Compassion is going to have different levels, and we have to train it to make that flower bloom bigger and bigger. I never heard this expression, but it's cute. In that sense, we have to help the flower to grow. We've got to fertilize it, we've got to water it, and we have to be patient and wait. We have to give it the right conditions for it to grow. There is the Compassion you already possess that motivated you to come here. You were looking for something that could help you in your life. Maybe you weren't even sure what that was, or what you wanted when you walked up the hill, maybe you were just wandering along the beach and thought, "ah, yeah, meditation, cool..." and you came up seeking for a high. Maybe that was the reason you got here. We have quite a few people who were thinking, "Maybe I can get a high higher than drugs," and they got surprised.
Many of them came back because they realized it was a deeper high rather than a higher high.
Underneath whatever thoughts you had was Compassion for yourself. You were going to give yourself a chance to learn something new. Now that is certainly not the same level of Compassion that you probably have now. I hope you have more Compassion now than when you first walked up this hill. And hopefully that Compassion will continue to flower. So we can refer to it as a flower in the beginning, we can refer to it in the middle, we can refer to it in the end, but hopefully it will be a bigger and bigger flower as we practice.