If in your heart you’re training yourself in inner peace and training yourself to find that peace for the benefit of all other living beings, there’s no doubt that sooner or later those opportunities will come. One thing that’s really stood out for me is purpose because we speak about it quite a lot. Is the path to happiness through finding purpose through faith, teachings, religion? Or can you find purpose outside that box? There’s two aspects to spiritual development, I believe, give your life purpose and direction meaning. One is the quest for happiness, which we touched on already. According to Buddha, every single living being, including insects and animals, have the principle wish to be happy all the time. And every decision that they subsequently make is informed and motivated by this wish. So everything we do in life is motivated by, I want to be happy. And some people might argue, well, sometimes I do things I don’t want to do. But when you do things you don’t want to do, you’re motivated by the consequence of not doing it. But it’s still related to the overall wish, I want to be happy. You know that if you don’t do this thing, consequently it’s going to affect your happiness in some way. And so it’s interesting, you know, like if you feel that you’ve found in life the thing that makes you happy and that motivates you, the quality of what you do is up here. But if you’re motivated by the consequence of not doing it, the quality is down here. Like if you think of a job that you hate, how well will you do that job? You will do it enough that you won’t get fired because you fear the consequences of losing your job, which will affect your overall happiness. But if you feel that that job is where you get your happiness, then you will put your whole heart into it. So there’s a sort of psychology of life that begins with this aspiration, I want to be happy. And I guess from a spiritual perspective, either as a lay person or as a monk or a nun, the psychology of a spiritual practitioner is built entirely on this wish. And so what Buddha is saying is any subsequent wish that is in any way at odds with your principal wish, you’re going away from the meaning of your life. And if your subsequent wishes and actions and activities are in line with your principal aspiration to be happy with the time, then you’re finding the meaning of your life. Now this starts to get very profound because once I was teaching on this in Australia, and in Australia it wasn’t uncommon for people to a little bit heckle or shout stuff out, which was sort of part of the challenge and the fun of it and the journey. In Britain everyone is much more well behaved. Anyway, there was one guy who said, oh, well, I found the path to happiness because I found surfing. And he’s like, well, surfing makes me happy, therefore it’s in line with my wish to be happy. So I found my I found a path. And I’ll come back to that. And there was another guy I met that played rugby league. And he said rugby league is a true source of happiness because I’m never happier when I’m running up and down the pitch with a ball. That’s my that’s me. That’s my place. That’s my source of happiness. And so on the surface, it looks like, yeah, they found direction and meaning. But in a more profound way, if we go a little bit more subtle, actually, they’ve not found the meaning of their life. They found really what the very thing that’s ultimately going to make them vulnerable. Like just with the guy with the rugby ball, with the rugby league guy, if he believes that playing rugby is the only source of his true happiness, then the more he’s running, the happier he should become. But if I was running after him with a cattle prod, saying, no, no, no, don’t don’t slow down because I want you to be happy. The time would eventually come that the running itself would start to cause him first fatigue and then physical pain, then agony, and then maybe even death. And as well as that, if he maintains the belief that the true source of his happiness is running on the pitch, when he reaches old age, he’s going to enter a severe depression because the one thing that brings him joy will start to be pulled away from him. And so when you really analyze these things, same with the surfing guy, when you really analyze these things, actually, these are not truly giving them direction in life. They’re leading them into a cold disact because ultimately these things will be what hurts them. So finally, and of course, you could argue that I’m biased because I’ve dedicated my life to the Buddhist power. But finally, I believe you have to say, if it’s true that happiness is pleasant feelings, pleasant mental feelings arising from inner peace, then direction, meaning, purpose, from one point of view, can only be found in finding mental peace. Whatever you do in life, it has to give you mental peace. And then another thing that you touched on, and this is the second part to this, is about altruism, like trying to help others or trying to care for others, have compassion. Once we start to understand the meaning of happiness and the meaning of suffering, which we haven’t really spoken about too much so far, but once we start to understand the meaning of happiness and we start to see how people are making so many mistakes about happiness, and these mistakes are often leading to addiction, depression, and all kinds of other problems in their life, if we can then start to become a guide for others, that dedicate our life, that doesn’t necessarily mean interfering, like it doesn’t necessarily mean that I would walk around Leeds and say, all right, mate, you look miserable, you’ve probably got wrong aspirations, but in our heart, we start to become motivated to be the best person we can for the sake of guiding others to happiness. It may be that you have very little opportunity to put that into practice, you know, like to actually help people, those opportunities may become maybe few and far between, but you still find purpose in trying to become that person. And if you feel like, if you start to think, well, all right, I need to be out there helping people, then you’ve slightly lost the aspiration, because you’ve already allowed yourself to become dependent. But if in your heart, again, this is coming from the point of a Buddhist monk, but if in your heart, you’re training yourself in inner peace, and training yourself to find that peace for the benefit of all other living beings, there’s no doubt that sooner or later those opportunities will come. But when they come, you’re already in the right place to help, as opposed to thinking I’ve got to be out there fixing everybody, because that in itself is a dependency.