Metta Cognition

It’s good to start your meditation with goodwill, a wish for true happiness. The Buddha recommends that you make that a wish for unlimited happiness all around—true happiness all around. When you try to develop that attitude, you learn a lot. You start thinking about, well, what really does make people happy? And does our happiness have to conflict with the happiness of others? If it’s true happiness, it doesn’t. True happiness comes from within. It comes from the good things that we do inside and that then come out in our actions.

They did a study one time about babies. One of the observations they made was that the things that make babies happiest are when they can do something again, and they get the same results—again, and again, and again, same results again. It drives us crazy. They’ll make a noise; they’ll hit something, again and again. But it’s their way of exerting agency, and they’re beginning to understand cause and effect.

There’s a sense of power that comes with that. That principle carries through with what the Buddha observed: that doing good things is what makes you happy: being generous, being virtuous, spreading thoughts of goodwill to all beings, thinking about the fact that you have no ill will for anyone, no matter what they’ve done. You can lift your mind above the back and forth that marks so much of human life. Your mind gets a sense of spaciousness, a sense of its own well-being, its own honor. These are things you don’t learn if you don’t develop thoughts of goodwill and make it universal.

You can also think about the Buddha’s observation that you could search the world over and not find anyone that you loved more than yourself. But at the same time, other beings love themselves just as fiercely. So if you harm them, your happiness is not going to last. You see a lot of people say, “I just want to take what I want,” not realizing that there are going to be consequences down the line.

So goodwill makes you think about the consequences of your actions, which is the beginning of wisdom. As the Buddha said, wisdom starts with the question, “What, when I do it, will lead to my long-term welfare and happiness?” When you think about genuine happiness, it has to be long-term. So when you think about your actions, what are you going to do? What are you going to say? What are you going to think? You have to ask, “What will be the long-term consequences of my actions? Will they harm me? Will they harm others? If they’re going to be harmful, why do them?” This way you learn a lot from having that original intention.

You might call this metta cognition, the things you learn from having goodwill. You don’t learn just by watching things arise and pass away, arise and pass away. You’re not going to learn causation that way. You have to do things, like scientists do. They take an experiment, and they change the conditions and see what happens. They change the conditions again and see what happens, so that they can see what’s connected with what. That’s how you learn.

And you learn from acting on your best impulses. If you know an impulse is going to be harmful, and you act on it, and you see there’s harm—well you haven’t learned anything. And you might even try to deny the harm you did, which makes things worse. But if you act on your best impulses and see that there’s still something lacking, you’ve learned something. Your best impulses were not that well informed. They’re not yet skillful. So this is what you want to develop: skillfulness in your thoughts, your words, your deeds.

These are some of the things you learn by developing goodwill all around—looking for a genuine happiness, a happiness that really lasts—and having that same attitude toward others. After all, if you have ill will for them, you’re going to do bad things, and it’s going to come back at you. So you act on your goodwill and you learn to turn it into skillful will. That’s how you grow in the practice. And that’s how your happiness grows as well.