Tag: peace

Generosity

Have you ever seen when you do a good deed something good happens to you? That is the benefit of generosity. Today I want to focus on this unique quality of generosity. There are actually three kinds of generosities. The beggarly kind, the friendly kind, and the princely kind. Let’s look at each one of them individually. The beggarly kind generosity is when one gives away the things that they do not need anyway. This is similar to when we give away old clothes to Goodwill. Nothing wrong with it but not really generous per se.

The friendly kind generosity is when we share the bounty that is given to us. We share it with people who we come across we share it with people who we see are in need. We keep some and give some away. This is what most people practice.

The princely kind is a rare breed. It is when we give away more than we keep. We keep less than what we need.

There are many benefits of generosity. When we give away material things, it reduces our attachment to the material world. According to a Canadian research study, generosity can reduce blood pressure, reduce depression, reduces stress, decreases anxiety, and more. Generosity also improves our relationship with the people around us. When we give, we are creating positive momentum and hope it catches on and other people carry on with that torch.

I saw an interesting research piece from the John Templeton Foundation on generosity. They found that people who give on their own accord, tend to be happier. Happy people tend to be more generous so it creates its own ecosystem. They also found that donating money releases the same neural pathways in our brain that are activated by other pleasure activities such as food, sex, etc. People tend to be more generous when they see other people giving. As Americans we are the most generous nation on earth. We donate more than $500 billion per year. That is a staggering amount.

Giving also needs to have the right motivation. For example, if we give something expecting something in return it is not really giving. It is just bartering. Giving also should be without pride. If we give with pride that washes away the benefits of giving. Buddha said that having pride for our giving is like eating a feast of a meal with poison sprinkled on it. It does you no good.

Giving for the sake of giving is what we need to learn to practice. When we begin to that, we do it out of contentment, and as a result, happiness follows.

And we have touched on this before but giving does not mean giving material things only. One can give our time, our skillsets, our compassion and care, our attention, and so forth. Giving away one’s skill and abilities without any thought of return is giving out of compassion. That is what true generosity looks like.

There is a lot of aid by governmental and quasi-governmental agencies nowadays. That is not really giving because people who are doling out the aid are not doing it out of compassion for the most part but they are just doing a job they are getting paid to do.

Why is generosity important you might ponder? Generosity by definition diminishes one’s ego. If we cultivate generosity, we will slowly take a stab at reducing our ego. Reducing ego is the first step towards experiencing emptiness – it is a very deep topic we will cover in a few months.

Gratitude

Every week we practice our gratitude attitude at the beginning of the meditation session. So today, I thought we would actually discuss the benefits of gratitude. Believe it or not, the guy who started the gratitude rock movement was my coach and is a personal friend. Lee Brower based in Utah and all around an amazing guy. Lee Brower tells about gratitude rock in the movie ‘The Secret’. He took a little rock and decided that every time he touched it he would think of something he was grateful for. So when he puts the gratitude stone in his pocket in the morning he goes through what he is thankful for, and when he empties his pocket in the night and finds the rock he goes again through what he’s thankful for.

Lee started every meeting we had with a gratitude attitude and he kind of rubbed off on me so about 15 years ago, I started conducting every meeting with a gratitude attitude.

Let’s look at why creating a gratitude mindset is important. Gratitude creates a mindset of abundance. If you look at life from a scarcity point of view, life will eventually become measurable. An abundance mindset allows you to not chase things for the sake of chasing them. Oprah Winfrey once said: “If you look at what you have in life, you will always have more. If you look at what you don’t have in life, you will never have enough.”

Do you notice some people have this victim mindset? If something bad happens, they always ask why me? They blame everyone and their siblings for their problems including their co-workers, the government, family members, and so forth. People with a victim mindset are never happy no matter how much material wealth they accumulate.

On the flip side, people with a gratitude mindset focus on abundant opportunities available to them. It’s like a classic saying “why didn’t I think of that?” When we are grateful, we tend to focus on the positivity around us. That in turn brings abundance. People who are successful know there are enough resources in the world and stay away from competing for the same resources. A gratitude mindset allows us to leverage the resources we have as opposed to competing for them. It also creates awareness for the resources around us – develop an eye out if you will.

We have talked about this in the previous sessions I believe. But if we think about where we are in life, we are extremely lucky. If you have food, shelter, and clothing (roti, kapada or makan) and you are in good health, you are luckier than most people on this planet. Once you realize how lucky you are and begin to appreciate that, you will start noticing the opportunities around you. Because as they say; when a perspective changes, everything changes.  

So how do we develop a gratitude mindset? The first thing to do is to develop a daily practice. Every morning when you wake up or before you go to bed or at a dinner table, spend five minutes thinking about what you are grateful for and why. Why is as important as what here. Why allows us to dig deep and create a meaningful experience.

Another way to develop gratitude is to major our success. No matter how small, be thankful for it. Some people live in what I call a “gap” – the distance between where they are and where they want to be. I used to be one of those people. Once I started developing gratitude practice, I began to appreciate the abundance that I already had. So it is very important to not live in the gap.

And the most important way to develop a gratitude mindset is with intention. Be sure to make it a habit to appreciate everyone who you come across from your family members, coworkers, essential workers you come across in your daily routine, and so forth.

They say it takes 21 days to make a habit. So for the next 21 days, give your best to develop a gratitude mindset. You will see changes in your life for the better.

This Precious Human Life

Today let’s talk about a topic one of the most basic concepts in all of spirituality. Our precious human life. Someone asked Buddha how precious is this human life. He had an interesting answer. He said imagine there is a blind turtle in the vast ocean. We all know how deep and cast the ocean is. Now in this ocean, there is a golden ring floating around. Our blind turtle is swimming deep in the ocean. What the chances of this blind turtle coming out and get his head in the golden ring when he comes on the surface? Think about it. There must be billions to one or some crazy odds like that for it to happen.

There are theories as to how rare human life is and one theory is that we get a human life once in a hundred thousand years on average. Does not mean one cannot have back-to-back human lives but in general, it is as rare as once in a hundred thousand years.

So now that we know that how rare an occasion this is let’s look at what makes it so special and what to do with it. A human being has an opportunity to work towards the liberation and even enlightenment. An animal does not have that opportunity because they are not capable of learning and practicing Dharma. Only human beings have the opportunity to engage in spirituality which leads to lasting happiness. This is what makes human life precious.

Another way to look at this is to realize that there are more than 7 billion human beings on this planet. Every one of us gets one life and that’s all. No matter who you are – rich, poor, powerful, layman, religious authority, nonreligious person – it does not matter. Each person gets one shot at this life. You are no different than Jeff Bezos in that sense. Steve Jobs tried everything in his power including a liver transplant but in the end, he could not buy more time. You can buy many cars, houses, all kinds of material things but you cannot buy another life. So once this human life is over, it would be very difficult to find another human life so that makes it a rare occurrence.

Now that we understand how rare and precious opportunity we have, we must make the most of it. It means we use this human life to advance our spiritual practice. Get one step closer to liberation and even enlightenment. This makes life very meaningful.

Nearly 150,000 people die on a daily basis in this world (maybe a little more during COVID). To quote His Holiness Dalai Lama:

“Every day, think as you wake up, today I am fortunate to have woken up, I am alive, I have a precious human life, I’m not going to waste it, I’m going to use all my energies to develop myself. To expand my heart out to others, to achieve enlightenment for the benefit of all beings, I’m going to have kind thoughts toward others, I’m not going to get angry, or think badly about others, I’m going to benefit others as much as I can.”

Sadhguru tells his followers to put an alarm every hour when they are awake and when the alarm goes off, just say I am still alive.

Can you imagine how it will affect our daily lives and decision-making process? I am sure once we start appreciating our human life, we will stop wasting a lot of time. We will begin to let go of little things and focus on what matters.

Does Inherent Existence mean everything is a mind game?

We are not saying nothing exists. What you see does exist but not an inherent existence. The existence of phenomena is a dependent existence as opposed to inherent existence. For example, if you look at a car that is coming at you, you are able to see it and hear the noise. So it is in your experience. But if someone is deaf and blind who is seating next to you, does that have that car in their experience as they cannot see or hear the noise the car is making. So the existence of the car is a dependent existence since one of you can experience it and another cannot. The idea about all this is to reduce our attachment to things. Once we know things do not exist inherently, hopefully, we will reduce our attachment to things. For example, if you lose some money, if we don’t have attachment towards our money, hopefully, it will not bother us and we will be able to carry on without much suffering.

Inherent Existence Continued

We have been discussing inherent existence for the past two weeks. Let’s continue on that topic one more session to make sure we have a good understanding of this topic before we move on to the next subject. Inherent existence means existence as the object’s basis of imputation. Inherent existence refers to the false idea that any entity can exist independently. Every characteristic defining an entity arises dependently from things that are not the thing being identified. You cannot have an object that is independent of its parts, causes, and conditions or mind that perceives it.

Things do exist just not in the way they appear to be existing. Things lack inherent existence means that things are existing by themselves. They are existing dependent on other factors. Let’s look at an example of a tree. All of us love to go watch fall foliage. A tree changes during the different seasons. Why does it change? It changes due to being set up dependent on other factors such as weather. That means that objects are constantly changing. If a tree were inherently existent it would never change. It would stay the same color with fruits and flowers all the time. It would stay the same not affected by weather all any other phenomena. But we know that is not the case.

Let’s look at a couple of more examples. A friend of mine used to have anxiety issues. He would be in the car in a rush hour and would get upset about the traffic. We had an interesting discussion maybe 10 years ago. I asked him if he would consider just ignoring the traffic around him and focus on music or something during his drive. He said, well, that’s not me. That is not personality. I said maybe you should consider changing. He took a big offense he said that is my identity how can I change who I am. I let the subject go. Fast forward 10 years and he has calmed down considerably. Things don’t bother him as much in traffic. He adopted. What he thought was his identity changed. 10 years ago, he thought that was inherent existence. Today it is clear that it was not since he has changed.

Let’s look at another example. Have you ever been absorbed in a movie? I know I certainly have. If it is a well made gripping movies and you are fully captivated by the plot; you can feel everything being real. You even get a physical reaction if there is an unexpected gunshot or something as if it just happened in front of our eyes. Even though we know we are watching a movie, at that moment we think it is inherently existent. We feel everything that is happening is real. We know it is just fiction.

We will do a longer Q&A session today than usual so we can clear up any questions on the subject. This is a profound subject, and I would like all of you to contemplate the subject and try to come up with your own examples to make sense for you in your experience. Once this clicks, the rest of the wisdom teachings become a lot easier to grasp.