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“Not to worry about,” I replied, “to care about. You’ve nothing to care about. Find a purpose, a cause bigger than yourself so you may have a reason to care, to live and to grow.”
Simple lives are beautiful lives. This is my view. A good meal, two ticks of laughter, a gesture of love, an act of kindness, that’s what life is about, that’s what simplicity is about. It’s these small gestures, these simple moments, that make you feel complete, fulfilled.
On a more serious note, the root cause of attachment is ignorance. The monkey had placed a greater value on the banana than its own freedom. To let go of the banana, it must exercise conscious detachment from the object of desire (a banana in this case). You consciously detach yourself from something for a few weeks and detachment happens automatically. You quit drinking tea, for example, for a few weeks and the desire to have tea will go away. Try it to believe me.
If there’s any way to change your destiny then it is by working on yourself. Everything falls in place then. Gems and stones, totems and trinkets, and what have you, cannot change the course of time. If your marriage is on the rocks, then both partners have to work on it. If you are under debt, then you’ve got to cut down your expenses and increase your income. Wearing a certain stone or pacifying a certain planet is not the answer,
The truth is, life will confuse you. You will have to make choices, make decisions. You will need to make up your mind. There’s little wisdom in putting it off. The course of history was changed by those who challenged the ‘common practices’, who refused to withstand the oppression, who decided to stand up, and not by those who kept quiet. Nothing changes unless we act on it.
In the absence of wind, the flame stays steady; similarly, a tranquil mind remains still in the absence of desires. And once again: desires are simply thoughts that you haven’t been able to drop. With an ever present mind that has turned inward or surrendered to the Divine, you will never find yourself pursuing unwanted thoughts. In that state of non-pursuit, how can there be any disagreeable reactions from you? In the light of the vigilance of the still mind, how can there be any deviation from the object of your meditation (read bliss)? A mind that has gone empty fills with love naturally.
No waterfalls emanate from dry mountains. They come from the ones that once absorbed rainwater, they gush forth from the ones that are full. The more love you pour in you, the more flows out of you. Fill yourself with what you wish to give out, for what’s inside is what manifests outside.
