 Everybody's trying so hard to be a good person. It's quite touching. I don't know if trying hard to be a good person really results in being a better person, except as a kind of prayer that attracts the necessary experiences that change you into a different person. I would not even necessarily say better or worse, but maybe a person who acts more consistently from love, from empathy, from compassion, from service. These are things that we tend to aspire to, but the aspiration often comes from a assumption that this is something that we can do to ourselves and for ourselves, that we can achieve it through an effort of will. Inherent in that is a kind of conceit, a kind of elitism, because if you do try really hard and you finally become more generous, more kind, more compassionate than somebody else, well why is that? It's because you tried harder than they did, shame on them. So it can result in this kind of arrogance or sometimes this patronizing indulgence of, yeah, you're not as far along, you're not as conscious, you don't get it. But I think that if you look at the motivation, where does the desire to be a better person come from? Maybe there's part of it that comes from the desire to like yourself, the desire to approve of yourself, which in turn comes from deeply ingrained self-rejection, which comes from multiple sources, but one would be the almost universal parenting practices of our culture that are based on conditional approval and rejection, and also based on, also another influence would be the religious and scientific stories that say your fundamental nature is bad. Your fundamental nature is to maximize self-interest, your fundamental fundamental nature is sinful. Like whether you grew up in a religious school or, you know, scientific school, the same implication is there. So there's all kinds of fuel for the fire of self-rejection that leads to the desire for to be good, or at least to look good to yourself. To the extent that that motivation is there, what you will achieve is looking good to yourself, but not actually being good. That might not be something that you can achieve, especially when it's driven by that motivation, but there's also another drive behind it, which is a kind of heartbreak. It's just to encounter something in the world that is so painful and so wrong and so sad that it pierces the shell. And you think, I will do anything in my power to serve the healing of this. I will do anything in my power to bring justice to this place, to bring healing to this place. That impulse can also, yeah, I mean it can then get hijacked by the desire to look to oneself as if one is a good person. But it also is a, it also drives in a kind of earnest quest for liberation, for liberation from the playpen and the prison cell of separation that we've been cast into. That quest is something that is impossible to achieve through your own power, but this is at least how I've experienced it. I mean maybe I'm, you know, not qualified to make such universal pronouncements that sound like wisdom, but in my personal experience I end up just giving up on trying to be a better person after the humiliation of realizing that I was just playing a game, that I was deluding myself, putting on a show. And it's been when I've given up on that that initiations have come to me that gave me what I said I wanted and partially what I did want. But be careful what you ask for, because there's a price to pay to actually being a person who acts more from love and compassion. You have to give something up, obviously, because if it's a place where you are not right now, then who you are will have to change. The generosity of the universe is such that the changes will be brought to you if you're asking is persistent enough. And the sacrifice will be asked, but it'll feel like the right time.