Someone asked: can simply sitting alone in silent meditation, then wishing loving-kindness out to the whole world, really help with anything?

It's genuinely true. Take this example: when two people are locked in a fierce argument, and someone opens the door and walks into the room, both of them will often turn away from each other, pausing the fight for a moment. The person who just walked in can still sense a frightening atmosphere hanging in that room, even though both people have already turned aside. That's because every particle of an atmosphere holds the three natural forces in a kind of balance — but once a wave of hostility builds up, it spreads and lets the unwholesome force dominate that space, which is exactly what the person walking in can sense as frightening.

If a mere atmosphere charged with bad feeling can have that much effect, then radiating a good atmosphere — one shaped by love, compassion, and genuine goodwill — will have an effect too. How much depends on the strength of our concentration and the intensity of our loving-kindness, which in turn depends on how consistently we practice it.

The elder teacher once said that when we see a storm building, that's "the unwholesome side's rain" gathering to cause harm — every particle of that cloud is saturated with the element of the unwholesome, capable of causing great suffering and danger. The loving-kindness we radiate exists precisely to dissolve every particle of these harmful atmospheres. When many of us join together to radiate loving-kindness across the world, it genuinely helps thin out and dissolve those harmful atmospheres.