WE’VE been told that so many times. In the Bible when it said we just need to ask and it shall be given and knock for the door to be opened. Buddhism tells us that as human beings we have been blessed with immense energy and skill that we can achieve unimaginable levels, but there is the need for mindfulness and the right concentration. Focus, don’t be distracted.
But it’s much easier to be distracted. We should know every time we pick up our mobile phone to browse through social media. Even Islam espoused the simple life. But humans that we are, we regard the simple life and the simple things in life as something we have to achieve. And so along the way we get distracted by everything and conditions are set. I will retire to a simple life after I achieve this. I will become a farmer and tend to the soil hopefully after five years, which will be extended by another five every five years.
Thus, we end up having complicated lives, relationships, and situations.
This much we see around us. It is not uncommon to find someone who has gained popularity to lose track of what earned him/her the popularity, and then wield the tiny power that comes with the popularity to put one over the people he/she should have been serving.
From that spectrum of the world we live in, it’s easy to take on the ways of the corrupt.
Along the way, the corrupt will have a brush with death or land behind bars, and from there will find a new life preaching the Holy Book and the simple life, when it has been there all along, we just prefer the complex and complicated.
“Serenity, regularity, absence of vanity, sincerity, simplicity, veracity, equanimity, fixity, non-irritability, adaptability, humility, tenacity, integrity, nobility, magnanimity, charity, generosity, purity. Practice daily these 18 ‘ities’ you will soon attain immortality,” Socrates said.
Reading through the 18, the rules seem complicated, but we get down to the brass tacks, we find everything emanates from being at peace, at being serene. As Socrates said, so has many other teachers of life that has come and gone.
“We can begin to let go of the complications that cause us to suffer by cultivating a simple state of awareness. In this process, tiny steps yield big results, in part because simplicity is nature’s default position. Suffering and the complications that fuel it are unnatural; it wastes energy to maintain complexity,” wrote Deepak Chopra.
Gurus through the ages, prophets and seers, all saying one thing.
But we can’t be bothered to believe so until a life-changing moment in our life will hit us, usually a life-threatening disease or some other near-departure to Kingdom come.
Indeed, we wonder, why we can’t just do as has been said...
If you’re wondering what brought out these thoughts, then I’m going to disabuse your mind and say, this is all about the present administration and the demi-gods therein; they who think the people owe them because the President came to be. You get a glimpse of it in the catfights that abound all over. I can only shake my head in incomprehension.