How to Reduce Sadness

If you have no useful purpose, your work, job, something that you do that is useful and serving humanity daily, or if you do not find what you do to be a useful service, then you may have a feeling that there is no reason for you to get up in the morning. Whether we realize it consciously or not, in contemplation we will find that our basic nature is to serve other people.

If we look at religions, God wants us to serve Him or Her, we are created to serve God. How do we serve God? What a ridiculous thought, what could we do for God that It could not do for Itself? The answer is, by serving our fellow beings. If we do not do that, we are not fulfilling a great part of our purpose for being and practicing a method of fulfilling the goal of our individual evolution. Therefore we may get into a depression to some degree due to the lack of that food. If we do not believe in this one God but rather follow a path of self liberation, there is still the goal of the Bodhisattva which is to work toward the ending of suffering of all sentient beings.

Being of service is a tremendous vehicle for attaining liberation. We forget why we are unhappy because we have lost the conscious memory and knowledge of reality, and we lose the realization that while we are here, our true joy comes in being of service. We may take on the society of “me me me”, and stop living to serve others and now live only for selfish desires to some level or degree. Depression grows like an epidemic of cancer and other life threatening diseases with the infection of self centeredness. Even if you think that you are not selfish, that is merely in proportion to your generosity. Selfishness is like a virus, you cannot see the germ with your naked eye, but it is there nonetheless, you only see it when it has taken over your life. If you see selfishness as a virus, you will work towards eliminating every molecule of it from your heart, only then will you be free. Of course, it is impossible to remove selfishness completely unless you are a saint, and I don’t think any of us can make that claim, so the luck of the system is on our side by making the scales of justice like a seesaw. If we get enough selfishness cleansed from our heart, then even if there are traces of it left, the balance will tip, and we will attain a level of knowledge that makes it easier to live on a different level to complete the cleansing. The Sufis, although they do not agree with reincarnation, do say that the path to God lies in cleansing the heart.

You may consider yourself spending a tremendous amount of time and energy in the service of others, yet there is still something missing. By applying the exercise at the end of this lesson, examine the real reasons you do these good deeds. In Sufism they say that at the end of your life it will be your intentions that you will be judged by, not only your actions.

Instead of drugging and doing all sorts of activities which distract us from the only food which can feed our hunger for liberation, which food is being useful and serving others rather than serving yourself, combined with a balanced diet of introspection, self observation, and meditation, then we could have a healthy life. It may appear that living in the practice of always giving will leave you starving on the street, but that is why a prosperous financial life is also part of this path. However the attainment of wealth taught here is not in winning in the stock market, but in the refinement of your Being that leads to being given the opportunities to win in the stock market, or whatever the gods bring. It is all a matter of balance and correct effort in the correct direction, inside, not out.

This is why in this school, I encourage developing the financial side of life and the accumulation of money so that you have the funds to live on and the time to serve. There is tremendous effort in achieving this level. I had to work many years to build that level of finances. Even when I had plenty of income, I still lived frugally until the assets where large enough to support me. This is the part that those of you who are coming to attain financial success do not like to hear, that it may take several years of hard work to get the freedom you desire, and until you have attained it, you must work and live in a different way than you live now. Let your present mentality go and train in a new way of living. When you get to the edge of a ravine, and you want to jump across, you must take some steps backwards so that you have the room to make a running start before you leap. Changing your life is no different. Are you ready to take what may appear to be some backwards steps in the way you live in order to leap across the ravine? Or you could continue to walk on the edge. There is no quick fix. As the Indian saying goes, “It may be difficult, but you have to do it anyways.”

Perhaps there is a path of therapy which instead of drugs, will help your therapy work more effectively by prescribing serving the needy for a few hours a week. This medication is the same for the cultivation of wealth. If you are financially deficient, you cannot just start to make money and get rich. First you must prepare your character and raise the quality of your being. This path will guide you in cultivating your best qualities and then when you are ready, opportunities for money will come. They actually are coming now, but you are not prepared or qualified to attain them.

EXERCISE

This exercise will be to spend one or two weeks observing everything you are doing, trying to do as little as possible that is purely self serving and do as much as possible in serving other people for the sake of serving. Although you may prefer to serve animals instead of humans, it is important to make this exercise a service to humans. Do things not because you will get credit, not because people will think what a wonderful person you are, but do things anonymously. If you serve at the soup kitchen for the homeless as an example, do not give out your full name, do not say anything about yourself so that no one can give you credit. Do not tell anyone, friends, family, what you have done so that you cannot attain any credit whatsoever for your acts. You will observe how much your ego wants to do good things only if you can get credit for them, which would be self serving. This is Karma Yoga, the path of attaining liberation through being of selfless service to others. Giving to gain credit or acknowledgment is not pure, true giving and will not bring the highest benefits.

You will find that of course you will let some information slip so you can get credit for it, that is normal, your ego is still alive, just observe that. Write down in your journal if you feel differently for this time period, and please let me know the results. You may find that there is little change, but enough to give credence to this practice. If you do feel there is something to it and you would like to increase the level of peace or joy you are feeling, then just lengthen the time of the exercise to 4 weeks. If you set these periods of time, you may eventually make it your manner of being rather than a temporary practice. Living this way, the quality of your being will change in ways that not only serve your best interests, benefit the ones you serve, but also cultivate you into the type of person that is so desperately sought in the business world, one that can be relied on to do the job at hand in the best manner possible. After you have established your reputation, which may take years, opportunities will abound.

If you take this exercise to every opportunity to do something for anyone, carrying a bag, paying for the person behind you in the coffee shop, or just letting someone in line in front of you, always without any emotion, attachment, or feelings of goodness about yourself. In short, without the lower ego. Then you will also develop the qualities of being that make you a prized catch on the relationship side of life as well. The two cannot be separated in a completed balanced being. One of my students was in line at a café and a couple just walked right in front of him in line and ordered, completely ignoring this humble individual. He did not say anything, and then the couple noticed what they did and apologized, but he generously let them go ahead anyway. When he ordered his drink, it was given to him for free. The server said that she so rarely sees such politeness that he deserved a free drink.

One tiny example, one tiny reward. It is all a matter of degree, action to reaction.

The joy of giving is actually love. Love is feeding us not only by somebody being there to love us as much as by somebody being there for us to love, it is a combination of the two.

The heart that is open to freely, spontaneously giving, is the heart that is loving. As breathing requires inhalation and exhalation, the giving of love is the exhalation, which is the relaxing part of breathing.

If you examine your breath, inhaling is actually a tension, and exhaling is a relaxation where you melt and feel very comfortable. So there is a love perhaps that spiritual people are aware of that comes to us through the gifts of the world that keep us alive whether we see it or not, air, food, water, and so on, all that provides for our very existence, that is the inhalation part of love, that which is given and we accept.

The exhalation is the relaxing comfort of giving. The giving of love, of anything, of being of service, is where we will start to feel the essence of true love. This is not simply the love of another individual, whether it be sexual or platonic, that is still related to one specific individual, which is very good and very important of course, but the completion of what love really is, is the joy of giving, regardless of who the receiver is.

When you become more aware of the joy of giving and understand that love is not only what we conceive it to be in our limited human language, understanding and experiences, then love will become more present in your life. And that will be your greatest joy.

Love is something that you can only get by giving. If you do not give, you cannot receive. Your physical heart is beating, your spiritual heart is likewise loving, but since you are not constantly aware of your physical heart beating, you may not be aware of your essential heart which is loving and desiring to love on levels far beyond what the ego consciousness is aware of. This is why we use physical practices of internal arts, or Qi Gong, to develop a greater sensitivity the body, not only the sensations of the outer skin, but the movement of the tendons, muscles, blood, internal organs. As our sensitivity to the internal organs and muscles of our body develops, we are also developing a greater sensitivity to our emotions, and that helps in becoming aware of the inner most desires of the True Nature of your Being. This happens because as we focus on the physical organ, we develop an awareness of its energetic counterpart, the chakras. The blood is related to the meridian lines and the flow of energy.

Pain and suffering, sadness, come from a lack of something, but the lack is not the lack of something we need to receive, it is a lack of giving. The difference is if you are giving and serving and loving with a pure heart that is giving for the sake of benefiting others, or are your actions tainted with giving in the expectation of receiving something. That is the key which makes the same act fulfilling or not fulfilling. This is why we train in the exercises of letting a stranger in line in front of you, or other simple practices that help us to experience the joy of giving, doing a good deed for simply doing the good deed. Start small, work your way up gradually.

Many problems in our personal love relationships are due to doing things with strings attached so in the self-observation of that manner of functioning, simply by seeing it, we are beginning to cut away at those strings.

Like a dog tied to a pole running in circles chasing his tail, he eventually hits his head on the pole that binds him, then he is stuck not knowing what to do. Humans are often not much brighter. We can spend our whole life hitting our head, getting headaches and failing to become free of the pole that binds us, yet we often will not give up our attachments and go in another direction. Sometimes it takes a willingness to accept that despite your firm beliefs that you know yourself, there may be significant changes that need to be made to achieve the goals you seek. Rather an obvious statement since if you where doing the right things, you would have succeeded by now. The first and most beneficial practice is simply to be willing to let go. That willingness is the opening of the mind, and since we are an intellectual society ruled by the mind, the best way to the heart is to disarm its guard.