Sunday, August 17, 2008

When we look at life we will see different sceneries depending on were we have our view point. The north side of a mountain can look completely different than the south side.

Suppose you’re well-off, with a nice husband, great kids and a nice job, but you feel very miserable and unhappy with your life anyway; maybe you say to yourself: `I have everything I want but I’m so unhappy that I almost want to kill myself´. Suppose you wake up from that depression, maybe with help from a psychologist, from a spiritual counselor or maybe it happens spontaneously, by grace. You will now probably see that you were fooling yourself before and how your mind tricked you. (It was just dark thoughts but you believed they where the truth.) And maybe you will now have the feeling that you have woken up from a bad dream.

If you are very poor, on the other hand, and work 12 hours a day, six days a week, picking grapefruits or bananas, but still have serious difficulties to feed your kids, so that some rich shareholders in a big fruit company can get richer, then all talk of waking up from illusions and the necessity of not taking thought's seriously doesn’t mean much. Other things than self deception and thoughts will be much more important. To wake up from that nightmare you probably have to win money on a lottery ticket.

To wake up doesn't mean the same thing to all people. We have philosophies for the rich and philosophies for the poor, religions for the rich and religions for the poor. Rich people will read the Bible with rich people’s glasses. “To those who have, more shall be given” will be taken literally. And poor people will find that “many of the last shall be the first". In India they have also teachings and gurus for different tastes, slow-witted gurus for slow-witted people, smarter gurus for smarter people and crazy gurus for crazy people. But none of them have the whole truth. Those who claims to know it all, belongs to the slow-witted kind.