Ethics of relating to the world
Asking ourselves the appropriate questions, we can define for ourselves the criteria to evaluate our awareness, and thus tune up the way we think leading to true abundance. Everyone defines these criteria for themselves by answering their own questions, because the truth is different for everyone.
Ask yourself some questions like these:
________
I. How do you price your business?
What is your relationship to your financial income?
Does the money you earn bring you grace?
Money with grace is rewarding you not only with money, but also with sincere and heartfelt gratitude.
Do you do any charity work? Since we are all interconnected and interdependent, charity has always existed in society. According to spiritual laws, when we give to another,
we transfer from one our hand to the other.
II. What is the level of humanity in your relations with the people around you?
There have been many vivid examples in the history of mankind when so-called “civilized” nations have come to new lands and “taught” the “natives”, imposing their language, culture, traditions, etc., They sincerely thought they were doing good and, moreover, they were arrogant of the natives, considering them uneducated but not realizing that they had a different culture, different values, which they could not access. However, there are people with the opposite thinking and approach, who are curious, open to new things, accepting other things, whatever they are: people, cultures, ways of life, etc. An example of this is Marco Polo, the great traveller, a truly “cosmopolitan” as we would call him now. Two virtues – sympathy and acceptance of people with different opinions, a sincere sense of curiosity – were considered by philosophers to be virtues “that lead to heaven” for many thousands of years, and they are still relevant today.
A little parable on the “theme”.
“In ancient Greece, in its heyday, every Greek was attentive to his appearance, developing valor and virtues in himself. Thus each encouraged his neighbor to be better in many different aspects: in elegance of poetry, an Olympianly trained body, fine taste, and knowledge in the various sciences.
Among them lived one outcast whose behavior everyone stopped paying attention to. He was unkempt in appearance, could say evil words, get very drunk, and molest women with abominable expressions. One day, a piece of an alien ship washed ashore. One unfortunate man, who had survived a terrible storm and catastrophe, was left barely alive among these splinters. He was completely black, wearing rags that had once served as clothing, which had lost all form, hunchbacked, crooked-legged, and hung with amulets that were utterly inconsistent with the majestic Greek gods.
The locals raced to see him, but when they saw the fearsome mask on his belt, the strange earrings in his ears, and the tattoos depicting idols, they dared not touch him. They decided that the stranger might be the spawn of hell, and left him helpless to die. The vagabond was also interested in the stranger. He helped him out of the ropes and wreckage of the ship’s mast that had entangled him. He set him down under a shady tree, and put a leather bottle of spring water to his salt-cracked lips. Then, the vagabond curiously groped the fabric of the remnants of his robes, trying to figure out what they were made of. He scrutinized each amulet and even licked it with his tongue. The stranger began to babble something in his own language, and the Greek Vagrant put his ear to his lips, and repeated after him the inaudible throat sounds. After a while, the rescued man came to his senses. He began to look around and listen intently to the Greek outcast’s questions, trying to guess. Gradually their gestures began to resemble a dialogue…
Aristotle, who was passing by, watched this scene with amazement.
On one of the following evenings, the two newfound friends found themselves at a feast, of which there were so many in ancient Greece, in those days . The Greek tramp put chunks of meat on his plate, while he respectfully put only vegetables and sweets on the foreigner’s plate.
Aristotle continued to observe them and described this strange friendship in one of his lost treatises on Alexander the Great and his valiant army.
Somehow, many hundreds of years later, this parable fell into the hands of a young, immature young man, Marco Polo. He was so imbued with the moral of this parable that he “absorbed” it with his own flesh and blood. He saw these two virtues, very necessary in distant and dangerous journeys: openness and curiosity about everything foreign, instead of a desire to fight with strangers, and mercy. All the other virtues that the Greeks so jealously trained in themselves and praised, such as: justice, moderation, prudence…, without these two mentioned, led to wars and deaths. And Marco Polo kept himself and others alive, in his wanderings getting into many dangerous situations with peoples of different faiths and cultures, and not only the “golden record” from Genghis Khan saved him, but these two of his virtues.”
How do you communicate with your employees, partners, competitors, management, customers, and even your neighbors: do you feel for them, show a genuine interest in what they do, what makes them happy and concerned?
By answering yourself honestly to this question, you will literally find the harmony in your relationships with people around you that will lead you to prosperity.
III. Your attitude toward radical change?
Criticism and fear? You see the only way to bypass change is to hold on at all costs to the ignorance that allows you to act as before, justifying yourself soothingly: duty – duty to your firm, to your companions, to your family, to your city, to the state, to your fatherland, to your temple – demands it?
Or are you clinging to the fact that you have lived a lie very comfortably and do not want to admit the truth, for the sake of which you will have to change radically?
There is another alternative: to want to learn new things, and also, to want to wean yourself from the many things that keep you from being virtuous.
IV. Your relationship with your inner sense of generosity ?
If genuinely asked for help, do you hesitate long?
Or do you draw the attention of the “loser” to the fact that he is probably, even if only in part, responsible for his own failures, explaining to them that ignorance and stupidity are punished by the nature of things? Do you know that this is outright malice? Or do you immediately help? Are you willing to be with your loved ones in difficulty?
V. How do you “make friends” with responsibility?
Do you realize that: “We are responsible for what happens to others”?
“For what happens in your life? For what happens to nature?
VI. How do you feel about traditions?
Do you see the achievements of your ancestors only as the lack of progress, the poor quality of their products, the waste of their time?
VII. How do you feel about reading?
What books do you read? How do you feel about the genre of literature? How do you feel about famous authors, whose works are translated into different languages and are preserved for centuries?
VIII. Is your attitude towards time, is it respectful?
Are you constantly in a hurry, bustle and turmoil? Does your rhythm of life bring you into stressful situations? Or do you not know how to “kill time”, constantly bored or in a routine of monotony?
And do you have the right attitude about time?
Did you know that to talk about a lack of time is to rob yourself and the person you are talking to of it?
Did you know that you shouldn’t say things like “to kill time”?
Do you know that if you start to treat time fairly, without being sly and steered by it, you will manage to do everything in time?
IX. How do you feel about the weather?
“Nature has no bad weather”…
Have you heard this saying?
How do you feel, for example, if it rains a lot? Do you remember that very expensive new shoes deteriorate because of moisture and lose their glamour, or do you think of the trees and plants for which moisture is life-giving?
X. Your attitude toward food?
Do you understand the importance of living food in your daily diet rather than synthesizing chemical elements? It is the living seed of rice, the living green of fresh fennel, the spoonful of honey, the alchemy of which only bees know, turning the most bitter substance into the sweetest, the milk from a cow, a goat or a camel that carries in each of its cells the essence of life? And chemical synthesis, no matter how full of vitamins and trace elements it is, by eating it exclusively, we do not lend life to our cells. Do you know this and do you use it in your life?
Are you looking for pleasure rather than satiation in food?
XI. Your Relationship to Nature?
Do you spend enough time in nature and fresh air? Do you play sports outdoors? Do you go to the countryside? Do you make at least a small contribution to the protection of nature, maybe it is a way out to the nearest park to collect garbage for 30-60 minutes? How in harmony are you with nature?
Asking these and similar questions to yourself, comparing and finding the desire to change – this is the way to change the worldview.
Each of us has his own truth, his own circumstances, his own employment, his own characteristics, in the end, his own individuality, but despite this we have a lot in common – we live in one world and our duty is to take care of it collectively!
