Sunday July 23, 2006
The positive side effects of a spiritual path
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Pointing out the inevitable failure of aspiring towards money, beauty, wealth, and material items, he draws a harsh but enlightening truth: “Material development is only for this life. We can’t take it with us when we die.”
His talk centred on the need for us to develop a sense of spirituality in the way we live.
While this is often, again, dismissed as something too imprecise for dealing with today’s problems, Lama Michel notes that all it is, is “diminishing our anger, jealousy and desires (where we project our happiness on something impermanent, like material items); and developing love, compassion and generosity.
“This is the spiritual path. It doesn’t matter how we do it,” he says.
“Normally we make excuses for our negativities. For example, if we’re angry, we don’t apply the antidote to stopping it, we don’t deal with it when it arises but push it back inside from where it came from. We rehabituate the anger.”
The bigger question is whether we actually want to stop the things that hurt us, and aspire towards things that will actually help us.
From a Buddhist perspective, Lama Michel reminds us, “We could all be enlightened now, but we just don’t want it,” that we’re directing all our energies only towards things we desire on a surface level, not what will truly help us.
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