The Buddha teaches that during our meditation we can send our mind of love and compassion into the four directions and embrace all species of living beings. But we must be careful not to think that the meditations of love and compassion consist in just sitting still and imagining that our mind of love and compassion will spread out into space like waves of sound or light. Sound and light have the ability to penetrate everywhere, and love and compassion can do the same. But if our love and compassion are only a kind of imagining—-for example, if we imagine they are like a pure white cloud that slowly forms and gradually spreads out and out to envelop the whole world—-then they’ll have no effect; they’re only a cloud of the imagination. A true cloud can produce rain. It’s only in the midst of our daily life and in our actual contact with people and other species, including the object of our meditation, that we can know whether our mind of love and compassion is really present and whether it is stable. If love and compassion are real, they’ll be evident in our daily life, in the way we talk with people and the way we act in the world. The sitting meditation position is not the only position in which we can give rise to the spring water of love and compassion.