So we are traveling through what are known as the four immeasurables.
These are practices that open the heart.
A heart that is free and unbounded.
Sound good?
You can sign me up too.
So what makes these immeasurable is that it includes all beings.
It's not just may my friends and my loved ones and everyone who loves me have happiness and the causes of happiness.
But all beings.
We're trying to extend the limits of our love and think,
You know,
May the jerk who cut me off on the highway have happiness and its causes.
May the doctor who screwed up my prescription be free from suffering and its causes.
May the person who complains about me,
May my friend who won't speak to me,
May all these people have happiness and the causes of happiness and be free from suffering and the causes of suffering.
So in the Tibetan tradition,
Of which I am not schooled,
I discovered that these four immeasurables are in a different order than how I learned them.
And I think it's significant enough to mention.
So in the insight tradition,
The Theravada tradition,
That's the school that I'm from.
These are the four Brahma Viharas or the four divine dwellings.
And the first is Metta,
Loving kindness.
Then the second is Karuna,
Compassion,
Followed with Mudita,
Empathetic joy,
Which we'll talk about today.
And the fourth is equanimity,
Upeka.
And in the tradition,
The Tibetan tradition,
It starts with equanimity,
A balanced mind,
And then moves through with love,
Loving kindness,
Compassion,
And joy.
And I think there's something to be said about starting these practices with a balanced mind,
Starting with equanimity.
Our mindfulness practice,
Our sitting practice,
Is the nourishment for these qualities within ourselves to be fed.
So in the sitting,
You know,
Our sitting practice is sometimes having to sit through a mind that is full of me,
Myself,
And mine,
And me,
Me,
Gimme,
Gimme.
But in the sitting,
Through it,
We develop these qualities of care,
You know,
For what we see,
And we start to listen to it and honor that what we see within ourselves,
It needs to be taken care of.
And we can stop telling the well-worn stories.
So it's in the sitting where there is equanimity.
So I really appreciate this,
This different way of presenting.
But today I'll continue in the order that I've been taught.
But really with a bow to the establishment of a balanced mind.
An equanimous mind is as good in the beginning as it is in the end.
And a balanced mind is part of the cultivation of each of these divine states.
So mudita is often understood as unselfish joy,
Finding joy in the happiness and success of others.
Boy,
That is something that we are not culturally conditioned to do,
At least on the mainstream media and social media.
So to really see this in action,
This unselfish joy,
I look to my 12 year old and his ski team buddies.
These kids really find joy in the success of their peers.
So when my son Oliver's friends and his teammates,
They have a really good run at a ski competition.
What happens at the at the gate when they come back in is the boys just tackle their teammates in joy for their success.
They just tackle each other.
Genuine joy for the success of others.
It is so beautiful to watch.
You know,
So much of our conditioning is to compare ourselves against others to get better.
We're conditioned to compete and to win.
And all that conditioning doesn't support unselfish joy.
Sure,
We can feel shared joy with our narrow circle of friends and family.
Have you noticed that we're happy for our friends and family.
But all around us,
In every media format,
We also see these negative impulses of our humanity.
We don't have enough,
You know,
We don't have enough.
This is what we're being sold.
We see the aggression,
The envy,
The jealousy,
The greed.
There's so much more evidence of that than our positive tendencies towards service and generosity and appreciation of these good qualities that we all have.
The Buddha said,
If it were impossible to cultivate the good,
I would not encourage you to do so if it were impossible.
So a helpful way to develop and encourage unselfish joy is to zoom out a little bit.
As we cultivate kindness and care for ourselves,
We develop compassion.
And as we model this behavior for our children and our grandchildren,
We start to stretch our well wishes to more and more people as widely as we can.
So the seed of empathic or empathetic joy can grow through this sort of chain reaction.
And it's a very important thing to know.
It grows as tolerance of different worldviews.
It grows as generosity,
Both in our heart,
In our actions and in our pocketbooks.
Empathetic joy grows in friendliness towards others and compassion.
What starts to occur when unselfish joy grows is many of the habits of me first,
Me,
Myself and mine that live in our human hearts quite naturally will also die a natural death within us.
So it's necessary through the active practice of loving kindness,
Of metta that we talked about last week and the active practice of compassion,
Of karuna.
When we actively engage with these practices,
Our actions,
Our words and our thoughts build into this cultivation of unselfish joy for others.
And we protect ourselves with mindfulness and equanimity,
Upeka.
We protect ourselves from envy and discouragement.
We protect ourselves from feeling frustration as we encounter difficulties in our efforts to expand into this realm of unselfish joy.
Mindfulness is the protection because then we see,
Oh look,
There's envy.
Oh look,
There's comparing.
We feel it,
We see it and we choose otherwise.
May I be happy.
May I have enough.
May I experience enough in my heart and mind.
It's easier when we offer that to ourselves to then offer it to another.
I'll close with the words of Thomas Merton who said,
Life is this simple.
We are living in a world that is absolutely transparent and the divine is shining through it all the time.
This is not a fable or a nice story.
It is true.
He goes on to say that the saints are what they are,
Not because of their holiness,
But because the gift of sainthood makes it easy for them to admire everyone else.
