular state of mind and this is not only unproductive, it’s just not only a matter of egotism, it’s very unskillful from the point of view that we really aren’t learning. Many people who have been involved with what we call dharma, what I mean by dharma are those methods, the techniques where we raise the level of our consciousness. From example, from desire to openness, from attachment to generosity, from hatred to love, from ignorance to wisdom. These methods. And some people who have been applying themselves to these methods for many years, quite often get discouraged.
If they have a moment of anger, say, Oh, should never be angry or I should never have attachment or desire. All these years I’ve been practicing, practicing, practicing. Look at me. There’s something wrong with me. I’m useless.
I can’t do it. This not only is of no benefit, but it’s quite unskillful. They haven’t seen the fact that they should be thankful that this state of mind was actually expressed. They had to have something really to work with. That they saw something which was there all the time but was unnoticed.
You know, was like a hidden enemy that finally came out behind the rock or something like that. And it gives them a chance to learn about themselves and be able to oppose these negative states of mind and develop their skill even more. It’s not so much that if one has anger or one has desire, that makes one a Dharma practitioner or not. It’s one that opposes the negative states of mind. So we can say that in some way practicing Dharma is actively opposing negative states of mind or in a more positive way, cultivating skillful or positive states of mind.
So even though we have lots of anger, we have lots of desire, doesn’t mean we’re not practicing, that we’re not developing ourselves spiritually. If in fact you’re aware of it and you, in some small way, are actively opposing them, applying some antidote, then you’re practicing. No matter if your mind is negative ninety nine percent of the time. Before, last year it was one hundred percent. Now it’s ninety nine percent.
So you’re practicing. There’s some development. That’s what counts. Not that your mind is always We’re not trying to be Buddhist angels or anything of that nature. We’re just trying to cultivate, develop our minds to grow.
That’s all. And we can grow through adversity. We can grow accepting ourselves as we are now. Matter of fact, we have to. You know many people they talk about it’s the idea of perfection.
The idea that somehow you know if I’ve been practicing, if I’ve been taking all these growth courses, I’ve been listening to teachings, I’ve been going through all these various masters, I should be perfect by now. So it’s not so much that we’re trying to be perfect in a perfect world. It’s that we’re trying to Rather than enacting perfect actions in a perfect world, we’re simply trying to enact appropriate actions in an imperfect world, make the best of all the situations as they arise. We should find perfect existence through imperfect existence. We should find perfection in imperfection.
For us, complete perfection is not different from imperfection. The eternal exists because of the non eternal exists. In Buddhism it is heretical view to expect something outside the world. We do not seek for something besides ourselves. We should find the truth in the world through our difficulties, through our suffering.
This is the basic teaching of Buddhism. Pleasure is not different from difficulty. Good is not different from bad. Bad is good. Good is bad.
There are two sides of one coin. Enlightenment should be in practice. That is the right understanding of practice and the right understanding of our life. I think I mentioned the basic dishonesty is not accepting the situation as it exists, thinking that the situation should be somehow different than it actually is. I think that’s all we have to work with is the present situation.
How we confront the present situation determines whether we’re going to grow, whether we’re practicing the spiritual path or whether we’re just going to maintain, support our present unskillful patterns of how we relate with situations. There’s nothing else to work with. No matter how many ideas we may develop in our mind, there’s nothing else but the present situation to work with. Basically, we’re trying to learn about ourselves and apply it in what we learn about ourselves, apply it in our everyday life in order to become happy, healthy, loving human beings. Not dharma robots, not growth freaks.
We can’t be anybody else but then who we are. So this involves working with the material, the raw material, and appreciating just like the Zen gardener, taking the weeds and using them as a means to further ends, to develop this crop. In our retreat last weekend we discussed a lot about shoulds and shouldn’ts, how very much our life is involved with shoulds and shouldn’ts, the idea of should. Shoulds are those things which are written up in the sky in stone engraved on big stones. They’re absolutes.
You should respect your parents or you should love your children. The universe should somehow support you. You should be happy all the time. You shouldn’t have to work. We have a great long list of irrational shoulds and shouldn’ts.
And they become quite a burden. They very much govern our lives. We should be doing more than we are now. I should be different than I am now. The reality should be something else than it is now.
It may in fact be preferable to love your children, to respect your parents. It may be preferable that if the situation were different than it is now, we can preferring that change, that some other situation, we can work toward that change. But it’s not to say that the situation should be any different from now, the way it is now. Somehow the present situation could be no other way. It has its reasons for the way it is now.
We may not be aware of all the various variables that go into making up the present situation. It’s probably doubtful that we could be. But somehow everything is right about the present situation. It could be preferably different, and we can work to change it, but we have to accept it as being the way it should be or the way it is. So even in our meditation we can begin to work, This is the way the situation is.
I have these present states in mind. Maybe you don’t particularly like them, all these various hindrances. You don’t desire because it hurts, it’s suffering. It also probably doesn’t fit in with the self image you would like to develop of yourself. You don’t like to experience hatred.
You don’t like to experience doubt. It’s a very unpleasant experience. And we have the I shouldn’t be like this, but that’s the way it is. And you have to accept that. And this is what you have to work with.
It would be preferable if it weren’t like this, and you can work towards that change. This whole preface is sort of getting to the idea that when you sit down to meditate that there has to be some fluid and openness, fluid attitude and openness to what you’re doing. That you have to welcome anything that comes to you at that time as something to work with, some way to learn about yourself. And obviously this is going to carry over to your everyday life. You’re not going to make demands that reality be somehow different than it is.
You’re going to be open to actual situations, the way people actually are, to relating to the world a little more realistically. And therefore, you’re going to relate with the world a little more skillfully and neither run away from it or demand that it should be some way than it is now. And so, in many ways, meditation is like a laboratory experimenting with our mind so that we can go out into our everyday life and carry out what we’ve learned, and it spills over into our everyday life. So we’re talking about the five hindrances. Maybe we won’t.
I have to be open and fluid to the situation. I we’ll save that and we’ll go into that next time. We’ll go into the five more. We were talking about the various antidotes to the five hindrances, the various ways that we can begin to work through them. And the first one was simply recognizing the hindrances as hindrances.
That is something which you know, in the sense of if you want to go to where? I don’t know my way around Adelaide. That’s a problem. If I want to go to town, to the city, If the street is blocked by a tree falling down, then it becomes an obstacle to my driving. If I wanted to walk, could get there anyway.
But if I’m willing to walk, I’m driving to the city, then that tree becomes an obstacle to my goal. If I don’t care about getting to Adelaide, then it’s not an obstacle. There’s no problem at all. It’s only if I want to go somewhere. So if you want to work with your mind, you want to produce more skillful states of mind, develop concentration, insight, then they do present an obstacle, a hindrance.
And they do have to be worked through. Otherwise, if you don’t see the potential of your own mind, if you don’t see the possibility of developing uninterrupted positive states of mind, finding unremitting peace and being able to develop the skillful means to benefit others in an effective way. If you don’t see that potential within yourself, if you don’t appreciate that fact, then these aren’t obstacles at all. They may be unpleasant, but they’re not obstacles because they’re not preventing you from attaining any particular goal. So we have to very much initially begin to appreciate our potential, what we can achieve, and to see the necessity of working through these hindrances because it’s necessary to transform our minds directly in order to achieve, to actualize the potential of our mind.
And the most effective, direct way of transforming the mind is simply through sitting down and meditating, working with the mind directly. So initially, the first of the antidotes to working with the five hindrances is to recognize the hindrances as hindrances and to work with them to be motivated. So we’re going to meditate now on the mindfulness of breathing. There’s some a few new people right here. We’ll just meditate about five minutes.
I’ll the initial, technique of meditating on mindfulness of the breathing. So the breathing is natural. It’s neither forced or it’s not prolonged in any way. It’s just the natural breathing that you normally breathe. And you’re just going to if you can there’s many variables, methods to the posture, but essentially we just want to keep a straight back, essentially.
And if just if you want to keep your eyes open, that’s preferable. But if you find it difficult, then you can close your eyes. And we just want to begin to know the breath. When we’re breathing in, we want to know that we’re breathing in. It sounds like quite an easy task, you’ll find it very difficult probably.
When we’re breathing out, we simply want to know that we’re breathing out. So to help us, we have some techniques. The first one is called noting. And this is mentally noting. When we’re breathing in, to help us know that we’re breathing in, we mentally note in our mind in.
When we breathe out, to help us know that we’re breathing out, we note in our mind out. So it just becomes a process of mentally, not verbally, but mentally noting in, in, out, in, out, at the same moment with the breath itself. Another technique to help us, we use the technique of counting. So we’re going to count in out one, in out two, in out three, in out four, in out five. We come back down to one, in out one, two, three, four, five, six.
Come back down to one, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, one, eight, one, nine, one, ten. And then if you keep on going, begin again with number five. One, five, one, three, six. So it’s very simple technique. If your mind becomes distracted, which it probably will, it will wander off.
You’ll be thinking about catching the bus home or what you’re going to do tomorrow for lunch or whatever. Immediately, when your first moment that you become aware of it, just like training a little puppy dog when it runs off the paper, you bring it back very gently with very patiently. Just keep bringing it back, put it down. If it runs off, you bring it back, put it down. Runs off.
Over and over again. And pretty soon, we get the idea that we don’t want to be uptight. We don’t want to be heavy handed about it. But make a determination that the very moment I become aware that my mind is wondered, I’m going to note. Maybe I’m hearing, maybe I’m thinking.
Thinking back to the breath. In out, in out, out one, in out two. Hearing, you hear the heater, for example. Hearing, then come back to the breath, in out one, in out two. Thinking, in out one.
So just over and over again, our mind back to the breathing, knowing what’s happening in your mind. If you’re breathing in, knowing that you’re breathing in. If you’re thinking, knowing that you’re breathing in, noting thinking. You’re listening to something, feeling some pain, thinking, note pain, pain, then come back to the breath. So we’ll do that for about five minutes.
We recite the verse of refuge. Does everyone have a copy? I was talking about the practice of Dharma. The Dharma is the actively opposing negative states of mind. Very much what determines whether a practice is going to be helpful spiritually or psychologically, if you like, is our motivation for the particular activity, whatever we’re doing.
It doesn’t have to be a type of activity that we particularly associate with any type of religious practice. That’s okay. And this depends upon our motivation, why we’re doing what we’re doing. We can go to church. We can go to Buddha house, whatever.
If we go to church to show off our latest dress or to make business connections, then of course it’s in no way involved with a spiritual activity. There’s no benefit to be derived from it. But we can if we have a positive motivation, it’s at least to help us go beyond the more unskillful patterns of our ego that we have developed, you begin to have some insight into your particular style of dissatisfactory way of relating with things. And you think, Well, I’m going to begin to sort of change. I’m going to develop more skillful ways of relating with other people perhaps in the situations.
And this is anything that you do is such a motivation. Even if it’s to take out the garbage is developing yourself. Is in some way you’re growing. You’re going beyond some unskillful pattern developing more skillful ways of relating and this is what it’s all about. Finally, we hope to transcend all habitual patterns, ways of relating, but initially we’re simply trying to cultivate more positive, more skillful patterns, styles, and begin to diminish the power of unskillful negative ways of relating.
So one way we do this, we can do this quite easily, is taking refuge. Now we take refuge, you know, it’s a new thing for any of us. We’ve all been taking refuge our entire life. It’s just that we may not be aware of it and we may not be aware of the object of our refuge. Whether our refuge is money, sex, drugs, job, houses, cars, we all have our various methods for alleviating our difficulties, for finding the happiness that we’re all looking for.
We have to very much check up in our own experience whether our particular refuge is working, whether it’s bringing us the happiness that we desire, and it’s alleviating the problems, solving our difficulties that we don’t want. In Buddhism we very much take refuge in our own mind. That sounds very strange, doesn’t it? To see, Well, initially it sounds strange, after a while it sounds perfectly reasonable. That it’s within our own mind where our problems come from and therefore it’s our own mind where the solutions to our problems are going to come from.
So we begin to see that it is the cultivation of our own mind, of our own potential, which is ultimately the source of our happiness. It’s not to say that other people, other situations can’t bring us happiness, but they are only a happiness in respect to our attitude we have toward them, aren’t they? The same situation, the same person can be a source of suffering one moment and a source of happiness the next moment. It’s very much like fire. You know, if we’re skillful, fire can be a it’s a very you know, we have a fire in a fireplace.
It’s very pleasant. It brings us a great deal of happiness. It can cook your food, warm your body. It can serve us brings us a lot of happiness. But likewise, if we’re unskilled, if we don’t know how to use fire, it can actually destroy us.
It can cause us a lot of pain. Likewise, all the various objects about us and the people in our life, they can become sources of pleasure or pain. In some way, things are neutral, you might say. It’s like a knife, a scalpel. A scalpel in the hand of a surgeon is life giving, life saving.
The same scalpel in the hand of a thief becomes life taking. It becomes a negative object, an object which only brings pain. So it depends on how we use the things about us, our attitudes towards them. So therefore, ultimately, our main protection, main way which we can find the happiness that we want in life is our own attitudes, our own mind. So we go for refuge to our own mind.
We acknowledge this fact. This is what going for refuge is. Simply acknowledging the fact that it’s within my own mind where my happiness and my suffering lies, the source of all my difficulties and the source of all my potential for being a happy, healthy, loving human being. And we go for refuge to the methods whereby we cultivate the mind and we develop more skillful states. That’s the Dharma.
There are many types of Dharma. There’s the Christian Dharma, the Buddha Dharma, there’s probably Dharma which isn’t necessarily connected with any particular religion, any particular spiritual practice. And we do this in the spiritual context of a community. Community of like minded people who we can turn to for examples, we can turn to for inspiration, guidance, support, physically and spiritually. So these things become a real source of realistic way to work with the difficulties in our life and find the happiness that we’re all seeking.
And we remind ourselves of this fact over and over again by taking refuge formally in hopes that we become we’re actually in our own mind thinking about what is our refuge. And we develop a going for refuge that is actually, in fact, not just in words, moving toward this refuge, moving toward cultivating our mind, inclining ourselves to reorientate our lives from seeing our difficulties and our happiness outside of ourselves to more and more orientating ourselves to seeing our own mind as a source of our happiness and suffering, seeing the cultivation of our mind as the means to our happiness and alleviation of our suffering, and seeing that our like minded individuals around us are a support in this entire priceless process of developing our minds and finding happiness. I go for refuge until I am enlightened to the Buddhas, the Dharma and the Sangha through the merit I create by practicing giving and the other perfections. May I attain Buddhahood for the sake of all sentient beings. I go for refuge until I am enlightened to the Buddhas, the Dharma and the Sangha Through the merit I create by practicing giving and the other perfections, may I attain Buddhahood for the sake of all sentient beings.
I go for refuge until I am enlightened to the Buddhas, the Dharma and the Sangha Through the merit I create by practicing giving and the other perfections, may I attain Buddhahood for the sake of all sentient beings. So we’ve been talking about the three principal aspects of the path. It’s a short text. There’s some copies of on top of the mantle. Can you pass those out please?
By Je Tsongkhapa, a fourteenth century yogi scholar from Tibet. There are three principal aspects to the path or that is to say a path is something which takes you from where you’re at now to your goal. With respect to this path, there are three main attributes, three main themes: developing the determination to be free, opening to others, and seeing deeply into the nature of reality. We’ve completed the first of the three paths and we’ve been talking about the second that is opening up to others. We’re beginning to take the seventh verse.
It begins with also. We’re trying to develop to have an insight to see why it’s necessary to open up to others, why it’s necessary to develop love and compassion. As I said, you know, if we simply think of developing love and compassion simply from a romantic standpoint, from a sentimentality, romantic notion, then whenever any difficulties arise we’re going to forget it. And also the love that we do develop will be exclusive. It will only be directed toward those we like, who in some way enhance our existence, who help us in some way.
It’s going to be almost impossible to develop a love for your enemy. It will be difficult to develop love for, for example, a stranger, for someone who feels no relationship whatsoever. So we have to develop We have to see through reasoning, through experience, through our own intuition the necessity for developing love and compassion, for opening up to others, to developing this attitude of wanting to develop ourselves in order to benefit others.