Can you talk about how to develop friendliness?
It is very hard for me to be open-hearted.
I always have a hard and unfriendly approach.
What do you guys think?
You want to develop more friendliness?
Is that the question?
Yeah.
How to develop friendliness meta.
It's very hard for me to be open-hearted.
I always have a hard and unfriendly approach.
Maybe Owen can tell us what's going on in the Brahma Vihara Dhamma in Mahasi Sayadaw.
What's his call on this?
Is Owen there?
Oh, he left.
Who's that?
Owen's... I don't hear Owen.
It's because I've turned my microphone off and I haven't realised I'm not... I'm talking away, giving the answer, and my microphone's turned off.
Well done.
Was it a good end?
Well, maybe.
No, what I was saying is the best thing to do would be to go and read the discourse and
I'm about over halfway through it and developing a such loving kindness for all beings whether you know they're the closest people to you or your worst enemies it's building up that general sense of loving kindness to all
from reading the book it states that you should start to develop a meta towards the people furthest away from you as such if you have enemies or people you dislike you should start off by developing loving kindness towards those kind of people first of all
And then follow through a process of trying to develop for all others.
Are you sure it doesn't say, normally they say to go for people you love first?
No, I was reading, I'm sure it said, because I was quite surprised when it was saying that you should develop loving kindness for those who aren't as closest to you because you naturally give loving kindness to
those very close to you as family and such I know there's you're not supposed to develop it towards someone of the opposite gender if you're a heterosexual person that can have problems but it's it's very good and I definitely recommend if you are seriously trying to develop that air in your life to start reading reading up and practicing and
practicing the techniques that are in there.
I mean, like you said earlier on, once you start reading a bit of a Mahasi Sayadaw book, you instantly want to go away and start either meditating or practicing what he's teaching.
Actually, science is actually showing how the brain actually rewires itself from doing these practices.
So the metta meditation, compassion meditations, actually help the brain.
So if you're looking for, like you asked to develop friendliness, it's probably the best way, metta meditation, compassion meditations.
You can actually rewire your transmitters in your brain.
Take some time to develop it.
But the other thing is not worry about it so much.
Don't, don't hate yourself because you're hard and unfriendly.
I mean, if you've got anger, that's the reason to develop metta.
But some people are just hard by nature and will end up being very much alone because their very nature is, is, is,
I mean, in a non-emotional way.
They have an abrupt way about them, and that's just who they are.
We're all different.
If you judge yourself and let people's reactions determine your actions, then you're just always going to be disappointed and upset.
So there's nothing wrong with... It goes back to talking about conflict in relationships.
Sometimes your behavior will cause conflict.
People will not like your behavior even though you're not... You have no bad intentions in your heart.
People will still be upset at what you do.
That was one big thing, one big relief from the meditation.
I don't really care if they don't like
what I do.
There's no logical reason to be concerned if other people get angry because of the way I behave.
You're not loving enough.
I had one monk yell at me, a very big monk.
I did something kind of wrong, but looking back, I just expressed my opinion about something that concerned me in a very public way.
on my web blog and got in trouble for it.
And so he called me into his room and said, you're a real troublemaker or something like that.
He said, meditation teachers have to have loving kind, and he was yelling at me, have to have loving kindness for people and have to have metta for people.
And I'm like looking at him.
This is not the right lesson on loving kindness.
but yeah so it's not not really necessary to be open hearted or this or that remove the bad things from your mind and don't be concerned about how people respond people might hate you even though you're a nice person it can happen
sometimes conflicts just happen misunderstandings are so easy it's amazing how easy misunderstandings are some of the misunderstandings I've seen think about it how you say something and you mean one thing totally innocent and how it just can destroy relationships you didn't even mean that it's horrible in Thailand because
my Thai is, I had to learn Thai, so sometimes I would say things and they would be interpreted totally the wrong way because Thai is very nuanced and when you say something, how you say it, the words you use have incredible meaning.
Simple words can have incredible meaning because it's all in the, not in the meaning of the words, but in the meaning that is implied by them.
which, you know, as a westerner, you just don't have that implication.
You don't mean that.
But it's taken very much the wrong way.
It can be taken very much the wrong way.
So I had real headaches because of that.
But that's it.
You just learn that, oh, that's the way.
I mean, I might wind up having an in fact idea.
For example, there was one case where...
Someone, I had these little Buddha images in my possession.
And someone came, someone told me and said, oh, yes, make those into malas.
And that's what they're for.
I said, shouldn't we ask the person they belong to?
He said, that's what they're for.
Because this was someone who was in a position of authority.
And so I did this, I got them all prepared, and I made them up, and then I got in real trouble from the person who they belonged to, saying, you know, look, he didn't even say it, because people will never confront you, but he made it very clear that basically I was stealing or using incorrectly, something that I had no permission to use.
And I never told him that it was someone else who had told me to do this, that someone else in authority, because
I didn't want to create problems between those two people.
I knew that if I wasn't in trouble because of it, this other person won't get in trouble because of it.
I only bring it up because it was a good example of where my relationship with this other person was strained because of something I had never done, because of something I wasn't even guilty of.
And that's common in life.
I can think of a dozen instances where that's happened to me.
I know that even my teacher at times, there were times where my teacher got the wrong impression.
People gave him wrong information about me, said I'd done this or done that.
And then he, rather than confront me about it, because that's the thing in Thailand, they don't say, why did you do this, why did you do that?
He just said, don't do X. Don't go and do this.
And I said, okay.
And I knew what he was relating to.
I knew that someone had accused me of doing something that I hadn't done.
And I just said, I won't do it.
And that was that.
So potentially, if my teacher hadn't been the wonderful person that he was, he could have been very much turned off or upset about that.
That just happens in life.
So I just wanted to point out that you don't have to endear yourself to people.
You don't have to worry about your behavior.
Worry about your intentions.
Some people are very nice and very kind to people and actually miserable inside or terrible people inside.
Very good at winning friends.
The four kinds of , fake friends.
I don't know, it wasn't even quite what you were asking, but certainly the answer is correct.
Develop loving kindness, that's the best way.
I just wanted to say, don't worry about it so much.
As long as you have vipassana, people might hate you.
Everyone in the monastery, not everyone, many people, it seemed like the whole monastic community was upset with me, except my teacher.
And so I was like, well, that's fine.
The only one I care about is my teacher.
And that's how a lot of people are in my monastery.
They fight and they have lots of problems with each other, but they don't care because they're only there for one person.
And so that's kind of how the place gets along.
But it was interesting to feel so much hatred from people, like really vicious, mean looks and everything.
And I was so happy because I was with my teacher.
I was like, this is the...
I wouldn't have traded it for anything, which is an interesting situation.
So I'm not just giving a wish for, you know, that other person to, they might be mad at you, whatever, and just a mental, you know, well, I hope that person gets more compassionate for themselves, kind of eases off the reaction to
what they're getting to you yes i love it and it's good because that's what it is james i want to know if you have a really deal with them just kinda intentions that you can just let it be