Find It. . .
If you hope to find lasting happiness, you must answer the question, what is your true priority—your inner life or your outer life?
The highest compassion, the only true act of compassion, is to point a person to their own liberation.These are the words of one of my spiritual teachers in response to a question I had asked them about applying the dharma in daily life.
He was gently suggesting that in my thinking I was putting too much emphasis on how to be in the moment with an awakened, open heart. His point was that since it is so easy to get caught in your own emotional and physical needs, you must never give the mind the opportunity to make your ego desires the priority in your life.
The danger in focusing on daily life as dharma is that instead of finding freedom, you simply become a better person-but only insofar as it does not threaten your ego needs. His message to beware of the snares of daily life, to look through them and concentrate on your relationship with the transcendent, is a key teaching in many spiritual traditions, including Christianity and Buddhism.
The teaching suggests that if you are a true seeker, your focus should be on the death of the ego-becoming free of grasping or clinging to the rewards of daily life and cutting through the illusion that anything in this temporal world will bring you lasting happiness. It is a grand vision of steadfast courage that does not yield to temptation or distraction and celebrates the magnificence of what is possible for a seeker of liberation. It brings vitality to your efforts for finding freedom and penetrating the mystery of life.
Peace and Love, Jim
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