How not to let Love & Desire end up in Greed & Anger?
LS202308-01Stay with the Big Universal Love: Realize that everyone is going through sufferings in life and make a firm resolve to use our life to help them reduce or be relieved from their suffering.
The body is not me, the mind is not me.
Love - the Big universal love for all beings, bigger than the universe and is perfectly fine and something we all have and share.
But when this love is entrapped by our self / ego - believing our body and mind are us - that's when we will work towards satisfying the desires of our body, thoughts and emotions. When we satisfy our desire, we feel happy and want more or want to maintain it - this greed continues and we become a slave to it, constantly chasing our desires. When we cannot satisfy our desires or maintain something we have, we get worried, upset and angry.
But Desire is not always negative has a positive aspect too - if it is not entrapped by self concern. Say for example, if we have very strong desire help others out from their states of suffering. Such selfless desires are important because they help us to make a firm resolve 立志 in life, and this resolve will be the compass and map in guiding us towards living a meaningful life. Otherwise, we will just drift and bob along by changes and trends of the society, doing meaningless things that lead us nowhere.
These are some ways I use to transform negative selfish desire to avoid it evolving into greed and anger.
1) Remind myself, the body and the workings of my mind - those thoughts and emotions - are not me. They arise and pass away on their own even if I do not try to think or feel anything.
2) Remind myself of the Big universal love for all beings that we all have and return to it by expanding my heart and mind beyond the body, and wishing them happiness and well and to be free from all their sufferings.
3) Remind myself to expand the heart beyond my own selfish concerns and desires, and focus on the big selfless desire to work for the happiness and relieve of suffering of all beings. Then take a positive action towards actually doing that immediately. It can be as simple as helping our family members do some housework, or going out to pick some rubbish and putting them in the bin, or even saying a prayer for others. The action part is important as this will help to generate a positive feedback loop that strengthen the resolve of the mind. Otherwise the resolve will just stay a resolve (in the level of the mind) and not be transformed into activity.
4) Remind myself, life is very short and I do not have much time left on this dimension, when I am dying and fading out from here - all the people, landscape, material world fading away...will my little selfish desire still be important? If it is not, why waste precious time?
5) Remind myself, even if this is just an illusory temporarily worldly dimension and body I am in, I should use my life to do something useful and beneficial for others, because many of us here are still not at the spiritual level where we can see this world like an illusion...the world is still very real to us, and so is its sufferings. So if everyone gets to live with a a little less suffering, it is useful and our activity to help them reach that will be very beneficial.
6) Engage in physical labour that can benefit others - e.g. volunteer work. Our mind is easily affected by our body. When we put our body to do physical labour, we will learn to reduce our desire for sloth, comfort, having things easy. The opposite takes place and we will toughen up to have the diligence, patience and endurance to tolerate sufferings and not have things the easy way. We will have the opportunity to test and expand the capacity of our hearts and minds to be of useful service to others. Our mind will also not indulge so much in selfish concerns when we are focus on doing volunteer work.
SilentContemplation
