I don't know if it's thinking in terms of gain or loss, but we'd like to open up the Compassion and Lovingkindness to everybody in the world. We'd like to see that we are actually all brothers and sisters, whatever, relatives in birth, aging and death. That doesn't negate the feelings we have for our close family and friends. What we'd like to do is bring the other beings up, we'd like to bring our feelings, our thoughts about other people up to that level.
Now, for a moment, and this can be a little tricky, let's think of Saddam Hussein. Imagine he'd been your brother growing up. And he took a left turn somewhere and went down the wrong road. Would you still open your heart for him even though he went down the wrong road? You were born with him, you grew up together, whatever. Can you do that? Can you see that he's another human being who's got his own problems, some obviously very serious problems inside. Can you open your heart for him as if you'd been playmates, if not your brother growing up, one of the kids at school who used to hang out together, play soccer with and whatever else? And you find out, "Oh, my gosh! Look at where he's gone now!" Can you open your heart to him and all the different people throughout history who have been so-called evil people? When they were three years old, were they evil?
In the regular ten day retreat you've heard me talking about separating the person from the action. Can we have Compassion and Lovingkindness for everyone equally, raising the level for the unknown people and for the so-called evil people, raising our feelings up for them, so that it's similar to our family and friends? Now that doesn't mean that we invite them into our house, because we recognize that if they're going the wrong way, then it's better to stay away from them. But it doesn't stop us having Compassion/Lovingkindness for these people. We want to balance this thought that we're going to have stronger Compassion/Lovingkindness just for our family and friends, we want to balance that.
Now if you think about me and Rosemary, OK here it's a smaller retreat, but in Thailand, some of you have been there, we average 50 people per retreat. Two-thirds of them are completely brand new faces, we've never met before in our whole life. We've had some people who are basically you can say "shady" characters, they've got things in their past that they don't totally tell us about sometimes, sometimes they do. With one person, the first bicycle they ever rode was one they stole. Now we've had even worse than that, people that have done pretty bad things. But when they come to us brand new, they come to the registration, we register them and all, should I treat them differently because they're an unknown face? Or should I welcome them into my family for ten days, treat them as a son or daughter, or younger brother, sister, whatever, and just give them Compassion/Lovingkindness, treating them as I would my own brother and sister? Because they've come into my life for a short period, and they want something I have.
This is where we want to break down these barriers of who we think are super close, "I'll do it for them, but I don't really want to do it for the other people." No, we want to open it up. The other day when I mentioned about doing Compassion/Lovingkindness in systems for all kinds of people, open it up. If you sit just with your family and friends every day, every day, well not only does it get boring, but you don't open it up much at all.