So then what we're really talking about is the development of the Brahma Vahara, the heart practices and we're looking at the far enemy of the cultivation of these intentional positive states and think of them as the afflictive responses. So in loving kindness practice, the far enemy is anger or hatred. In compassion practice, the far enemy is cruelty. In the practice of sympathetic joy, the far enemy is envy or jealousy. And in the practice of equanimity, the far enemy is craving aversion or unconsciousness. And so you'll notice as you're tracking these states as they arise, if it boils into any one of those, then we're looking at an afflictive state and then we have the antidote to those afflictive states, which is the intentional development of the positive alternative to that, the positive opposite you might see.

So I guess embedded in the idea of the Brahma Vahara is that all of them contain some kind of inherent wisdom. Right. But you're not building a positive delusion by doing them, but that actually you'll be operating more skillfully from these.

So if you look at, say, loving kindness practice, the folly word for that is metta, you're cultivating a view which I like to call kind, open-hearted, curious because it's inclining towards something. And so you're holding a view of that. You notice anger arising and you push the anger view out and replace it with the loving-kindness view so that you can examine the conditions of the present moment with a kind of open-kind curiosity rather than with anger or hatred. The near enemy of loving-kindness is sentimentality, which is what you're talking about. The Pollyanna-ish, a distortion of experience or events without actually examining them. Whereas in the active state of loving-kindness, you're open to the experience of what's happening and you're able to examine it without the mind being clouded by anger. The Buddha said one expression of anger could annihilate a thousand years of kindness. So you can inquire kindly about something that's bothering you or disturbing you and that appears difficult to you where if you respond with anger, you could damage the relationship in such a way that it's not repairable. With compassion, of course, you're opening to the suffering experience of other people, not repelling it through an expression of cruelty. One of the couples therapists we worked with engaged how likely it would be that a couple's relationship could be salvaged in therapy based by the expressions of contempt. Contempt is a kind of cold, devaluing anger that one person in the relationship expressed to the other because it's almost impossible for somebody to recover from contempt where you're being judged by somebody as morally unfit. Is that making sense? So that cruelty that comes from that kind

of expression.