It's understanding the sickness in the mind. We want to really look to the sickness in the mind, or to the conditions that created whatever caused that person to become vain, foolish or evil. To a certain extent, every little kid is vain and foolish, and sometimes playing with their toys they're even evil. So a lot of this is just that we're born being vain and foolish. Most people stay vain until they die, and foolish, too! But most of us are not evil. It's more a matter of seeing the universality, that we're all in this game together. We're all in this thing called Samsara, we're all in a mess. Having Compassion for the mess, and realizing that some people just don't get the tools to get out of the mess.
Earlier I mentioned about being on our island. We have 50 people, there are regularly 5,000 foreigners on the island, and 50-100,000 or more in the country. Even when the offer is there, as I mentioned last night in the regular retreat, "Here do some meditation, here it is!" a lot of people don't want it. Why don't they want it? Well, they're vain and foolish to begin with, but their Kamma's not there, they don't have enough Parami development, they just haven't got the conditions ready.
Now, we talked about looking at the trees the other day (see 03.04.04.08.S), so we know how to be a little bit less vain, less foolish and less evil. So maybe we're similar to the big pine tree out there, but that little pine tree sprout that's over there in the corner of the field, should we look down on it, should we elevate ourselves and not be Compassionate just because they're still little and they're not grown up like we are? So we really want to see that all creatures, even though they may be older than us, they may be not as developed in the Paramis. There's a little quote Rosemary and I knew before we met Buddhism, I think it was a Chinese teaching: "Treat all ten thousand creatures as your children." So even the dogs, the mosquitoes, the birds, whatever, to see them as another living being, another creature trapped in their own body, trapped in that world they live in, and to wish them all well.