Q. Should we practice dhamma in an environment where there are other people, or should we be alone with our thoughts?
A. It depends. If you already have an issue or topic to contemplate, you should be alone to process it. At times like those, you don’t want to be disturbed by other people. But you don’t even need to go into isolation in order to process your thoughts. You can simply keep your mouth shut and keep conversation to a minimum. That alone will be extremely beneficial.
On the other hand, if you do not have a topic to contemplate, you will benefit from being around other people. Their actions or speech may be able to trigger something inside of you, giving you a new topic and new material for contemplation. Not only can you benefit from being around other people, but you can also benefit from watching the TV, listening to the news, reading books, and consuming other media. By observing our reactions (thoughts, emotions, feelings) to these media, we can better identify our faults and strengths. In this way, we can improve and fix our personality traits and wrong viewpoints.
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