You have fierce love for yourself. Everyone else has the same fierce love for themselves. So if your happiness gets in the way of their fierce love of themselves, they’re not going to stand for it.

"You realize that if your peace is going to last, if your happiness is going to last, it has to depend on not causing any harm to anybody else. Otherwise they’ll try to destroy it. So you have to take their desire for peace, their desire for happiness into consideration.

There’s a passage where the Buddha tells King Pasenadi that you can search the whole world over, and you’ll find no one who doesn’t have fierce love for themselves. You have fierce love for yourself. Everyone else has the same fierce love for themselves. So if your happiness gets in the way of their fierce love of themselves, they’re not going to stand for it. There’d be no peace."

~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "No Happiness Other than Peace"

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Connectedness through karma can go either way — the connections can be good, or they can be bad. So you want to foster the good ones.

The mind doesn’t operate totally on its understanding of things. Feelings of pleasure and pain do play a role in the way we act, the way we think. We try to give rise to feelings of well-being within ourselves through the meditation.

Gratitude is focused on actions: the actions you’ve benefited from and the actions you feel called on to make in response to repay your debt of gratitude and to try to continue this stream of goodness into the world, on into the future.