Yesterday I gave a rather simple talk on the development of qualities in meditation to a group of about 25 people in Goolwa, South Australia. The talk was in response to the notion that one can develop loving-kindness (metta) or compassion through doing exercises to generate those states of mind. I started off by stating a basic principle of the teaching on dependent arising: nothing arises from itself, nothing is self-created, nothing is born without conditions. I applied this to the idea of creating a mind-state of loving-kindness from trying to generate an experience of it based on having heard the concept of loving-kindness. This is what most people are taught: you identify an experience of loving-kindness based on what you have been told loving-kindness is and then expand on that experience, spreading the feeling from your heart to other parts of your body and/or out to other beings. It is then believed that you have created a state of mind known as loving-kindness. But how can you create a mental state? By imagining it and having it appear? By trying to get into that state by some technique or strategy? By connecting with that state believing that it exists in some kind of separate reality which you have to reach in order to manifest it? Each of these approaches treat loving-kindness as something created by itself or by another and not as being made up of conditions (arising out of conditions).

            Let us now take another approach to this same matter, one that involves seeing how our experience develops through causes and conditions. Friendliness (I prefer this word over loving-kindness when translating the Pali word “metta”) is then a higher development that emerges out of the cultivation of related qualities that are more readily accessible in our ordinary experience. Let’s say one of those qualities is your ability to tolerate unwanted or unpleasant thoughts and feelings. For example, you sit down to meditate and immediately remember an argument you had with someone. You start replaying what was said, but may not be sure that you want to let these thoughts go on in your meditation sitting. If you have given yourself permission to allow yourself to have thoughts in meditation, then you might feel less resistance to having thoughts, but you may still have resistance to replaying an argument while you meditate. Sitting with your resistance, tolerating it a bit more, may help you become kinder and softer to yourself. This kind of tolerance of an unwanted experience may then actually influence how you relate to the content of the argument running on in your mind, enabling you to be gentler with yourself, more willing to accept your feelings and the other person’s. The conditions are thus being developed that would allow for the emergence of friendliness and compassion.

            But many people may not recognize such qualities as friendliness and compassion when they arise out of conditions rather than being created by some intentional practice or strategy. That may be because when there is a self that creates something that it has tried to create, the thing created is easier to see—the fulfillment of a desire is as clear as day! When something comes about through conditions, it may take greater discernment, a more subtly attuned awareness to pick it out of the other conditions (elements) arising with it—it is like picking out stars at night.