When you do good, you get good in return; when you do bad, bad things happen to you. Doing good expands and loosens the heart; doing bad restricts and tightens the heart until the heart shrivels and dies. Then there is just a shell left, full of hatred and fear.
Discipline is the first step in doing good. Begin by doing good for yourself by being disciplined, and before you know it, you will find yourself doing good for others.
The first secret to happiness is that discipline releases and lack of discipline imprisons. And you can do good and become disciplined by not harming things; which means not killing, not lying to others, and not stealing things as well. Also, you can do good by not taking drugs, or drinking alcohol in excess, and being careful with sex so that nobody is harmed. These things will establish discipline. When you don't lie, steal, kill, misbehave sexually, or confuse your mind and judgment with drugs or alcohol, the heart begins to trust, and when it learns to trust enough, when it can sit quietly in meditation, happy, and without being agitated, then that mind finds release.
The second secret is that a calm mind frees, and a disturbed, frantic mind restricts. A calm, disciplined mind is also restful, void of stress and anxiety. A calm mind has no interest in killing or stealing, or doing any of those things that are so hurtful to others and eventually to oneself. A calm mind does not require the constant stimulation that coexists with the strain and pressure of providing oneself with constant activity. A calm mind becomes wise.
The third secret is that a disciplined and calm mind becomes wise and happy, and an undisciplined and scattered mind becomes foolish and fearful. These are the simple secrets to happiness. One has some breathing space when the noise of a troubled mind subsides, and the world becomes clearer. The difficulties and problems of the past become less relevant as things begin to make more sense. Priorities are shuffled, and life can take on a new meaning. One begins to see less of one's own needs, and begins to see the needs of others. And this is when happiness really kicks in.
Part of wisdom is seeing clearly that the one who was so concerned with itself was the one that was keeping him or herself from true happiness. It's as simple as that. It's as simple as losing yourself to something so much greater, something so immense that all of your problems are as small drops in a great ocean of healing water, an ocean that is as accessible as your next breath.
Your next world will remember, just as the new morning remembers the night before. If you do good, you will have a good destiny. If you do bad, you will have a bad destiny. How do you know if you are doing good or bad? Just look at yourself, and for whose interests you are working. Selfless service, not working for the benefit of oneself, is the key, because when you work for only your own benefit, something weird happens, you become overwhelmed with conflict.
But when you work for others, even if they don't appreciate it, you are conflict free because conflict can only happen when you have an agenda, and helping others is never an agenda; it is simply seeing what needs to be done and doing it for the good of others. It is something that one cannot appreciate until one actually feels that kind of direction in one's heart. It's like using your body and mind as a company truck; letting the owner worry about the maintenance; you just use it to get the job done! And as the years go by, the jobs become ever more involved with everyone but yourself.
And when death comes, as it must, you will know that you have given to others all that you have to give, and because of that, you will have nothing left to lose.
... And you will be happy.
E. Raymond Rock (anagarika eddie) is a meditation teacher at:
http://www.dhammarocksprings.org/ and author of "A Year to Enlightenment"
His 30 years of meditation experience has taken him across four continents including two stopovers in Thailand where he practiced in the remote northeast forests as an ordained Theravada Buddhist monk.
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