Seth Godin’s blog this morning: – thanks, Seth Godin.
“Snarky vs. earnest”
“In the ongoing battle between dismissive irony and well-intentioned trustworthiness, the early rounds always seem to go to those that sell snark.”
“Snark is clever and funny and easy to spread. Snark protects us from confronting the truth of the situation, and snark is incredibly easy to do. Snark is fun, but it doesn’t look good on you.”
“In the long run, though, it’s those with right intention, a long term view and consistent persistence that manage to win”.
“Good thing, too”.
…Gets me thinking about intenetion which leads me to The Buddha’s EightFold Path as outlined in Ryuho Okawa’s “The Essence of Buddha, The Path to Enlightenment”.
Okawa says:
“As we live our everyday lives and come into constant contact with others, we tend to be swayed by an incessant flow of thoughts, and it is difficult to know the True Self that lies deep within us. However, when we retreat from everyday contact, away from others and from their vibrations, and reflect deeply on our own mind, we can find the True Self. When people are around, we may try to put on an act, maybe out of vanity or to offset our feelings of inferiority, but when we sit alone in meditation, the part of us that is true and honest will emerge. This is the purest part of our soul, connected to Buddha. The very beginning of the Eightfold Path is to examine our own thoughts and deeds from the perspective of this True Self.”
“Shakyamuni Buddha established eight checkpoints against which people can examine their own thoughts and deeds:
Right Seeing
Right Thought
Right Speech
Right Action
Right Living
Right Effort
Right Will
Right Meditation
He put the adjective ‘right’ to the eight directions of the mind and the actions of the physical body: seeing, thinking, speaking, acting, livng, making diligent efforts, the use of the will, and meditating. ‘Rightness’ in the Eightfold Path does not imply a simple set of model behaviours against which people can judge themselves to be right or wrong; it means a ‘right’ state that can only be attained throught deep contemeplation.”
While it’s alot to take in, the Eightfold Path is a great place to begin and check-in whether our intenetions are aligned with our True Self – what is true.
