Thursday, 9 February 2006

An Open Heart

A book by Dalai Lama, one of the leading spiritual teachers of our time. In this book, he invites the reader regardless of their background, race & religion to open their compassionate and kind hearts.

He stresses on the fact that we are very much born similar, similar in our innate desire to be happy and without suffering. That all of us have the very same underlying potential to enjoy blissful peace and a calm mind.

With such an understanding in mind, we open our hearts to the people around us, to see them as equals and to start on a path of kindness. In the book, he also prescribed some techniques used in the Tibetan Buddhism to cultivate a lasting compassion for all beings.


More than often, we are caught up in the whirls of this material world. Sometimes so caught up in it that we become unmindful of the present moment. Instead, we keep going backward or forward in search. During the process, we hurt ourselves and others, be it knowingly or unknowingly. All these stems from our fundamental ignorance.

Ignorance of what? ~ ignorance of the treasures we already have in life. The treasures includes your family, friends and everything, even the trees around that provides us with shelter and oxygen. Ignorant that we have no true self and that all are dependant on one another.

This is because that is. We cannot be here in this very moment if conditions did not exist right for us. Example, a tree cannot be here if there is no sun, no water, no earth. All conditions had to exist before it can transform from a seed into a tree. Looking deeply like this, we can see that the whole cosmos exist within us. Every single factor has to be just right in order for us to be here in this exact moment. Isn't it wonderful just to be alive? =)

Why not open the heart to embrace and treasure this moment, the people and all things that is already surrounding us? Don't look elsewhere, all we need is already here and now. We just need to open our kind hearts. =)

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