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Matthew Fox in Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the Flesh
I believe that the true moral path of the twenty-first century will be very different from the modern era because it will be marked by generosity: not "Everyone for himself (or herself)" but "Who can give away the most?" — the most time, the most of one's gifts, the most of one's dreams and hopes and accomplishments of hands, head and heart.
I believe that the true moral path
Happiness
I sell my happiness with words
As if it were money
And maybe
It is
Because if people have it
They smile and laugh
With joy in their bodies
Happiness
Takes sadness from many
And gives them joy that cheers them up
How beautiful life would be
To erase sadness
Spread happiness to those who need it
And make their day better
I am truly happy
And so . . .
Are you
Originally published in KidSpirit Online for the Fulfillment issue.
When he wrote this poem, Andrew Glinski was a freshman at Mamaroneck High School in Mamaroneck, New York. He is passionate about sports, especially lacrosse, basketball, and golf. He hopes to play college lacrosse.
A poem by KidSpirit Online contributor Andrew Glinski.
Deep Hope
"We always have something to give. Sometimes, all we can give is the gift of ourselves — our intention to be fully present and respectful, to meet others with openness. We can give our story or listen to another's story. We can give our fearlessness, encouragement, or silent support of all kinds. We can give our stability or effort. We can give speaking and listening from the heart.
"We can also practicing giving to ourselves with an open magnanimous mind. Putting ourselves first is sometimes the generous thing to do, but without magnanimous mind, it's self-indulgence. This is a tricky one and not always easy to discern. But, from the perspective of Zen, all giving begins with ourselves. We can give ourselves the opportunity to be fully present in the experience of anger, aware of our clenching teeth and tensing muscles. We can give ourselves the experience of the pounding heart of fear. We can give ourselves the experience of the heavy body and tearful eyes of sadness. To open our heart and minds to our experience is a form of giving and receiving.
"When we open to our experience in this way, we relinquish the boundaries, the holding on. Instead of drawing our circle in closer and tighter, we can lean into its circumference and question deeply held requirements in the self's thinking about how it should be or needs to be. This is also generosity. When we give ourselves the gift of relinquishing that requirement, we open up the space to turn toward the experience of what's happening. And we open to those experiences. This is generosity — openness, acceptance, allowing."
Try a Spiritual Practice of Paying it Forward
A Zen Buddhist understanding of giving.
Minding the Earth, Mending the World
" 'Becoming like this' and renouncing preferences can be a joyful, playful business with considerable creative payoff. Zen Master Banzan showed how. Or rather, a butcher showed him how, quite by accident, when Banzan overheard him talking to a bossy customer. The customer demanded, 'Show me your best cuts of meat. I want only the best meat in your shop!' The butcher protested proudly, 'But everything in my shop is best! There's no piece of meat in my shop that is not the best!' Banzan was struck by collateral lightning, you might say. 'Everything is best!' hit him with such force that he could never quite shrink the world back to his own small terms again.
"In some parts this is called 'enlightenment'. But really, it's just consistently dropping the resistance in your mind while doing all you can to be of some help. After a while, it will be hard to tell you from a cool breeze passing right through.
"This best has no room in it for better or worse; in fact it has trouble separating you from me, or valuing this leaf on the tree while finding that one hard to like. That threadbare leaf on the ground, is it not as completely itself and in place as a shining one still intact on the tree? 'Everything is best' sees right through preferences to the reality of infinite relationship in which everything counts and is completely worthy of awareness and care. 'This' is a word for it in the present koan. 'Become like this.'
"It's actually not so hard to try it out. Watch waves rolling to shore or breaking onto rocks for an hour or so and try to find a single one you can't admire. Or a patch of grass with one blade of grass that fails to be the best.
"Another Zen troublemaker, Linji, was heard famously to say, 'There is nothing I dislike.' This did not make him a pushover, just a bit more fluid, responsive and in the right place at every moment, the way the creek flows, the mountain stands its ground, the clouds dissolve and form. What makes such relaxed readiness possible is having no constant interruption from a self that needs to say, 'But what about me. I deserve the best!'
"We all deserve the best, it's just a matter of seeing how you already have it. When you can see in all directions nothing but the best doing its best, we're freed up to be of some use. Until then, the sense that so much is wrong, and that it has grown too late to fix it may defeat even the best of us.
"Nothing is held back in the natural world, neither life nor death, and by this unparalleled generosity we continually test our limits. Giving away what we are, and have, until life goes back in to the mysterious place it came from — that's the only way to hold the gift of being here. Our limits are transparent, with no final state. They don't need to hold us back, so we just go beyond them. That's 'becoming like this' too, a more fearless generosity that knows that uncontrived reality is the only safe place from which to act.
"So 'I have already become like this' cedes a lot — everything, to be exact — to the way things are, and the generosity hidden in that is easy to appreciate because it embodies love that leaves nothing out. This 'already' quietly contains a lifetime of rigorous practice of awareness.
"It takes all you are to know yourself this way. But that's love, and it keeps us entirely on our toes and in the world."
Susan Murphy on being grateful for what you have.
Being Generous
"And so we can see that in virtually every tradition (religious as well as secular) humankind has known — every faith community on every continent and also among those who are agnostic or even atheistic — there exists a diverse set of teachings that emphasize generosity. Being generous is, I would therefore argue, not just a core part of the human condition, but a universal moral urge, our defining nature. Since generosity so defines our human nature, it is one of the few things on which people around the entire globe, though on different pathways, can agree.
"There is a long religious history of wisdom, commonly defined as the judicious application of knowledge. The Book of Wisdom is part of the Roman Catholic Bible. Nearly every religious tradition venerates wise thinking and the persons who do it. The Jewish proverb 'fear of God is the beginning of all wisdom' (Prov. 1:7) is not atypical. For the ancient Hebrews, this fear started with hating evil, arrogance, and pride. The wisdom of giving, and of giving generously as a habit, can also be traced to pre-modern times. In fact, generosity as a virtue has long been considered a central part of wisdom.
"Seeds of unity have been planted around the world throughout the ages. I believe it is not too much to hope that today, in a world beset by momentous choices and unprecedented problems, people will take a closer look at the virtue of generosity and, as a result of this examination, seek and work toward a global community and local communities united by giving.
"Remember, however, that giving is not exclusively for the rich. The widow gave her 'mite,' and it was more generous than the rich young ruler. Giving is for everyone."
Theodore Roosevelt Malloch saluting generosity as a universal moral urge and our defining nature.
How Can I Help?
This is a watershed work of ethical import for all those involved in the helping professions. Ram Dass and Paul Gorman have written a cogent work on caring that tells the stories of those who have served others and found their own lives enriched: a doctor, a minister, a drug counselor, a literacy tutor, a nun, and many others.
"Shall I become involved or not, and if so, how deeply? How much human pain to let in, and whose?" — these are questoins faced by all those who care. The authors describe the mental roadblocks (pity, abstraction, professional warmth) which stifle the "inherent generosity of the heart." They describe the different motivations for serving others and the necessary lineaments of "the listening mind."
One hazard of the helping profession is "know how" or specialization. Another is burnout. Dass and Gorman offer avenues of renewal which make sense. They note: "Service is an endless series of questions, puzzling and insistent. It not only raises questions, it helps to answer them. Service is a curriculum."
A watershed work for those in the helping professions.
Path to Buddhahood
Ringu Tulku has been a university professor of Tibetan studies for seventeen years and a visiting professor at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, for five years. In this user-friendly paperback, he interprets Gampopa's classic text in Tibetan Buddhism that outlines the step-by-step path toward enlightenment. There are chapters on Buddha nature, a precious human life, the spiritual friend, the instructions of the spiritual friend, perfect Buddhahood, and the activities of a Buddha.
Ringu Tulku clarifies some central aspects of this philosophy and way of life. For example, he reveals that when Buddhists talk about emptiness, Westerners usually think it means nothingness. Instead it means that everything is interdependent and all phenomenon are "empty of an essential independent nature." He also explains that every human being is capable of kindness and the understanding of right from wrong. That is what is meant by the phrase that we are all little Buddhas.
Given the large number of wealthy people in the West, it is interesting to note that according to Tibetan tradition, these individuals have achieved this status because they were generous in previous lives. So instead of trying to get rich right now, we should learn to give. Then perhaps in a future life, we too will be rich. But Tulku advises us to remember that "if we are rich but don't have the courage to enjoy what we have and share it with others, then no matter how much we possess, it's as if we had nothing."
These are only a few of the insights into Tibetan Buddhism to be found in this clearly written and ethically profound paperback.
A clearly written and ethically profound exposition of a classic text that also clarifies some central aspects of this philosophy and way of life.
Sacred Practices for Conscious Living
"One of my favorite metaphors for representing the intricacy
of psychological wholeness is the kaleidoscope....Every change in
pattern and color happens as a result of a shift of pieces that
already exist, that are already part of the whole. Pieces that
were hidden suddenly come into view and add their quality to the
overall pattern," writes marriage and family therapist Nancy J.
Napier in Sacred Practices for Conscious Living. All the pieces are in place to find sacred meaning in our lives. We can, in the author's words, become co-creators with God by taking responsibility for what happens to us each and every day.
Napier begins with an exploration of what it means to live consciously by looking at the shadow, those parts of ourselves which we have repressed and disowned. She then examines the enriching potentials of nurturing our bodies, practicing mindfulness and equanimity, expressing compassion and lovingkindness, mining intuition and connections, and tapping our capacity for gratitude and generosity. Throughout the book, Napier includes questions, exercises, and guided meditations to enable readers to make the most of her transpersonal psychological advice.
Explores the quest for sacred meaning.
Rambam's Ladder
Julie Salamon is a culture writer for the New York Times and author of the bestselling novella The Christmas Tree. She begins this provocative work on generosity with the following words: "We spend a lot of time thinking about why people are bad. Just as perplexing, maybe more perplexing, is why they are good."
To explore this moral topic, she delves into a treatise written by Rabbi Moses ben Maimon, a 12th century physician, philosopher, and scholar known to the Greeks as Maimonides and to his followers as Rambam. He created an eight-step ladder to explain the different levels of giving. The bottom rung would cover tossing some coins to a beggar in order to get rid of him; the top would be making a gift that enables someone to become self-reliant. Salamon uses illustrations from her own encounters with a homeless person on the street and her participation in the Bowery Residents Committee. She also provides fascinating material on corporate giving, celebrity charities, and American aid to other countries.
One quote that really rocked us is from the late Stephen Jay Gould: "The tragedy of human history lies in the enormous potential for destruction in rare acts of evil, not in the high frequency of evil people. Complex systems can only be built step by step, whereas destruction requires but an instant. Thus, in what I like to call the Great Asymmetry, every spectacular incident of evil will be balanced by 10,000 acts of kindness, too often unnoted and invisible as the 'ordinary' efforts of a vast majority."
Salamon guides us through the contemporary world of sharing and makes it clear that there is a lot more at stake when we pick up a pen and write out a check to a charity or volunteer to give blood or make a decision to tithe than we once thought.
Uses an ancient Jewish text to shed light on the complications of contemporary charity.
The Garden of Dervishes
For 20 years, Sheikh Muzaffer Ozak al-Jerrahi was the Sheikh of the Halveti-Jerrahi Order of Dervishes, a Sufi order with many circles in Turkey and America. He passed into the eternal realm in 1985. In the foreward to this book, Sixtina Friedrich, the Masjid al-Farah, comments: "Sheikh Muzaffer had made sure that he had delivered the trust bestowed on him by God, the declaration of God's Oneness, la ilaha illallah (There is no god but God). As a spiritual teacher he deposited the most precious treasure in the hearts of the members of his spiritual family."
This paperback contains essays by Sheikh Muzaffer translated from Turkish by Muhtar Holland. The first is a mystical catechism presenting an overview of Sufi understandings of divine creation, human destiny, outer cleanliness and inner purity, the role of the spiritual guide, love and affection, divine remembrance, and more.
Sheikh Muzaffer at one point emphasizes the essential interplay between faith, worship, and moral character. All three are underlined by one common denominator. "Sincerity is often a prerequisite for worship and sincerity constitutes the greater part of moral virtue." Especially impressive is the Sufi scenario of "The Four Gates and the Forty Stages on the Way to Truth." Each gate is associated with certain conditions. For example, the fourth gate, "The Gate of Marifa" includes the spiritual practices of self-knowledge, solitude, modesty, generosity, and hospitality.
The second essay here covers holy sites and how to conduct oneself when visiting the tombs of saints. He talks about the charisma of these holy beings who are "Friends of Allah." Best of all, Sheikh Muzaffer presents the adab or spiritual etiquette to be used when visiting these sacred places.
A succinct mystical catechism and the etiquette appropriate for visiting the tombs of saints (the friends of Allah).