This world has enough resources for everyone's need, but not for everyone's greed.
- Mahatma Gandhi
A final thing to ask ourselves about this matter of whether or not to indulge in worldly pleasures is this: Dedication, sacrifice, renunciation, and postponing gratification are often needed in life, especially at certain critical junctures, if we are to conserve and more intentionally channel our energies in order to make room for new possibilities and latent potentialities to develop. This kind of self-restraint may not be very popular today, but it may be exactly what's required to counteract the ennui, cynicism, hollowness, inertia, scatteredness, and distractibility that many of us sometimes feel - especially if we have addictive personalities.
It's fine to be liberal and open minded about how life can be lived and what we allow our selves and others to do, but I believe that we need to go beyond this neutral starting-point to further the larger life we personally aspire to live. As we do so, we must acknowledge the value of mastering certain addictions and other unfulfilling habits, discontinuing possibly counter-productive activities, or simply training our selves to do without what we can afford to do without. As in science, the best and most elegant solution is often the simplest. Fasting or even various kinds of abstinence can be at times an excellent and respectable option, we worth experimenting with, and conducive to conscious evolution.
- Lama Surya Das
Anger, arrogance, inflexibility, hostility, deception, envy, pride, conceit, bad company, these are impure foods, not meat.
- The Buddha |