To begin with, a joke:
Having worked all life long a man amassed himself a fortune, and felt he now deserved himself a settled married life. So he married a stunningly beautiful and charming lady. He soon found out that his lovely new wife had the misfortune of having had three husbands, all quite wealthy, who all had died un-natural deaths.
To console her, over a candle lit dinner, he asked his wife how her previous husbands had died.
She said the first husband had died of food poisoning.
"And the second?"
"Also of food poisoning."
"Oh I am sorry. Did the third one die of food poisoning as well?"
"No. He died of strangulation."
"That's a tragedy. How did that happen?"
"The fool would not eat up the poisoned food I gave him."
I Decide How I React to Events.
One of the most common reasons for unhappiness in my life is anger and annoyance.
Anger, because someone has hurt me, and annoyed because things are not going my way.
I need to recognise that these feelings are really my own perceptions of what is happening to me. They are my own thoughts concerning the external events happening to me. The thoughts are mine. I should be able to control them.
One person may bemoan his ill fate that he has been blinded by an accident. Another may overcome that same ill luck and become a home minister of his country. One can be born a wrong colour, in a country where such things matter, and yet go on to study to high levels,
and then aspire to be, and become the President of his country.
I remember attending a Nichiren Shoshu Buddhism meeting at Richmond, in Surrey, where the speaker had two glasses of water on the table. In one glass in addition to the water, there was a brown sediment at the bottom. The speaker took a glass rod and stirred the water in the glass with the water alone. The water remained clear. He then, with the same rod, stirred the water in the other glass. That water became a muddy brown colour.
The lesson was simple. The glass rod, external event, was not the cause of the water going cloudy. The ultimate cause for that to happen was in the water itself. The anger shown by a person is in the person, not in the event.
There is no point saying, the other person cut me in, so I can, at the next traffic lights, pull him out of his car, and punch him up. "He made me do it- he made me angry". No, my anger was the way I responded to his action.
May be if everyone could learn to control their feelings, understand that how they react to a situation is their choice, a lot of quarrels, fighting, and misery in the world will disappear.
The world will become a better place to live in.
To learn to control one's feelings, thoughts, is one subject of meditation. That is what I will find out more about in the next few days.
I thank you for reading my blog. Please do help me along by giving me your ideas in the comment box of this blog.
Wishing you all the best, Shree-1
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