Post by moonlight on Feb 3, 2011 17:13:40 GMT -5
I'd like to translate into English a nice Dutch column I read today in Happinez Magazine, number 1 from 2011. It was written by Ruud Hollander. Here goes to the best of my ability:
Your inner voice
A friend of mine, who was at loggerheads with himself and had no clue anymore as to what to do with his life, decided to submerge in a silent monastery for 10 days. "I needed calmness in my head", he said. Ten days, he meditated on a cushion, wandered in de monastic garden and ate without saying a single word.
When I asked him what it had yielded him, he said: "Contact with myself. By looking inside instead of outside for a change, I realized how far I'd driven away from myself. How in my daily life I'd always been so concerned with what others thought and expected of me. And that the way that others looked at me had become a voice in myself that wasn't my own."
According to Buddha it isn't too hard to recognize "the voice that is not your own voice", because basically there are only eight things that it worries about. In English, a rhyme has been made from it: praise & blame, pleasure & pain, loss & gain, fame & shame. In other words: when you're concerned with these things, you know that's it's not your soul but your ego talking.
By smothering the voice of his ego a bit, to my friend it became clearer what he considered of importance in life. Which were the things he really enjoyed to do and which weren't. Silence gave him the clarity and calmness he'd been looking for. More wasn't necessary. His life wasn't upside down. He just continued doing what he did before. From the outside, nothing seemed to have changed. But inside, the loggerheads had gone.
Your inner voice
A friend of mine, who was at loggerheads with himself and had no clue anymore as to what to do with his life, decided to submerge in a silent monastery for 10 days. "I needed calmness in my head", he said. Ten days, he meditated on a cushion, wandered in de monastic garden and ate without saying a single word.
When I asked him what it had yielded him, he said: "Contact with myself. By looking inside instead of outside for a change, I realized how far I'd driven away from myself. How in my daily life I'd always been so concerned with what others thought and expected of me. And that the way that others looked at me had become a voice in myself that wasn't my own."
According to Buddha it isn't too hard to recognize "the voice that is not your own voice", because basically there are only eight things that it worries about. In English, a rhyme has been made from it: praise & blame, pleasure & pain, loss & gain, fame & shame. In other words: when you're concerned with these things, you know that's it's not your soul but your ego talking.
By smothering the voice of his ego a bit, to my friend it became clearer what he considered of importance in life. Which were the things he really enjoyed to do and which weren't. Silence gave him the clarity and calmness he'd been looking for. More wasn't necessary. His life wasn't upside down. He just continued doing what he did before. From the outside, nothing seemed to have changed. But inside, the loggerheads had gone.
