“A very poor man, after a great deal of work, manages to accumulate a whole sack of grain… he was very proud of himself and when he got home, strung up the bag of grain to keep safe from the rats and thieves. Lying underneath, for added protection of his loot, the man’s mind began to wander, ‘ If I can sell this grain off in small quantities, that will make me the biggest profit. With that profit I can buy more grain and do the same again and again, and before long, I will become rich, and I will be someone to reckon with in the community. Plenty of girls will be after me. I’ll marry a beautiful woman, and before long have a child and it will have to be a son…. What on earth will we call him?’. Gazing out the window, the poor man saw the rising moon. ‘how auspicious! that is a good name, I’ll call him ‘As Famous As The Moon’. At that instance, before the man could utter the words out loud, the bag of grain dropped from the ceiling, killing the man instantly.. ‘As Famous As The Moon’ was never born….”
How often do we find ourselves swept away by busy or active laziness?
Busy laziness or active laziness is what we experience, as a result of not recognizing our life priorities, while we are experiencing the sufferings of samsara…..Fulfilling
ones life mission is the basic sense of peace and happiness…
Samsara the endless realm of the illusion (not reality) of the life death cycle. This drowns us in the uncontrolled ocean of suffering. Imprisoned in the very aspect of our own death, with not its acceptance..
How hollow and futile life can be when founded on a false belief of continuity and permanence, are we unconscious living corpses?
The kind of comfort most of us seek is a kind of stopgap comfort………
Stop´-gap` That which closes or fills up an opening or gap; hence, a expedient. Moral prejudices are the stop-gaps of virtue.
Comforts of material lifestyles, and daily accumulations of ‘things’ to be responsible for, to ‘protect’ from thieves, is the basic cycle in suffering. To protect from loss, the ultimate failure in the recognition of impermanence.
We experience this kind of laziness because we have a problem recognizing our real life’s priorities. Even if we have time, we put the most important thing in our life—our spiritual development—on the back burner.
Instead of working to live, how many of us find we are living to work. Do we ever find we are not living our life, but it is living us? Modern samsara feeds off an anxiety and depression that fosters and trains us well to be greedy, obsessed with hopes and dreams and desires of attachment…and endless vicious cycle of desire of permanence, within the reality of impermanence…Impermanence is an essential part of our understanding of reality…not even the universe is permanent…..our ‘universe’ as we know it is in flux, everything is changing always..
The Great Deception
The birth of a man is the birth of his sorrow. The longer he lives, the more stupid he becomes, because his anxiety to avoid the unavoidable death becomes more and more acute. What bitterness! He lives for what is always out of reach! His thirst for survival in the future makes him incapable of living in the present. Chuang Tzu
Taking life seriously, knowing it is very impermanent. Pay attention to your motives. Our intentions determine the true nature of our actions….
References:
Matthieu Ricard: a Buddhist monk residing at the Shechen monastery near Kathmandu, Nepal. Coauthor of The Monk and The Philosopher, The Quantum and the Lotus.
Trinh Xuan Thuan: professor of astronomy at University of Virginia and author of The Secret Melody, The Quantum and the Lotus.
Sogyal Rinpoche : Tibetian born and raised, one of the spiritual masters of the century, Jamyang Khyentse Chokyi Lodro. Founder and spiritual director of Rigpa, an international network of Buddhist groups and centers. Author of The Tibetian Book of Living and Dying.
GELEK RINPOCHE is a lama in the Geluk lineage of Tibetan Buddhism and the founder of Jewel Heart, based in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He is the author of Good Life, Good Death: Tibetan Wisdom on Reincarnation.
