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Introduction
There is a story about two young Hasidic students, one
of whom was going to study with a Rabbi in some faraway
town. The student staying behind says, ‘Well, what
are you going to study, are you going to learn all about
the Torah and the Kaballah?’ The other student
replies, ‘No - I’m going to see how he does
up his shoe laces.’ You may have met people who
are very proficient in giving sparkling lectures but
don’t know how to do up their shoe laces, or leastways
they don’t appear to be very good at it.
Our daily life is generally lived by the clock, We measure
our lives in months and years and seasons. We grow old
and die and that too takes place in time. We have the
whole language of progress or development, of growth,
and evolution - all measured or presented in relation
to time.
However, we also inhabit a world in which everything
is already here. The capacity for love, for instance,
has the potential to break out at any moment, no matter
what we are doing. What we can do in terms of these
deeper dimensions of our lives is to create the conditions
that are most ideal for such states to erupt.
What would some of these preconditions be? Being mindful,
compassionate, peaceful, attentive, loving are only
some of the potentialities. If we can live in such a
way whereby we train ourselves to open to such qualities,
such conditions, then we are more likely to notice when
these depth qualities emerge.
An image that a Tibetan lama gave once to illustrate
this is that of a dirty window. Light can do what it
likes to try and come in, but if the window remains
uncleaned it simply won’t be able to penetrate.
What we can do is clean the window and make sure it
is kept nice and clean. We can’t guarantee that
the sun is always going to be shining but when it does
come out it will be able to get through.
A key element is patience. One cannot force love, one
cannot force wisdom, it just won’t work! They operate
in their own time. There is a time that they decide
to fill our lives over which we have no control. So
again,what we can do is to create the conditions, to
clean the window, so to speak.
On the following pages we share some suggestions and
ideas to help you to cultivate various values in your
life - to become the window cleaner if you like. We
will have a different value and related suggestions
each month. We hope that you will find the exercises
useful in keeping your windows sparkling clean.
The monthly tools listed on the left
hand side are updated monthly. Please visit again for
next month's tools.
