Sometimes it is good to go back to the essence, and interestingly, the next slogan in the #lojongchallenge does just that: slogan 19 says that "All Dharma agrees at one point, and that one point is to reduce self-importance." Dharma refers to the Buddhist teachings. In other words: the whole point of the Buddhist teachings is to reduce our sense of self-importance.
I think this is such an important slogan because it helps us to keep checking whether we are still on the path, or whether instead we have succumbed to spiritual materialism, in which we use the spiritual path only to be more successful and more praised. I think that many cases where spiritual masters go off may be linked to forgetting this slogan. Of course it also is really difficult to keep reducing your self-importance if people constantly treat you as being very important, very wise and very amazing. It is all the more amazing that there are still some spiritual teachers keep a very low sense of self-importance, in which they treat even the most simple people with the utmost respect. I find that particularly inspiring because I know for myself how attractive it is to feel yourself better than others.
One particular way in which we tend to assert our self-importance is through social media. While I do not think social media are unequivocally bad, one thing they tend to be very effective at is creating groups that amplify there extremeness, and thereby become more and more polarized. If we don't feel better than others ourselves, we may still feel our group is better than the others--whether it be a political, religious, social or some other group. My aim for 2020 is to refrain from feeling myself better than others and instead to cultivate enough self-confidence that I do not need to be better than others.
Finally, this slogan also has an environmental interpretation. I think 2019 has been the year in which the world woke up to the reality of climate change and the need to do something to deal with that. If you consider yourself a bit less important, and the world and environment a bit more important, then it may be easier to undergo the minor discomforts of eating less meat, using more bicycles and public transportation, buying less, using less water and electricity... A good blog with practical advice is this one. Happy new year!
I think this is such an important slogan because it helps us to keep checking whether we are still on the path, or whether instead we have succumbed to spiritual materialism, in which we use the spiritual path only to be more successful and more praised. I think that many cases where spiritual masters go off may be linked to forgetting this slogan. Of course it also is really difficult to keep reducing your self-importance if people constantly treat you as being very important, very wise and very amazing. It is all the more amazing that there are still some spiritual teachers keep a very low sense of self-importance, in which they treat even the most simple people with the utmost respect. I find that particularly inspiring because I know for myself how attractive it is to feel yourself better than others.
One particular way in which we tend to assert our self-importance is through social media. While I do not think social media are unequivocally bad, one thing they tend to be very effective at is creating groups that amplify there extremeness, and thereby become more and more polarized. If we don't feel better than others ourselves, we may still feel our group is better than the others--whether it be a political, religious, social or some other group. My aim for 2020 is to refrain from feeling myself better than others and instead to cultivate enough self-confidence that I do not need to be better than others.Finally, this slogan also has an environmental interpretation. I think 2019 has been the year in which the world woke up to the reality of climate change and the need to do something to deal with that. If you consider yourself a bit less important, and the world and environment a bit more important, then it may be easier to undergo the minor discomforts of eating less meat, using more bicycles and public transportation, buying less, using less water and electricity... A good blog with practical advice is this one. Happy new year!
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