D.M. Kenyon's Blog, page 7
March 8, 2012
Karma Builder: Today's Karmic Workout: Write Blessings On Your Money
Today's Exercise: Write Blessings On Your Money (or putting your mouth where your money is)
Open your wallet and take out all of the bills.
With a pen or marker, write messages to the people who will eventually receive and pass on the bills.
Your message should be a blessing that anyone can hear like "may everyone who touches this bill know that I want you to be happy." Think carefully about what you want to say. It should only be a few words, but they need to be powerful and authentic. "I don't know you, but I love you anyway."
Avoid religious blessings because in the eyes of someone outside of your religion they may not see such a thing as a blessing. The idea here is to empower someone with your words, not win them over to your point of view. You certainly do not want your words to offend anyone.
Use the marked money in your normal course spending.
Training Note:
Paper money changes hands hundreds of times. It is an opportunity to speak with people that you do not know. It is a chance to let someone know that a perfect stranger is off in a distant part of the world wishing them well and hoping for their prosperity. This may seem like a tiny gesture, and it is, but people notice these things. This is your chance to put something helpful and reassuring into someone's mind and perhaps their wallets too.
Karmic Benefits:
The Gift That Keeps On Giving: it is one thing to communicate an aspiration for someone's well being to them and you should do that regularly. But to put such an aspiration into the karmic circulation of the human race, offers the opportunity to take your tiny impact and multiply it hundreds of times. It adds up.
Germinate Beneficial Thoughts: thoughts grow. When you give someone something beneficial to think about, even for a second, you have helped fill the human living space with a positive intention. Our world is full of harmful "litter" communication, so why not fight back? These ideas can spread like wildfire.
Think About The Stream of Karma: This exercise helps you realize that you words and actions are actually part of a stream of consciousness that flows from one person to the next and leaves behind an impact. Taking responsibility for what you put in the stream is the first step toward removing the pollution of harmful and negative communications that bombard us daily. Make small acts of compassion regularly and you will change the world.
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 7, 2012
Karma Builder: Today's Karmic Workout: Give Your Meal To Another
Today's Exercise: Give Your Meal To Another
Pick a meal during the day. It should be a regular meal and and not a snack.
Give up your meal to someone else and go without.
If you are in a restaurant, buy someone else a meal and then leave without eating.
Giving a sack lunch to a co-worker or a homeless person counts.
Training Note:
Let's face it, most of us can use to skip a meal. But to skip a meal for the benefit of others, is a particularly good thing to do. Notice the conversation in your mind. You might be 100 pounds overweight, but most of us will come up with a wide variety of excuses not to do this exercise. Some people might notice that if you miss a meal, that they even panic a little bit. We eat way more than we need and we can use this excess as a benefit for others, but first we have to pry our own fingers away from our food.
Karmic Benefits:
Breaking Away From Food Addiction: for most of us, our relationship to food is more emotional than anything else. Eating makes us feel better emotionally and when we use food as an emotional pacifier it hurts us both physically and mentally. Breaking this additive relationship with food creates the karma of good health by helping us only eat what we need and keeping our minds clear of addictive behaviors.
Sacrifice: this is a word that hardly anyone ever uses any more. The idea that we give of ourselves to others, even if it is inconvenient or difficult is becoming a lost art. But sacrifice has huge karmic benefits. It creates acts of generosity. It puts our minds in order by having us focus on the positive impact we can have instead of living in our greedy, whiny self-absorption. Sacrifice makes you stronger because it shows you that you don't need what you think you need and by doing without you create an opportunity for others.
Generosity: face it, most of us do not do that many purely generous things. In the Me Generation, we have developed the habit of taking care of ourselves and avoiding any responsibility for taking care of others. A well thought-out act of generosity changes who we know ourselves to be. If you make it a habit, it will change who the world knows you to be.
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 6, 2012
Karma Builder: Today's Karmic Workout: Mindful Breathing
[Practice Note: You can do this exercise almost anywhere, but we suggest that you do not do it while you are driving. While it is unlikely that a beginner will attain "breath body", a state of extreme relaxation, one should focus on driving when driving, which is a form of mindfulness.]
Today's Exercise: Mindful Breathing
Take a breath and notice your breathing the entire way in and the entire way out.
As you breathe, try to make your inhale and exhale take the same length of time.
Focus all of your attention on you breathing including the sound it makes and the feeling in your chest. You can even have the thought "I am breathing". Do this for at least 3 full minutes.
If you want to take the exercise further, stand up and as you do feel the muscles in your legs as they lift your body. You can even say to yourself "I am standing".
The object of this exercise is to only think about what you are actually doing. If you swallow, think to yourself "I am swallowing". If you scratch your head, think to yourself ," I am scratching my head". Do not allow yourself to think about anything that you are not doing. If you drift away, simply return your mind to what it is that you are actually doing. Since you are always breathing, it is a great place to start.
Training Note:
This seems like it is a very easy exercise, but it is not. We spend almost no time thinking about what we are actually doing. We do not notice the feel of the ground under our feet when we walk. We do not smell the air we breathe. We spend most of our day in a day-dreaming version of oblivion. Paying close attention to our breath is the first step toward building the habit of being aware of what we are actually doing. Eventually, with considerable practice, we can be present to most of our day. You will be amazed at what you have been missing.
Karmic Benefits:
Situational Awareness: we spend most of our day in a conversation with ourselves or thinking about things that are not actually in front of us. We can drive for miles and not remember an inch of the journey. Mindful breathing is a path back to being aware of your surroundings. When you focus your attention on "now" it is amazing the benefits. You have less accidents and mishaps. You notice beauty and detail. You also realize that life is not nearly as threatening as you thought.
Stress Is Mostly In Your Day-Dreams: we create way more stress for ourselves thinking about what might happen, what is going to happen or running through our endless loops of thought considering how we are going to deal with situations that are not in front of us. We float off in fantasies and miss the beauty that is right in front of us for real. The real world, is just breathing, walking and occasionally talking to someone. There is not a lot of stress in the vast majority of our day. Remember when you were a child and had to go to the doctor to have a shot? The car ride might be a half an hour and you would spend most of it afraid and already processing the pain. The injection actually caused pain for only about a second or two, but children torture themselves for hours when they know one is coming. This is a habit we do not outgrow.
Where Did These Kids Come From? When you learn to think about what is actually in front of you and what you are doing, you notice a whole new world around you — like your children or your spouse. Training yourself to actually think about your children when they are with you takes practice. Mindful awareness of people around us does not involve contemplating our opinions of them. It is something much more basic. When you see a person next you, mindfulness is merely the practice of noticing. "Sally has on a green blouse." "Bob is lifting his hand and scratching his head." It is nothing more than that. If you allow opinionated commentary to begin, Elvis has left the building.
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 4, 2012
Karma Builder: Today's Karmic Workout: Contemplate Your Own Death
[Practice Warning: If you suffer from depression, are being medicated for depression or another psychiatric condition or have suicidal ideas, you should not do this exercise. The purpose of the exercise not self-destructive; in fact, it is quite the opposite. The purpose of this exercise is to break up our cling and attachment to our own lives that cause us to live in a guarded, suppressed state. This exercise should only be undertaken by people who are mentally well. If at any time you begin to feel overwhelmed or self-destructive, you should discontinue this exercise IMMEDIATELY.)
Today's Exercise:
Find a quiet place to think. Take a moment to relax yourself and establish smooth, long inhales and exhales of equal length.
Visualize the end of our life. There is no need to imagine or fantasize about the cause of your death, just think about the moment when you let go and let go of this world.
Visualize the disintegration of your body and the release of your molecules back into the universe. Perhaps other living things will make use of them.
Consider that your time here is impermanent, that you are only a flash and then you are gone.
Consider that all living things, your parents, your children, your friends and everyone else in 100 years or so, will have passed out of this life.
Notice that you might feel sadness, but most of all, notice that you feel fear or anxiety. Why?
Consider that when you die, you not leaving, you are ceasing to be. Notice how it makes life right this moment seem more precious. Life is precious, but it is also temporary. It is best to make the most of it.
Training Note:
If we really think about it, we do not fear death itself so much as the pain of dying or the psychological sense of loss and separation. Our minds cling tightly to this reality. But what if you lived your life in a state wherein you were always prepared to say good-bye. Not by shutting the world out and pretending that it does not matter, but by having said to everyone around you how much you love them and by appreciating every moment to the fullest while you are here. Our fear dampens our experience of a life that we have not yet lost. When we lose our fear of the future, we are free to fully engage in the present. The secret is to always be in the moment that you are actually in.
Karmic Benefits:
Letting Go Of Your Life: The quickest way to choke off life is to try to preserve it. Our attachment to our lives twists and bends our minds into some pretty unhelpful modes of thinking. Nothing you can do will make you live one day longer than you are going to live, but are you really living at all? Life is most rewarding when you live it freely and without reservation
Embracing The Moment and The People In It: if you were dying and looked up and saw stranger leaning over you with sadness and concern for you, how would you feel about them? They are the last person you will ever see – would you see the miracle of life that they are? Probably. Perhaps you should not wait until you die to get this about your fellow beings. Maybe should look at everyone like they are the last person you will see on this earth.
Make Your Moments Count: You don't have much time, so why are you wasting it on things of no true consequence? If you had an hour to live would you really spending watching reality television? Would you spend your last hour arguing about who gets the television remote? With life as impermanent as it is why do you spend any of your time on petty things. Why spend anytime being cruel or thoughtless? You don't have enough moments to waste like that.
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 3, 2012
Karma Builder: Today's Karmic Workout: Undo The Curse Of A Stereotype
Today's Exercise: Undo The Curse Of A Stereotype
Spend a few minutes thinking about the people in your world that represent to you a "type". You are looking for someone who you know by a negative label like "the typical dumb blond", "the classic macho jerk", "dirty politician", etc. You will know that you have a good test subject because it will be someone that you have reduced to a single label and you are just sure that it fits.
Envision this person sleeping, waking up, eating breakfast, starting their day.
Imagine this person crying over the worst pain in their lives, you may even know what it is.
Imagine this person facing their own death and how afraid they are.
Imagine the pain they feel when they are injured or sick.
Notice how weak and vulnerable they are even if they pretend that they are tough.
Ask yourself, as if you were their guardian angel, what are they desperate for? What is their essential human need that is not being met in their lives?
Notice you mind trying to justify the label and searching for evidence that you are right. Why are you doing this?
Notice that the label you put on them was designed to protect you and to contain them like trapping a genie in bottle. The label actually makes you feel safer, justified or happy in some way. That is why you put the curse of stereotype on them in the first place.
Look and listen for their pain instead of being afraid of their threat and then acknowledge that you cursed them with a label and take it back.
Training Note:
This practice is particularly difficult because in order to do it well, you have to break up thinking that you believe to be true and real, but are really just concepts that you have created out of your own, often strong, emotional needs. People scare us or make us mad and we put trap them inside of labels in order to not have to think about them as much or feel the negative emotions that they trigger in us. These stereotypes function like curses. They are declarations of being, but worse they are promises of the way we intend to treat those whom we have cursed. We have an endless ability to rationalize our stereotyping.
Note that stereotyping through labels actually prevents us from thinking about who a person is in a given moment. It creates prejudice even if it is unwarranted. Even the most violent gang banger has moments of love, remorse, sadness and joy that go unnoticed because we have locked them in the genie bottle of "dangerous". Because we react to them as if our label is true, we are actually creating a self-fulfilling prophesy that creates real conditions that encourages that they will live into what we have called them. Every child knows this experience because parents label their children by telling them "you are always this way or that". Children try to resist these labels, but usually wind up being trapped by them and living into them despite their efforts. The label is an identity with nearly magical power because it draws our cognition to the meaning behind the name. Whether we agree with the label or not, "dumb blond" is in the room because it has been spoken, if only in our minds, and will be given life either because we will treat the person as a dumb blond or they will resist the curse causing it to persist.
The secret here is to destroy the label altogether and relate to people for what is happening with them in the moment of observation and relationship and not in your imagination. In this way, we have a greater opportunity to understand their true condition and contribute to it.
Karmic Benefits:
Liberating Clear Thinking: Among the harmful effects of stereotyping is that the genie bottle works in both directions. For as much as you are trapping their being, you are also trapping your own. By destroying the trap, you are able to not only free them from the constraints of your point of view, but you are able to free your own mind to be able to engage everyone people in real time based on what is really going on.
Turning Off The Auto-pilot: Stereotypes are prefabricated thinking designed to act as "sub-routines" of thinking to allow us to relate to things more quickly than if we actually engaged a situation and studied it for what it is. This has actually helped the human race survive, but in our complex society, it is now hurting us. Seeing people and events for what is really going on is the path to clarity. Otherwise, you just processing your world like Cheez Whiz. Relating to what is really going on gives you greater mastery to contribute to people and events because you can tailor your thoughts and being to what is really happening to create an effective interaction.
Seeing Human Nastiness For The Suffering That It Really Is: We often create stereotypes as a psychological defense. "Snake bad" is a mental short code that we use to help us stay safe, but it is crude and applies to the venomous rattle snake and the harmless garter snake without differentiation because it is not based on complete thinking. When we develop the skill to live outside of our crude mental defenses and engage the world as it actually unfolds, we become aware that many of the things that we tried to curse with stereotypes are actually the artifacts of the suffering of others. If we react harshly to the suffering of others, we make it worse. But when we see it for what it is, we often have the power to help relieve the suffering. This karmic transformation can be profound.
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 2, 2012
Karma Builder: Today's Karmic Workout: Honor Your Billions Of Dead Ancestors
Today's Exercise: Honor Your Dead Ancestors
Find a quiet place to sit. Turn off your cell phone out of respect and so you will not be interrupted.
Think about your parents and then your parents parents and then your grandparents. Notice how the number grows quickly as you go back through each generation.
Try to imagine all of your ancestors, there are millions and millions of them over the past five million years.
Contemplate the fact that it took millions of people millions of years to make sure that you came into this world. Contemplate the sacrifices they had to make to keep each new generation alive and the fact that millions of genetic lines have perished because their ancestors were unable to provide for the survival of the line.
Spend two full minutes in gratitude for the sacrifices of your ancestors for making it possible for you to have life.
Training Note:
We have no real appreciation for what it has taken for us to be here today. Most of us only have a working knowledge of our ancestors that goes back only two or three generations. Consider this: by the time any living person tracks there ancestors back just five hundred years, or twenty-five (25) generations, each of us is the direct descendant of 33,554,432 ancestors. At forty (40) generations you have over a billion direct ancestors (40th great grandparents). By the time you go back 44 generations (20 years per generation), you have more ancestors than currently live on the planet earth. Human beings (homo sapiens) are estimated to have diverged from other species about 350,000 years ago. That's 17500 generations. What this means is that it took a whole lot of people to make a single you.
Think on how improbable it is that you are here. If anyone of those billions of ancestors had have did before giving birth to the next generation, you would not be here. Think of the things those billions of people had to endure, the starvation, the disease, the wars. How many of the people, and they were very real people, hid a child in the grass while their village was being slaughtered by invaders so that you could be here. There is a lot to be thankful for and the implications of this are immense. You are an improbable miracle, but at the same time you are part of an enormous network of people that at some point descend back to a common ancestor about 4.5 million years ago. that is a lot to think about.
Karmic Benefits:
Gratitude For The Gift Of Life: you did not get hear on you own, billions and billions of people struggled, suffered and even died to make your life possible. Seeing yourself as a recipient of a massive historic contribution should make you feel privileged to be here. This kind of gratitude makes a person comprehend the very real miracle of life and relate to the world more graciously.
The Awareness That We Are All Related – Literally: When you realize our very real interconnection, you start to comprehend that harming others is actually a form of self-harm. We only treat people as strangers because they are estranged to us in our minds, not be cause of our biology. We are actually all cousins or various degrees. What would happen if we started to act like a family instead of a world full of selfish individuals who think they have nothing to do with one another?
Understanding Our Sameness While Celebrating Our Diversity: We go to great lengths to believe that we are unique. We think this uniqueness validates us, but it really just separates us from everyone else. Understanding that we are all literally of one blood, allows us to see that our difference are really arbitrary and foolish. This gives us a place to start as we make our way in peace.
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 1, 2012
Karma Builder: Today's Karmic Workout: Speaking Virtue Into The Being Of Another
Today's Exercise: Speaking Virtue Into The Being Of Another
Choose a friend or co-worker in whom you see a virtue that does not often get recognized. It can be "hard working", "honest", "caring", "thoughtful" – pretty much anything.
Spend two full minutes thinking about how you see this virtue in the person and contemplate as many examples as you can as to how that virtue has appeared in that person in your experience.
Tell the person that, at least to you, they are the very manifestation of the virtue that you see. "Betty, I just wanted to tell you that in my world you are the poster child for grace under pressure. I mean it, you are like grace come to life." The point is to make the verbal association "you = virtue". You have to speak the virtue as the person's identity and make sure they understand that they are that for you.
You must be 100% truthful and authentic in your statement.
Tell one other fried or co-worker that you have declared your virtuous friend to be the manifestation of the virtue that you see and make the case for your claim.
Training Note:
Behavior arises out of who we think we are. Sometimes other people will tell us that they see certain things in us and we believe this and begin to behave accordingly. Speaking virtue into the being of another empowers people. It makes them happy to be known for their virtue and it also calls them out to live into that identity. You cannot speak a virtue, however, into a being that does not already possess it. You must see it and then call it out for the person so that they can see that this is how you know them. This energizes the virtue and gives it strength in the being of others.
Karmic Benefits:
Brings Virtue To Life: The best of who we are is often buried under a lot of mental static. But a person who sees a virtue in the being of another has the power to call it out, bring it to the surface so that it becomes unimpaired. An unimpaired virtue brings benefit to everyone.
Empowers Another To Become Virtuous: People are often on the fence about themselves. Why not push them off the fence by acknowledging the best things about them. If we do this for each other everywhere, we will soon be living in heaven right here and right now.
Causes You To Relate To Another As A Person Of Virtue: To call out virtue, you must first be able to see it. This requires that you knock the cynical crust off of your own eyes. The more you have x-ray vision that spots virtue in others, the more you get to live among virtuous people. In the end, this exercise builds merit in both directions.
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
February 29, 2012
Book Review: The Cosmic Serpent By Jeremy Narby (1999)
Jeremy Narby's The Cosmic Serpent is a short, but densely academic book that is 50% footnotes. This is not light reading, but on the other hand, it is essential reading. Narby's premise is that hallucinogenic drugs used by shaman in the Western Amazon actually give them access to medicinal information through knowledge coded in DNA. This would be a rather bizarre premise except for the fact that Narby is a trained PhD. in anthropology and his work is based an extensive survey of academic materials across numerous disciplines.
His journey starts with his experience in the Western Amazon basin where he was invited to try powerful hallucinogen called "ayahuasca". This compound, by itself is mystifying because it is made through a complex chemical process that one would not expect would be within the reach of native Amazonian chemistry. And yet, ayahuasca is used throughout the Amazon rain forest as an access to a hallucinatory world where images of spirits inform shaman how to use the hidden power of the plant life in the Amazon rain forest cure a very broad spectrum of disease. Only in the past decades have pharmaceutical companies invade the province of these shaman to start mining for botanical compounds to patent and basically steal from the indigenous population.
More than an anthropological account of how shaman use hallucination to find cures for disease, The Cosmic Serpent is a challenge to Western rationalism and modern science. Narby calls into serious question the limits of the scientific process and how we come to know things int he industrialized world. His argument is actually quite convincing as he punches holes in rational constructive thinking and makes the case for completely different and more intuitive platform of knowledge.
While many in the scientific world have scoffed at his theories, Jeremy Narby has succeeded at least in throwing a monkey wrench in the the more-myth-than-truth paradigm of science and has opened the door for inquiry into what may prove to be the future of human knowledge.
Karma Builder: Today's Karmic Workout: Food Offering To Wild Beings
Today's Exercise: Make A Food Offering
Pick a meal that you will actually sit down and eat.
Spend at least a full minute looking at the food and realizing that it is more than you really need.
Take at least 20% of what you intend to eat and take it outside and leave it on the ground near a tree or in a quiet corner of a yard where animals can eat it.
Make sure that you do not leave behind non-biodegradable debris such as cups or plates.
Contemplate the condition of wildlife that is around you, even if you live in a city, and consider that the structure of your DNA and the DNA of other living things. It is very nearly the same and ultimately comes from the same origin.
Training Note:
We human beings are particularly adept at seeing anything that is not us as "other". And yet, all living things have DNA and all DNA is remarkably similar in structure and function. This is true about plants and animals. Our ancestors were concerned about protecting nature and considered themselves to be part of it. In our digital world, we are becoming increasingly estranged from our planet and the other species with which we share the biosphere. This is a great source of ignorance and it could prove to be deadly for life on earth.
Karmic Benefits:
Compassion: sharing the essentials of survival, i. e. food, with the rest of nature is a fundamental human activity, a communion if you will, that creates a bond. Understanding that we are part of a biosphere and not something other creates a substantial shift for most of us and puts us in a relationship that assists life instead of harming it. Making a life-giving offering actually causes life, even if only by feeding a small animal for a day. Giving life, instead of taking it, reverses our normal karmic process.
Active Participation: Our separation from the biosphere is only in our heads. The majority of what we eat is DNA based life just like our own bodies. We live in biological system where we are supposed to eat and be eaten. Being conscious of this system changes our thoughts on what we eat, how much we eat and what we do to the world to get food. Actively participating in the this cycle with other life forms has us engage the biosphere instead of assaulting it.
Sacrifice: Giving up part of a meal for the benefit of other living things creates very good karma. We eat way more than we need to begin with. By sharing our resources with other forms of life, we give up something that we don't really need in order to contribute to something that we really do need. This puts our thinking in alignment with the real natural order of things.
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
February 28, 2012
Karma Builder: Today's Karmic Workout: Contemplate Your Home In A Landfill
Today's Exercise: Contemplate Your Home In A Landfill
Walk through your home and look at all of the items in it. Take a deep breath and relax.
Close your eyes and try to imagine everything in your house disintegrating, rotting and falling apart within the next 5 years.
Imagine the building disintegrating in the next 100 years.
Imagine the life cycle of the things in your house from the mining of materials and harvesting of wood, to fabrication, to delivery to the store, your purchase of them and their ultimate destruction and disposal.
Spend two full minutes realizing that all the things that you have worked for are really just temporarily yours as they make their way to a landfill.
Training Note:
Human beings never really own anything. They have legal rights that entitle them to use property for various lengths of time, but eventually we die and "you can't take it with you". Think about your favorite department store and take a breath. Look at the shelves and shelves of things. Think about the trucks coming to that store every day and dropping off more stuff. Now realize that nearly every scrap of this stuff will be in a landfill in less than 5 years, in most cases. Notice the life cycle of the things that we work so hard for – a truck brings it to the store, we work for hours to buy the stuff, a truck takes it to the landfill. Try to visualize the life cycle of the things we buy as a whole process. You will find that it really looks more like termites eating a tree.
Karmic Benefits:
Awareness of Impermanence: Everything in the universe is temporary. This is true about your body, the sun and the ground you walk on. It is particularly true about the stuff you buy. Awareness of impermanence makes us appreciate things in four dimensions (with time being added to our consideration of width, height and depth) and allows us to see beings while they are beings. Impermanence helps us consider the world around us in all of its consequences, as form coming together and then falling apart. Awareness of impermanence breaks up our attachment and mental cling to things and helps us see people as beings and not objects.
Awareness of Waste: Waste is not just bad economics, it is harmful living. The faster we chew up our resources and spit them into a landfill, the faster we die as a global organism. People will go to the gym to prolong their lives, but will not exercise frugality to prolong the life of the biosphere. The karma of waste is ultimately death.
Liberation of Self From Your Stuff: You cannot live without certain things. We need shelter, food, and a variety of other tools and devices to make our lives work. The problem with consumer culture, aside from the incredible waste it produces, is that it trains our minds to see our world as a collection of things instead of systems, processes and being. This is a very narrow minded way to think. Contemplating our stuff as a process, noticing how it materializes from raw materials and disintegrates into particulate waste, lets you see the true vapor trail of what we bring into and take out of existence.
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
