Page 55 - NAMAH-Oct-2022

Namah Altruism in Various Lights

experience of humanity, to which the name of intellectual concept. One has to live it in
love is given. Human evolution rises through order to know it. For example, the next time
love and towards love. when any sense of a separate self, being a
limited confined personality rises up, or one
….The Vedanta provides in the realisation of compares oneself with some other person,
a single Self and the illusory character of all look how successful he/she is, what kind
division the only real explanation of this higher of knowledge and wisdom he/she has but
or spiritual love. Altruism in the light of this I don’t have…. then, instead of shrinking
one profound revealing truth becomes natural, back in this thought — I don’t have, I am
right and inevitable. It is natural because I am inferior — which makes me weaker and
not really preferring another to myself, but my full of depleton, I can actually consciously
wider truer Self to my narrower false self, God rejoice in their happiness/success. I can
who is in all to my single mind and body, myself tell myself: how happy they must be to
in Devadatta and Harishchandra, to myself in have their wishes fulfilled. How nice! May
Devadatta alone. everyone have this joy and happiness. I
can, in that moment, know deeply that it
It is right because by embracing in my range is the Divine in the other body rejoicing
of feelings the enjoyment of Harishchandra in through the success. And since in essence
addition to my own, I shall make my knowledge I am that Divine, it is me who is rejoicing
of the universality of Brahman an experience, in that success.
and not merely an intellectual conception or
assent; Gradually, this process of being conscious
……It is inevitable because that is my way of of the sense of limited/separate self, and not
evolution. As I have risen from animal to the following its dictates can help me cultivate a
man, so must I rise from the man to the God, new path, the Sunlit Path, one of collaboration
but the basis of godhead is the realisation of towards further and further unification with
oneself in all things (5).” the divine Consciousness, which is that which
only is; and therefore liberate me from the
Practical implications clutches of the ego-consciousness. And hence
it can help fulfil our true purpose of being
For those of us who don’t experiment with human – a continuing union with the Divine
these truths, of course it is all theory and consciousness.

References

1. [Online] https://www.yogaanytime.com/
attach/2018/12/18/Training_the_Mind_with_
Jetsumna_Tenzin_Palmo.pdf [Accessed 2nd
August 2022].

2. Shantideva. The way of the Bodhisattva:
A translation of the Bodhicaryaavataara.

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