Let’s talk about the kindness of others. If you look at every day so many people are doing so much work just to keep us happy. Think about that, you want groceries. You order it from Amazon. Well, it started out with someone farming the groceries that you want. It goes then to a wholesaler and the distributor and so on. Just to bring tomatoes to your door, more than 25 people have done their part at least. Now you may say well I paid for the tomatoes and they all got paid. True. But they did not have to do those tasks. They could as well have done something else. How did you get money to pay for all this? Someone had to give you a job. You may say, I am good at what I do. Sure you are. Someone gave you those instructions. You paid for your tuition – someone had to give you that money. So if you think long and hard, you will notice that everything we enjoy, a lot of people who we don’t even think about play a role. We must appreciate the kindness of other beings. In our meditation, we will try and contemplate these points and towards the end, we will develop affection towards all beings. This is the focus of our meditation.
What if someone is trying to provoke you to get you angry?
Excellent question. When someone tries to provoke us, we should try and figure our what it is that provokes us. If two people say the same thing to us, one will provoke us and other will not. Why is that? That’s because of our attachment towards that person. This is self-cherishing. As your meditation practice grows, thing that bother you will no longer bother you. And eventually, they will realize that it does not bother you and stop trying to provoke you.
What if you are trying to help someone and they don’t get it that makes you angry? Where does self-cherishing come in this case?
That is a great question. Let’s say for example, you give some money to a homeless person to get some food. They turn around and buy liquor or cigarettes with that money. If that happens you get angry because you think they are not conforming to your values. You have attachment towards the money you just gave them – which arises out of self-cherishing. So in this case even though you are trying to help someone, your anger towards them is due to your self-cherishing.
Self-cherishing
Let’s talk about delusions today. There are six so-called root delusions – anger, attachment, ignorance, pride, doubt, and wrong views. If you think about it, delusions are the reason for our day to day unhappiness. Someone offends us in some way, and we get angry. We have high expectations from our friends and family due to attachment. So, on and so forth. Have you ever stopped to think about where these delusions come from? Why do we get angry or jealous? The root cause of all our delusions is self-cherishing. Self-cherishing is a mind that thinks “I am important”. Think about it. We have a conversation with someone, and they say something that hurts our pride. Why does that hurt our pride? That is because we think we are more important than other person. We can apply the same logic on all of our delusions. For example, someone on your staff did not complete their task on time and you got angry. Well you got angry because that makes you look bad – you promised your client or your superior that task would be complete on certain date. So your anger is out of your self-cherishing and has nothing to do with the project itself. So we should try and contemplate during our mediation that all of our problems arise from self-cherishing. I must eliminate self-cherishing.
Are these Buddha’s teachings towards enlightenment?
Short answer is Yes. However, we are trying to teach non-secular meditation techniques that will help most people in their day to day lives. Buddha gave 84,000 teachings and it boils down to training our mind. In our meditation, we focus on different techniques to train our mind.