Hope you're well

A meditation story from 2014.

My first compassion meditation — I'm not sure I did it entirely right.

The basic idea is to follow the mantra "may X be well, may X be happy, may X be free from suffering", where X is a variable. At first X is yourself. Then X is a good friend, then a neutral person, then a difficult person in your life. From there you broaden it gradually to include your town, your country, the whole planet, and ultimately the whole universe. For all X.

Very simple. But did I do it right?

Here's what I did. I wished myself well, happy and free from suffering. That was quite easy. Then a good friend sprang to mind, and if I was going to be well, happy and free from suffering, they certainly deserved it too. Why not?

The first problem was the neutral person. Trickier than it sounds. Bizarrely, the first one who came to mind was my boss's boss. Fine. May he be well, may he be happy, may he be free from suffering. The difficult person, as you can imagine, was easier to think of — less easy to wish well, but I managed.

Then it starts to get properly interesting, because the next step is to hold all of these people in mind simultaneously. I had to picture them somewhere, and this is my first real question for the professionals: is it right to imagine them in my old college bar? That's where I put them. Sitting around a table in the corner of teh George Tavern, at Birkbeck. Without any drinks — we're meditating, remember — yet happy and well despite the lack of drinks, and free from suffering. All of us smiling. That I happily accomplished. So: expand.

Next I took in the whole bar, which wasn't very busy, then the whole university, then the rest of Malet street and the other universities nearby, then that little bit of London.

Then — well, not all of London, but everyone inside the Circle Line, which seemed a nice clean boundary. I could picture all of them smiling, even the ones on the tube.

Then everyone inside the North and South Circular. I didn't want to use the M25, so I vaguely said "the south of England". But wishing wellbeing on just England seemed a bit nationalistic, so in came the Scots, the Welsh and all of the Irish.

Next, Europe — the EU, I should say. I had quite a bit of fun imagining happy Frenchmen, happy Italians, even some happy Scandinavians. The circle kept widening: the Russians, the Slavs, the Middle East, who all needed the wishes rather more than we did. I was getting good at this now, so in quick succession came Africa, the Far East, even that pariah state, America. And then the circle closed around the whole world, and I really was wishing you could all be happy.

I still do.

Then it got a little tricky, because as far as we know there are no other sentient beings anywhere in the immediate neighbourhood. So I had to imagine a planet full of aliens somewhere not too far away.
Then further out.
Then, what the hell, the whole Milky Way.

I was pleased with my munificence.

Some time later..

But doing the same meditation a few more times, I wondered if I could be kinder still. Could I send metta to the whole universe? The old texts are clear on this point: radiate kindness over the entire world, "outwards and unbounded".

Unbounded.

Instantly I hit a snag. Bleeding Einstein.

The speed of light is not just a good idea, it's the law. Every object and every signal in the universe must obey it. So when do my good wishes arrive on the far side of the galaxy? The best part of 100,000 years from now. Andromeda, the neighbours, takes delivery in two and a half million years. And it gets worse. The universe is expanding, and the most distant galaxies are receding faster than light — they're allowed, it's a loophole — which means most of the universe can never receive my good wishes at all. There I sat, cross-legged on the floor, sincerely radiating wellbeing at beings who are, as a strict matter of physics, permanently outside the delivery area.

You might think this would be discouraging. I found it rather the opposite. The law that slows my metta down is the same law that says it never stops. The Buddha set this practice going about two and a half thousand years ago, so his own loving-kindness has so far filled a bubble a few thousand light years across — a modest suburb of one galaxy, cosmically speaking barely out of the front door. Mine has a twelve-year head start, currently washing over a few dozen of the nearest stars. The leading edge arrived at Tau Ceti — sun-like, with a couple of possibly habitable planets — sometime this year.

If anyone's home, I hope my metta finds you well.

These things take time. But it's out there, and it isn't coming back.

And if you're reading this, you're already inside the bubble. May you be well. May you be happy. May you be free from suffering.

The rest of you, hang in there. It's on its way.