Best Of
The Art of Happiness
A friend on another forum said to me, “You seem to want to idealise poor people. Would you ever choose to live long-term as a poor man in India?”
I would wish for them to have happiness, which cannot be bought, but which can be found in Freedom. I don’t think that’s idealising people, just acknowledging that the quest for happiness is universal.
Often it is people’s desires that make them unhappy, whether they realise it or not. People who think they are too fat, lonely and wanting a rich husband, envious of the status of others, it all is desire and part of the mind.
So I think whether you are rich or poor, there is a way to happiness, as long as you know the art of being satisfied with life’s small pleasures. A cup of tea, or a favourite piece of music on the radio.
As a child, your expectations are small. As an adult, things get out of hand. Your desires get large, until you start on the spiritual path and let it all go again, recognising the ultimate futility of the thing. And in the end you are satisfied with a cup of tea again.
In Poonjaji the other day I read “this is the discrimination of the burning ghat: in the end there is nothing left of your body but a few ounces of ash.” And you can’t take possessions, money or family with you when you go.
Jeroen
Re: No Buddhist Quotes
“This is the clue I can give to you: stop your activity. This is called Love, and Happiness, and Nirvana. Stay like this in Satsang and outside also. Thank your stars that your mind even wanted to come to Satsang! This is quite enough because mind attached to senses is trouble, and mind detached from senses is Freedom.”
— Poonjaji
Jeroen
Re: DoubleSpeak...
There is a psychological and a spiritual realm in which to approach communication.
These noodles are about the latter.
Are our egos not just personifications of a fundamentally delusive communication?
The degree that one stops enabling our ego's inertia is the degree that ones communications are no longer just an expression of that ego's momentum.
Beyond a dubious mastering of one's communicative skills, less suffering bound possibilities can arise as skillful means.
Here, no longer caught up in a habituated adversarial dance between subjects & objects, the questions & answers need not contest with each other.
Put more simply, in our respective practices, how does getting ourselves out of the way of an attempted communication, result in truths that might otherwise be obscured?
how
Re: DoubleSpeak...
I regularly watched The Daily Show when Jon Stewart hosted it the first time and would listen to Al Franken and other shows on Air America. They would often point out the spin and obfuscation (doublespeak) the right would conduct. I developed a lay understanding of what to watch for and began to see how the narrative was spun. However, having learned the underlying form rather than just the specific examples I began to see the same patterns and behaviors from left leaning sources. I lost a basic trust that what I was hearing was an accurate picture so I began to listen more broadly and am coming to see more and more that pretty much no one gives a truly accurate and honest picture of reality. My attitude now is that most points of view have something worthwhile to contribute as well as inherent and relatively unavoidable biases. To really get an accurate picture requires a collective, at times collaborative and at other times conflictive, effort. What people often call our sense making institutions such as science and journalism at their best rely on.
Essentially its all doublespeak to a mild or major degree and it requires a collective effort of diverse, good faith views to gain a less wrong picture of the world.
person
Re: DoubleSpeak...
@person, do you think it is worthwhile to acquire this nuanced understanding of the American right for a left-leaning European? My understanding of even Dutch politics is pretty sketchy, and I’m wary of just wading in.
Jeroen
