D.M. Kenyon's Blog, page 6
March 17, 2012
Karma Builder: Today's Karmic Workout – Save A Life
Today's Exercise: Give Life A Chance To Live
[This exercise involves setting free a living being, but takes some preparation and consideration. It can be done in a variety of ways, but there are some very important ecological considerations to take into account. It is very important that you DO NOT release creatures into the natural environment that do not belong in the local ecosystem. For example, releasing gold fish, carp, exotic turtles and other animals into the natural environment that actually do not belong in the local ecosystem could cause a disaster. If you have doubts about the creature(s) being released, DO NOT DO THIS EXERCISE.]
Go to a store that sells bait such as worms or crickets. The point is to buy creatures that are marked for death.
Buy some of these creatures and take them to a suitable natural environment for them and release them. Worms can be released in a garden provided that the soil is suitable for worms. Crickets can be released outside nearly anywhere, but should be only released outdoors if the temperature supports their lives. Putting crickets out side in snow will kill them.
An alternative practice would be take insects out of your home that would otherwise be killed during cleaning. Spiders are particularly vulnerable to death by cleaning.
Let the creatures go hopefully in a place that will be healthy and beneficial for them.
Spend 3 full minutes meditating on the very real lives that you have just saved. These are beings that move and have families just like you. Why do you consider them inconsequential when their lives are the same as yours? Notice the temptation to consider humans more important than other life. What is the karma of that, do you suppose?
Training Note:
This exercise must done with care. Releasing certain fish into streams can cause ecological disaster. This is particularly true with carp and other fish sold live in Asian food stores. Releasing an animal like a worm in an environment that is inhospitable (like dry sand) or toxic would create the exact opposite karmic consequence that you are trying to produce. The point here is to take responsibility for saving a very real life. To think about that life and to act with the clear intention of saving life. This is not a hypothetical exercise. Insects found in houses like flies that you might ordinarily kill as pests are perfect for this exercise and precisely the type of being that should be rescued from certain death.
Karmic Benefits:
Wake Up To The World Of Living Things: life is everywhere and we are quite careless around it. It is bad enough that we maliciously end life, but way more living beings are killed by human activity than are even noticed by the average human being. Waking up to the living world feels inconvenient even though the opposite is true. Not taking our place as a source of nurture in the world is not just killing most living things – it is killing us. Like a virus, we are destroying our own host. The only way to stop this is to wake up. To do this requires individual awareness and action.
Who Is Responsible For Life – You Are: humans are incredible dealers of death. We wipe out whole species and even kill each other by the thousands. Why? The answer is ignorance. We simply refuse to wake up to life and the systems of the natural world. When you stop to think about it, which is precisely what this exercise is about, you suddenly see the human race as an incredibly blind and dangerous thing – especially if you are an animal. We are the poisonous snakes that all animals fear.
Notice The Killing That You Do Out Of Ignorance: human beings kill without even knowing that they are doing it. It is inevitable. It impossible to drive a car a mile in the summer without killing thousands of creatures. We actually deliberately blind ourselves to this so that we do not have to be responsible for the killing we do. Life is life until it is taken or expires.
Notice How You Are Barely Aware Of The Life Around You: your lack of awareness of living things makes you a threat to and a burden on the biosphere. Living beings lose their lives simply because you are unconscious. Is that how you really want to live? Is a non-human living thing simply an inconvenience? History shows us horrific examples of what happens when human beings are the creatures whose lives are considered inconsequential. We consider this genocide. Why are we so removed from the lives of other beings? Is it a fact of life or blindness that has us be so obtuse?
Share Your Experience:
Leave a comment when you have completed the exercise.
Enter your email address to subscribe to TLB's Daily Karmic Workout:
Delivered by FeedBurner
March 16, 2012
Karma Builder: Today's Karmic Workout – Breathe Harm, Exhale Benefit
Today's Exercise: Breathe In Harm, Exhale Benefit
[This exercise takes 10 Minutes, though you can do it for as long as you like. It is best done in a tranquil place.]
Situate yourself comfortably on a chair or on a meditation cushion and get your breathing under control. Take long inhales with slow exhales that are of equal duration to the inhale.
Visualize the center of your chest an empty space of pure, clean white emptiness. It is perfectly empty of anything but white light.
Think about the harm in the world. Think about disease and violence. Try to see it clearly in your mind.
As you identify a harm, turn it into black smoke in your mind and inhale it into your center of pure white light. The second the black smoke touches the white light it turns to white mist and is purified.
Exhale the white mist back into the world. With every breath, continue to inhale harm into the white light in your chest and exhale harmless white mist that is beneficial to all living things.
Turn yourself into a filter that inhales harm and exhales benefit. When you have completed the exercise, check in on your own mind to see how you feel about it.
Training Note:
Tibetan Buddhists will recognize this exercise as the Tronglen or "taking and sending practice". It has nothing to do with religion, but everything to do with conditioning your mind to be a natural filter for negativity. It trains our minds to be responsible for negativity and to make it our habit to be a force for transformation turning every negative thing we encounter into a benefit for all living beings. The power of this practice, especially when done regularly, cannot be underestimated.
Karmic Benefits:
To Breathe In Harm, You Have To See Harm: as human beings in the chaos of the Information Age, we tune out negativity. We turn on music so that we do not have to listen to the news of people being murdered or who are starving to death. We literally drug ourselves so that we do not have confront the discomfort that we feel when we consider the true nature of the human condition. Eventually, we become too weak to confront harm at all. When we get to the point that we must ignore harm because we are too weak in mind to deal with it, we have officially become part of the problem. Opening our eyes to suffering and seeing ourselves as a "negativity filter" is one way that we can train our minds to have the strength to confront negativity in the world.
It Is All About Intention: when we blind ourselves to suffering, we lose the ability to hold an intention to provide a remedy for that suffering. The harm goes unattended and becomes worse. Psychologists call this "denial". Look around you. The reason that there is so much negativity in the world is because it is not being confronted. We cannot rely on a hand full of aid workers to lift the burden of human suffering. The entire human race must come to its own rescue. This begins with forming a firm intention and understanding the better world depends on you.
The Joke Is On You: the black smoke coming in and white mist going out are visualizations that are not doing much for the real world, but they are doing wonders for you. The training here is to get your mind to engage suffering, and to train yourself to take responsibility for it. The being that is being healed here is yours.
Share Your Experience:
Leave a comment when you have completed the exercise.
Enter your email address to subscribe to TLB's Daily Karmic Workout:
Delivered by FeedBurner
March 15, 2012
Karma Builder: Today's Karmic Workout – Visualize World Peace
Today's Exercise: Visualize World Peace
[Note: this exercise will take 15 minutes in a quiet tranquil place. This exercise occurs in a sequence or "stages" so stick to the order of the mental inquiries set out below.]
Find a comfortable, quiet place to sit.
Take 3 minutes to consider the conflict and chaos of the world. Try to visualize this chaos as it is happening and try to locate where it is happening.
While you are sitting there, realize that hundreds are dying and being tortured. Try to imagine what it is like to killed or tortured. Think of their fear and pain.
While you are sitting there, realize that hundreds are starving and their children are dying while people in their own nation have more than enough food.
While you are sitting there, think about mountains of waste that are being created and the harm that is being done. Think of sweat shop workers and miners whose lives are in jeopardy.
Inhale deeply and exhale deeply. Repeat this process several times.
Now imagine that you knew every person on the planet personally. You knew their families and what they care about. Think about sharing a meal with them and helping them repair their homes.
Now imagine that every thought that every human action that ever caused harm in the world was born of a thought. It was born of the thought of having to have more. It was born of the the thoughts and beliefs of the origins of the world. But most of all, it is born of the thought that human beings just like you, who feel what you feel, are some how "other", "not me", "enemy".
Spend five minutes visualizing a world where every person realizes that they share the same DNA, the same basic concerns for family, prosperity and freedom. Visualize a world where suddenly everyone wakes up and realizes that everyone just wants to be happy and healthy.
Visualize people recognizing that the road to peace is not based on complexity, but outrageous simplicity of basic human nature.
Training Note:
Conflict, all conflict is based on mentally identifying other people as "other" or "not me". We might use nationalities or religious affiliations as the identities of "otherness", but in the end it is always simply made up in our minds. Human beings are simply creatures. They are no different that monkeys or sheep in that they share the same basic DNA, the same basic biological processes, but have an absolute addiction for fiction and fantasy. We are the only species that does not kill for survival, but for ideas The road to peace is paved by letting go of the complexity of our thinking and find our way back to a simple mental oneness. If we take an interest in others and come to know they we almost never hate them. We find common ground and that leads us to understand our sameness.
Karmic Benefits:
Understanding Why Humans Behave So Badly: if you strip away the drama, human beings are really quite simple. We want to be safe, we want to be happy and we want to be free. We need each other to survive and this would seem to be a simple task, but it is intensely complex. We live in the ever-expanding consciousness of justification and have an infinite capacity to rationalize our wants and our needs. This pension for fantasy causes us to fabricate perspectives that justify murder, rape and slavery. Human beings can rationalize anything. Understanding this phenomenon frees us from our own mental concoctions that cause us to hate or become indifferent to others.
Transcending Complexity: over time we build layer upon layer of reasons why things are they way they are. This can become so complex that we become trapped. The truth is that we are simple beings that need basic things that are in abundance so long as we are not justifying to ourselves why I should have it all and you should have nothing. If all relationships were face to face and one-on-one we would have few enemies and we would want good living for everyone because we knew them and they were our friends. That is pretty simple.
Unconcealing Empathy: Human beings are naturally empathetic. This is an amazing phenomenon. We see ourselves in others and can feel what others feel even though we do not necessarily share the root experience that is causing the other to feel a certain way. Babies do this. When one baby cries, others will cry in shared upset. Over time, we harden ourselves thinking that we cannot take any more heartbreak. When we do that, we become the source of heart break for others. Better to remain awake and sad for others than to become indifferent and part of the problem.
Share Your Experience:
Leave a comment when you have completed the exercise.
Enter your email addressto subscribe to TLB's Daily Karmic Workout:
Delivered by FeedBurner
March 14, 2012
Karma Builder: Today's Karmic Workout – Go Blind
Today's Exercise: Go Blind
[Note: this exercise will take about 30 minutes and is best done around people and in the course of your regular daily routine. Because this exercise requires that you be blindfolded that entire time, this might cause some controversy. Select a time and a place that is appropriate for the exercise, but do not shy away from taking on this exercise in the middle of your life.]
Procure a blindfold that will block all light from your eyes. This cannot be merely transparent. You will need total black-out conditions.
Select a time when you can blind yourself for 30 minutes. It is best to do this around other people and in the course of your normal routine, but if you are an air traffic controller, doing this at work is a very bad idea.
You should plan to do this at a time when you will need to move around your environment.
Arrange to have assistance because the sudden loss of eyesight will be challenging at first. Take care to avoid hazards, but the object is to make your way through your life without seeing for 30 minutes.
Function blind for 30 minutes. Do not cheat and do not quit early.
Training Note:
We have become intensely visually oriented in our consciousness, but this is not the way human beings have always functioned. Your ancestors could here insects in the grass and knew the sound of trouble before it created danger. We take our other senses for granted especially our sense of hearing and smell. When do not use our eyes, our other senses compensate. The purpose of this exercise is to notice what you usually miss when you rely on your eyes.
Karmic Benefits:
Free Your Other Senses: for most of us eyesight dominates our other senses. We become overly dependent on our ability to see. By blinding ourselves temporarily, our other senses immediately attempt to compensate, but these senses have not been sharped completely. By removing vision from the sensory equation, we can actually enhance our other senses.
Literally Tune In to Your World: there are many ways to know your world, but we largely ignore them. There is an entire subtle universe that exists in sound and smell alone. The problem with allowing vision to dominate our senses is that our minds do not rely on other information even though it is readily available. Your ears do not actually hear better when your blind, instead, you mind actually starts paying attention to sound.
Give Part Of Your Brain A Rest: we rely so heavily on vision that we even dream in pictures. This is not necessarily so for all people. Many musicians, for example, hear sounds when they dream. Professional chefs sometimes dream about smells. By giving your visual cortex a break, you can relax this part of your brain and give your mind a change of pace. The idea here, however, is to alert you to the fact that you can actually develop your other senses intentionally.
Share Your Experience:
Leave a comment when you have completed the exercise.
Enter your email address
to subscribe to TLB's Daily Karmic Workout:
Delivered by FeedBurner
March 13, 2012
Let My People Go: Why We Are All Syrians
Nothing makes me feel more powerless in the face of the gristmill of international politics than to watch the valiant people of Syria stand up to one of the worst tyrannical dictators in human history and be slaughtered, man, woman and child. Snipers blow the heads off of protesters in the streets and yet, these people exchange their lives for the cause of freedom while the world sits idly by watching them be hunted house to house in Homs. The news today from Syria is that the government is now planting land mines at the borders, not to prevent a foreign invasion, but to stop refugees from leaving the country. For the wide-awake human, this is an unbearable situation. We are all Syrians. Many of us stand from the safe distance of our quiet neighborhoods in nations that bicker over its own affluence. Some of us may even have a modicum of compassion as we watch our Middle Eastern brothers and sisters being mangled and murdered as they demand only to have the same freedom that we have in their own land. What is to come of this? What is to come of them? Worse, what is to come of us?
The human race has been betrayed by its own greed and has entrapped itself in its own politics. Are we, the Great "We" of the human race, to be denied the full pain of a broken heart made only mildly uncomfortable by the anesthetic of distance that prevents us, all of us, from feeling what they feel? The slaughter of the Syrian people is happening to you; it is happening to us and if we rely on our politicians and their inhumane chess game, thousands more will perish.
We, the people of the world, must reclaim our humanity person to person, door to door. We must separate ourselves from the political rhetoric of the money-grubbers, moguls and corporate interests that are herding us around the globe like goats to slaughter. You as an individual, have no responsibility to be a tool, or worse, a weapon, used by the wealthy to in the never-ending conquest of MORE. We have the inalienable right to pump blood through our veins, love our families and share meals with each other.
The human struggle for freedom, happiness, sustainability and peace cannot and will not be fought and won by politics. Politics is the framework of competing interests and economic control. It may put a hundred pairs of fancy tennis shoes in your closet, but it only provides for you with freedom by the law of averages. It is not concerned with you, the person with a name and a specific location on the planet Earth. It manages your existence as a genus or species of which individual particles are expendable. Your daughter, your mother or your neighbor are not expendable. They are invaluable.
We are on our own, we humans of the One, Great "We". We must take on the task of caring for each other as if it is our personal business because it is our personal business. We must return to the days of protecting our neighbors, even when we do not agree with them entirely and even if they are seven thousand miles away. We have to take our place in the fight for freedom, life and happiness because our institutions will not do it for us. We have to be our own army. We have to be our own community. We have to bind ourselves together with our love of life and family because that is what we all have in common regardless of our gods, our churches or our temples. Our governments only tell us how we are different from each other. We, the people of the Great "We", must stand up tell these organizations that have run amuck and that we support the children in the streets of Homs in their claim to be free. We love our Syrian brothers and sisters and will not be taken from our love by politicians, preachers or imams. Our blood is the same color, it is red, and our minds need only know that all people want, and ultimately must have, safe families, basic prosperity and freedom. When we keep politics and religion out of it, the unity of the human race is simple task. We wake, we eat, we love our families and we sleep. It is only when we let our twisted thoughts divide us that we find our separation. We are only divided by thoughts. The fist that oppresses us has no direction without hateful thoughts. We have buried ourselves in unnecessary complexity when one human being to another is the only true concern we need to have.
I can hear them calling me from the streets of Homs. I hear their shrieks and their fierce determination. The children of compassion must find a way to be with them as they fight the great evil that would force them to obedience or take their lives, but will never grant them freedom. It is time for basic, simple human compassion to rise above all of the chatter of all the theories and mythologies that preach of why we are different. It is a lie. We are the same.
Karma Builder: Today's Karmic Workout: Defend Someone
Today's Exercise: Defend Someone
Find a rubber band or a ribbon and using a marker or pen write the word "PROTECT". Put this message on your wrist. This is to remind you to do the exercise which will require you to find an opportunity do it.
At some point in your day, someone other than yourself will come under criticism or attack. It is your job to defend them even if you do not agree with them. You do not have to take the side of the person being attacked. You simply have to stand up to the attack or criticism and try to get it to stop happening.
The object is to confront the aggression not necessarily change anyone's mind.
You are standing for peace, tolerance and civility, but not necessarily a point of view.
Notice what runs through your mind when you defend someone. Notice how you become tempted to sell out or have a hard time finding the energy to do it. Then ask yourself why the world is in the mess that it is in.
Training Note:
It is amazing the amount of aggression we enable. We will listen to people gossip about others and cut others to shreds with criticism or worse. Sometimes we get sucked into it, not because we agree, but because by joining in the hostility we get to fit in with those exercising verbal malevolence. Sometimes we join into criticism to disguise our own points of view. Defending peace and tolerance does not necessarily come naturally. We have to take a principled stand to stand up for peace and tolerance, especially when we do not particularly agree with the person who is being criticized. If you stand for hate, you get hate. If you stand for peace, you get peace — even in the face of people you do not necessarily support. The purpose of this exercise is to notice how your own ego resists standing for the greater good and how easily it will ignore hostility in order to avoid "making waves". This is the root of genocide.
Karmic Benefits:
Standing For Principles And Not For Popularity: it is amazing how easily we are sucked into nastiness. Someone starts complaining about someone else behind their back, and we can quite easily join in the backstabbing. Complaint, without corrective action, is nasty business. It is simply mongering hate without the intention to correct the problem. This is karma that should be cut off in every case.
Noticing How Much Negativity You Tolerate And Enable: people complain and criticize anything, but notice that we do not suggest an alternative to complaint that we may very well be enabling the discontented point of view. When we are too lazy to address our problems, we take solace in complaining and criticizing. We talk our selves into hate because we are too lazy to create a solution.
Noticing How We Trade Peace And Tolerance For Comfort And Complacency: it is a myth that complaining makes us feel better. When we make a complaint or a criticism, we are actually granting being to the very thing we are complaining about. We are literally bringing this despised thing into our consciousness and, hence, into our world. It is like dumping your garbage in your living room. And yet, we are often so nasty that we actually take pleasure in tearing down other people. That is pretty twisted stuff. Defending peace and tolerance stopping criticism actually brings peace and tolerance into existence. It takes protective action to make peace and tolerance real.
Share Your Experience:
Leave a comment when you have completed the exercise.
Enter your email address to subscribe to TLB's Daily Karmic Workout:
Delivered by FeedBurner
March 12, 2012
Karma Builder: Today's Karmic Workout: Purge A Doubt
Today's Exercise: Purge A Doubt
Identify something in your life that disappoints you. It might be your job, your spouse, one of your children or even yourself. It needs to be something that was completely possible to have in your life, but did not turn out how you wanted it to.
Spend 3 full minutes considering what it is about the object of your disappointment that has let you down.
Spend another 3 minutes verbally identifying the ways in which this thing or event has disappointed you. Hear your own voice speak the elements of your disappointment. If you prefer, you can write the elements of your disappointment down on paper. The point is that these elements must come into the physical world as a sound or a written word.
Notice how you are giving up being responsible for the thing that has disappointed you.
Take a deep breath, exhale.
Now notice you have quit on the object of your disappointment and that your disappointment is your excuse for not taking a stand for the person, event or thing that you wanted to have come into the world.
Training Note:
Most of us quit far before we fail. We expect certain things to happen or we expect people to behave a certain way and when reality does not meet our expectations we give up. What is quitting? Quitting is a declaration that you are now longer willing to be the causal force for something to exist in the world. It is an attempt to absolve yourself of the responsibility for causing things to turn out they way you would like them to turn out. It is a surrender of your power, but worse, it is abandonment of vision for the future. This might not always be a bad thing. There are many things worth quitting – cigarette smoking, for instance, is something that everyone should quit. But when we feel doubt and disappointment, we are blaming someone or something else for our lack of resolve. We use doubt and blame to justify are decision to abandon our stand. We almost never simply say, "I am not doing this anymore". Instead, we say, "you are such a jerk, I am no longer required to stand by you." In many cases this is dishonorable. Doubt is a mind killer. It cuts off our pursuit of possibility. It destroys innovation. It is the permission that we give ourselves to take the low road.
Karmic Benefits:
Finding Our True Measure Of Tenacity: When we quit, the thing we were hoping for ceases to be possible. This can be useful if we are quitting something harmful to us like taking drugs. More often than not, however, we quit our dreams or we give up on people who could really use a friend. We even do this to our children. But what if we didn't quit?
Knowing The Power Of Failure: sometimes, despite our best efforts and the full application of our skill, we cannot make something happen. There is nothing lost by failing, even though you might not gain what you had hoped. But taking a stand for things being a certain way, even if they odds are against you, can be a reality-altering event. It is to say, "I may die here, but I cannot live without standing for this — even if I fail". This is the skill of true resolve and most of us never get near it because we quit way before we fail.
The Virtue Of Resolve: sometimes it does not matter whether you win or lose, but that you stand on one side or the other. If your child is losing a battle to drugs and eventually dies because of them, could you live with yourself knowing that you quit that fight while she was still alive? Wouldn't it be better to lose that fight in a pitched battle for her life even if you lose in the end? Who are you serving when you quit? The person you are committed to or your own ego?
The Truth Of Battle: contrary to what you have been told, you are not born to win every battle. Sometimes, what there is to do is lose or even die. But dying on your feet with your sword in your hand is a far better fate than slinking away having abandoned what you believe in. Losing does not negate who you are, but quitting most certainly does. It may be better to lose one's own life than lose one's faith or principles by which life finds its deepest meaning.
Share Your Experience:
Leave a comment when you have completed the exercise.
Enter your email address to subscribe to TLB's Daily Karmic Workout:
Delivered by FeedBurner
March 10, 2012
Karma Builder: Today's Karmic Workout: A Day Of Gracious Living
Today's Exercise: A Day Of Gracious Living
Take a wide rubber band or a ribbon and write the word "grace" on it. Tie it around your wrist on your dominant hand. This is so you remember that today is a day of Gracious Living.
For the entire day, when you see some who needs assistance, come to their rescue. Open doors for people, help them carry things, get them coffee.
For a single day, put yourself into service to others. You will know that you are getting wrong if you are asking for people to serve you or you are saying "no" to requests made of you.
Training Note:
We tend to take care of ourselves. Even basic ordinary manners have fallen by the wayside. We do not hold doors open for people or help them carry things even when we are going to the same place they are going. An enormous mental shift is available when you consciously put yourself into the service of others. You will probably notice that you do not want to do it. It seems like it will eat up all your time or be a burden to you. The opposite is true. When you put yourself into the service of others, you get energized. Things go more smoothly fore everyone and your day flies by. Step out of your selfishness for a day and try it. (It does not matter how many kids you have or how tough you think your job is. You are bigger than you think.)
Karmic Benefits:
Sharing The Daily Load: making life easier for others actually makes life easier for you. You might spend a few minutes here or there helping someone, but it makes their day easier, creates human connection and gets everyone thinking about contribution instead of taking. This mental shift from taking to giving can be intensely powerful and can set off a chain reaction of contribution.
Making Grace Familiar To You: of all the human virtues, grace seems to be the one that is most neglected. Grace is the act of contributing without a reason. It is a give out of pure generosity of spirit. That is probably why you don't see it very often. When our resources seem to be spread thin, a sudden and unforeseen contribution can help lift the load and energize the moment. More importantly, it allows you to confront your own stinginess. The real work, like all Karmic Workouts, gets done on you.
Observer Your Unused Capacity: we all love to whine about how we don't have enough time for our own needs and that we really can't give ourselves away to others. This is a lie. You always have time for a minute here and a minute there to help someone carry a box or to open a door. A day of gracious living will wake you up to the fact that you can do way more for the world than you think you can. It gives you access to the power of your compassion and commitment.
Share Your Experience:
Leave a comment when you have completed the exercise.
Enter your email address
to subscribe to TLB's Daily Karmic Workout:
Delivered by FeedBurner
March 9, 2012
Karma Builder: Today's Karmic Workout – Pick Up Someone Else's Litter
Today's Exercise: Pick Up Someone Else's Litter
Put a couple of grocery bags in your pockets. If you have reusable bags that is even better, but they will need to be washed when you are finished with this exercise.
Take a walk outside. Keep an eye out for litter. Unfortunately, this exercise is very easy to do because there is litter everywhere.
Pick up as much litter as you can. If you are near a trash can, clean the whole area.
Properly dispose of the garbage you collect.
Training Note:
Even a city sidewalk is your living space. You can be as upset as you want to be about how people throw things careless on the ground, but it still landed in your living space. Take responsibility for the quality of your space. Ignoring messes made by others is nearly as bad as making the mess yourself because it is an attitude that perpetuates the mess one way or the other. Yes, it is your problem even if you did not put the garbage on the ground.If you get your friends to help, you may find that your immediate environment improves rapidly and substantially.
Karmic Benefits:
Clean The Space, Clean The Earth: you can be the problem, you can ignore the problem or you can solve the problem. The choice is yours. Note that there is very little difference in the end result between these first two alternatives. It is really easy to make a daily difference in the quality of your living space. It is not much work, it mostly takes thought and a little motivation. Making yourself responsible for your living space, and this includes public spaces, is not a burden, it is a commitment to a better world.
Transcend Your Laziness: face it, the reason you do not pick up litter as you walk around is because 1) you think it someone else's problem; 2) you do not have time to save the earth; 3) you are really lazy about these kinds of things. This exercise is the perfect opportunity to confront all of the opportunities that you pass up to make a difference.
Own Your Space: the truth about life is that you have no right to survive. In fact, you have no right to anything. If you want a cleaner space, get a bag and pick it up. You and only you are responsible for what you allow around you. The garbage in our world was not put there by sea otters, it was put there by us.
Share Your Experience:
Leave a comment when you have completed the exercise.
Enter your email address
to subscribe to TLB's Daily Karmic Workout:
Delivered by FeedBurner
March 8, 2012
From Slavery To Prominence: The Extraordinary Life of Venture Smith
The first biography of Venture Smith was published during his lifetime (1729 – 1805) and titled A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture, a Native of Africa: But Resident above Sixty Years in the United States of America, Related by Himself. It is a relatively short publication that was based primarily on a journalistic interview of Smith that was done well after he had become a prominent business man in the Connecticut. Born the son of a tribal king, Smith, whose original name was Broteer Furro, was purchased by Robert Mumford, the first mate of a slave trading ship for four gallons of rum and a piece of calico.
His story is extraordinary, but more importantly it paints a very rare portrait of the slave experience in New England before the practice was ultimately outlawed. Northern slavery could be every bit as cruel as the treatment of Southern slaves, though Northern slavery had additional dimensions. For example, we learn from Venture Smith that he was allowed one day a week to work for wages and eventually raised the enormous sum of seventy pounds to buy his own freedom. His treatment by the Mumford family was more like that of an indentured servant, though later, after he had been sold to another family in the Connecticut colony, he would be abused.
What is remarkable about Venture Smith is that from the outset, he saw his enslavement as temporary and believed that he could free himself, his wife and his children through hard work. One account of his industry was that he spent a summer splitting hundreds of cords of wood and making considerable money doing it on the one day per week that he could work for wages. Not only would he eventually free his own family, but he would free many other slaves, most of whom fled without paying him back the money he had earned to buy their freedom. He eventually wound up owning a farm and a number of boats that he used to conduct trade along the Connecticut River.
His tale is one of incredible hard work and determination, but also shows us a man who refused to hate because he was far to busy working for his future. In one instance a white colonist stole from him and he pursued him and carried the man into town and demanded justice. He got it. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Venture Smith was never at a loss for how to get along in the white colonial world. He earned the respect of nearly everyone who met him and ultimately inspired even his owners to help him earn his freedom. In those days, a slave could not be simply released because of the burden that a destitute former slave could impose upon a community. Former owners releasing slaves had to post very large bonds (as high as 100₤ which was a sum large enough to buy a farm) to ensure their continued support.
The tale of Venture Smith is a story that every American should know. It is story of amazing determination. Venture Smith may have come to Connecticut as a slave, but died not only a freeman, but a wealthy man of some prominence. His casket was carried to its resting place by both black and white pallbearers. This was not a status that he won by money alone. While it is true that their were considerably better conditions and more opportunities for freedom for Africans in the northern colonies, they were still slaves and often treated with great cruelty. Smith's inner nobility eventually won out over his circumstances. He is true American hero and one that should be celebrated for the quality and force of his character.
