You are richer than most of the humans who have ever lived, present or past, in terms of your wealth measured by luxury and material comforts such as the size, location, durability and design of your house, your bed’s fluffiness, whether you have gone a day without eating at all because you literally didn’t have food, and whether you have a shiny equipped toilet and that big car most riches are buying.
Am I wrong or won this bet about you?
If I’m not wrong, are you grateful? Are you so, really?
Or for you wealth, safety, and material comfort tend to be addictive, like drinking more alcohol is to an alcoholic?
Honestly, it’s a little of both.
These are not rhetorical questions. Please, I would love to know your views.
Do the things you own end up owning you? Does caving to fear only make it stronger?
Even with their electric-powered refrigerators stuffed full with food, the greedy will always starve. They are insatiable, and feeding the greed usually only makes it hungrier. Don’t you agree? The tummy expands.
The good part is you need to give up your tons and tons of wealth to be truly happy and content, with persistent inner peace that is practically invincible to outer circumstance. For sure, you can avoid the alcoholism while still being moderate drinker and even moderation is often best enjoyed only in limits of need. In fact, because inner peace, gracefulness, and the habit of gratitude are each so practically invincible to the variations of outer circumstance and petty luck, they, meaning inner peace, gracefulness, and the habit of gratitude are also compatible with self-discipline, moderation, and extreme indulgence.
For instance, you can have the benefits of bravery, inner peace, and unconditional acceptance–and keep your running toilets and electric refrigerators. The former’s are virtues and latter are materialistic.
Luxuries only tend to push you in the direction of addiction. It’s merely a tendency. You can be exceptional or maybe not.
In other words, the things you legally own don’t need to own you if you choose to hold them with an attitude of unpossessed gratitude, realizing that in time nothing is truly owned but only temporarily borrowed from the sands of time, for a very short time.
But the present moment seems to be eternal. Present is not simply a now in time for there is no objective time and no universal now, but rather a now in timeless space-time. That present–that seemingly eternal here and now–appears to be mysteriously linked to consciousness somehow, For if I, my body and my memories was to become you in given time then at what time I would not be me but you ? Perhaps there is no such point if fundamentally I am you and you are I. Or perhaps the limit lines and borders printed on reality are fictions of a beautiful mind prone to pretty and beautiful imagination, and perhaps such divisions are not fundamentally real, but just arbitrary conceptions and false assumptions. We always thought that Legos make structures but may be point of view that the Legos are made of structure is more apt.
These human bodies may be like different eyes of a shared mind, some that see more clearly or blurry, some that see with more gratitude and inner peace and some that are clouded by hate and resentment, acting like dirt that the can be wiped away, but even the dirt may be revealed as lovable to one who sees it clearly.
Those eyes that see most clearly may see the whole world revealed as a mirror. They may look at other humans and see not bodies but consciousness, see not others but an indivisible beautiful singular self, a single real whole with no actual opposite.
Mirrors only give the appearance of an opposite.
When you look at the mirror, when you look at the world, isn’t it beautiful?
Be grateful, relax and appreciate !
