Be Strong Where You Need To, And Weak Where You Can - Blogs, Self-development

2023 Author: Oswald Adamson | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-05-21 20:18

Active humility is the awareness and acceptance of the limitations imposed by the objective order of things.

The inhabitants of the small mountain kingdom of Bhutan are not spoiled by civilization, but they consider themselves lucky. In 2006, psychologist Adrian White built a global ranking of happiness and named Bhutan the happiest country in Asia and the eighth in the "happiness index" in the world (Russia is 167th in this list). In the kingdom itself, they even abandoned the material indicator of GDP and measure "gross domestic happiness."

One of the conditions for happiness is: "Your needs should not exceed your capabilities." I dare to assume that the Bhutanese simply do not have the needs that a person living in modern civilization has - that is why they are happy. Good or bad is a separate question. But happy in Bhutanese can only be those who were born and raised there, those people whose needs are minimally Bhutanese. This "happiness" is not intended for a person of Western civilization, although it is traded, and successfully, by sellers of Eastern sweets and wisdom. Bearded, fine looking gurus, endlessly quoted on social media and living in exotic locations.

SWING OF SATISFACTION

When a person is completely satisfied with his life, he has nothing to change and, accordingly, there is no point in developing! Ahead of criticism, I will emphasize the word "completely". It turns out that contentment does not stimulate development, but, on the other hand, it contributes to the enjoyment of life. Harmonious people are rarely outstanding, because they do not want to prove anything to anyone.

With dissatisfaction, on the contrary, stimulating dissatisfaction with life, it can give impetus to development.

When a person develops to the level of a perfect being - a kind of bodhisattva, he has nowhere to grow and there is no need to grow. And dissatisfied people - those who constantly strive to do better and better - will never really be happy with the result they get.

In order, on the one hand, to develop, and on the other, to feel moderately unhappy / happy, it would be nice to find the optimal amplitude of the swing of satisfaction - dissatisfaction.

WHERE YOU ARE ENLIGHTENED, THERE YOU WILL SECURE

The fully satisfied people I met lived as "hermits" and were happy only when they were in their "caves." As soon as they got out into the light of day, faced with real life problems, it turned out that they were hiding in a cave, because they simply did not have enough energy to fully live “in the world”.

I talked with "cave yogis" in the Crimea; they lived there for two or three months, practiced yoga, ate "only grass". They were proud that they did not know anything about what was happening in the world. They continued to develop in their limited spiritual practices, but the yardstick for them was only themselves and their spiritual teacher. They did not even admit the thought that they could be wrong. Their guru is infallible. When they argued with each other (and there were representatives of different "yoga confessions"), whose teacher is cooler, Abhidharma First or Abhidharma Second (I don't remember the exact names), all their enlightened humility disappeared somewhere.

At the moment I met, I envied the strength of their spirit. And then I thought that maybe they left society because they were weak - they just ran away. You can't run away from yourself either to Goa, Bali, or Nepal.

In Russia, judging by the statistics, there are not many satisfied people. Probably, this explains the craving for spiritual practices that promise such a state.

Is it possible to achieve satisfaction without running away from life? It seems to me that you can. With the help of active humility: to be strong where it is needed, and weak where it is possible, to be active in those situations where something depends on your activity, and to save nervous energy, to turn on "healthy indifference" in those situations where little depends on you. The question, as always, is in personal wisdom: how to distinguish one from the other.

Those who claim to be completely satisfied with life are either saints, or they are not able to see their inner "sensor of dissatisfaction", broken as a result of mental trauma, or are deceiving. Not so much in front of us as in front of us.