I think I’m going to go back to the self-cherishing mind. I think that’s very important. For example, when we buy some clothes, let’s say you’re bored of your clothes, so you want to buy new clothes and you feel enjoyment. By looking at yourself in the mirror, you see something fresh, a new look. That kind of feeling that you get for yourself, when you see someone that bought new clothes, how come you don’t have the same feeling for them? For example.

Or, for example, when you look at a recent group photo and you’re in the group photo, who do you look at first? Yourself, right? And, what is the first thing you do? You look for the defects of yourself. You’re like, “Oh, my god, I’m so ugly or this or that, or my hair or maybe my smile is not, or maybe I wish there was another photo where I looked better than that.” You have all these monkey-mind thoughts coming in and you don’t like, basically you don’t like the photo so much in general, let’s say.

Because we have that, that mind of seeing the defect in us, we’re not satisfied with how we look. We are so self-aware or self-cherishing or self-centered. But then, for example, we see the same photo two years later, three years later and the first thing we do, look at us again, right? “Where am I? Where am I? OK. I’m there. Oh wow, I used to look good at that time.” Why is that? What changed? Did the photo change? Right. What changed? Our mind changed, our way of seeing ourselves. This is a very good example of self-cherishing. If we can really start switching it, instead of looking at ourselves, look at everybody, “Oh, look how beautiful everyone is. Someone got a new haircut. Oh wow.” You get the joy from their haircut, their fresh look. They bought new clothes, you enjoy their new [look], that feeling of freshness they got, the same way you would enjoy it. Start doing it like that, care for other people instead of caring so much about ourselves.

I don’t know if you’ve seen that new movie, what is it called, Doctor Strange? There’s one phrase, I thought it was so funny. The woman says, “You are not the center of the universe.” I thought it’s a good movie. It’s action, Hollywood, whatever, but it does have certain messages like the Matrix or some other movies. What is another movie that’s interesting to watch? Yeah, Star Wars is good. There’s a movie called The Peaceful Warrior, that’s a good one. 

Anyway, I think it’s a great thing to be able to switch that, to start putting it into habit, create new patterns of thought, mindstream, where you care for other people before you care for yourself, when you think about the others before you think about yourself, you put ethics. You want to talk about ethics? Humility, compassion, respect, patience, all these things are good methods for having a harmonious, peaceful life. If we really put that in practice, we would have a harmonious, peaceful life, genuinely. Because many people strive to find happiness and most of the times we strive, we look for it outside. We are distancing ourselves from inside by looking outside, so it makes it almost impossible to really find the happiness which is inside. The real happiness is inside, right?

So, maybe instead of looking for happiness, we may start looking for non-unhappiness. That’s easier. And once we get the non-unhappiness state by basically switching the cherishing mind into outside cherishing, then maybe we will create the conditions to really start being happy. Because happiness, if it existed, it would be a state of mind, it would be continuous. But somehow, because we are in samsara, we have temporary suffering and we have temporary happiness, and we think the temporary suffering is so big and so bad and the temporary happiness is so small and so insignificant. So, let’s switch that around again, right?