Bringing light into the world
I know I wasn’t going to spend too much time on spiritual topics, but I found myself watching a number of wonderful near-death experience reports, and I thought to myself, these are almost spiritual in nature. They talk about the hereafter, the nature of what we are, our purpose here on Earth, it’s almost like a complete life philosophy. And you can see the people who have had these experiences have been genuinely transformed by it, their reactions give it away, it’s like they know something and have had their lives changed by it.
This man says, our purpose in life is to know joy. So to help ourselves and others we should teach them about joy. This is not always easy, life’s ups and downs teach us first about pleasure and pain, and only later do we find out about joy. When you’re young, life is about chasing happiness, and when you’re older, life is about appreciating joy.
For me, joy is to be found in the real world, not a virtual one. It is about nature, it is about family, it is about meditation. It is about caring for people, about good food, about sharing. In a way, all the things that isolate us make it more difficult for us to find our joy, and modern life with its houses and its cars is great at isolating.
So if we all pay a little more attention to giving others joy, we can succeed in bringing a little more light into the world.
Comments
I like that.
My fundamental purpose these days is to "be a light unto others".
To do that, I must "be a light unto myself" first.
A work in progress.
“Some believe it is only great power that can hold evil in check, but that is not what I have found. It is the small everyday deeds of ordinary folk that keep the darkness at bay. Small acts of kindness and love." Gandalf (Hobbit movie).
The light I try to shine onto the world stage....
Don't take life too seriously, for things are never quite what they seem
life's just a mind-made simulation - a make believe adlib dream
This is not to say that one should take the suffering of others as not real
for in this somewhat lucid dream, actual pain we really feel
Take things as they come, but never for granted should one take
the suffering of other sentient beings, for their suffering is not fake
I guess what I'm trying to say is I may know my life's a dream
but I take the suffering of others seriously, for theirs like mine can be extreme
Sadness is just the joy of what might have been...
One of my main New Age Pop-Buddhism practices at the moment is a sort of adapted Chod breathing in negative/tension/pain and breathing out an abundant aura of positive/relaxed/healing metta.
https://pluralism.org/popularizing-buddhism
meanwhile a recap:
