Determined Goodwill
August 20, 2021
The Buddha speaks of goodwill as a form of mindfulness—something you have to keep in mind—which means that it’s not an innate quality of the mind. If it were innate, you wouldn’t have to be mindful. It would just be there, constantly expressing itself. But the fact is that the mind has both goodwill and ill will. We have to keep in mind that we want to hold by goodwill all the time. Even when we go through all the brahmaviharas and get to equanimity, the reason we use equanimity is for the sake of mature goodwill, realizing that there are areas where we would like to see people do what’s skillful and to experience the results of skillful actions, but for one reason or another, it’s not going to happen. If you have genuine goodwill for yourself and for the people you could be helping otherwise, you have to treat other things, beyond the range of your influence, with equanimity.