His Holiness the 14th Dalai lama of Tibet is honoring us all in Toronto by a visit this week-end. here is an extract from the teaching His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet will read, from the 8 verses of "training the mind".

I liked this passage a lot . It talks about the difficulty to identify with absolute compassion for most of us. With a simple comparision, he puts this endevour into perspective in a way to which most can relate :

"The point is to try to develop the scope of one's empathy in such a way that it can extend to any form of life that has the capacity to feel pain and experience happiness. It is a matter of defining a living organism as a sentient being. This kind of sentiment is very powerful, and there is no need to be able to identify, in specific terms, with every single living being in order for it to be effective. Take, for example, the universal nature of impermanence. When we cultivate the thought that things and events are impermanent, we do not need to consider every single thing that exists in the universe in order for us to be convinced of impermanence. That is not how the mind works. So it is important to appreciate this point."