Just as there are two ways of generating a sense of equanimity – one by acknowledging common aspiration to happiness and to be rid of suffering and the other by acknowledging the implications of rebirth in terms of relationships over the course of lives – so there are also two techniques to generate a sense of others’ kindness. One…is to reflect on the kindness of others to yourself in former lifetimes. The other is: In meditation, reflect on the value of the many goods and services that others provide. In the latter case, appreciating kindness is not so much based on motivation but is a valuing of what is provided – for instance, the nexus of people who present us with a supermarket with all this stuff that we can buy and take home. Consider the trucker who delivers to the supermarket – the "kindness" of the truck driver. The truck driver may not look on it this way, but she provides; thus, this kind of appreciation means the valuing of something, regardless of motivation. I value my watch, but it doesn’t have any motivation to help me – this is pure appreciation.
When you think of it that way, this nexus of people involved in providing a glass of water, all the people who are involved, wow! These are the types of thoughts that lead the Dalai Lama to say, "Kindness is society." Without kind motivation you don’t have society, but also without recognition of this other type of kindness, you don’t have society. You have one person fighting the other for the bottom line, thinking only of himself or herself, trying to outwit one another in order to rip one another off. We need to build up this type of appreciation; society will be healthier, we will be healthier, we will recognize the truth of the vast network on which we depend, in which we are imbedded. We will take more responsibility for one another, stopping, for instance, from trying to create consumer demand for a product that is actually dangerous. We will discover an ethic of commerce….
So the affluent have a false sense of independence. A false sense of independence. Why? Because all of the trappings of their lives are dependent on others. All of them. Your money is dependent on others. Imagine the nexus that allowed you to make whatever money you have. The nexus that put up my house. The nexus that allows me to have water when I turn on my kitchen sink. It’s all thoroughly dependent on others. But because I’m affluent, I have more of a false sense of independence than people who aren’t so affluent. And as the Tibetan lama said, once you have this stronger sense of self-sufficiency, you have more self-cherishing.
And then, the real blast was that he said that with more self-cherishing you have more self-pity! It was like being hit in the chest with a battering ram. With more self-cherishing, there’s more self-pity: "All the terrible things that are happening to me. This is going wrong, and that’s going wrong, and I don’t have this, and I don’t have that." The more independent you are, the more you end up being self-pitying about what you don’t have. Very interesting. "This is going wrong, and that’s going wrong. This person’s against me, that person’s against me. The world’s against me. I can’t seem to get ahead. Blah blah blah." Whereas if you’re poor, you’re struggling, that’s the situation you’re in, and you’re craftier about how to deal with it. You’re not lamenting so much about what you don’t have. It’s just the condition that you’re in.
So, to overcome this false sense of independence, we need to reflect on how dependent we are.
— Jeffrey Hopkins in Cultivating Compassion